Sample

ROUGH TRADE

\"Blimey! This showbusiness lark is worse than gangland - it's a bleedin' rough trade.\" 'Mad' Frankie Fraser wiped the sweat from his forehead with a towel, turned to me and gave me one of his manic looks. “You never told me it was going to be like this,” he said as he put a jagged steel comb through his jet black dyed hair. He had just come off stage after performing his second one man show of the day and there was another one to follow in twenty minutes time. “Even when I was on trial for murder at the Old Bailey, I never had to do as much talking as this. Pass me a drink.”
    We were sitting in his dressing room backstage at London’s tiny Jermyn Street Theatre when he was appearing in ‘An evening with ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser’ directed by me. Looking back I can’t really remember whether it was his idea or mine, but working alongside Frank, just like meeting the Krays, Reggie and Charlie, was for me an accident waiting to happen. I couldn’t help thinking though as I adjusted his bullet proof vest underneath his hired dress suit, that this wasn’t quite the stuff I had trained for at drama school some twenty years before. This kind of theatre wasn’t on the curriculum. I wasn’t complaining however, the reviews were cautious (what critic would upset ‘Mad’ Frankie?) and we were sold out for every performance. Above all it was controversial and that’s the way I was brought up.
    My dad, Patrick Galvin, would have approved of the whole idea of ‘Mad’ Frank taking to the boards enormously. Back in the sixties, when I was growing up in Dublin, Dad, a playwright, was the enfant terrible of the Irish theatre and something of an old lefty. In a play of his called And Him Stretched, there is a man on stage who tears the Irish flag in two. On the first night the audience were so shocked that they started throwing things and the next thing, the Gardai were called in. It made all the front pages of the papers the next morning and dad loved that.
    Sitting in the cramped dressing room with Frank, I realised that this was the ageing exgangster's third week in legit show business whereas I had spent most of my life in the trade. At the age of five my Dad's friend Brendan Behan had come round to our house and ruffled my hair, his huge frame leaning over me, as he bent down and whispered \"Why don't you be an actor when you grow up?\" a pretty stupid thing to say when you come to think of it. I didn't know what he was talking about but I remembered his breath reminded me of a sweet and old-fashioned cough mixture and when he moved about the room he missed a step or two and was swaying slightly. I thought this was very funny and laughed a lot. My mum didn't think it was funny at a11 and she threw him out. Sometimes he and Dad would disappear for a day or two and nobody ever knew where the two of them went. When I asked my mum she said, \"You father's away on business,\" and for ages as a child I always imagined that Brendan and my dad were doing something very serious and important together. When I grew up I promised myself I would do the same.
    Being an old lefty my dad always had the Daily Worker newspaper delivered to our house every morning. He would read it over the breakfast table with his head buried deeply between its pages and sometimes I'd heard him mutter things like \"Fascist bastards!\" or \"Capitalist morons.\" My mum thought it was a hoot since we lived in the poshest part of Dublin where everybody had a front lawn the size of a tennis court. Even Dad was a landlord with two tenants upstairs. When he wasn't reading the Daily Worker or writing plays he was writing poetry. Long into the night I could hear him at his typewriter, the keys clattering away into the small hours, keeping me wide awake but strangely safe. A poet, my dad said, was a man who tells lies but tells them with style.
    Looking back at my dad then I could never think of him as being anything other than a writer. He had a shock of black wavy hair and a lived in face and there was always a fag dangling from his mouth. When I saw him at mealtime he would tell me stories, painting pictures with his hands as he told tales of improbable Irishmen and goblins who were larger than life and I believed every word. Born in Cork he had come from a family of twelve. He had done all sorts of jobs from labouring to shifting and in the fifties he had even been a folk singer and cut a few records. He had met my mother when they both worked at Francis Edwards’ bookshop in London's Charing Cross Road where she had been a secretary and he had worked downstairs as a packer. When I was fourteen I asked him what had first attracted him to her and he said quickly, \"I saw her bending over a pile of books and I fancied her arse.\" They didn't marry until I was about five and I can remember the day when a Catholic priest came round to perform the ceremony under the apple tree in our garden. I was the only witness.
    Dad said he was a Communist and I believed him although I didn't have a clue what it meant. There were books all over the house, in the living room, piled on the stairs and even in the bathroom. The famous Left Book Club titles in their yellow wrappers were stacked up against Wolfe Tone annuals and histories of the Spanish Civil War. One day he wrote a poem about the war in Korea and it got published all over the world. I didn't know what it said but somebody in China read it, a man who owned a publishing house, and he wrote to Dad to congratulate him. It began \"Glorious comrade of the People's Revolution...\" and carried on like that for about five pages. Dad was thrilled. He wrote back to the man who called himself Wang-Yu-Fen and thanked him profusely. Pretty soon another five page letter arrived and with it a selection of pamphlets and political tracts as a gift. A few weeks later books started to arrive as well - great big parcels with notes stuck to their sides and across the front the words 'From the People's Republic of China' for everyone to see. The postie raised an eyebrow. The parcels got larger - there were books for me as well, children's tales with titles like 'Little Chang and her struggle against the Oppressors! and 'Chairman Mao's Nursery Rhymes' and there was some for my mother as well. '100 Ways with Noodles' was one.
    The deliveries were never ending and even the neighbours started to look through their net curtains. My mother decided that something had to be done. You couldn't move in the house for the stuff. It lay everywhere turning our home into a Communist warehouse. She told my dad that either he would have to write to China to stop it or she would do it herself. My dad was very huffy and told her that she was being ungrateful. \"Workers in China would give their right arm for this lot,” he said. \"Well, they can have it,\" she snapped. Reluctantly he wrote to his left wing benefactor and the unwanted flow of literature finally stopped. Now there was the problem of what to do with the huge pile that littered the house. \"We can't sell it,” my mother said, \"people might talk.\"
