As well as writing my fiction, I am working on a true story. It is that of my godfather who was born in 1919 and lived well into his 80s. Uncle Bob, as I called him, was gay and wanted everyone to know his story, so when I was in the UK several years ago now, I recorded him telling his lie story, and later, started transcribing it. I am now working on a version for publication (eventually), and today, I thought I would share the opening with you.

I have checked and amended certain facts as best I can (because his memory of all those years ago may not have been accurate), but other than that, the text is written more or less as he spoke it.

Here’s the first page.

Tooting           1919 – 1933

When I was born in 1919, our house was worth 100 pounds. Fourteen years later, I was earning that amount each week as a rent boy in Piccadilly.

Three things happened to me between 1919 and 1933 that had a lasting effect on my life. I look back on them now as defining moments, but at the time they were more than that. I suppose you might call them revelations. I didn’t realise at the time what exactly they meant to me, only that they were important. But now, recalling the 85 years of my life, I can place them in the order of things, and understand their significance.

They were small events at the time but things which shaped the way I approached my life – a life that took me from the house of my birth in Tooting, to the West End of London when I was still only thirteen, and from there to Wormwood Scrubs, the Royal Navy, the Mediterranean and the Pacific, and then back to London where, in the course of my professional duties, I was to meet politicians, religious leaders and royalty. They are the first things that I remember encountering on my path through almost a century of gay life – a century that saw the world change rapidly. Television, telephones, computers and gay rights were not even things of science fiction when I was born.

But what are these three clear-as-a-bell memories from an early twentieth-century childhood? They are more than just recollections of a post-First World War life in south London. They are not just snapshots of a life lit by gaslight, when boys went to school barefoot, and Mr Gilman walked ahead of the horse-drawn funeral carriage, stopping the traffic. I am certain they are not parts of dreams that come back to me in old age, tricks played on the mind by my four score years and five. These moments are as real to me now as they were then. It is as if I can reach out my hand and touch my own history, like Alice putting her hand through the looking glass and reaching into another world. Only, when I do it I am touching another time.

I can still see the group of ex-servicemen, wearing women’s clothes and pushing a barrel organ along our street.

I can still feel the older man’s hand touching mine.

I can still remember the moment another boy kissed me for the first time, and I realised what was different about me.

These are the three most prominent moments in my memory of a childhood in Tooting. But they are not the only ones.

Beginnings

My birth was the result of the Great War, although not the only result, of course. Far more important matters were taking place in the world at that time, but on November 12^th, 1919, a year and a day after the fighting had stopped, and London was beginning to return to normality, I was delivered into my parent’s front room. More precisely, I sloshed out into the world in the safe hands of Mrs Allen, the formidable, fat midwife who delivered all the children in the street. Like some matronly earth mother, she was also the one who laid out the dead, often before the doctor arrived; if the doctor arrived at all. She was a central character in Gambole Road, Tooting, whereas I was just another post-war baby.

Gambole Road was typical of its time; a side street of terraced houses, dimly lit at night by gas burners. Each lamp was hand lit at dusk by the man whose job it was to walk the streets and ensure that we had light. There were three families living in our building, number 30. The house had three floors, one family on each, and like most houses at that time it was rented. It was quite common for one landlord to own several properties in a street, as ours did. He was a local decorator and kept his houses in good repair, investing some of his rental income back into them.