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                    Duncan Fallowell & April Ashley

Forward

April at 21

In order to survive the kind of hypocrisy sometimes displayed by otherwise tolerant people when faced with the subject of a sex change, a very resilient sense of humour is called for. This April Ashley has in abundance. When her privacy was invaded in 1961, she was a top London model and rising social star. Overnight her bookings were cancelled, she was harassed by insulting phone calls and advised by friends that she might as well forget about London. They even removed the credit for her part in the Bob Hope, Bing Crosby film, The Road to Hong Kong. Yet bitterness is not at all a tone which features in this book.
      In this outstanding collaboration with friend and writer Duncan Fallowell, the descriptions of social scenes positively sparkle: in Paris where Sartre sat about in his dingy overcoat, in London where April shone in the salons of wealth and rank, and in Spain where her suitors included very famous actors as well as her future husband. This is an emotional and dramatic story as well. We encounter the Liverpool slum where a young boy was relentlessly bullied and beaten senseless by his peers; the first, unexpected remarks about his unusual beauty; the terrible confusion which set in when he went to sea; the suicide attempts and sentence to the most stringently policed section of a mental hospital; then escape to London, and soon after, to Paris.
      'The day I wear women's clothes,' April (then called Toni) had said, 'is the day I know I can become one.' But in Paris Toni was to wear elaborate costumes in a club called Le Carrousel where celebrities gathered to feel they were doing something 'existential'. It was the first break from many years' strictly androgynous dressing habits. Until then Toni had largely let people make up their own minds. Of course, with close friends (of which there was not just quantity but an endearing variety) the labels were unimportant. Then the decision was made. Toni flew to Casablanca. The operation and its psychological effects are described in moving detail.
      The labels eventually became important, during April's divorce proceedings from her husband, the Hon. Arthur Corbett. Church and State demand strict definitions. The case was an extraordinary judicial undertaking to 'determine' the sex of an individual which had no legal precedent. One legal adviser predicted that it might be twenty years before the law would arrive at a more realistic, not to mention compassionate, way of viewing these issues.
      This is a marvellous, joyful life despite its harrowing obstacles - dashing and hilarious by turns, full of not just notable, but interesting people. The book reflects tremendous wit and warmth, a great deal of wisdom and, most of all, generosity of spirit.

DUNCAN FALLOWELL was born in Middlesex in 1948. He has written and travelled widely, lived in Berlin, Bangkok and Rome, and was for a time editor of Deluxe and Boulevard magazines. This is his first full-length book.

Contents

Chapters

1. Liverpool
   
   • Childhood
     
   • Bullying
     
   • April's Transsexuality at Fifteen
     
2. Sea
   
   • April's Transsexuality at Seventeen
     
   • First asks for help
     
   • First Suicide Attempt
     
3. Madness
   
   • Last Suicide Attempt
     
   • Walton Hospital
     
   • London
     
   • First Love
     
   • Transsexual in Jersey
     
4. Paris
   
   • Le Carrousel
     
5. To the Wizard of Casablanca
   
   • A History of Sex Change Surgery
     
   • April's Transsexuality #1
     
   • Surgery with Dr Burou
     
   • Virginity Lost
     
6. Scandal
   
   • Modelling
     
   • Arthur Corbett
     
   • Exposure by Tabloid
     
7. Spain
   
   • Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif
     
8. Rome
   
9. In Which I Meet Just About Everybody
   
10. Divorce
    
    • Corbett-v-Corbett
      
    • April's Transsexuality #2
      
    • Why there was no Appeal
      
    • Criticisms of the judgement
      
11. AD8
    
12. A Woman of Property

1Liverpool

'And, darling...'
      It was dear old Prince Max von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, fat and twinkly in his decorations, sitting on my left at a gala dinner in the south of Spain. The room glittered with crystal and silver, pineapples, lobsters and champagne. And the smart talk - what a row! One side of the room was a semi-circle of colonnaded windows through which jewelled figures slid out to the candlelit terrace and the beating of a band. I gave up toying with my truffles and let my gaze move across the breathless midnight Mediterranean lit up with yachts and beyond, way beyond, to the lights of Africa.
      Max was leaning over me and looking downwards. 'And, darling, what colour - ?'
      The Princess Bismarck came past our table on her sticks. Click-swoosh, click-swoosh, on her way to the lavatory. He managed to stand, sway, and bow. I laughed. She nodded from the crow's nest of her great height and proceeded fitfully through the wrong door.
      'Darling, what - ?'
      'Max, do spit it out!'
      'Well, dear, I was wondering what colour your nipples are. Brown or pink?'
      I smoothed my delicate bosom held by a band of ice-pink shantung and said, 'The palest, Max, pink.'
      He took out a Corona and began to tremble, so violently that he set fire to one of his fingers, which was wet with brandy, and I had to light the cigar for him.
      'Young cherries, sweet rosebuds, ah - you see that woman over there?' He indicated an American acquaintance who had inherited a large piece of Ohio and fled with it to Europe. 'Dried figs! Chewed up... but you, mmm, pink pips, my treasure, you are high-born I think.'
      Angelic Max. Perfect manners. And quite wrong about my origins. Don Pedro tapped me on the shoulder from behind. 'May I have the pleasure?' he said. Don Pedro squeaked at the waist when he danced. But such a noble head. And we went off to Watutsi on the terrace.

High-born! How funny. I didn't know what a present was until my eleventh birthday.
      'I've got a present for you,' Mother said. I gripped the table to steady myself and broke out in goose-pimples. 'But you can't have it until you get home from school.'
      The bell clanged, I ran out of the gates, made a quick sign of the cross as I flew past the church. At home Mother was holding a brown-paper parcel. I took it breathing heavily. Out rolled a pair of grey socks.
      Conceived one summer at the Fort Hotel (where my mother was a chambermaid) on the Isle of Man, I was born a boy in the Smithdown Road Hospital, Liverpool, on 29 April 1935. This birthday I share with Emperor Hirohito of Japan, which makes us Taureans like Fred Astaire, Catherine the Great, Shirley Temple and Hitler.
      Next, Mother brought me home to a black dockland slum called Pitt Street and christened me George. You didn't get lower than Pitt Street. Even in those days the police patrolled it in pairs. If you moved at all it could only be up. And we did, very slightly. When I was a couple of years old the family was rehoused on a new council estate in Norris Green on the edge of town. Since the rest of Pitt Street moved with us, along with the equally notorious Scotland Road, the atmosphere continued to be full of fists.
      51 Teynham Crescent had an outside lavatory and a bath full of coal. Families like ours stored coal in the bath to stop it being stolen. But we had the luxury of three bedrooms. The smallest was reserved for me alone because for the first fourteen years of my life I nervously wet the bed. As a punishment I would be locked in there without heat or light and told there were ghosts.
      My parents were both Liverpudlians. Mother was born Ada Brown, a name I now use when attempting to travel incognito.
      She, a Protestant, married my father, Frederick Jamieson, when she was sixteen. He was a Roman Catholic and so virtually she dropped one child a year: Roddy, Theresa, Freddie, Me, Ivor, Marjorie. Apart from us there were several who died at birth.
      Being a middle child I never had new clothes. Just grey hand-me-downs, patched, darned, frayed, hanging off my scrawny frame. Even my clogs - then de rigueur among poor scouse kids - even these were hand-me-downs. I thought I should never see the end of those clogs coming down to me, hard wooden shells with a steel rim nailed on to the undersides. These rims were always falling off and had to be hammered back on, so one felt like a horse.
      In her youth Mother was pretty and flirtatious, with fine brown hair and eyes and good teeth. She adored to go out dancing or 'jigging' as she called it. This was hardly ever since she was always pregnant. My first impression of her was that she didn't like me. There was so little between us that was physical. But she had a large heart for taking in strangers. Big blue-eyed Roddy, who went to sea when I was very young, was constantly bringing back strays. One was called Reggie Endicott, half-Indian, always laughing, fabulous-looking, who stayed with us for a long time and shook up the house by buying a gramophone and playing Frankie Lane records until the plaster cracked. An Australian, Bernie Cartmell, followed Roddy in through the door one day. He was skinny and floppy, all hands and feet. We called him 'the long streak of piss' and wondered when he would leave. And there was a Mexican girl, Beautiful Phyllis. Mother had gone out to the lavatory in the morning and found Phyllis in there asleep. In her arms was a baby covered with sores. Of course Mother took them both in. There were always processions through the house. Usually they slept where they fell.
      Father was a cook in the Royal Navy and not often home. When he was, he would hand out bars of chocolate white with age and while we munched he would describe exotic seaports or indulge his passion for oysters washed down with Guinness. Father was as short as Mother, slightly built but good-looking, with strong dark eyes which I inherited and a heavenly, puckish smile. He was also a scoundrel, a heavy drinker and spent every penny on the booze. I was mad about him.
      The house was always active, but I don't recall many other relations. My only living grandparent, Mother's mother, was so taken aback by the sound of the first air-raid siren that she had a heart attack and died on the spot. One of Father's brothers was said to own a Stradivarius, but we never saw it.
      Father's irresponsibility meant that Mother had to work very hard to keep us alive. She heaved sacks of potatoes and boxes of oranges at a grocery shop and during the Second World War made bombs at the Fazakerly bomb factory. Because of the daily proximity of TNT, she lost much hair and all her teeth. Doris Paper, Mother's best friend from across the road, worked in the same establishment. They would go off together every day in their. slacks and overalls, their hair knotted up in turbans. One morning in the factory Doris said, 'I feel all queer.' In fact she was burning up. TNT can do that to you. She and Mother were brought home in an ambulance. Mother made a pot of tea and Doris started yelling, 'I've got to go to the lav! I've got to go to the lav!' Ripping off all her clothes she ran out of the back door. Mother found her dead on the toilet seat.
      I was a problem child. Apart from the bed-wetting, I was born with a severe calcium deficiency. This led to frequent accidents which left me unable to walk. On a poaching trip I fell off a twenty-foot wall on Lord Derby's estate, escaping from the game-keepers who were trying to shoot me. The fall immobilised my legs for three months. Roddy and Freddie constructed a go-cart from an orange-box and old perambulator wheels so that I could be pulled around the neighbouring streets. It was always breaking down, or smashing into walls when they raced it. People kept finding me lying in roads, which irritated them after a while.
      There were weekly calcium injections at the Alder Hay Children's Hospital. If I were out of action, Mother would have to carry me piggy-back. She could rest on the tram, then pick me up again and carry me to the hospital. These journeys were made in complete silence, with Mother's mouth set in an unnerving way.
      Eating was another problem. I didn't take to it at all. We lived on a basic diet of brown-sauce sandwiches but Mother would bribe me to eat with chip butties, which I did like. Sometimes I stole beetroots from allotments and ate them raw, or carrots which I would clean by scraping them on a wall and share with my mongrel pointer Prince.
      Roddy didn't bring back only people. He brought back the first bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup I ever saw. And the first post-war banana. It was cut into six pieces, one each. Such a bizarre taste. I spat mine out and haven't touched them since. And when I was seven years old, he brought back Prince. We adopted each other immediately. He would follow me to school and wait outside the gates until I reappeared. He followed me to the Saturday Morning Pictures at the Broadway Regal, running along behind the tramcar, and while I was inside enjoying my favourite series, The Perils of Pauline, he would sit patiently outside surveying the street. As the one whom nobody wanted in their gang, I always felt safe with Prince. His only vice was killing cats. He murdered about twenty of them before a great tom cured him with several nasty blows in the face.
      Liverpool had twenty-three miles of docks, the largest dockland in the world at that time, and was bombed heavily during the war. When the siren blew at night, everyone was supposed to run into the Anderson shelter. These were made of corrugated iron and were to be buried in the garden and covered with earth. Ours wasn't. It was stuck out the back at a lopsided angle in a few inches of soil. There were three bunks on either side full of fleas and bugs. I detested going in there even more than into the single bedroom and if Father were home he would allow me to crouch close to him under the hedge while explosions shook the house and the sky over Liverpool turned red. But what I most remember is the smell of salt in his uniform.

