Mum and Dad were pleased and relieved when I started to earn money from dancing. They used to give me 10 pounds every now and then, and did whatever they could on top of paying for my fees. This job was a great support and help for them, as the money I earned helped to pay for things I would need at Italia Conti, such as uniforms, which were very expensive, and my dance clothes.
And what a job it was. We rehearsed at Pineapple Studios and at the theatre, Her Majesty’s, in Haymarket. We also got to stay in a hotel for three months, which was great fun, sharing with two other boys in the show.
I remember one evening looking out of the window to the hotel opposite and I saw a couple having sex. He was a lot older than her and even at that age, we figured out that she must have been a prostitute. For some reason he was wearing a 10-gallon hat. By the time they finished, we had the entire cast of Bugsy Malone watching. When our chaperone on the show realised what we were watching, she nearly had a cardiac, bless her! She was a sweet little Irish lady, but she never really looked after us. As soon as we got back to the hotel she went straight to her room, feet up. Not that we needed looking after – showbiz kids are always older than their age. In fact, I think we used to look after her.
The first night of the show was amazing. I had a coach trip come up from Braintree – sisters, aunties, friends – to support me. When I met Mum and Dad after the show, I could see how proud they were. I think it was at that point when they realised they had done the right thing in sending me to Italia Conti.
I certainly knew it was the right thing: everything about the place just felt so right. Everyone was so much older in the way they conducted themselves, so aware of who they were and also what they wanted. We all knew we wanted a career in showbusiness, whether it was as a dancer, actor or singer. Everyone had an incredible creative energy, the whole place felt as though it was buzzing. Even though I used to dread getting up in the morning at 5.30, especially in the winter when it was cold and dark outside, when no-one else was awake in the house, just me creeping around having a cup of tea and marmite on toast, before a 20-minute walk to the station, before an hour and 40-minute train ride to school. That’s if there wasn’t snow, or leaves on the track – but whatever, it was so worth it.
As soon as I walked through the school doors it was showtime – every day was a performance. Someone was always working towards something, for an audition or a film, or just practising what they had done the day before. I can’t remember any negativity – everyone was encouraging and if you were down, you could guarantee in five minutes you would be laughing – there were so many wonderful characters. See, I am one of those people who is not very good with names but I never forget a face, but the group of people I can remember included a girl called Janine, who used to sit next to me in class. We were as bad as each other: we hated academic work and would sit laughing in class before being kicked out, when we would laugh even more.
Then there was Vanessa, whose sister also attended Italia Conti – I don’t know how her parents did it. And then there was Tina Foley – her first and last name seemed to go together, so I remember hers. She had really big boobs as well.
Gary had a Sta-Sof-Fro hairdo, which used to drip on to his collar jacket. Absolutely beautiful, and would give Naomi a run – now he’s Sade, and I mean completely Sade. The complete lot gone, the big chop – he makes a stunning lady.
ONE DAY we bunked off school – me, Gary and John (who I’ll tell you about later) – and went to Julia Sawalha’s house – you may know her as Saffy, the long-suffering daughter in Absolutely Fabulous and one of the stars of Lark Rise to Candleford. We got the tube to Brixton, which was my first time there. All I had ever heard of it was the riots, so I expected a war zone but it was nothing like that at all. It was quite nice – we had a walk around Morleys, which was like a really cheap version of Selfridges, and bought a few provisions for our day of bunking off. Then we were met by one of Julia’s older sisters (Nadia or possibly Dina; if she wasn’t Nadia, she looked like her). She was beautiful, with long brown-blonde hair and lovely skin.
Julia was the same, she was very beautiful. She had lovely feet as well – I haven’t got a foot fetish, I mean lovely for dancing. She had a naturally beautiful arch, or instep. So even though we were bunking off, it was very well-arranged. Her parents were away and her sister came to pick us up – we went to visit her in South Norwood, I think. The house was lovely, big and looked expensive. We had a very nice council house with all the trimmings, but this house was something else. Their furniture wasn’t from MFI and there wasn’t a bit of Artex or wood panelling inside.
When Artex came out, our house was done top to bottom, swirl and dry. The only problem was if you walked past and fell into it, you’d be stabbed by the prickly bits that stuck out, where Dad had got a really good pull on the swirl. I’d wake up some mornings and look as if I’d been dragged backwards through a hedge.
No, all the furniture in their house was solid and real. The dining-room table was proper wood – you could see it had been a tree. It was not for convenience and it didn’t have an easy-wipe surface: the table would definitely have needed a French polish.
Even though it would really piss my parents off to know that I was bunking off after all the sacrifices they had made, it was the first time I had done it. It didn’t feel like I was bunking off because it was all so well-arranged, but I am so glad I did. It wasn’t like we were hiding up in the farmer’s fields, or in some dirty garage, with a mouldy old sofa and a wet mattress. Because that was how they used to bunk off in Braintree, in my dad’s old garage that he never used, all sitting around on that smelly sofa smoking their Rothman Royals. No, not me, I was doing the VIP bunking off.
Julia’s sister was cooking us lunch while we popped off down to the video shop to get ourselves a couple of films for the day. I’m sure we must have got something like The Sound of Music or Annie. But I remember perfectly the third video we got. It was included free with the other two and was called I Want to Be a Woman. I can’t remember who chose it, but it wasn’t me; it must have been on the top shelf and there’s no way I could have reached that. (I only reached up to the Disney films at five foot two and a bit; looking back now, I think it might have been Gary/Sade.)
I Want to Be a Woman was a very detailed, step-by-step docufilm about a man who wanted to become a woman. Now I know you can now see that kind of thing on Channel 4 after the watershed, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you saw on the telly back then. (In fact, as this was around 1982, Channel 4 had only just started.) All I can say is, I couldn’t bear to eat a banana for years after – I couldn’t peel the skin, because that’s exactly what it was like. They just took the inside of the banana out, and wham, bam, alacazam, you are no longer a man!
But the end-product was amazing: it was very neat and tidy. I think transsexuals had the first designer vaginas. See, once again, we always lead the way in everything. And after that, I remember having my first moussaka. I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it, because I hadn’t been introduced to foreign food.
I poked at it for a bit, then said to John, who was sitting beside me, ‘What’s this purple thing?’
He replied, ‘I think it’s beetroot.’
Now, that was a surprise to me – I had only ever had beetroot in a salad. I didn’t know that you could cook it in an oven. Of course, it was not beetroot. I know now that it was aubergine.
I could not see any meat in the dish and although it did not have potatoes on the top, I thought it might be a posh shepherd’s pie.
Coming from a traditional-ish British family, fish wasn’t fish to me if it didn’t have breadcrumbs on it. The nearest we got to foreign food was pasta, which wasn’t really pasta but spaghetti hoops – well, it had spaghetti in the title, didn’t it? I later found out that spaghetti came with many things, but the one thing it didn’t come in was a tin: it was normally in a packet that you put in water with a bit of salt.
I said to Julia, ‘Is there meat in this?’