    \"I know what we'll do,” said Dad triumphantly, \"We'll hide it.\"
    In the bathroom was a low cupboard built into the wall next to the lavatory itself. Inside there was a storage tank and plenty of space to put odds and ends. There was a rather rusty catch on the door and the whole thing hadn't been used for ages. Dad decided it was the perfect hiding hole. One afternoon we went round the house together gathering up the piles of books and pamphlets and bit by bit we stuffed them into the cupboard. Several times the propaganda cascaded out onto the floor. We piled it back. After about an hour, with my dad sweating and cursing, he put his shoulder against the door, gave a shove, and managed to close it. The job was done. I eyed the catch nervously.
    About a year later Dad announced gaily that he was fed up with living in Ireland. We would move to England. \"Good,\" my mother said, \"I've never liked it here in the first place.\" We decided to move to Brighton and Dad sold the house very quickly to a very posh middle aged couple and got a good price for it. He told them it was a lovely area, a quite place where nothing ever happened. The Pickford's van came and took all our furniture away and the family got a taxi to Dublin airport. My mother was twittering on about the time of the flight and Dad was talking to the driver. As I sat in the back of the car I wasn't thinking of my new life to come in England but rather the fate of the new owners of our old house Mr. and Mrs. Posh. Just what would happen if one of them was sitting on the toilet with their drawers down and the catch on that cupboard suddenly flew open? They'd almost be buried alive in Communist propaganda. Perhaps then they would have thought the revolution really had arrived.
    The jump from so called Communism to Conservative Brighton in the early sixties was a shock for Dad. On arrival he opened the local paper, the Evening Argus, to find a whole page advert demanding that Enoch Powell should be the new Prime Minister, a move suggested by the majority of the townsfolk after Powell had made his infamous \"rivers of blood\" speech. Dad wasn't amused. \"Fascist bastards, you can't get away from them!\" he roared. My mother coughed politely and turned the page for him.
    By default rather than design I was sent to an all boys private school where caning was as an important part of the curriculum as morning assembly and most of the teachers were decidedly bent. Housemaster's had their blond favourites. I wasn't a blond so I didn't get to sleep with the maths teacher - although several did. The headmaster, who looked like a minor elderly colonel also had strange habits. One lunchtime he called me into his study and said, \"Stand up straight, boy. Push your shoulders back,\" and then added \"Do you ever play with yourself - down there?\" He made a sort of waving, throwaway, gesture towards his genitals and I blushed, shuffled my feet, and gazed down towards the carpet. \"I don't know what you mean,” I whispered.
    I was lying of course. There was a pause for a moment and then he said dismissively, \"Well, it doesn't matter anyway. You can go now,\" and he motioned me to leave. I hadn't played ball. I knew exactly what he had meant but I wasn't getting up to his sort of fun. That was for boys of my own age.
    Although I wasn't at the school for very long the atmosphere there was stifling. High walls surrounded the building and all the pupils were consciously shut away from the outside world. Whilst other children in the neighbourhood would play football and other games barely a hundred yards away from our school, we were being drilled inside in Latin and other dead languages. The library had nothing more up to date than books about Billy Bunter and jingoistic war epics by G.A.Henty some of which had been borrowed in the 1930's. It was like being in a time warp and I can say truthfully that in the year I stayed there, I learnt nothing save that some old men could be dirty. In contrast when I went to a secondary modern school in Brighton, one year later, I found myself surrounded by high open glass windows which overlooked the South Downs and an education system that allowed you to choose the subjects you wanted to learn. There was a fully equipped theatre with real stage lighting and from the moment I saw it I wanted it. I appeared in several plays and at the age of 13 secured a teachers office, which I decided precociously, to use as my own dressing room. On a card stapled to the door it read: Number One Dressing Room - Please Knock.
    I was aware from a very early age that I was queer. When I was about twelve I remember seeing a film with Peter Sellers in which he played a camp couturier complete with smoking jacket and cigarette holder and the character impressed me no end. One evening I walked along Western Road in Brighton in front of my mother and father swaying my hips and swinging my jacket backwards and forwards. I thought it looked impressive. My mother, acutely embarrassed by this strange behaviour called me back and said, \"Have you ever heard of the word 'pouffe'?\"
    She said it as if she were describing a piece of furniture. \"Yes,\" I said defiantly, \"I have,\" and 1 marched on. The matter was never mentioned again. I embraced being queer as a duck takes to water or in my case the school swimming pool changing rooms, which was a feast to the eye. The other boys knew me as a queer or \"bender\" but I was smart enough never to be bullied. How could I when I was wanking the tough guys off?
    Although I was involved with drama classes, away from school I immersed myself in reading and writing and spent most of my weekends scouring old bookshops. Whilst my teachers had aspirations for me to go to a university I had other ideas. I wanted to drop out. When one day I told my mother I wanted to leave school, she wasn't shocked or disappointed in the slightest but merely shrugged her shoulders and said, \"Well, do whatever you want to do then.\" My father raised his eye from The Anarchist News and grunted. I was amazed. There was no one to defy me. Even my headmaster, who had initially tried to talk me out of my decision, said rather brutally at the beginning of term \"Well, if that's what you want I am not stopping you. You had better go now then. There's no point in waiting until the end of term, you've thrown your life away in favour of the dole office. Goodbye.\"
    As I walked, somewhat symbolically, down the steep hill outside the school I had mixed feelings about my future. I had got what I wanted and to my mind had ‘dropped out’. On the other hand I wasn’t worried about whether I would ever get a job but, more to the point, would I ever get a blow-job?

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