My schooldays - such torture. Those nuns, those priests, those hopeless teachers, those disgusting children! Although he never went to church himself, Father insisted we were brought up as strict Catholics. I was sent to St Theresa's Primary School, a vicious and backward institution run by the clergy where one was forced to one's knees four times a day in prayer. It was very rough. We spent a great deal of time cleaning the floors with dusters tied to our clogs and if we were slow the nuns would rattle rulers between our knees. Knees were the big thing at St Theresa's.
      On the whole my education consisted of learning how to run fast. I was the ultimate weed. My head looked far too large and this was emphasised by Mother's penchant for cutting my hair into a Henry V pudding bowl, If they weren't calling me Sissy they called me Chinky, and I was. the target of school bullies. It was fortunate that after school the staff would inspect all the air-raid shelters because often they would discover me inside one, tied down to a bunk. It wasn't so dreadful being tied on one's back. But being tied face downwards left ugly red marks across one's cheeks from the bare bunk springs. Once a gang held me to the ground while several more jumped rapidly up and down on my feet. This meant another term missed, more piggy-back rides to hospital, and Roddy and Freddie wheeling me about in a box.
      In an attempt to freshen up my life, Miss Filben - an eager young Canadian teacher with large expensive teeth - decided to make me class monitor with responsibility for distributing books. As I came by with the decomposing red textbooks (I can't remember what they were, Miss Filben never managed to get very far into instruction), the urchins lashed out with their iron-clad clogs. After a fortnight of being rendered black and blue by my privilege, I had had enough and the next time that breezy Canadian accent came lilting over the desks - 'The books please, Jamieson' - I froze. Miss Filben tried again. Nothing happened.
      'Jamieson, will you please hand out those goddam books!' By now she was standing in front of me and sweating in a bright-yellow blouse. I was paralysed and she slapped me in the face. I slapped her back. We were all flabbergasted. Her pretty eyes filled with tears but I lost the job.
      Anything else in the academic line? An essay: What do you want to be when you grow up? I wrote: 'I want to be a Film Star and live a lovely life.' It got me hooted to the back of the class. One was supposed to say 'train driver' or 'priest'.
      Sport. 'Can you swim, boy?'
      I'd never tried, so I said, 'Yes, sir.'
      'Dive in then.'
      I came up blue in the face and frantic but from that moment I swam. Eventually they awarded me a bronze medal for life- saving.
      Vincent Patterson was my only friend at school. He was dark and pale like me but bigger. He didn't enjoy fighting but was good at it if somebody insisted. We were very religious together and decided not to swear. For such a place Vincent was exceptionally ethereal and he might well have become a priest. One day he went on an outing to Bromborough in Cheshire and drank from a polluted stream. Three days later he was dead.
      I was thirteen years old, very shaken, and committed the mortal sin of missing Sunday Mass. During Confession the priest said, 'Why weren't you in church on Sunday?'
      'I want to think about it, Father.'
      'If you have to think about God you're damned for ever! Get out of this church!'
      He had been among a group of priests I had seen drunk and cursing in their garden several weeks before, so I didn't feel unduly deprived. A by-product of my loss of faith was a loss of guilt over poaching. Thus cleansed, Prince and I caught rabbits with renewed zeal on the estates of Lord Sefton and Lord Derby. These were about half-an-hour's walk into the countryside from Norris Green, dreamy spots on a sunny afternoon, but the arrival of myxomatosis put an end to it.
      Not long after Vincent's death, Mother had Father evicted from the house, which therefore ceased to be home for me too. Long voyages at sea, and when he was home getting plastered in pubs on rum with beer chasers, he would go Absent Without Leave. There would be fights, Father coming off worse. 'But, Ada love - .' Slap, slap, she'd go at him, then he would sit groggily in a corner waiting for the Military Police to come and take him away.
      Besides, Mother was now getting on very well with Bernie Cartmell. After Father's eviction, she and Bernie lived as man and wife. Father was eventually invalided out of the Royal Navy with shrapnel wounds in his stomach and legs which refused to heal. He worked briefly as a bus driver, then tramped round Liverpool on a tiny pension.
      Just before my fourteenth birthday I had another terrible shock. The school leaving age went up to fifteen. The most intelligent course of action was to ignore it - until the authorities threatened Mother with prosecution. One day the Headmaster came into the classroom. We stood up in uneasy silence. While talking to the teacher, he suddenly span round. 'Who was that whispering? It came from over there.' His long bony finger stretched towards me and I cowered.
      'You! Come up here! You were whispering!'
      'I wasn't, sir.'
      'Don't lie!'
      'I'm not lying, sir.'
      'Don't argue!' And he began to strike me in the chest so hard that I fell over.
      Hurt and angry, I yelled, 'You horrible man, I told you it wasn't me!' and ran home sobbing.
      Mother was furious. 'Come along,' she said, 'I'll deal with him.'
      When we arrived back at the classroom the Headmaster was in full flood on the evils of insubordination. Mother barged straight in. 'Did you knock my child to the ground?' She was puce, clenching her fists so hard that the knuckles were white. The Headmaster made the mistake of trying to patronise her.
      'Don't you "My Good Woman" me! You bloody Roman Catholic, I'll kill you if you touch one of my kids again!'
      'How dare you swear in my school!'
      Mother decided to smack his face but since it was about two feet above her she was forced to jump. 'Swear'? She was jumping up and down, hitting him. 'I'll bloody well say what I damn well like, you silly bugger! I'm Protestant. I didn't want my kids brought up bloody Catholics anyway, I'm sick to death of them spendin' half their bloody life on their knees prayin'!' She slapped him again, grabbed my arm, and we left. The word went round about Raving Ada of Teynham Crescent and my final months at school were largely untroubled. What a hard life it is for mothers and head-masters in the slums.

If I have given the impression that home life and school life, though brutish, were continuous, I shall correct that now. From the age of ten I started moving out.
      John and Edna Lundy ran a grocery shop in the old iron St John's Market (now demolished). John's brother was briefly engaged to my sister Theresa (goodness, the times Tess was 'engaged' as she called it). When I began to drift away from home it was towards them. They employed me as errand boy at their shop, which was famous for bacon. I hauled sides of it which were much larger than myself. Half-a-crown a day plus tips, 8a.m. to 10p.m., astonishing wealth for a ten-year-old. This was at weekends and during the holidays. Later, whenever I chose to ditch school, which was often every other day.
      John was large, fair and given to mirth. 'Hullo, Nugget.' This was their special nickname for me. 'Another religious holiday? O.K., the bike's round the back, here's a list of deliveries.' Edna was dark, with buck teeth and a rich Devonshire accent which fascinated me. I tried to imitate it and in doing so fell between two stools, as far as accents go, so that later when I moved to London it became easy for me to speak with no accent at all. John and Edna turned into surrogate parents and I lived for long periods in their warm flat. For the first time I encountered wine and uncracked crockery and could sneak slugs of whisky from the bulbous cocktail cabinet with a musical cigarette-box on top.
      Edna became pregnant, a business one vaguely understood in a creepy way. Something about it had been indicated to us at school via readings from the Bible, but on the whole the nuns and priests, celibate themselves, circumnavigated the problem by filing it en bloc under 'Sin' and trying to pass their sense of revulsion on to us. At home, where we were frightened even to put our arms round each other, the entire subject was taboo.
      But one cannot live long in a town like Liverpool and remain ignorant of the facts of life. The red-light district in the port was Sodom and Gomorrah with flick-knives. From one's earliest memory the prostitutes were a city sight. It was said that if ever a virgin walked down Lime Street the lions outside St George's Hall would roar. Each Friday evening the girls would gather on Lime Street Station, wearing red lips and red shoes, to meet trains bringing in the G.I. s from Warrington for a dirty weekend. We would follow, making grabs at the sprays of chewing gum which went flying across the platform as the carriage doors crashed open. If any girlfriends were there to greet their beaux, the tarts would flay them with handbags: 'Piss off, ya lousy free fuck!'
      When Edna became pregnant again and gave birth to a second daughter, I had to return to sleep at Teynham Crescent, obliged to run a gauntlet of catcalls and kicks from the tramstop to the front door. If this sounds melodramatic, be assured that scarcely a day passed when I was not subjected to some barbarism by the local tough boys, so that early on there was forced upon me a sense of my own uniqueness.
      Thank God, through cutting so much school to work in the Market, I was rich. As a bonus John would push a bunch of tea coupons into my hand (rationing still prevailed). Everyone was mad for the thrill of an extra ¼1b. of tea and I sold them on the black market for a shilling each. With my wealth I bought Mother presents - scarves, stockings, cheap jewellery. 'I'll put them in my Bottom Drawer for a rainy day,' she would say. Weird.
      After he was turned out of the house, Father would hang around the Market or the school gates and ask me for a few bob. I gave him what I had, knowing he would make for the nearest pub. When at the age of fourteen I made my first court appearance - Prince had returned to his old ways, been caught biting the head off a cat, and the outraged owners prosecuted me - I was able to pay the fine of ten shillings. Funnily enough, I hardly ever bought anything for myself.
      Except shoes. The bliss of those first shoes. It was like walking in bed.

At 14

      On leaving school I went to work for the Lundys full-time, one of the fortunate ones with a job to go to. My hair grew out of its embarrassing pudding bowl and, with all the bicycling, I developed slight roses in my cheeks. I came to work one morning, put on my white coat and was about to nip under the counter to collect the orders, when Edna said, 'Why, Nugget, you're quite beautiful.' A momentary dizziness. Physical references to myself always made me feel ill. I assumed I was ugly, a belief most others seemed happy to confirm.
      Later I checked up in the mirror. Thin and stunted for my age. Teeth crooked. Eyes dark, greenish brown, eyelashes very long and eyebrows finely arched. This part of my face was always held in a deep frown, except when it lifted into bewilderment. No spots - I never went through that ordeal. A bit of red in an otherwise gruesome pallor. Thick black hair. So what was new?
      Soon after, returning from the Pierhead on the No. 14 tram with Jo, a neighbour from Norris Green, I dozed off. Unexpectedly he knocked me in the ribs. 'Are we there?' I asked.
      'No, but you fockin' wake up, you look like a fockin' woman when you're asleep.'

