This Much Is True

Despite my BBC contract, I wasn’t earning much, but it was a proper salary at last, and Mummy decided it was time for me to move out of Plaistow. She hated Plaistow; she felt happy, in one way, to have arrived in Oxford, and my returning to a place she felt she’d escaped from was a blow — an entirely class-based attitude. She said, ‘Well, you can’t live there now, darling. It’s time to move to somewhere else.’

I wanted somewhere within reasonable distance of Broadcasting House, on the Central Line and perhaps near Hyde Park. I stayed in rooms in Lancaster Gate, in Portland Road, Notting Hill and viewed many flats in Rachman-land. (Peter Rachman was the unscrupulous slum landlord who took over West London and exploited his tenants outrageously.) After some looking, I found my flat in Gloucester Terrace, a beautiful street of early Victorian, white, five-storeyed houses resembling the terraces of Brighton, but in the heart of London. Mummy always called it Bayswater, but it was Paddington, really.

The house was owned by a Jewish lampshade-maker called Mr Sagar, and his wife, Sibyl; they lived in the basement and were both hunched, as if the house above pressed them down, like two little moles that seldom came up from downstairs into the light. They resembled people from a Dickens novel: Sybil was cadaverous, with a deep voice; they had no children and seemed to lead entirely solitary lives, but were educated and artistic. I wish now I’d asked them more about themselves and why they became lampshade-makers and what their backgrounds were. They were intelligent and entirely benevolent, but in those days I didn’t see that — I laughed at them and thought they were ‘odd’, instead of celebrating their individuality. They had a tough cleaning lady, Mrs Morgan, who took many years to get to like me.

My flat was on the ground floor. My bedroom at the back of the house had a flat roof above it, and in the summer I could go out there and talk and drink with friends. I decided to have a flatmate and found a ‘nice Jewish girl’, Rosalind Stoll, who has remained a dear friend. The rental was twelve guineas a week, which was £12/12s. Imagine living in central London now for twelve guineas a week!

I was never part of Swinging London. If I had been part of the West End set, going out in Soho at night, that would have been thrilling and fun, but I was always someone who read books and went to the theatre. I knew the whole scene was going on, but I never had anything to do with it — I didn’t like fashion and I didn’t like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, and I didn’t like pop music. I disapproved of it. I also hated the mods and rockers and the violence and Teddy boys: Swinging London left me cold. Apart from Dusty Springfield, that is. Even then, she was my girl. Such an astonishing talent and such a tragic life, all because she came from a Catholic background. She was gay at a time when you couldn’t be.

However, I relished the loosening up of the sixties towards gay people. The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalised homosexual acts between two men over twenty-one years of age in private in England and Wales. In 1965, I had joined a group called the Gay Yids and wore my Gay Yids badge when I went to the BBC. People found it rather shocking. I quite liked that, because I thought that being gay was something that could make me more interesting. For me, it was a plus, a feather in my cap. I held Gay Yid parties at the flat and it was during one of them that Saul Radomsky, the great South African theatre designer, met Israeli chef, Oded Schwartz. I loved being a matchmaker for real.

Heterosexual swinging London seemed much less fun. It was harder to help people. One night, I was walking home to Gloucester Terrace from the theatre when I saw a woman lying in the gutter, sobbing her heart out. My sympathies immediately aroused, I went over and asked her if something was wrong. She sat up on the pavement and wailed, ‘He threw me in the gutter! He threw me in the gutter!’ She was quite a pretty woman in her thirties and she was crying, her hair in a mess and her eye make-up smeared all down her face. I said, ‘Look, it’s late now and I think you should go home. This is my card. I live in Paddington. Come and see me around eleven tomorrow morning. Let’s have a chat about this because I’m sure it’s not as bad as you say.’

The next morning I looked up her boyfriend in the phone book. I didn’t think about it, I just rang him and said, ‘Hello. You don’t know me, but I met a friend of yours last night who was in a very miserable state. I don’t exactly know the background of the story, but you really can’t treat women like that, you know. It’s not right.’