The Diaries of Mr Lucas, page 3
It is eighteen years that I wrote of someone going forward ‘down a stony and sorrowful road to a future of aching years’.
The road I have walked to 1968 has been stony and sorrowful enough, and the years will ache worse as I go on from this ambush.
The sight of my sitting room, forlorn in the cold morning, was dispiriting; it was a good thing that the constant pressure of business at the office should keep me on the strict, unable to think of what I’d lost or how. Work is an opiate.
To the bank to withdraw £10 [£216], and straight away to spend £4-15s-6d [£103.21] on a calendar watch with clear luminous figures on a black dial I’d noticed in the jeweller’s window in Charing Cross Road and half-decided I’d buy.
It’s a mercy I’d put off buying it on Monday.
It’s an elegant enough watch, a German make, a little like that I’d had of Gale in Hanover Street seventeen years ago and lost to the thievish young men in 1955. I think it’s three watches that have been stolen from me now.
To Piccadilly Circus tonight, very wretched, and was a little inebriated by the ready sympathy and understanding that Smith expressed. I have suspected him a little in the past, but I know he’s had nothing to do with robbing me; and his expressions of contempt and anger for the robbers rang true.
Fred, the Scots lad, too, was as mannerly and sympathetic as I could have wanted, though I’ve spoken to him but once before. I can rule out Lyons, at any rate, for I’m told he’s in Wandsworth gaol. Whatever he’s done, he’s done nothing to me.
I ran into Ross, with his older ex-guardsman companion, in the ’Dilly underground, and mentioned my having had an unfortunate experience and unpleasant callers last night.
‘Did you have your telephone flex cut?’ said he, which has set me thinking. I don’t see how he could be concerned, but I’m sure he must have heard someone describing how ‘they’d turned a chump over and cut the geezer’s telephone cord’.
No duplicate season ticket at Leicester Square station – but John Leround in the ticket queue, who insisted on buying mine, introduced me to a girl he was taking to his new lodgings, and pressed on me a prize he’d just won at bingo, a carving knife and fork, cheap but useful. This was heart-warming. I must not rule everyone out, nor suspect everyone overmuch. Better to think of those who have not robbed me, those whose acquaintanceship I am glad of. I remember it’s a year since ‘Tokyo Rose’6 had a similar experience.
1 An occasional friend of Mr Lucas’s and one-time pash.
2 The downstairs neighbours.
3 Two friends of Mr Lucas’s.
4 An occasional rent-boy friend.
5 Another rent boy.
6 Journalist friend of Mr Lucas’s. The origins of his nickname – sometimes shortened to Rosie Toke – are unknown.
2
The Early Years
WHO WAS THE man who found himself being burgled by three young men that night in January 1968? The earlier diaries give a fascinating insight into the young Mr Lucas. We join Mr Lucas, an earnest, deeply religious and very dreamy bespectacled twenty-one-year-old on Thursday, 1 January 1948. In the UK, King George VI, father of Queen Elizabeth II, has just bestowed the annual New Year Honours; the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a precursor to the World Trade Organization, has come into effect; and Mr Lucas is searching for his socks.
Britain as a country is weary. Battered and bruised economically after almost exactly six years of war, the capital is pockmarked by bomb sites, its inhabitants still mourning those lost. Clement Attlee is in power for the Labour Party and, in July that year, would oversee the creation of the National Health Service, still creaking on all these years later.
And so the backdrop to the earliest diaries is set. Counting down the days to the end of his National Service, we come to the first entry of Mr Lucas’s surviving diaries. It opens in a typical nitpicking way with a reminder note to himself: ‘Investigate socks prior to kit check.’ This is a man for whom every detail must be recorded. Not just his moods or those of others. Not just the sexual encounters, coy in the forties and fifties; more explicit as we drift into the sixties and seventies. But everything around him, whether it is the political climate or the actual temperature.
For the time being, the most important matter on his mind is not the baronetcy awarded to William Sholto Douglas, former commander-in-chief and military governor of postwar Germany, nor, oddly enough, the vagaries of global trade. National Service has been a long stretch – three years and four months in total. And it can’t finish quickly enough.