At fifteen I had no facial or pubic hair, my voice hadn't broken, I was not overwhelmed by sexual desire, and I hadn't shot up. In comparison many of my contemporaries were hulking brutes covered with fluff. Although I neither wanted to play with dolls nor dress up in Mother's clothes, I was constantly taunted for being like a girl and yes, I wanted to be one. Until my loss of faith I would have long conversations with God each night, asking Him to make me wake up normal, wake up a girl, wake up whatever it was proper for me to be. Instinctively, without knowing why, we all knew me to be a misfit.
      Therefore I decided to take myself in hand. It was no longer any good wanting to be a girl. I wanted to be a man. When nobody was around I croaked away in the lower registers until my voice was forcibly broken or at least roughened up. I couldn't speak for five days and the Indian doctor told Mother I had 'done something mental' to my voice. Far more important, I privately determined to go to sea. All the other men in my family did, even little Ivor in the end. It seemed to be one of the things that made you a man.
      My grocery deliveries took me to the smartest districts of Liverpool. Since these were a long way from the town centre, I would be given cups of tea when I arrived. One of my favourite destinations was the house of Mrs Rossiter. To me she was a creature from outer space, with her hair-dos and long fingernails, her Tradesmen's Entrance and sprinkler on the lawn. Mr Rossiter was an important man with Cunard and when I confided in his wife she arranged for him to interview me in the Cunard Building itself.
      'But you are much too young to go to sea,' he said.
      I was fifteen and looked about eleven years old. 'But I'm not too young to go to training school, am I?'
      He gave me a magnificent letter of introduction on embossed Cunard paper. It cut through all the red tape such as medical tests and parental consent, which was a boon because I had told none of my family or friends about this - not even John and Edna who were more important than anyone - in case they raised obstructions.
      The night before departure I came home from work and said, 'Mum, I'm leaving tomorrow to join a cadet ship.'
      'Well, isn't that somethin',' she said and carried on cooking Bernie's chips.

On a damp November morning I found myself at Lime Street Station with a small brown cardboard suitcase, waiting for the train to Bristol and the cadet ship S.S. Vindicatrix. My only personal memento - rosary beads. How superstition sticks!
      The course was very intense - six weeks long.
      'What are these, sir?'
      'Knots!'
      'What the bloody hell,' I thought. Knots. I never could do them. I did bows instead.
      The first three weeks were spent in nissen huts. There were about two dozen of us. We were issued with blue serge trousers and a boiler jacket, thick woolly socks, square-bashing boots and a beret to be worn at a jaunty angle. There were no fittings. Everything simply came at you out of a big cupboard. All mine were far too large. I looked like a vaudeville act.
      Up before dawn, ablutions, tidy the bed and locker, polish buttons and boots, clean the washroom, marching, breakfast, formal classes, lunch, potato-peeling and floor-scrubbing, physical jerks, dinner, lights out at 9p.m. There was no time for conversation.
      The second three weeks were more romantic. We moved on to the S.S. Vindicatrix herself, a three-masted hulk slurping up and down alongside the River Severn, where one was taught the practical skills of seamanship. I dashed up the rigging, out along the yard, and shouted 'Land ahoy!' with both lungs.
      'Come down, Jamieson. We're putting you in charge of the yacht.'
      The 'yacht' was an old cabin-cruiser used for navigation lessons. The Captain shouted 'Nor' Nor' East!' and I - straight as a matchstick behind the wheel - had to reply 'Nor' Nor' East, sir!' and turn the 'yacht' in that direction. Every order on the Bridge had to be repeated to ensure there were no errors of communication. At night we fell asleep exhausted, soothed by the creaking of the ship and the sound of water. I loved it all, especially this new experience 'companionship', even when the others bragged about girls and I went peculiar inside. My only reservation was in having to occupy a bunk when most of the class were swinging glamorously in hammocks.
      Shore leave came at Christmas but those unable to afford the fare home were allowed to stay on board. It promised to be glum until an extravagant food parcel arrived from John and Edna. Included was a huge fruit cake. I cut myself a slice and passed the rest on. In return, back came a hunk of haggis which I tasted for the first time and found not unpalatable. We shared everything, cracked jokes, and in the evening ambled over to the Mission House where the tea ladies in flimsy paper hats made a sense of occasion out of lemonade and buns. On Boxing Day three of us slipped away to the Bristol pubs and got tiddly: strictly against the rules and therefore essential to do. It was the most delightful Christmas I've ever had. By and large I loathe Christmas, bolt the doors, and watch television until it goes away.
      My final report was creditable, apart from knots, which were disastrous. We signed each other's group photograph, pledged eternal friendship, vowed to meet up in Cairo or Rio or Tokyo, and all went home.
      A few months later a young man called Colin Shipley, who was a ship's carpenter and yet another of Theresa's fiancés, said, 'There's a place going on my ship for a deck-boy. If you want it.' The next day I picked up my cardboard suitcase, opened the front door of Teynham Crescent, took a deep breath of air, coughed, and set off on the road to Manchester to join the S.S. Pacific Fortune.

2Sea

That was a fast start to life. It slowed up for a moment when on a cold February night in 1952 I found myself with Colin at the entrance to the vast blackness of Manchester docks. In fact my heart almost stopped. It was so dreadfully silent - apart from the squeaking of rats and the ominous ripple of unseen water. Black lines of cranes and sheds fell away into pools of ink. It started to sleet again, softening the smell of resin and old fibre.
      A policeman checked our papers from his little sentry-box and let us pass. Colin walked ahead. I screwed up my eyes, stuck my head forward, and stumbled after him into the murk, trying to avoid coils of rope and long cables mooring dead ships to the wharfside. Suddenly the black hull of the Pacific Fortune hung over us. Except for half-a-dozen hurricane lamps the ship was in darkness. The sailors were ashore. I followed Colin up the gangplank.
      At the top a man stepped out from the shadows. He was about fifty and cube-shaped. Swinging me into the lamplight he looked me up and down, then said over his shoulder in a thick Glaswegian accent, 'Och, Colin, I thought we was gettin' a laddie!' and chuckled. This was Mr Macdonald, my boss, the Bo's'n.
      We crossed the deck, went down the gangway, flicked on a light, along passages, down again, along more passages, down, down, to the aft of the ship where the sea crew had their quarters. An iron door was opened and I was shown into a small cabin.
      'You'll be all right here. Danny will be back soon - he'll explain everything. Have you eaten? Good. Sign the list tomorrow at 9a.m. Welcome aboard, laddie.' And the Bo's'n took Colin off for a drink.
      There were three bunks in the cabin. The two lower ones had already been taken. I clambered up into mine and sat there nervously swinging my legs.
      An hour later the door opened and Danny came in. He was about nineteen or twenty, skinny with an unexpectedly studious air. Danny had a crisp tongue which I later discovered enabled him to hold his own among the bigger, rougher sailors. Robby, a junior like myself but a couple of years older, followed. Robby was amiable enough but overweight and afflicted with boils and indelicate odours. I was the youngest crew member, the only one who had never before been to sea.
      Danny showed me where to hang up my toothbrush, all that sort of thing, and said, 'I'm bollocked so it's lights out.' There was no doubt who wore the trousers in our cabin. 'Besides, you should try and get a good night's sleep, you'll need it.' Lying up in the bunk, heartbeat unnaturally loud in my ears, listening to the creaking of the decks, trying to decide whether I should have packed my rosary beads... but eventually I faded out.
      Suddenly there was a rumpus outside the door. Drunken sailors crashing back from the bars, a sound which was to panic me often in the future. The door sprang open and a light went on. Three young mariners were hooting round the cabin. They weaved across to my bunk and started to tug at the bedclothes. The ringleader, a heavy leathery crewman about twenty- five years old, was bellowing in a Scots slum voice, 'C'mon, let's have a look! Ooh, 'e's wearing pyjamas!' I held on tight and kicked. Danny was shouting, Fuck off, Jock! We want our sleep if you want your breakfast!' A group of older crewmen turned up to investigate the noise and they restored order. Robby was giggling uneasily and playing with a boil on his neck.
      'Are they always like that?' I wanted to say to Danny, but my mouth had gone so dry that the lips stuck to the teeth.
      'They're O.K. really, they're just pissed,' he said, turned over, and fell asleep in seconds.
      Clang!!! The alarm shook me rigid. 5.30a.m. Robby was already pulling on his trousers and saying, 'Get a move on, we've got to get the mess going before the sailors turn up, I'll show you the routine.' I soon realised that one's status on board advanced with the hour one was permitted to rise. We were the first up.
      Robby led the way along brilliant red decks and into the sailors' mess, which was spotless and had to be kept that way by us. He showed me how to make the tea, set the table for the crew, trot along - everything was done at a trot - to the Petty Officers' Mess and set it up for the Bo's'n, Colin and the Ship's Electrician (known as 'Sparks'), then along more corridors to meet Chief Ship's Cook Heywood who resembled a barrel of lard. His face opened in a grin and he said, 'Well I'll be blowed, whatever next!'
      The stewards were now coming out of their cabins. They lived amidships with their own mess and waited on the officers and passengers. There was a sharp distinction between the sea crew, who actually moved the vessel, and the stewards, who provided service for the elect. The sailors dismissed them as a 'bunch of fairies'. Most of the stewards were English and all the sailors seemed to be Scotsmen called Jock, coarse-grained types yet good at heart. The passengers were even further away, somewhere in heaven - the Pacific Fortune was a 9,400 ton freighter carrying general cargo but with room for a dozen or so banana-boat travellers. One never saw them unless 'scruberising' their decks or painting the scuppers where the water ran off. Captain Perry one saw only when he chose to make the ship's round like Matron in a hospital. 'Settling in all right?' he asked with a smile, and passed on without waiting for a reply.
      Having been introduced to the hot, steaming galley it was time to trot back to the sailors' mess to clear up the tea and ashtrays. The crew would work until about 8a.m., when we would serve them breakfast. Afterwards Robby and I had to dash away to serve the Petty Officers. Colin said I had a choice - to call the Bo's'n 'Sir' or 'Bo's'n'. I chose the latter because it sounded so nautical. When all this had been set in motion one was permitted to eat too, for about five minutes, before the clearing up had to be done.
      My duties were divided into one week in the mess, one week on deck, plus serving tea and breakfast daily. £10 per week and a monthly allowance of £3. Mess duty was no joy. Waiting on the sailors, cleaning out their quarters, scrubbing floors, polishing brass, waxing teak, lunch, tea - after which many of the sailors would finish for the day - dinner, collapse. Our part of the ship was usually silent by 9p.m. while the passengers at the other end would be chatting somewhere between the cabinet pudding and the brandy. Scrubbing in the fresh air is more entertaining than scrubbing in the bowels so I preferred deck work, especially when entering or leaving a port. My overseer on deck was a taciturn Scot. I can't remember his name but presume it was Jock. Since he had no regard for words I learnt as I went along.

The first voyage began. The stevedores came on duty and cast us off at dawn. Winding the steel hawsers on to the bollards made my palms bleed. Jock said, 'Put these on', and my hands disappeared up to the elbows in deck gloves. But I lost some of my excruciating shyness and began asking questions which Jock ignored with a friendly smile.

