Friday 9th April 2010
The First Fine Day! It was yesterday, wasn’t it? Important to record, for it is such an event, not to be lost.
My anguish over the Mottram situation completely evap. Joy and contentment suddenly installed. I have heard from Marcus Cargill that he has been lodged in a neighbouring street on a visit from the Central of Europe, with some important bankers involved in Mottram Inc. What if we were to meet by chance? Would it be the hissing cats sketch he does so brilliantly? Nothing beats Mottram’s sound work. Once you have heard his Final Cough of Mimi (from La Boheme: it’s an opera), only given twice in thirty years, you are not the same person.
We’re supposed to be on speakers but he does not reply to texts.
We’re both impossible people but touched with greatness.
Between 1982 approx and 1987 approx we were asunder. Reasons now lost in the mists of… Perhaps it was to do with money. I’ve always had a bit, but not enough, owing to being Landed Gentry (as well as Poor Little Rich Gay, of course). In those days, Mottram was yet to be self-made. Once I bought him an overcoat from a charity shop which ended up being worn by Tim Piggott-Smith in a Michael Frayn play. You see, we’ve always been at the centre of things, always finger on the pulse. Piggot-Smith (why add ‘Piggot’ to cheer up ‘Smith’?) must have walked off with the garment. Mottram has never had a good wool outdoor coat since.
Leon de Veer and Miles Kent (of The Vases, where Mottram was struck with Swine last summer) fetched him away from the flat we were sharing and drove him into obscurity. Possibly they were something to do with the row. For a time he was ‘sharing’ with an unsavoury person who dragged back, even though the partitioning of the sleeping areas was improvised. Furthermore, he put grit from the sour, rented garden in the washing-up water. That was in Earlsy Courtsy (will have to wait for another day but Earlsy Courtsy is vital in PLRG iconography). Intermittently Mottram sent messages (how?). ‘I saw you on the platform at Baker Street last week – generating enough electricity to run the underground for an entire day.’ Another: ‘Haven’t you heard? I’ve met someone.’ At that time, Robert Nevil was living in agonised slavery in my flat in London’s West. When I was away one time, he smuggled Mottram in and they rigged up a photo-shoot with Mottram leering on my bed, displaying the Balliol Record. His Balliol was a big one-up on my London Uni – that was the idea. The resulting graph was mounted on card and the surround painstakingly decorated with glitter, stars, various cut-outs. I still have it somewhere.
The other thrill coming with the blossom and balmy days is that rents in London are record-high. It was on the news last night.
The Multis!
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I am delighted to read that Earlsy-Courtsy will be the subject of future posts. London slang in the mid-20th century was much gayer than it is now. You went down the ‘Dilly, or up Torra-Corra (Tottenham Court Road). If you were poor but well-bred, you had digs in South Ken, near your aunt who lived in a mansion flat round Earlsy-Courtsy way. My mother (who was a student at the Chelsea School of Art, and stole silver forks from stalls on the Portobello Road) called it “bus conductor’s language”.
How marvellous! Those mansion flats. Aunt Olive lived in one actually in Earlsy Courtsy. I do hope you are going to biog your mother. In the 80s an Oxford undergraduate decided to have a dinner party. Feature was that absolutely everything had been stolen. He was arrested leaving Harrods with food mixer under his coat.
Robert Nevil, Anthony Mottram and I first heard Earlsy Courtsy from the dotty old lady in Absolute Hellby Rodney Ackland, which was filmed for TV. Proper practice now is, whenever in that neighbourhood, to text all and sundry the simple greeting ‘Earls Courtsy’. It will always be understood. Woe betide anyone discovered to have been in Nevern, Trebovir, Bramham and not signalled. They might be made to go and live there. None of this has anything to do with the Earls Court Gays. That is a separate problem.
Robert Nevil and I were very Earlsy Courtsy in the early 80s…it was the centre of the Gay Universe….The Coleherne, Bromptons, not to mention The Philbeach Hotel…now there’s a story!
Yes, I was going to mention Eardley Crescent and Frank Bough a few doors up enjoying splashy ‘surgery’ with unusual lady surgeons. Who now remembers….?