4 January 1948 (Sunday):
So the dreary expanse of years that I surveyed ahead of me in September 1944 has insensibly narrowed down to these last nine days. The years and months and days have passed, some rapidly, some with an infinite tedium: what seemed intolerable has been tolerated; what seemed unendurable has been endured; and so at last it is all hurrying to an end.
At the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939, Mr Lucas was evacuated, first to Trimley St. Martin, a small village in Suffolk close to Felixstowe, and then to Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. As he writes in 1948, looking back at his twelve-year-old self: ‘Nine years ago, I was in Felixstowe, alarmed and alone, waiting for war to be declared and wishing I were home.’
The ragged aftermath of the war, however, offered other opportunities; the bombed-out parks of London’s East End provided the perfect location for illicit late-night sex. ‘Victoria Park [in Tower Hamlets] is a great haunt of inverts. I must explore its possibilities,’ he writes in April 1949, ever keen to find new cruising grounds despite the evident dangers, not just of arrest but also assault from a deeply homophobic general public.
Mr Lucas had his first sexual experience at just fourteen in 1942 with a man called Ronald Terry (whose own age we don’t know) in a public lavatory in St Chad’s Park in Chadwell Heath. It is a moment he comes back to time and time again. In August 1948, he looks back: ‘(To) the happenings of that idyllic twenty minutes six years ago… that white lily of love whose beauty I then feasted on. At the beginning of 1941, my sexual inclinations were becoming definite [and] my interest in homosexual activities was beginning.’
But, as a committed Catholic, Mr Lucas spends his adult life torn between his sexual needs and the desire to live a life according to the church’s teachings. ‘A believing Catholic, who is also a practising homosexual, is forever fighting a war on two fronts – good for the intelligence, and pretty hellish for the emotions,’ he muses in 1961. Gay sex would not be legalized – and then only partially – until 1967 when the Sexual Offences Act permitted consensual same-sex relations in England and Wales in private for those over the age of twenty-one.
Society remained riven by homophobia. As Mr Lucas was growing up in the late twenties and thirties, the conviction of Irish playwright Oscar Wilde in 1895 was still fresh in many people’s memories. The trial of Irish revolutionary Roger Casement – author of the notorious The Black Diaries, which explicitly detailed his same-sex sexual exploits, and some now believe were faked by the British Secret Service – had ended with Casement’s execution just ten years before Mr Lucas’s birth.
Gay culture might have bloomed in London during the Roaring Twenties, with weekly drag balls and a thriving queer scene played out in the personal ads of national newspapers, but very much only for the privileged few.
In 1932, thirty officers from F Division of London’s Metropolitan Police stormed a ballroom in a private house on Holland Park Avenue, several worlds away from Mr Lucas’s childhood home in suburbia, where they found sixty men dancing, many in ‘female attire’. The subsequent court case of ‘Lady Austin’s camp boys’ cast a long shadow over social attitudes, with hundreds of men prosecuted each year for offences connected to homosexuality (such as gross indecency, soliciting for immoral purposes, indecent assault and buggery) in the thirties.
Gay-friendly bars and clubs did exist, with many gay men and lesbians – and bisexual men and women – frequenting the Kit-Cat Club in the basement of the Capitol Theatre, right in the heart of London’s West End. Gay members’ clubs would appear and disappear with ruthless regularity. The Caravan in Covent Garden, which at one point had 445 members, lasted for a month before being raided by the police and shut down in August 1934. But otherwise, it was a life of cottaging and cruising, centred around public lavatories and late-night visits to parks.
In the sixties, we’ll see how Mr Lucas becomes a fixture on the London gay bar scene, flitting between the Welsh Harp, White Bear and Golden Lion in search of fresh guardsmen. But in his early twenties, his sex life and social life are kept strictly separate: the gins and limes with his best friend Pat Connolly, a very serious, bookish young man the same age as our diarist, in the Charing Cross Hotel or the White Swan in Covent Garden, do not cross over into his night-time activities in Raphael Park, three miles from his home in Chadwell Heath, or around Marble Arch, one of the main cruising grounds at the time.