The Liver Building topped by the twin Liver Birds, Pierhead, Liverpool

      From Manchester along the Ship Canal and out into the River Mersey takes a day of complicated manoeuvres. At Liverpool the ship floated past the green bronze birds on top of the Liver Building. Father said that if one saw them flapping it was a premonition of tragedy at sea.
      First week out of port: passed quickly, everything so new, porpoises raced the ship, a white clipper in full sail passed by. In the mornings I ran up to the fo'c's'lehead to retrieve the flying fish which had inadvertently suicided there. First come, first served, delicious for breakfast. And at the end of the day, while the crew were gambling or unwinding in their bunks, I climbed to a secret place on the poop deck and sat on a pile of ropes in my oilskin. Out in the Atlantic after dark the world is eerily bright. I wondered many things - and especially: what on earth am I doing on a poop deck with raw hands?
      Ten days out: the weather much warmer. The sailors began to take off their clothes, which was very disconcerting. I clung on to my jumper and black trousers. We worked without shoes or socks unless the steel decks became too hot. We put up a canvas swimming-pool for the passengers.
      About two weeks out: I was running along the deck in the early morning when a remarkable smell hit me. The relentlessness of salt had abated, and a heavy scent was in the air. Even the old hands were growing frolicsome on it. Eight hours later - land! On the horizon a low green island wobbled between the blue water and the sky. Haiti. My first palm trees. I had never been anywhere in my entire life and now - whack! Palm trees! Haiti! I kept rushing the sides of the ship and shouting, 'Can't we get off now?' But we cruised on through the Windward Passage, for our port was Kingston, Jamaica.
      The ship rode at anchor all day in the Bay of Kingston, waiting for a berth. I asked if we might swim ashore like the sailors do in films with a Polynesian setting. Cook Heywood said, 'Ever seen sharks, laddie?'
      I had seen only the fin of one following the ship. An old salt had become very agitated. Apparently the saying goes: aarr, if a shark do follow your ship for three days it do portend a death on board. Ours disappeared on the second night and the old salt lived to sleep again.
      Cook Heywood picked up a bucket of bones and offal and tipped it over the side. At once, and I mean at once, the water convulsed in paroxysms of pink foam and teeth. It was absolutely mesmerising.
      'And be careful when you're ashore,' said Cook. 'It's a popular form of burial hereabouts.'
      At about six in the evening we upped anchor and sailed into harbour. The ship was overrun by hawkers in jazzy clothes with whom the crew bartered furiously. Last to arrive was a black woman of enormous size. She wore a peppermint-green blouse which couldn't have been cut lower, a blue skirt daubed with flowers, and a flamingo scarf tied round her head. She flapped on board in sandals. Actually, she sashayed. When she moved everything moved because she wore no undergarments. 'Hiya, boys,' she drawled on reaching the top of the gangplank, wheezing and patting beads of moisture from her throat with a hankie.
      This was Cynthia, the washerwoman, who had come to take the sailors' laundry ashore. Obviously she was very popular and knew all the men by name. 'Oh!' she boomed, 'I's sure gonna take care ob dis lil baby.' Two black arms heavily laden with flesh cut out the light and I disappeared into a chest which sported the most tremendous pair of breasts I had seen in my life. They were phenomenal, and running down them was an unstoppable exudation of sweat. I emerged damp and red with the promise that 'One night, darlin, I's gonna show you der reeeel Kingston.'
      Colin, whose uncle was the Chief of Police, had been invited to a starchy garden party in the grounds of Government House and he took me along. The ladies wore Army & Navy Stores frocks and white gloves, and the gentlemen white dinner-jackets frayed at the cuffs. They looked incongruous, seedy even, in that tropical landscape.
      Officially the party was in honour of a Royal Navy battleship moored in the bay. A group of young matelots moved towards me and I overheard 'Look at that skin!' which is naval slang for 'That's a bit of all right!' They were flirting and asked me what I drank. Only minutes before, I had discovered Coca-Cola, an invention of genius. So Coca-Colas started to arrive. 'This is the life!' I thought, taking in the view with a sweep, then everything went round and I fell over. For the first but not the last time I was horribly sozzled. They had fixed the Cokes with rum.
      The next morning I made another discovery. My first hangover. Double agony, because our cabin was at the bottom of the ship, just over the screws, where the heat is at its most aggressive. True, there was a porthole. But this could not be opened in harbour because of rats. In fact it couldn't be opened at sea either because we should have been drowned. But when Cynthia, smoking a cigar, turned up to take me along the Kingston Waterfront, I knew exactly what to order. In and out of the little wooden bars we went, where three-piece tin-can bands make the sound of thirty, and smiles leer at you out of clouds of marijuana smoke - eventually I ordered so many rum and Cokes that I went quite off them.
      Next stop: Cristobal, where South America begins. We went ashore across a solid red carpet of cockroaches the size of sparrows., With every footstep along the wharf there was a ghastly crunch like the cracking of wood, followed by a sickening yellow ooze up around one's pumps.
      The Panama Canal: the middle of it is a bayou, a steaming stretch of swampy water strung with liana and full of flying creatures straight from Jules Verne. Here the issue of salt tablets was added to my chores. I hardly needed them myself, being a salt addict. Salt over everything, even over anchovies, even today when I'm supposed to be on a sodium-restricted diet.
      Sliding out of the Canal into the boundless blue clarity of the Pacific Ocean, we almost bumped into a whale. 'Slow,' shouted the Officer. The idea was to avoid ramming it. The whale rose out of the sea like a cathedral, waved and gracefully disappeared. This went on for twelve hours because the animal had adopted our ship as a playmate. If you ram them you drive right into a mass of blubber and it sticks, forcing the ship to put into port to have the corpse removed.
      The first call on the Pacific Coast was San Pedro/Long Beach, where I stocked up on short-sleeved Californian shirts splashed with cacti, Red Indians and film stars, then three days in San Francisco which the sailors said was la grande volupté of the run.
      Usually I wouldn't press myself on Danny and Robby when ashore. In public they were embarrassed by my effeminacy, I think. But the older sailors didn't give a damn. They were amused by the sight of a young thing groping pathetically into the mysteries of alcohol and adult life. But in San Francisco all the sailors had their special banging parlours to visit, so I went into the city alone. From the docks I caught the bus uptown past the gingerbread houses to Union Square where you have to press your face against the bus windows to see the tops of the skyscrapers. I gravitated towards Chinatown. We had one in Liverpool but San Francisco's exploded all over me in a dazzle of Chinese neon. Too young to enter the bars, I walked agog for hours and hours and formed a lifelong friendship with the American hamburger. After the lights, the most noticeable feature of the district was the number of drunks vomiting in doorways.
      Then it went very quiet. It must have been the early hours of the morning. I had to return to ship and grew apprehensive between Fisherman's Wharf and dockland. No bright lights here. Out of the gloom, wailing and flashing, a cop car flew at me. Two uniformed immensities jumped out, an entire hardware store hanging from their belts. I hadn't known there could be so many different instruments of persuasion. Hands up, against the wall, frisk; I knew the routine from James Cagney.
      'How old are you, kid?'
      'Sixteen, sir.'
      'Well, at least the kid don't lie.'
      It seemed to be an offence in California for anyone under twenty-one to be out so late. They clanked around for a few minutes, checking my papers, expressing surprise at my being at sea 'aweady', and told me to hop in. I was treated to a motor tour of the city before being dropped back at the ship. Their surprise returned when I shook hands and said thank you. Americans, I've since realised, are always impressed by civility. They don't quite know how to cope with it. If ever you find yourself the victim of aggression in the U.S.A., simply say 'I'm awfully sorry' or something like that and they'll blink and fall into the palm of your hand.
      As we sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge I very much hoped Seattle would be as stimulating - one was so inexperienced. But we did see a body float by with a bullet through its head, so even Seattle must have its moments.
      Canada. Brrr! And quiet. Our northernmost call was Woodfibre, an isolated lumberjack settlement with one coffee bar, where, surprise, we took on timber. It was in Canada that I gave my first interview. Colin had something to do with it because the radio people were allowed to come on board. They introduced me to the listeners as 'the youngest person to go to sea since child labour was abolished'.
      Now the voyage reversed itself.
      Haiti was on the horizon for a while.
      My seventeenth birthday came and went like a piece of flotsam.
      Then only the sea.

