PAUL BAILEY
At home in London, talking to friend and fellow author Nigel Gray, May 1984.
I come from a working-class, South London family. My father was a road sweeper and dustman. My mother worked in service all her life - until she was well into her late seventies in fact. Doing a day's work was the most important thing in her life. My father was much older than my mother - she was his second wife. It was very odd having a father who had fought in the First World War (about which he never spoke). I felt very self-conscious as a boy because all the other boys in the school had youngish-looking parents and I had a very old father. He died when I was eleven. It was he who encouraged me to read, strangely enough. He used to read to me from Nicholas Nickleby. No other books - just that one. I don't know where he'd got the copy from. He didn't read it as a sequence - he just read funny bits out of it. Otherwise there were no books in our family.
Most of the books that I had as a child were things passed on to my mother from people she worked for. That's how I came to read Alice in Wonderland and things like that. Otherwise it was just The Dandy and The Beano and those sort of things. My father read The Daily Herald. Apart from that I can't remember him reading anything. It was the radio generation. (Television was in its infancy - and we couldn't have afforded one anyway.) It wasn't until I went to my second school (a grammar school which later became a secondary modern) that I started reading seriously. I was encouraged by the English master to read all sorts of things outside what we were reading at school. Listening to classic books enacted on the radio was a wonderful encouragement to read too. When we did Shakespeare at school, saying all that wonderful language, that gave me a kick; that kind of language still does give me a kick. It's like great music to me, and when I'm really in the doldrums I still pick up poetry rather than anything else - although I realise that the novel is the great art form.
I was the afterthought of the family. My mother had me after what she thought was the change of life. My brother was already grown up by the time I was a small boy. It was my dad I spoke to more as a child. We used to go for long walks together. It was he who took me to the zoo and places like that. We were a staunchly socialist family. My father hated Conservatives. He hated Churchill too (it was a working-class attitude of that period, certainly in South London - unlike the kind of adulation with which Churchill is now talked about); he saw Churchill as a warmonger. My mother was a bit of a snob because she worked in high-class service. My father used to send her up about the nobs and toffs she worked for. My dad had two children by his first marriage. One of them attended his funeral. It's very odd to suddenly meet your half-brother who's fifty when you're eleven. I've never seen him since. I think my father probably was an intelligent man: the two children by his first marriage were exceptionally intelligent and went on and did very well.
I don't know anything about his early life. He came back from the First World War and found that his wife was having an affair with another man so they divorced. With my mother it was a sort of closed subject, so there was a great area of mystery about him. In fact I'm now trying to write about it. I've invented a father who lives to be ninety-seven. I know what it's like to be without a parent - I'm now trying to imagine what it would be like to be cursed with a parent who goes on and on forever and just refuses to die.
After my father's death it was perpetual warfare with my mother to do what I wanted. She was going out to work and during the long summer holidays I was plonked on an elderly Scottish couple. I think this is where my (some people say, morbid) interest in old age comes from. When I came to write about old people I didn't ever see them as a sort of separate species - as a child I'd been surrounded by old people. My brother and my sister have been very much content to do as my mother said: 'Don't think above your own immediate horizons.' We were told this as kids and I fought with her ferociously about it.
When I went to the grammar school, which was a marvellous school, I was encouraged to act. I was in the school play every year, always played the lead, and by the age of thirteen I'd developed an ambition to become an actor. At the age of fifteen, before I'd left school, I'd got a scholarship to go to a drama school. I fucked up all my academic work in the last three years of school, almost deliberately actually, because I had this appalling confidence that I was going to be a very successful Shakespearean actor. And because of this ambition to go to drama school I had to spend a great deal of energy fighting my mother. She thought actors were disgusting creatures: rather poncy, and sexually ambiguous: and all that horrified her. My brother used to put a heavy hand on me and say, 'You don't want to do that for a living.' (I can truthfully say that my brother and I really loathed each other.) I used to say, 'I'm going to do it. I don't care what you say.'
I liked poetry. I started with Keats, Wordsworth, very much the Romantic things, and I used to learn Shakespeare off by heart out of sheer pleasure. I went to the sort of school where the English master would encourage you to learn a poem a day. I did that for years actually, even when I was an actor, so now I've got a huge catalogue of poems in my head. We lived in the upstairs of a terraced house in Battersea. The woman who lived downstairs used to take the piss out of me. It was odd for a fifteen-year-old boy to be spouting Shakespeare. I used to get sent up rotten, and I had a nickname which was 'Bleedin' Macbeth'.
I don't know where that interest came from. My mother's side of the family were all plodding, country people. They didn't have any interest in anything remotely literary or artistic. I'm still looked on as the peculiar one in the family, although when I got published it made a slight difference. But until I got my name in the papers (and I was thirty then) they didn't take me seriously. I was always asked, 'When are you going to get a proper job?' My mother's stopped saying it now, partly because she's so old. When I changed from acting to writing it was just one evil that followed another, and this was an even more inexplicable one. 'Are you still writing that book?' People can't understand that you seem to be happy to spend three years of your life writing the same book. My family don't understand it, and so when you're in the middle of something you sometimes begin to think, 'Christ! I'm wasting my time - this is getting nowhere.'
There were two other boys in the school I went to with whom I was extremely sympathetic. There was one boy there who was amazingly well read. I have never met anyone so intelligent. He came from a broken home, and he was one of those manic readers - he was never without a book. I would carry a book around, but he was never without one, ever, and he was reading Crime and Punishment and stuff like that at fourteen. I didn't get round to reading that till I was in my twenties. And there was a Jewish boy: one forgets the kind of casual anti-Semitism that went on, even amongst working-class people - it still persists. He'd somehow built up a resistance to it. He was extremely musical and I used to go to concerts with him.
I wasn't happy about my homosexuality. I'm not one of those people who took to it like a duck to water. I felt immensely guilty - for many years actually; society makes you feel guilty. I was interested in sport. I played cricket and things at school, not terribly well, but I wasn't a total aesthete locking myself off in an ivory tower or anything. When I was in my teens I developed a passion for tennis and went to Wimbledon every year. We didn't have tennis courts at school. I would happily have played tennis had we had the facilities, but it was considered a slightly upper crust game. (And still is, which is probably why we've never had any great tennis players in this country.) I went on having friendships with girls - trying to get there. And then, when I was in my twenties, I experienced a great moment of truth. I'd thrown myself onto the bed with a woman, with me simulating passion, and she said, 'You're not really interested in this, are you?' And I said 'No.' Having been gay in that time it's odd to see how young gays now behave and the comparative freedom they've got. But it's very odd to remember the kind of hatred that used to be expressed. Kingsley Amis uses the word 'queers' in his new novel (he also uses 'Jewboys'), and it brings back to you the moral attitudes of the 50s. There was the difficulty of meeting people in those days, and all that. I don't want to sound self-pitying about it - I had a very happy time in my twenties and thirties - but there are parents now, you see them on television programs, who seem to be quite adjusted to the fact, whereas I couldn't tell my mother. She obviously guessed eventually. She would have been...