And, like every other twenty-one-year-old, he is desperate to find love. For Mr Lucas, stuck with his homophobic hateful parents and a black cat – very prosaically called Geoffrey – in a 1920s terraced house, however, the idea of escape, the idea of finding love, remained at that point just a dream, not least because of the internalized feelings of disgust he felt about his burgeoning sexuality. ‘How vain, unsatisfactory, gross, is this perverse carnality,’ he writes in July 1948.
But what is love for Mr Lucas? His feelings for Pat, with his love for literature and the arts, is building into something more serious. And yet, while Mr Lucas is becoming closer to Pat, he has also found a hint of the ‘noble and exalted love’ he so keenly desires.
10 January 1948 (Saturday):
What balm, what medicament, can give ease to an aching heart? Not cocaine nor morphia, nor any drug known to physicians, can soothe the gnawing cancer of desire for what is lost. For a year and a half, I have been consumed by a pure flame of love for F. It burns clear as ever now, though I’ve not seen him for six months – and oh! The pain of longing for him and knowing there’s no hope. As a thirst-parched wanderer in the stormy wastes of Arabian Deserts seeks for the pool of water that may cool his mouth; as Dives in Hell cried for Lazarus to comfort him, I cry with all my heart for my most dearly loved one: and there is no answer given to me.
F is the ‘casual, cynical and fairly arrogant’ Fred, who does not reciprocate, leaving Mr Lucas to seek solace in the arms of others in London’s bombed-out parks and dark-lit alleyways. Fred disappears quickly as the 1948 diary unfolds, leaving us to presume the ‘grand passion’ was played out in the 1946 and ’47 diaries now lost to us, though the initial passion is strong and deeply felt. But we can see a deeper, perhaps more obvious, motive at work here: as the unhappy child of two unloving parents, Mr Lucas simply wants someone to like him. For now, though, Mr Lucas is moody, introspective and oh-so-pretentious, keen to record every bon mot or witticism made. But then what are diaries other than an extended wail of the unappreciated? This one, from nearly five years later, sums up his need for people to appreciate the real George: the witty, erudite Mr Lucas.
4 December 1952 (Thursday):
I made a good witticism this afternoon. Seeing House [colleague at the Board of Trade] munching sandwiches when I returned at 3 p.m., I remarked, ‘I see you’re still masticating… I once made that remark to a man who was hard of hearing.’ H. turned purple and choked with laughter for five minutes.
Pat Connolly was one of the few who perhaps came closest to knowing the younger Mr Lucas. We know little about him, other than they met sometime during the war. We never quite find out whether Pat, ‘so calm, gentle and courteous’, is gay or not. ‘I dare not hope he is like me,’ Mr Lucas writes early in 1948. Frankly, from the vantage point of two decades into the twenty-first century, Pat sounds deeply tedious: tortured, another dry pseudo-intellectual and as soaked in religion as our protagonist. But for Mr Lucas, he is the best friend: someone he can call on for an early dinner at the Adelphi in Villiers Street followed by ‘two films at the Warner (“mutilated shorts”) and a gin and lime at the Fitzroy’. A weekend holiday with Pat in Clactonon-Sea – ‘the first I have spent with a sympathetic friend’ – leads Mr Lucas to come close to coming out, in the typically pretentious way of a highly literate, if rather gauche, twenty-two-year-old.
23 August 1948 (Monday):
I wrote a long letter to Pat, touching at some length on the topic of homosexuality and quoting Proust.
Pat, perhaps unsurprisingly, does not reply, leaving Mr Lucas even more tortured the next time they meet. ‘Home, with Pat to London Bridge,’ he writes, ‘possessed by a violent desire to embrace him, so that when I left him, I was quite weak.’
Their friendship, very close in the late forties, meeting at least two or three times a week, drifts on awkwardly until a sudden stop in 1952. ‘Pat Connolly has taken offence at something I have said or written and won’t meet me again,’ Mr Lucas writes in April that year. It was a hump that would last for six years.