Whenever I could I retreated to my secret place on the poop deck. While we were in and out of port, everybody had plenty to occupy his attention but now, back in the small claustrophobic world of a ship in mid-Atlantic, my anxieties proliferated.
      At meal times the sailors flaunted their sexual conquests, while I sat in silence and became increasingly choked. With all the toil I should have been developing male muscles but I remained puppyish. Most of the men showered in the evening after work. Always secretive about bathing, I was now so ashamed of my body that I crept out to shower in the middle of the night so that no one would see me unclothed. My behaviour of course only made them more curious. It was always a huge relief when the weather changed to wind and rain, so that everyone was covered in oilskins and there was no pressure for me to take off my top. I was phobic about anyone seeing my chest. Instead of the hard pectoral muscles which all the other sailors loved to display as one of the bonuses of physical labour, there was a pulpiness around my nipples which I took to be rudimentary breasts.
      The ragging of that first night was repeated, usually at the instigation of the same young bullying Jock who now frightened me very much. There was always a great commotion. 'Silly fuck' this. 'Sod off' that. Objectively nothing catastrophic happened - a few bruises in the scuffles - and the older men prevented matters getting out of hand. But it made me wretched. Sometimes they blew kisses and said 'Hullo, ducks' or 'girlie'. They would wink, slap my bottom, slip an arm round my waist. What was one supposed to do back? All my wires were tangled up inside because, you see, I was excited by it as well as afraid. Had I been among the stewards, possibly it would have been easier. But I was at the Men's End of the ship, in the throes of a profound identity crisis brought on by puberty but not explained by it (I never completed the proper physical cycle of male adolescence). Why did I have this curvaceous body?
      After three months of voyaging, the ship was in a filthy condition. It returned via Antwerp and London to Manchester where one went through the ritual of being paid off (the balance of my wages came to £19.13s.3d). If one wasn't asked to join up again all the fears about not being good enough were confirmed. 'Will you be making another trip with us?' asked the Bo's'n. I had made the grade as far as they were concerned. 'And your monthly pay goes up to £4.'
      There were a few weeks' leave so, carrying scent, lace, American groceries, holiday shirts and strings of abalone shells, I went off to put my lightly weather-beaten face round the door in Teynham Crescent. 'Oh, thanks,' they said when I flung forth my treasures, and then withdrew back into themselves. I couldn't wait to return to the ship.
      When I did, it was a comfort to see that the seamen were by and large the same as on the first voyage. At least I knew where I stood with them. And one - tall, too handsome, blond, a friend of the young bully - thrilled me strangely. This could not be openly admitted, especially not to myself, but nor could it be disregarded because I went groggy every time we met.
      Half-way along the Ship Canal my overseer knocked me to the deck with one clout. A whirring noise passed overhead, terminated by a violent whipcrack. One of the hawsers securing the ship in the lock had snapped and would have gone through me like a wire through butter. It wasn't a good start. Passing out into the Mersey I scrutinised the Liver Birds. A light flashed from them but did they move? Or was my mind wandering?
      Life on board settled down to its jittery routine. One of the stewards I met in the galley presented himself as a suitor but I didn't respond, having adopted the condescension of the sailors with regard to these lesser mortals. Besides, the rejection of all advances had become automatic. Touching people is a very healthy activity. The absence of it made me morbidly sensitive. Nor could I accept my feeling for the Blond Sailor who caused such an upheaval in my prudish breast. I stared at him working on deck. He would look up, wink, and I'd turn away hot and confused. I was convinced a monstrous mistake had been made and only my being a woman would correct it. There were no fantasies about dressing in such and such a way. I merely wanted to be whole.
      One night the Blond Sailor opened my cabin door, unbuttoned his shirt and started to kiss me. Two of his friends burst in to see how far he'd got. The Blond Sailor laughed and went off with them. But I was engulfed by shame and driven closer still to paranoia.
      In Kingston Cynthia said, 'Why, honey, you sure is gettin' prettier every time I sees yooo.' She calmed me. Cynthia, all Earth Mother and soothing powers. Yet really she could do no more than she already did. Which was my washing, free of charge.
      Colin took me up into the Blue Mountains for a drink. We sat on a terrace overlooking a misty valley. The alcohol churned and threw up the conviction that not only should I never be normal but that instead of getting better it was going to get worse (which it did). I experienced an acute attack of panic which suddenly began to break me up from within, the eruption of intolerable pressures, and a compulsion to jump. Reason played no part in it. The compulsion emanated directly from the body.
      'Come on, it's time to get back,' said Colin and the brainstorm cleared, leaving me debilitated and depressed.
      As we sailed for the Panama Canal on a calm sea I began to vomit from nerves and tried to pass it off as seasickness. The Blond Sailor knew he had broken down my reserve. He appeared to swagger with extra self-assurance. The battle raged on inside me.
      In the Pacific the Bo's'n began to realise I was in a pretty bad way. He gave me work which was either alone or with older men but he couldn't isolate me. Knots, always my torture, now I had them in chest, stomach and head and they were getting tighter and tighter.
      The sailors must have thought me a very odd kettle of fish. I was over-polite with them through fear of involvement. Physically I had deteriorated, eating little, working feverishly in an attempt to block my thoughts - so much so that the Bo's'n took me aside and told me to take it easy. But I was under excessive emotional strain. The upshot was that, walking down the street in San Pedro, I saw a sign saying 'Doctor' and went in.
      After an initial reticence I burst, ending up with 'I want to be a woman!'
      'That's insane!... I mean, you'll grow out of it.' Which is what they were all to say.
      He gave me two sorts of pills, anti-depressant amphetamines and barbiturate sleepers, and told me to visit a psychiatrist as soon as I arrived back in England. He added that he would waive his fee.
      Well, I hadn't a clue what a psychiatrist was. It was a new word. The amphetamines shrivelled up what remained of my appetite and shredded what remained of my nerves. The sleeping pills made me dizzier than I already was. By the time we reached Los Angeles I was totally screwed up.
      After clearing away the dinner I stayed on board and when my two cabin mates returned I pretended to be asleep. At about 3 a.m. there was a hoo-ha outside the door. It banged open. Panic! They were laughing and stank of drink. I fought like a tiger. As usual the old men broke it up and I was left on the floor with a nosebleed. Later I relaxed sufficiently to weep. But I'd had enough. My mind went cool and I decided to kill myself. On this resolve I fell sound asleep for the first time in weeks.

Next day I worked dispassionately through the schedule and after the last job, which was to clear up when Colin, Sparks and the Bo's'n had dined, I shut myself in the Petty Officers' Mess. No one would return there until the following day. Picture me looking androgynous under a mop of black hair, with a tall glass of water on my right and on a tabletop to my left two piles of pills, one pink, one yellow. It was common knowledge that the way to kill oneself was to swallow an overdose of pills. But which ones? To hedge my bets I decided to swallow both, first a pink, then a yellow, then a pink, then a yellow, until they had all gone. I'd got half-way through when I began to shake, tingle and sweat. My vision flashed on and off. It went into black and white. My final thought was 'This is wrong but so is everything else I do - hope Mum forgives me.' The last thing I remember was falling off a chair.
      Strange to say, I didn't blame the sailors. They didn't mean to be unkind and were only being their raunchy selves. Certainly if they'd realised what was really happening they would have done anything to make life easier. But there was no way of getting it across. How could they be expected to understand what I couldn't understand myself? Actually their attempts to make contact with me, however rough and ready, were in fact an example not of their meanness but of their generosity of spirit. Sea people are wonderfully generous. They have simplicity and depth because dealing with the elements is their business. And because of this simplicity they are also touched by romance. I have always admired and loved them. Later on, when I became well-known, I received many letters from sailors and from whole messes.

6 Mess, H.M.S. Crossbow. Dear Miss Ashley - When you first appeared in the papers we have been collecting your photos and pinning them on our locker doors. Not long ago we decided to form a fan club and all the Mess wholeheartedly agreed. We thought that if you could send us a few autographed pictures...

D4 Mess, H.M.S. Excellent, Monday Tot Time. Dear Miss Ashley - It is with hearts full of hope that we write this our first letter to you, an ex-mariner and now a beautiful woman. In our mess deck we have forty-one pin-ups of various young, good-looking women but nowhere among these can be found one such as you. We would willingly tear these down if we could replace them with portraits of yourself... We write this letter in the belief that you will treat it as a sincere one, and it is you know. Yours hopefully, Able Seamen Grimwood, Gwent, Sheppard.

The Lads, H.M.S. Battleaxe. Dear Miss Ashley - I wish to thank you on behalf of all the lads for the photographs you very kindly sent. They now occupy a place of honour in the mess, where no matter where we look we can see them, not that we would want it any other way... Take good care of yourself and the very best of luck and happiness in all you do. Sincerely yours, A.B. Derek Herron.

3Madness

'Now listen to me, you silly fucking cow. Stop all this shit about wanting to be a woman. You'll grow out of it. Man? Woman? Who Cares? You've got it up here, that's what counts. If God had intended the genitals to be as important as the brain He'd have put a skull round them.' Roxy was dispensing advice in a coffee bar, Renshaw Street, one cold November evening.
      The first thing I'd done was go for another ship but I'd been given A Dishonourable Discharge. The second thing was to fix up work with John and Edna. And the third was to try and learn to live with the word 'freak', an embarrassment now to my family as well as myself. In this, a positive element had entered my life which was crucial: Roxy.
      Slightly built, with a strikingly red face and a pot of green eyeshadow on each eye, he had come to work on one of the stalls in the Market. His forehead was very high with a mass of ginger hair piled precariously above it in oily quiffs. When he was excited they dislodged themselves and wound down over his face, in the centre of which was the foulest mouth I'd ever encountered. From this nervously jerking orifice, night and day, issued a flow of abuse and wisecracks. For Roxy it was a condition of existence, like breathing or the circulation of the blood.
      And his hands - when they weren't involved in the reconstitution of his coiffure, his hands jumped about in unpredictable staccato, perhaps coming together for a second under the chin like a stunned madonna before shooting off in independent directions, one to the hip, the other to interfere with an earlobe, explore an itchiness in the lumbar-region, or simply gouge the air, then they would meet up again behind his neck in a desperate attempt to knot an imaginary turban. I never saw him, one might say, in repose. The animated effect was enhanced by the comparative sobriety of his dress.
      Roxy was a new type for me. And in case you imagine him to be of a simpering disposition, I should emphasise that he was as tough as boots. Liverpool can be a mean town for those who stick out like thumbs. But under threat Roxy was at his wildest. 'You touch me, mate, and I'll fucking knock yer face through the back of yer head!' With green eyes blazing in green war-paint, the blood vessels standing out on his scrawny neck, the hands zipping up and down - thugs ran a mile. At first he frightened me too. But the discovery of Roxy's throwaway attitude towards all that was considered reprehensible, well, I simply talked and talked, it was like a bowel movement in my soul.
      He invited me to meet his friends in the gay bars. Whenever the doors opened everyone inside would stop talking, turn round to check out who was coming in, and then return to the business of letting off steam among themselves. There were two main haunts: one behind the Market which I was reluctant to use for fear of being spotted, and another at the Stork Hotel. The hubbub! Many of the customers wore cosmetics and semi-drag. The more exaggerated ones had left home and gave parties. I went to one at the flat of two men who lived as women by night. Full of pink satin, white lace, gold tassels, doilies all over the place, it looked as though Mae West had thrown up in there. The atmosphere made me uncomfortable, for my own presentation went much further than Roxy's in formality - a dark boxjacket with padded shoulders to make me shapeless, black trousers, hair long on top but cut into a Tony Curtis Boston at the back, and a white untouched face.
      There was nothing to do in Liverpool in the early 1950s. The only nightlife was people being beaten up and murdered. After closing time we hung around the Pierhead which was the focus for youthful frustration. Liverpool has tremendous nervous energy. We youngsters brought it to the Pierhead where a dangerous static would build.
      Reggie Endicott took me to a boozing party at the house of a friend of his. It was a smart modern one, distinguished by an indoor lavatory. I stood behind a sofa feeling worse and worse and finally went off to this lavatory and locked myself in. For want of anything more constructive to do I took down a bottle of aspirin and swallowed the entire contents. This second suicide attempt was much feebler than the first. In fact it failed to connect at all. I crawled home with Reggie, slept for eighteen hours, and awoke with a monumental headache. It was assumed I had drunk too much, a permissible excess denoting manliness.
      ...We were at the Pierhead. Roxy was bitching with another Liverpudlian queen called Little Gloria (as opposed to Big Gloria who came from Leeds) over a piece of rough trade they both had their teeth into. As usual I was outside it. We had been to the pub behind the Market and had had a few. I loved to drink. My manners had become even more reserved than before. Putting a psychological distance between myself and others was my method of self-protection. Only drink relaxed me, gave me a holiday from myself. But it took quite a lot, half-a-dozen gins before the lights started switching on.
      Out there in the keyed-up atmosphere of the Pierhead I overheard two young men discussing marriage plans. I couldn't live that life. On the other side the row between Roxy and Little Gloria grew intolerable. I knew I couldn't live their life either. Despair swept through me like a dry wind. Roxy, Little Gloria, me, everything was so sordid. At eighteen I had no future, no chance for any kind of happiness, so -
      I shot like a bullet towards the railings, jumped clear over them and fell thirty feet into the fast current of the Mersey. As I fell through the air I registered the shocked silence of those I'd left behind. My fall was broken by an icy smack. I plunged in and the water carried me off at top speed. Thinks: 'Thank God the tide wasn't out - it's going out now - I'm rushing towards the sea - I'm going like the clappers towards New Brighton - I'll float for a while until my clothes get waterlogged - then I'll be dragged under.' Having analysed the situation, I settled into the current as one would settle into an armchair.
      On my way down-river I passed beneath a line of pontoons. As I sped out the other side there was a frightful pull on my hair. For a moment I assumed I had crashed into a post until I found myself rising out of the water. One of the young men contemplating marriage had seen me vanish under the pontoon, calculated the point at which I should emerge, ran about three hundred yards, jumped down to it, and was now hauling me out of one of the most dangerous rivers in the world. I writhed and fought. Chunks of hair came out. But he was so strong, and I ended up at the Ormskirk Mental Hospital. 'Youth Saved by Long Hair', said the Liverpool Echo. My first press.

