After 
you, I will be a shadow
If you were to ask me if I’d had a happy childhood, I’d have to say “No”. And if you were to ask if I had a happy life, I would need to answer “Sometimes”. But if you were to ask me if I had experienced happy times in my life, then I would have to say “Yes!” What ratio of happy to unhappy would there need to be? Should I count each joyful time one by one like an abacus of bright beads? Or would one dark traumatic episode, or one malevolent figure trump several lesser indignities to skew the balance between happy and sad, good and bad forever in the fickle reality of memory? Could one amazing, fabulous moment of connection, of unity, wrap up all the bad times in one great blanket of love and harmony?
On the side of pain was Doddy’s garage, with its rough wooden operating table, greasy with motor oil, and its sadistic horrors, masquerading as a childhood game of Doctors and Nurses. Doddy, cute curly blond hair atop a square head like Desperate Dan’s, the strange boy who, even then, didn’t quite fit. Too large a head, big hands, curt conversation, but unlimited imagination. Being Nurse, having to pick out the spelks with a needle after each juvenile surgical procedure, dabbing the wounds with surgical spirit, soothing the tears of the newly initiated, while Doddy cleared away all evidence of his wrongdoing before tea.
Being pushed around in a toy pram too small for my eight years, gangly legs hanging out, blindfolded with a back to front boys’ balaclava, my captors fearful of me seeing out because that would just spoil the fun. “Hold your hand out!” I was commanded. Wincing against the itchy wool across my face, I obeyed for fear of social death, of being excluded, of having to play at the poor end of the street with the “dirty Catholics”, where unimaginable other horrors awaited, because they were known to be cruel and uncivilised. Even though I secretly was one, or at least half a one, or maybe some smaller portion still, seeing as my mother stopped taking me to Mass when I was seven. What did that make me?
I missed the angel choir in the church balcony singing in glorious melody. I thought they stayed up there singing, because it was as far down as they could come to earth; they had to stay close to heaven or God would worry about them. All I knew is that Mam fell out with the priest, around the same time that my Dad started getting some “funny ideas” though no one ever told me what was funny about the television talking to you, warning you that religion was evil. My good Protestant friends didn’t know that though, because I went undercover every Sunday, scuffing my soles along the tarmac with them to St. Aidan’s C of E Sunday School. I went mostly for the biscuits. Jesus fed the hungry with loaves and fishes, but we got malted milk, or digestives. Catholics weren’t allowed biscuits, they had to sit for hours on hard pews, and when they weren’t kneeling and praying to the Blessed Virgin at St Teresa’s, they were out inflicting violence on each other because they all drank and smoked and stole. Eight year old holy delinquents. They were allowed to, because they confessed their sins. We had to be pure all the time at St Aidan’s. Catholics just cheated or so my friends said. But they can’t be unholy I thought, because they always ate fish on Fridays; the queue in the chip shop was crazily long, zigzagging out the door, the Loynes twins’ skinny leg braces clanking against the metal of the Walls ice cream sign of the newsagent next door.So there I am, in my pram ambulance trying to be brave and definitely not to cry, having my fingers poked into squishy objects, “Ugh you just poked a dog’s eyeball!”, having slime dripped on my bare legs, then interrogated “What is it, do you know?” I could feel the sneers even if I couldn’t see them. If I guessed right, the torture stopped and it was someone else’s turn as the victim. I learned to eat tomato eyeballs, stand in wet clay poo, and be tickled by caterpillar tarantulas long before more exotic abuses were legitimised for ridiculed celebrities in the Australian jungle. Kangaroo balls and Witchety grubs. Slugs and earwigs. This was the backstreets of Hartlepool.
But I had my own rosary, my guardian angel, my transport away to an exotic spectacle of voices, costumes, competition and dreams of faraway lands, of beauty beyond Barbie; the warm world of the Eurovision Song Contest. Dad and me, on the leatherette sofa in front of the black and white TV for hours of daydreams, choosing “our” song in the run up over tense weeks before the competition, and finally on the big day itself, bowls and bowls of Spangles, Refreshers, Liquorice Allsorts, Panda Pop for me, and a couple of Double Diamonds for Dad. It was as close to the angels as I got.
That couch was my seat of all learning about the world beyond the steelworks and the gusting winds off the pier at St Hilda’s.
“How come Greece and Turkey never give each other points, Dad?” And he would explain in his best layman’s tone about military juntas, the strategic importance of Cyprus, how hugely colourful the flowers were, when he was there with the Navy, and inevitably he would digress onto Israel and Palestine, the Holocaust, in homage to my Jewish great grandma, who came good and early on a boat from Germany, trussed up in her furry collar against the cold, dressed in shades of sepia in the proud photograph taken aboard. It was the only one we had of her.
Everyone else gave Greece 10 or 12 points the year that Nana Mouskouri won but that was before I was born. We watched her TV show together after she became famous. I would hold my breath, in awe of Nana’s calm serenity, the smoothness of her shiny hair, not the merest kink would appear as she shook her head passionately to the controlled vibrato of her voice. My dad and I adored her. Vicky Leandros, stood up for Luxembourg again, ten years later, a paler imitation, with mussed up hair, and less style than Nana but with a song I could rote learn. In French!
At the inter school Eurovision contest to celebrate our entry into Europe, each school group selected wrote a song about their designated European country. My school drew the short straw, Luxemburg, and I wrote a song about catacombs, well what else was there to say about the place? It was a kind of destiny really that I should be Vicky Leandros’ shadow. I couldn’t bear when the contest ended, the back to reality of a boring Sunday Night at the London Palladium, a single tube of Parma Violets and early bath-time, so I kept the glory alive until the next year when another Greek beauty, or later, a Turkish, or Israeli or Danish imposter took her place.
In honour of my love of this particular kind of Greek tragedy, I became an annual impresario, recruiting the kids of the street, in a spectacular replica, with eight year olds singing tearfully in every language of Europe. I never did understand why Israel was there but all were welcome in my garden extravaganza.
We rehearsed with the gimlet eyed vigour of modern day X factor contestants. We commandeered mothers into late night sweatshops, borrowed their needlework baskets, making costumes sewn from old sheets, brocade curtains, greying net standing in for lace, frayed coat lining for silk, dresses trimmed with ribbons, tinsel and glitter raided from the Christmas box in the garage. Trashy glamour and unintelligible songs echoing out and reaching beyond the marigolds of the front lawn, to the heathen end of the street.
I didn’t care if I got nul point. I was happy. The Catholics came to scowl and shuffle. And as my voice soared high, even Doddy stood at the gate watching, his dad’s hammer beating the rhythm against his palm as I sang. Après toi, je ne serai que l’ombre. In our glistening splendour, we came out of the shadows.
At eight years old, I learned to value diversity.
thelgbtfed 