3 February 1958 (Monday):
Today, I saw my erstwhile friend Pat Connolly, now long estranged from me, and was astonished to observe how old he seemed, with dry skin, faded eyes and worn features, drawn pinched face, tight lips and a complexion that has lost all freshness. Yet he is a year younger than I. At first, I could not believe ’twas he, so dry and faded he looked, but some man ten years older that looked like him. I went on my way a good deal cheered by this – his prim puritanism evidently agrees with his health very ill.
The glee at the physical decline of his former friend is evident, but the break in the friendship is, unfortunately, very typical of Mr Lucas. His earnestness quickly tips over into stubbornness and a youthful conviction that he is right, often at the expense of retaining even very old friends and acquaintances.
Was Pat actually gay? I’d say probably yes. Applying a contemporary eye to attitudes, styles and feelings of seventy years ago is both dangerous and probably futile, but he certainly sounds the archetypal tortured young gay man, sublimating his sexuality into his religion. Either way, better to give the last word to Mr Lucas: ‘We have been long estranged,’ he continues in February 1958. ‘My liberalism in political and sexual fields grated on him. He is, I am convinced, a true homosexual who has, consciously or unconsciously, suppressed his affections and stifled all his natural desires.’ It is precisely this refusal by Mr Lucas to stifle his own ‘natural desires’ that leads him into such trouble – as is the sheer fact that, several years later, he comes to see his sexuality as natural and not against God.
This need to be loved leads him to Raphael Park one fateful night, where, deep along the dark paths, he feels the heavy hand of a policeman upon his shoulder, his first encounter – but very much not his last – with the law.
2 May 1948 (Sunday):
Horror and ruin mark this calamitous day… unless God once more intervenes miraculously, I’m ruined, and my career blasted. My hopes gone: name, reputation and future destroyed at one stroke. After dinner to Raphael Park, where I met judgement in the form of a police constable, who took my name and address and demanded my identity card. When I could not produce it, he advised me to take it to Chadwell Heath police station, which I did as soon as I was arrived home.
He had spent the night, as he often did at the time – sometimes twice in one night – cruising for sex in Raphael Park, a good hour’s walk from Chadwell Heath.
Today, the park is rather spruce. Neatly laid out, it is bracketed by a tennis court at one end and an ornamental lake at the other. But in 1948 it was a mess. The neighbouring town of Romford was bombed badly, with extensive damage to many houses in the borough and 143 residents reported killed.1
Sports pitches were dug up and emergency air raid shelters were built, and the park lost its railings as the war effort drove a desperate search for available iron. Trees overhung paths unswept for years; a deep trench at the north end was left unfilled. And one particularly perilous path led deep into the undergrowth, where men crept silently and softly into the dark, unseen by the cars on the main road heading into the slowly recovering capital. Perfect, indeed, for cruising. Or so Mr Lucas thought before one last stroll around the ageing bandstand would prove disastrous.
Mr Lucas is not the first to feel the tap of the law on his shoulder late at night. Friendship is the idealized form of love for him, but only because he knows its sharper, more intense version comes with the constant risk of arrest – and the consequences are harsh.
2 May 1948 (Sunday):
I imagine [the police officer] means to charge me with either loitering with felonious intent or indecent exposure; either charge might stand. I do not know whether he would charge me. If he does, I am ruined for conviction means instant dismissal from the War Office for an offence that entails disgrace and obloquy.
Secular laws policing same-sex behaviour stretch back to the Buggery Act of 1533, introduced under Henry VIII. With a penalty of death by hanging, sentences were carried out up until 1835 when James Pratt and John Smith were executed for sodomy. The death penalty was repealed in 1861 under the Offences Against the Person Act. But same-sex love remained very much against strict Victorian sexual mores (despite a heterosexual age of consent of twelve up until 1875). In 1885, Liberal M.P. Henry Labouchere introduced a last-minute change to the Criminal Law Amendment Act, designed to raise the straight age of consent to sixteen, bringing in a new charge of ‘gross indecency’ that would stalk queer society for decades to come.