Though sedated I woke up with a start in a soft white gown with no metal fittings on it. In the bed opposite, with jug ears and clawlike hands covered in black hair, a man was tied down and screaming. Some were giggling, or sobbing, or releasing horrible howls from their throats; others shuffled up and down the ward with faces cancelled by drugs. In the bed to my left was a young man with the loveliest pale features. We would chat in the normal way until a fixed stare came into his eyes. He would start to shiver and to mutter. 'Arrgh... arrgh... I like them black, I like them big, they've got to be big and black, I've got to have them big and black.' Then the fit would pass and he'd continue the conversation as if nothing had happened. His obsession was the breasts of black women, he'd gone over the edge in that respect, and it had disfigured his whole outlook on life. It occurred to me that his best chance of a cure lay not in a madmen's ward but in a ticket on the first boat to Jamaica and Cynthia.
      Wanting to go to the lavatory I was distressed to find myself escorted there by two giants in white coats and not allowed to shut the door. The inmates were not permitted to shave themselves either. No knives or forks with the food. One ate with a spoon like a babe in rompers. The screamer opposite had to be fed by one of the giants who wiped the slobbering mouth and chin after every spoonful. This filthy performance effectively put me off food. The ward lacked all adornment and was painted a bleak white. The windows were barred and could open only an inch or two. The doors were bolted shut. I had been imprisoned in a ward for violent maniacs.
      When this appalling fact dawned on me I asked to see a doctor, and was told to wait. At last he came and I said, 'Why am I in a place like this?'
      'Because if you do stupid things like you do, you come to places like this.' Like all the staff he wore a white coat. It was to prevent psychological contamination, to remind themselves they were part of the sane community.
      'But I'm not mad. This is a place for raving loonies, this is not for me. I only tried to kill myself because I'm so unhappy.'
      He was non-committal, apart from informing me that I'd have to stay where I was, under observation for at least three days.
      The two giants took me for a bath, which completed my humiliation. In the ward the lights stayed on all night.
      On the fourth day Mother arrived. Bernie was with her in his customary, not-with-it way. She said, 'I wouldn't have come if Bernie hadn't come with me.' I screamed at her. To this day Mother thinks I've let the family down. It was agreed that I could leave, conditional on signing papers committing me to a year's psychiatric treatment as an out-patient at Walton Hospital near by, which had one of the largest psychiatric units in the British Isles. When I got home my brother Freddie said, 'You silly git', and ruffled my hair. It was the nearest the family came to discussing it.
      Dr Vaillant was the head of the unit. His dark eyes couldn't rest, least of all on anyone else's, and darted about in terror of everything. Small and twitchy, he reminded me of a rat in distress. After an interview with him I was passed on to a much younger doctor who began the cure by putting a mask over my face and dropping ether on to it. The idea was to release one's hidden depths by getting one high.
      'Why do you want to be a woman?' he asked. Claustrophobia began to flow up my nose and oppress my chest. Through the stone walls I could hear someone crying.
      'We've got to go and help them! We've got to!' I was babbling like an old wino and tore the sodden mask off my face. There were four or five sessions with the ether mask and I grew to like it. This is fatal for therapeutic probes because it means one has regained one's composure. The doctor asked me about homosexual activity. 'I'm approached nearly every day but I don't like it and I don't do it.'
      After a physical examination they put me on a course of male hormones. The dose was massive and might have encouraged a little growth in height but failed to make me shaggy and broad-shouldered. 'No matter what you do, you'll never be able to change my mind,' I said with a knowledge I didn't know I had.
      Next on the list was sodium pentothal, the truth drug. It is jabbed into your arm and injected slowly while they ask you questions, questions, always the same ones, always the same answers, over and over again. Eventually they decided to go straight for the Main Nerve. Electro-Convulsive Therapy.
      For this I was put in a public ward. Observing those who came out was no encouragement. These blitzed souls returned from the convulsion chamber like zombies, their eyes blinking and heavily bloodshot, with an attendant supporting them on each side. A few hours later they awoke in their beds with murderous headaches in comparison to which an aspirin overdose is like a day at the seaside. When it comes to medical matters I'm usually very brave but on these occasions was not.
      You are wheeled into the chamber. Wires are attached to your wrists and ankles. A crown of wires is placed on your head. Heavy canvas straps bind you to a table. Once they press that button it's zonk! out! until you wake up with a head full of cannonballs and broken glass. What theory lies behind E.C.T. I couldn't grasp. It was followed by more talk.
      After six months of these mind-bending exercises, the doctor told me there was nothing more they could do without wrecking me physically. The report noted, '...he presents a womanish appearance and has little bodily or facial hair.'

Mean while I had continued working in the Market. One was really supposed to live on sickness benefit like an invalid, but the work kept me sane. At the same time I had my first clumsy affair with a man. He was called Vic and I'd met him at the Stork Hotel. The barman came across to me and said, 'Someone wants to buy you a drink', which wasn't unusual. Already I was the prettiest and most mysterious of the bunch, but going out of my way to look as straight as possible (although the one thing they always said was, "You've got a 'woman's eyes'"). Occasionally Vic would crash out on Mother's sofa. She quite liked him. But his insane fits of jealousy killed it before it had a chance to reach anything romantic.
      I had also met one of the directors of a local brewery, who offered to put me on a catering course. My first assignment was with Mr and Mrs Leadbetter in Chester at the Commercial pub in St Peter's Graveyard. But when I started to attract an extrovert clientele I got cold feet and asked for a transfer. This was to the Westminster Hotel, Rhyl, to learn dining-rooms and kitchens. It was off-season, dead as dead (roller-skating was the biggest treat in town), so after some months I asked for another transfer. It took me to St Asaph. I didn't get on with the family running the hotel. The last straw came when a horse bolted and dragged me on my back all through the shopping streets one crowded Saturday afternoon. Besides, there's only so much you can learn about a dining-room. I'd run out of ideas; something else had to happen.

Ronnie Cogan, a friend who'd gone to London, would occasionally return north to demonstrate his metropolitan style. Aghast and goggle-eyed, he said, "You mean you've never heard of Cuban heels? Eee, Liverpool's nowhere, kid - if you want to get somewhere you've got to come to t'Smoke."
      It seemed the essential move.
      Mother refused to lend me a bean, so I boarded the train with fifty shillings in my pocket. At Euston Station Ronnie said, "We can sleep on the floor of Big Gloria's room in Earl's Court."
      This was it - London. Piccadilly, the Ritz, Her Majesty! The most sensible thing I'd done in my life. It's funny how these changes seem impossibly major while you contemplate them. But when you do them, it's so easy - freedom and a floor like Big Gloria's had been waiting there for years. Six-feet-four with a face like Sitting Bull, he didn't seem at all surprised to see us and immediately brewed a cuppa.
      Now for a job. Ronnie and I found positions right away as table-wipers at Lyon's Corner House, Coventry Street, the night shift, upstairs. In imitation of Roxy I smeared my lids with green paint, and ate Benzedrine Inhalers to keep me wiping through the night (you took out the wad of inhaler, cut it up with scissors and swallowed the pieces with water). It caught on. In 1953 if you wanted a cup of tea in Central London at 4 a. m. you went upstairs at the Lyon's Corner House to be greeted by a squad of painted macaws screeching about on speed. My section was soon filled with fans, little old men and women to whom I gave free cups of tea from a gigantic metal teapot. They sat there all night drinking tea and going to the lavatory, and at dawn they melted away.
      With Ronnie I took a small flat in Westgate Terrace. In the morning after work we'd fly back in a fever to scrub it, hoping to exhaust ourselves for sleep. My God, those Benzedrine Inhalers. Three days later you'd be all of a pother and still going! One drank excessively to smooth it off round the edges. Sometimes I ploughed through a whole bottle of vodka before work.
      No, London was not disappointing. I learned all that was free if you were prepared to walk and can still surprise Londoners with odd corners they didn't know existed. The pubs we frequented were the Fitzroy and the Marquis of Granby north of Soho, in a district hung over from Bloomsbury days and known to us as Fitzravia. The Fitzroy was the most outrageous pub in London and often raided. The police entered, the place fell silent, they bolted the doors, and anyone without identification was taken off in a Black Maria. "Are you old enough to be drinking here?" they would ask - I always carried my passport in case of these interrogations. It was in the Fitzroy that I met Rock Hudson and Ava Gardner. After hours a mixed bag, including Danny La Rue and Tommy Osborne, congregated in the Snake Pit, a Soho bomb-site with railings round it and a tea caravan in the middle behind St Anne's Church. London was of course littered with bomb-sites. Soho I never really took to, despite spending considerable time there. But I did meet a famous scientist in a restaurant in Dean Street.
      "Is it Mr Einstein?"
      He turned and said, "Are you a boy or a girl?"
      "I think I'm a girl."
      "Whatever you are, you should be Madame Butterfly with those long eyelashes."
      "Can I have your autograph?"
      "But I don't like to do that, it embarrasses me so much."
      "Oh, go on..."
      "Oh, all right..." He gave me five, one each for our table, some kind of record for him.
      Little Gloria came south too and brought the news that Vic had committed suicide on a camping holiday. At lunchtime he'd walked into a Welsh reservoir. "Don't be too long, food's almost ready," his friends cried. He called out, "That's O.K. I'll not be back." The body was found a few days afterwards.
      The first Christmas, I went home, laden with gifts (for Mother a £5 box of chocolates the size of a cartwheel), showing off in a royal-blue box jacket and slip-on shoes. Slip-ons had recently come into the London shops. Before it had always been lace-ups.
      I arrived on Christmas Eve. Ivor turned up blind drunk, ready for Midnight Mass.
      "No, Ivor, I'm not coming with you, I'm an atheist now."
      "I'll thump you if you don't come, you great cissy!"
      "Not very spiritual talk for a Christmas Eve."
      "No fancy London stuff here, thank you very much," said Mother. "You are going with Ivor."
      "Well, what's happened to you all of a sudden? You're not even a Catholic. You're famous for encouraging people to defect! So leave me alone. I just want a quiet Christmas."
      Feeble as it was, such confidence astounded Mother. "Get out of this house!" she bawled. "And never ever come back!"
      Luckily I hadn't unpacked. Ivor sloshed along the hall walls behind me, attempting to get to the church across the way. He zig-zagged all over the road. Mother was pushing him, abusing him, trying to stop him collapsing before he reached a pew. The two of them fell up the steps, he crashed into the door, and she shoved him inside.
      I turned and called out, "Are you sure you never want to see me again? Because if you say yes, you never will."
      Mother was out of breath at the head of the church steps, framed in the light of the doorway. "I never want to see you again, d'you hear? I've hated you from the second you were born!"
      This moment had been a long time coming. But there was no mistaking that it had arrived. I walked a mile or so to Broadway where Ronnie was spending Christmas with his lot. When he opened the door he was horrified to see me with my suitcase but Mrs Cogan was marvellous. "You come in, love, we'll give you your Christmas," she said.
      Back in London, while elbowing tea stains off the Formica at five in the morning, a very pretty girl called Sylvia drifted in for a cup of tea and said, "Wouldn't you prefer office work to this?"
      "This is O.K. I wouldn't mind a change."
      "I'm sure my boss would love you."
      Which is how I came to operate the switchboard at J. Rowland Sales Ltd, a theatrical agency in Charing Cross Road. I gave up the Benzedrine and the eye-shadow and went legit. There had been inducements - I gave an inhaler to a fellow worker and he ran into a bus and was killed. Finally, when Ronnie metamorphosed into Humphrey Bogart under my very eyes, I knew I'd overdone the drink, drugs and sleeplessness. It was at this agency that I met Duncan Melvin, a musical and ballet impresario whose wife owned Le Petit Club Français in St James's, a fashionable dining-club for politicians and civil servants. Duncan looked like a little leprechaun, which is what I called him. Pink and chubby, always chuckling, he wanted to be my sugar-daddy but I said no. I was too romantic to make it as a tart.
      The agency was perfectly situated when the coffee-bar boom happened. Our favourites were nearby in Old Compton Street, the Two Eyes where Tommy Steele used to sing before he became famous, and the Kaleidoscope round the corner. Here I first met my great friend Rita Wallace (née Farrell). Like Big Gloria she came from Leeds. Like Duncan she looked like a leprechaun. Like me she was a teenager, but half my height with wild red hair, ravishingly pretty and usually hysterical with manic laughter. Rita was doing the same as I'd done, waitressing all hours, Benzedrine Inhalers, have another coffee on the house, have another Danish, have you met Betty the Berk? One was always being introduced to people with names like that. Betty grunted and carried on spooning piles of sugar into his coffee.
      When Ronnie moved on I couldn't afford to keep the flat. A transvestite hooker friend, Tristram, who had a record of petty-mongering as long as your leg, said I could take a room in his basement in Victoria. After a while I had to put it to him.
      "Tristram, I think somebody's been sleeping in my bed."
      "Oh yes, Eyelashes [my latest sobriquet], "this couple I know, she's a doll, he's a dish, so in love, so romantic, they had nowhere to go, sorry, I meant to tell you."
      "And Tristram, you've given up going to work - how are you living?"
      "Didn't you know, sweet? I have this private income." He was a crashing snob, gave himself such airs.
      A few weeks later, coming down the street after work a little earlier than usual, I spotted a young woman coming up the area steps. Nothing romantic about her and she was with a man a hundred years old at least. And something else bothered me. I went up to Bill, one of the boys who lived upstairs, and said, "Do you know, I got the most shocking bill from our grocer. It's £43 and I hardly eat."
      "Haven't you any idea what's going on?"
      "What do you mean?"
      "You're in a very dangerous position. Tristram's letting your room to whores during the day. By the hour. By the half- hour when he can.
      "You haven't missed much, have you."
      "They must be using your account at the grocer's too. And the house, you realise it's being watched."
      I went cold. Who would have believed I was innocent? Who ever believes it?
      "I'm getting the night boat to Jersey tomorrow," said Bill. "Why don't you come?"
      Bill regularly went there to work the summer season. The night boat appealed to my sense of drama. A few days afterwards Tristram was arrested. He was described in one newspaper as appearing in court "with heavy black beard poking through heavy white make-up".

