Street Sadness

     In 1835, one-hundred and twenty-six years before my birth, James Pratt and John Smith were hanged for sodomy in front of Newgate Prison, London, before a jeering crowd. They were the last British men executed for this ‘crime’.   In 1861, ninety-six years before my birth, the penalty became imprisonment from 10 years to life.      In 1957, in the year before my birth, the Wolfenden committee issued a report that recommended that the laws against homosexuality be relaxed. Until that moment gay men were routinely sent to jail from between 7 years - often with hard labour - to a life-sentence. During the 1950s it was very common practice for police to break down men’s doors and arrest them in bed with their male lovers. Neighbours routinely reported men to police if they suspected that they were receiving amorous male visitors to their homes. It was a time of dread. Gay men very often killed themselves, once ‘found-out’, rather than face the r...

     Paul Harrison (not his real name) lived at the top of my street in Eastbourne, Sussex. We both attended St Mary’s Boys’ School. Paul was a plain, freckle-faced boy with auburn hair. His rambling late-Victorian house was set in a lush, jungly garden that tumbled untidily down an incline; in the centre of this acreage there was a rectangular fish pond in which half a dozen fat, orange-and-white koi drifted through the bronze water. There were pieces of statuary set here and there, overgrown with weeds or brambles. At the bottom of the garden was a thicket of young trees which grew up through elderly stone pathways, disrupting and crumbling them into dysfunction.   The general neglect of the garden had a magic quality, which fascinated me: much later, I read John Ruskin on the importance of allowing Nature to make its mark on man-made structures – and here was his principle in action. Paul couldn’t really understand my fascination with the place; his familiar...

    My mother would often take me and my two younger sisters to the Heathfield market. Here we would see sheep, cows, geese and chickens, in pens and cages, or on the backs of trucks. Ruddy-faced farmers from all around the area would be jostling for the best prices. The noise of their shouts and the smell of animal dung filled the fresh Sussex air. Whenever we encountered a recently-born calf my mother would encourage me to offer it my pudgy, six-year-old hand, whereupon the hungry animal would scoop my fist into its mouth with its hot, strong tongue, and begin powerfully sucking it. This always filled me with a mixture of pleasure and horror. I later learned that this trick, although transposed to a more urgent body part, is a time-honoured tradition amongst randy young farm lads the world over.     Sometimes on our walks into the village we would walk down a steep, narrow path which cut through a bank of wild flowers and stinging nettles. At the bottom...

    In 1962 my mother, father and sister moved from our house in Hornsey, North London, to a small farmworker’s cottage in Heathfield, Sussex, near the south coast. We were to live there for four years. The year after our arrival saw the legendary winter of ’63, the coldest for two-hundred years. It was so cold that parts of the sea along the south coast actually froze. The mammoth snowstorm which violently ravaged England – particularly in the south - half-buried the cottage. The front door, which swung outwards in the old-fashioned way, could not be opened against the snowdrift, which barged its icy shoulder seven-feet deep all around the building. We were effectively marooned inside for several days. I can remember the strange effect of the muted sunlight which struggled to enter through the snow-covered windows and the sense of claustrophobia and panic that filled me when I began to wonder if we would ever escape from this ice-shrouded cell.     T...

     In the mid-1960s my mother had somehow found work on the evening shift at an old people’s home, in Eastbourne, Sussex, lifting the oldsters into their chairs, spooning-in their stewed apple, and wiping their chins and arses. I would later be traumatised by a visit that my family made to this home, in order to say goodbye to the residents before we embarked on our new life in Australia. We children had never met these people before, so it is baffling why my mother decided to present us to them. I recall being traipsed around the little bedrooms, each of which contained a bewildered old granny or granddad. We were surveyed by dimming, rheumy eyes and clutched and plucked at by gnarled witch’s fingers.      I had never seen a very ancient person before – my own grandparents having popped their clogs during my infancy – and the sight of all these toothless living-skeletons filled me with urgent panic. One old lady had only one eye and an em...

    When I was fourteen, my mother decided that she wanted an Old English sheepdog. The fact that she had five children, and no money, seems not to have entered her head. Perhaps she thought that such a symbol of middle-class prosperity would somehow act as a self-fulfilling prophesy and we would miraculously resume our rightful place in society, instead of languishing, as we were, in the open jaws of destitution.     And, so, a pedigree dog was purchased, at large expense. We had had the dog for almost a year when we were forced to move house. My father had been gambling the rent money for many months and the landlord had reached the end of his tether. We moved into a decrepit Victorian boarding house in the Dandenong Ranges, consisting of four rooms, arranged along a wooden platform, with a separate kitchen room, which was little more than a wooden box with a sink in it. There was no running water.     Even at the time I ...