We floated into St Hélier at eight in the morning feeling gorgeous. The following day I was washing dishes. The day after that the bush telegraph informed me of a more amusing job out at La Corbière.
      The hotel there was unfinished, plonked by itself on the edge of a cliff, with the lighthouse rising theatrically opposite. It was owned by Mr and Mrs Wormold who lived in St Hélier. He was a charming softie from the North of England. She had more zap, the double of Ginger Rogers, and was having a duet with his business partner.
      "We want someone who can do everything," he said.
      "That's me."
      "So far only one bedroom's finished. You can have it as general manager and caretaker. Breakfasts, morning coffee, lunches, teas and the bar."
      "When do you want me to start?"
      "How about now?"
      Under me were a part-time barman, a woman in the kitchen and a cleaner. Among my customers were the lighthouse- keepers, a tourist called Clare Cork who was passing through and an Italian waiter who was her lover. But at night I was alone, with only a black cat and a tortoise for company. I'd start the day with an early-morning swim, then open up, take in the milk, tidy the bar, put the chairs and tables out on the terrace, put on tea and coffee, cut bread for toasting, heat the fat in case anyone ordered a cooked breakfast, and sit there eating pieces of orange in summery bliss. Apart from the vagrant staff, the first in would often not be until 11a.m., the new shift for the lighthouse wanting a drink. A few for lunch, mostly salads. Tea-time was busiest, cream teas on the terrace, but the nights alone could get very gothic.
      On my Sundays off I'd sit in the Red Cabin Bar of the Royal Yacht Hotel and be sociable. Imagine my joy when Rita and the gang pranced in at the tops of their voices. "Dwahling, it was such a good idea, we're going to slave here too." After work they'd come out to La Corbière to keep me company, turning up with the Sarah Vaughan records around midnight and ready for a party. Mr Wormold normally left at 11p.m. He knew about these dansants but didn't mind because I was such a godsend during the day.
      "All I ask is you don't forget to lock up last thing."
      "I wouldn't, Mr Wormold. And after midnight I'll turn the lights out too, in case the police get nosey. I shouldn't want to distract them from their duties." Besides, the lighthouse cast such a poetic light through the large window it would have been criminal not to exploit it.
      One night I'd gone up early to ease my head - the lighthouse men had been in and out and I was whoozy from drinking with them. Hearing a noise below, I went to the top of the staircase wound in a sheet. The party people were arriving. Raising my hand I said "Welcome, darlings!", tripped, and fell all the way to the bottom where I rolled under the piano. Dazed momentarily, I grabbed one of the piano legs to raise myself up. It moved. I noticed it was covered in black cloth. My eyes travelled up it to where a powerful thigh stretched tight the fabric in an outward curve, up to where it joined another leg and bulged menacingly as a beam from the lighthouse moved slowly across the jutting pelvis, and from there to a narrow leather belt, a stark white shirt suggesting the shadows of a heavily muscled trunk, up towards an open collar and a dark throat kissed by the sun, two ropes of muscle between which an Adam's apple was gently swallowing, and on to a strong jaw line, wide mobile mouth with brilliant sudden teeth, a nose slightly fleshy but only so much as to render all the rest more huggable, and proceeded to the magnificent eyes in whose endless green depths birds sang and lions roared and dreams slid to and fro. The head was square, covered in tight glittering curls, and set rocklike on straight shoulders. For me the rest of the room had vanished into silence. All I could hear was, "Let go of my leg, you bloody idiot." He was young and sturdy. Rita had brought him.
      A week later, while I was working late in the bar, he walked in. Rolling golden body, deep deep tan. Taken unawares, I stuck my head in a glass of gin and scrutinised him out of the side of one eye.
      "Remember me?" he said.
      Knives switched under my ribs. I'd forgotten the tonic.
      "Can I get you a drink?" I said.
      He jumped up on a bar-stool and sat there grinning. "Just a beer."
      I grabbed a bottle, snapped off the cap and sent it frothing across the bar. "Oh here, you do it." I was pumping shots of gin into my glass with the other hand and failing to be blasé. I was tongue-tied. Whenever his own patter ground to a halt, which was quite often, he would look down and brush non-existent specks of dust from his thighs.
      Once the gin began to soak in, I relaxed a little. His name was Joey, a Cockney boy from the Isle of Dogs in the East End of London. Italian and Irish blood splashed together with the English inside him. He was so tremendously bright and alive that he seemed to trigger a phosphorescence in the air. He was working in St Hélier in the office of a boatyard. And I was, I was -
      "They call me Eyelashes!" I blurted out, reeling inside.
      "That's a funny sort of name. Can I have another beer?"
      Yes!!
      ...That is, "Sure you can."
      After closing I walked with him to the bus-stop. Before he climbed aboard he kissed me. In front of all the passengers. I was completely floored. When I fell into bed I thought, "What is going on?" He had walked into my mind and now squatted there. I didn't sleep.
      When I met Rita in a coffee bar in St Hélier, Joey was with her.
      "Hi, Joey," I said in my most nonchalant breeze.
      "I don't want to know you," he said. "Eye-bloody-lashes!"
      Horribly crushed I returned to La Corbière. But in a few days, much to my surprise, he called in again. After spinning a silver coin in the bar for half an hour he said, "I wanted to say sorry."
      "What for?"
      "For being a prick in that coffee bar."
      "Oh that. Don't worry. I'd forgotten about it."
      "No, you hadn't. I thought you were a girl, then Rita told me... Oh it doesn't matter."
      At the time I was dressing in a very non-committal way: slacks and a sweater. The Tony Curtis hair-do had grown into an Audrey Hepburn. I let people decide for themselves what sex I was, behaving accordingly. On the beach I hid under an all-over singlet.
      Joey didn't catch the bus back that night. He stayed quite a few times from then on, despite plenty of girlfriends back in St Hélier. Yes, he was sensationally handsome. With an unavoidable body. But in no sense was it easy. Because of my loathing for my own flesh, for my genitals especially, I was a terribly uncertain lover, no lover at all really. Joey didn't know what he was supposed to do, what I would allow him to do, or what he wanted to do either. What we did most that summer was talk about it. Hours and hours of talk going round in huge circles on the sand.
      At the end of the season, we found ourselves on the beach. Joey came out of the water. I stared at him as he stood dripping in sky-blue briefs, covered in gooseflesh.
      "One day," I said, "I'm going to be a woman. I promise you because I love you."
      "Ha, you're ridiculous," he said, rubbing his golden pectorals with a towel.
      "Oh, I know that only too well."

In London I obtained work at Waitrose grocer's in Gloucester Road, slicing bacon - would I never escape that bacon? Ronnie brought his mother to my bedsitter and in honour of this Liverpudlian reunion I cooked on the single ring a pan of Scouse (like Irish stew, you throw in the lot and braise). just before they left, Rita showed up.
      "Have you heard?" she said. "Joey was dancing and his back went."
      He was in St Bartholomew's Hospital. At last, unable to restrain myself, I went over one evening. His parents were coming out of the room so I hung back until they'd left. Joey looked grey and thin and had broken out in spots. He was covered with sweat. All his vigour had gone.
      "What the hell are you doing here? My parents might have seen you. I don't want any visits, understand? Now get out!"
      His embarrassment over me was understandable. More distressing was his loss of confidence in himself. He was going through an emotional crisis because he believed his back would never fully mend. I sent him notes and left it at that.
      A Windmill girl asked me if I'd like to occupy her flat while she spent Christmas with her family in Dorking and then went on tour. We lived like gypsies then, throwing things into a suitcase at the drop of a hat. So much so that for a long time I deliberately didn't acquire more than one suitcaseful of possessions.
      What a gloomy basement it turned out to be, livened up only by a coal fire which I kept on the roar. Not long after moving in, I had a late-night visitor. It was Clare Cork.
      "I'm sorry, I'm terribly ill," she said. She was panting, fainting, the sweat pouring off her.
      "My God, come in."
      The problem was pregnancy, thanks to the Italian waiter. In fact she was on the verge of labour.
      "Quickly, lie down, get into my bed, I'll call an ambulance."
      "No! I can handle this. No ambulances."
      "But, Clare, I've got no idea what to do!"
      "Look, it's O.K., false alarm, please, I'd like some tea..."
      While I was in the kitchen there was a scream and I dashed back. Clare was looking ghastly. "It's hurting," she said. "They wouldn't understand in Ireland, for months I've been trying to abort it. I think I've done something to myself. Can you look to see if I'm all right?"
      As I examined her, she burst. The bed filled up with blood and water and the baby's head began to emerge.
      "I don't care what you say, I'm going to get an ambulance."
      "No, darlin', it's too late, I need your help here. Now go and boil as much water as you can."
      Hot water. The number one priority in every film you ever saw. My first birth! And at Christmas too. It was turning out to be an occasion after all. The kitchen rang with pans. The water took an eternity to boil. I unearthed some fresh towels and steamed back in to assist. Clare was lying exhausted on the bed.
      "You've done it! Is it a boy or a girl?"
      She looked at me from under her lids and said, "It's neither."
      "What do you mean it's neither? Let's have a look."
      But that wasn't possible. Clare had wrapped it up in lots and lots of newspaper and thrown it on the fire. just like that. She said it died a few minutes after birth, but I wasn't so sure. Clare wouldn't let me touch the fire. She sat beside it for two days, obsessively poking the ashes, then she left for Ireland, relieved that her ordeal was over, and that she could now face her mother as a good Catholic.
      Without explaining why, I said to Little Gloria, "I've got to get out of Olympia, it's driving me nuts." Actually I was having nightmares and daytime horrors about the burnt baby. He said there was a room going where he lived.
      7 Nevern Square. The basement and the ground floor were inhabited by a Polish family who acted as caretakers. They would have ignored an atomic bomb so long as it paid the rent. Which was a blessing because from the first floor upwards it was bedlam. Prostitutes, transvestites, drug addicts, petty crooks, and their guests, a non-stop party, doors banging, music blasting, lights on, twenty-four hours a day.
      Little Gloria, with pin eyes either side of an enormous rotting nose and no mouth at all, had come a long way since the Pierhead. At night he donned a shift, a stole and a wig and went out on the bash. He was tiny and I'm sure this helped - short people get away with drag more easily than tall people. He was also a kleptomaniac and his room was an Aladdin's cave of glittering trash hoisted from Woolworth's. Little Gloria invited you in for coffee and then gave it to you out of one of your own cups. The form was: don't bother to say anything, just pick up your own bits and pieces on the way out. Hoisting (shop- lifting) and kiting (a spending spree with a stolen cheque-book) were his two stand-bys when trade was thin on the pavement.
      My room was towards the top of the house and underneath it, "making ends meet, darlink", was Sheherazade, a towering Titian redhead from the North, a lesbian and a harlot. Most of the women prostitutes were blatant men-haters. Yet, no, she was not so much a lesbian as prodigiously kinky. You name it, Sheherazade loved it. However, her predilection was for sado- masochism. With boots, leather and whips, she ran a prosperous business out of her severely furnished bedsitter. Apart from height, Sheherazade's most conspicuous asset was the bulk of her breasts, strapped up in a brassière like a black- leather hammock to render them more victimising. They were magnificent, even better than Lana Turner's in They Won't Forget. On duty she added a pair of black-leather briefs with apertures let into them front and back and decorated with curlicues of metal studs, Prince Charming boots (seven-inch stiletto heels) reaching to her strong upper thighs, and round her wrists and neck coils of chain cut to the correct length by a man in the hardware department of Harrods, himself a suppliant. A true exhibitionist, Sherry often patrolled the streets attired thus, with a trench coat over the top to prevent arrest.
      Once she called me in as I was walking downstairs. A client was with her.
      "Look at that!" she said. "I mean, Toni [I'd lately rechristened myself], just look at it! What garbage we've got in today. Doesn't it make you want to spew all over it? Disgusting little worm! It's fit for nothing but the shit pit!"
      The man's eyes were paralysed with fear. He was lying naked on his back on the bed. A leather thong had been tied fast round his flame-red testicles. This thong was looped over the old-fashioned light bracket in the centre of the ceiling and pulled tight by the weight of a heavy flat- iron hanging in mid-air from the other end. Every so often, mouthing cruelties and curses, slapping her thigh with a riding crop, Sherry strode up to the flat-iron and gave it a yank.
      "There! Serves it right for being such a pile of bile! Go on, love, you give it a yank."
      "I don't like to, Sherry."
      "No? Do you want to whip him then? Is that what you want to do? Go on, give him one. Give him several. Give him the bloody lot, the stinking heap of fishheads!"
      Sherry was marching up and down with a blood-curdling sneer on her face. I didn't know whether to laugh or run away.
      "No? Well, watch." She struck him smartly across the testicles with her crop and a charge of ecstasy rippled through his body.
      'I was only on my way out to buy some Jaffa Cakes,' I mumbled.
      'Don't fret, darlink,' she said by way of an aside. 'He has to lie like that for an hour or more before he gets the inspiration. Then I give him one good tug, he comes, and pays me fifty quid. Sometimes it takes hours and hours. I tell you, it's no cinch this work, but it makes ends meet.'
      To me Sheherazade had passed on to the Higher Wisdom. She was so at home in strange waters. We always knew when she'd had a good day because that splendid red head appeared in the doorway, announcing in the vaguely Central European accent she affected, 'I've got an itsy bitsy bottle of bevvy.' From behind her back she would produce a magnum of champagne. Nothing about Sherry was small.
      On my floor lived Pussy and Ernestine, both waiters and apart from myself the only inhabitants in bona fide employment. Pussy was so named because he had the face of a Persian cat, the features all squashed into the centre by two large round cheeks. Ernestine was an alcoholic who eventually drank himself to death. Next to them was Jicky, who named himself after the scent by Guerlain. He had a Garbo fixation and his room was improvised from packing-cases in the Scandinavian style. He would sit in it and say, 'Yes, sweetheart, today I'm suicidal, I think I must kill myself.' In the end he did of course. Jicky was very beautiful, in the cold hard way that a plate can be beautiful, and affected dead-white maquillage. To everyone's disgust he insisted on storing it in the communal fridge. With Jicky everything had to be cold, even his pots of paint.
      Our resident junkie was Dawn Roberts, much older than the rest of us, about forty. Dawn was a bony little blonde, actressy, with a slash of red lipstick for a mouth and blue skin. No one knew where her money came from but she was a close friend of the famous Society drug addict Brenda Dean Paul. Brenda was always being arrested on charges of possession. She was the daughter of Sir Aubrey Dean Paul and his Polish wife, the pianist Lady Irène. Looking like Veronica Lake in dark glasses, Brenda made one feel that her life was all tragedy. In 1959 she was found dead in her flat just before her fiftieth birthday.
      Dawn was very far gone in the needle game, jabbing herself in the bottom several times a day; not bothering to lift up her skirt and slip down her panties, she simply jabbed it in through the worsted. On one occasion, a boy called Hilary stood to inherit quite a few thousand pounds if he married. For a fee, Sheherazade came to the rescue and we all filed off to the Kensington Register Office. Dawn was a witness. Half-way through the ceremony she took a syringe out of her black suede handbag and stuck it into her bottom. It was the middle of winter, she was in thick tweeds, so it took a bit of muscle. The registrar looked up, blinked, and carried on. He can't have missed it. Presumably he couldn't believe the evidence of his senses.
      As a safeguard against incapacity, Dawn taught everyone in the house how to do it for her. Heat up the drug in a spoon over a burner, pull it up into the syringe, and so on. When drunk, in bits and pieces, or first thing most mornings, she was unable to supply enough will-power and co-ordination to her limbs to fix herself.
      The most glamorous of the drag queens by far was Tallulah, so called because he modelled his voice on Miss Bankhead's. His big blue eyes, high cheekbones and mouthful of white teeth set in a jaw of granite gave him immediate distinction. While the rest of us were talking it was Tallulah's pleasure to flick his tongue in and out over scarlet lips so gummed with gloss you could see your face in them, and then slowly draw the lips back like stage curtains to expose the brilliant teeth. These would be held on view from ear to ear for as long as it was necessary to fill the room with white light, a glorious phenomenon on a dull winter's day. In addition to the smile, there was the walk, an effortless glide which conveyed the impression that he was moving forward on ball-bearings.
      Tallulah's dilemma was that in drag he looked like a man and out of it, like a woman. He was especially fond of black men - 'goolies' as they were called. Oh, they all loved the goolies whose constant presence in the house was indicated by the aroma of hashish on the staircase. Black women also came on occasions. One went by the name of Vernon. She had short curly hair dyed pink and always laughed instead of speaking. I took this for confidence at the time but now realise that it must have been tremendous insecurity.
      I never knew what I'd find on returning from Waitrose. We didn't lock our doors, were constantly rushing in and out of each other's rooms. Someone would say, 'We're all going to Jicky's for coffee, are you coming?' Jicky was only across the landing but we'd make an outing of it. Anyone might be in there - Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland. They were extraordinarily gifted mimics.
      Usually after work I went to Tallulah's room, which was the most comfortable as well as the most bilious. He'd draped tangerine and shocking-pink chiffon over the lights, covered the bed with leopardette scatter cushions, congeries of lace frothed at the windows picked out with velvet bows, hundreds of bottles of scent and cosmetics, a plastic Jesus that lit up from inside, coloured stills from the film musicals on the wall, frilly frocks which gave you migraine, and wigs on the window-sill: a style known as 'Hollywoochie'. Tallulah would be at his dressing-table practising The Smile, whose only drawback was laugh lines which he attempted to defeat with endless face- packs.
      'Perhaps I should forget the smile and go po like Jicky.'
      'You mustn't, Tallulah.'
      'You're right, honey - it's my glory - but in the wrong light I look as though I've been garotted - this new Leichner's bona on the eke - what do you think? - and you haven't mentioned the ria - navy blue is really me, isn't it.' But after a few hours he would decide that really navy blue wasn't him after all and the following day his hair would have changed to grass green or lemon.
      The slang was known as 'parliare' and seems to have been linked with Italian, from the days when travelling players came over from Italy. For example:

bona	good
cod	bad
eke	face
homey	man
lallies	legs
nanti	not
ogles	eyes
peluccaxxxx	wig
polone	woman
the ria	hair
varda	look

When the island police saw Tallulah they almost fainted. Chrome-yellow hair, plucked eyebrows, see-through plastic mac (these were known as French Letters), the smile and the walk, a touch of rouge - he couldn't bear to look pale. We washed dishes. The manager of the hotel, Mr Pomfret, took a violent dislike to Tallulah, who was incl