I must admit my heart sank a little when I walked into the Central School of Speech and Drama to meet the rest of Stage 84 - every year was named after the year they were to be released into the community. I'd been getting more and more excited over the summer at the prospect of spending the next three years with fifteen or so impossibly glamorous young actresses in the making. After all, I'd already met one of them at the audition and she was fantastically glamorous and confident, so I assumed, if she was a yard-stick, the rest of my year would be breathtaking in their gorgeousness. I couldn't see the waste of time it would be to give twenty-eight drama school places to a bunch of eighteen year old pretties, so I held my breath outside the reception room and prepared to open the door onto a veritable bevvy of beauties.
Serena Evan's was the first face I saw. Now don't get me wrong, I'd give my right testicle to go out with her now, but it must be remembered I was expecting nothing less than to be faced with a Pirelli calender's worth of moisturised flesh, so when lovely Serena smiled at me hello, I'm ashamed to admit I felt intense disappointment. I quickly scanned the room and realised this was not going to be the lust-fest I'd been preparing for over the summer. Dan was the next face I saw. He looked as though he beat people up for a living, boxer's nose, boxer's physique, crash helmet. He scared me to death. So I went straight past him and sat down in a corner. Let the classes begin!
The very first class had us all massaging each other and holding one or two of our number aloft and carrying them around the room. This was, of course, to begin a process of breaking down our barriers. What they didn't realise was that I had absolutely no intention of breaking down my barriers at all! I liked my barriers. I felt safe behind them. That's why I had them in the first place! Were they stupid? I put my hands onto someone or other's shoulders and broke out into a sweat. Blind panic. Of course, no-one knew this. I maintained my legendary icy cool exterior, but inside I was screaming. The sweat on my hands made the T shirt I was rubbing stick on his skin. His body heat was making everything worse. Was he as tense as I was? Was my tension making him uneasy? Did he think I was tense because I was secretly getting off on rubbing his shoulders? By the time the class had finished, I was exhausted.
You may wonder where this irrational fear of all things homosexual came from. Suffice it to say, not only was I branded by my class-mates a 'homo' at school because I had a pretty face and a tendency to waft, but during 1976 - my fourteenth and hormonally-significant year - my Mother moved to London and began working as wardrobe mistress at the National Theatre. I would spend week-ends with her in the wardrobe department surrounded by the gayest men you ever saw! Honestly, they made The Village People look straight. Sean, the man in charge, actually wore a sailor's cap. I had to sit there for hours amongst all this campery desperately trying to think of something to say. I mean, I would have been ill at ease at the best of times, but here I had to laugh weakly as one of them announced that he was going out for a 'troll' along the South Bank! For f***'s sake! I was fourteen! Sometimes I marvel at the fact I managed to emerge heterosexual at all!
It reminds me of the joke, "My Mother made me a homosexual!" "Oh! Do you think if I gave her the wool, she'd make me one too?" Sadly, almost all of them are dead now, for obvious reasons.
So here was another layer of anxiety to cope with. Having got through the massaging bit, we then had a class where we had to stand in a circle and take it in turns pretending to 'wade' into the middle and 'search' through imaginary gloop for a ring. I believe my actual words were, " I'm not doing that!" The disapproving gaze of the rest of the class made me reconsider and I half-heartedly 'waded', feeling that this was a complete waste of time. I wasn't here to piss about massaging people and pretending to look for rings in mid-air. I came here to stand in a warm pool of light, my beautiful voice resonating around an auditorium! I felt it far too revealing to risk making a fool of yourself in front of others. Neil, from Liverpool, was there watching me! I had a reputation to maintain! I'd blinded him with my talent in that dressing room a few months before! How could I be seen to throw all that status away by making a tit of myself and joining in!
There was also the issue of accents. Basically, I refused to do them, or, more accurately, I refused to try. When it came to the casting for our first 'showing', I was to play Boamer, "King of the Mowers", in 'Lark Rise to Candleford', a story set in Oxfordshire. Everyone else 'Oo Arrhed' their socks off in rehearsals while I simply refused. By the time of the performance, in a local church hall, on a gloriously snowed-in day, I'd got a little braver and had joined the rest of them with the Oo Arrhing. The irony was that Lark Rise is actually set about twenty-five miles from Stratford, in a place on the Oxfordshire/ Northamptonshire border called Juniper Hill, so had I stuck to my guns, mine would've been, completely by accident, the most accurate performance, accent-wise, of the lot!
By the way, do not think that 'Oo Arrh Acting' as it is known in the trade, is confined to students and amateur dramatics. I had the pleasure of being in a lavishly-cast production of a play about Cornish tin mining at the Cottesloe Theatre in 1987, and we had accents from as far afield as South America and Benny Hill...
For the second term, we rehearsed and performed Chekov's "The Seagull", where I could be accent-free and tragic, and in the third term, we ended up in familiar territory with Romeo and Juliet performed by me in footless tights and an earnest expression in the school's theatre itself.
By this time, I had met and fallen in love with one of the most beautiful girls in the college. She was on the Speech Therapy course and her name was Naomi. We had noticed each other in the school corridors and coffee bar, but, me being me, I had never had the courage to actually say anything to her, such was her heart-stopping attractiveness. By March, things were getting silly. It would normally be about this time that the object of my affection would become bored with my refusal to speak, and go out with someone else who could string a sentence together. As luck would have it, a party had been planned that Saturday by some people from my year and I'd heard that Naomi was planning on going. In my mind, I decided that that would have to be the night I did something, anything, rather than continue with this silent yearning. To illustrate her drop-dead gorgeousness, I'm sure Neil, he of the Brookie fame, wouldn't mind my telling you that, on hearing of Naomi's plans to attend, he decided to travel back from Liverpool to London purely to be there and put himself in with a chance.
I had been at the party for an hour or so when she arrived. Hasty looks were exchanged between Neil and myself. Who would make the first move? I'd've put my money on the man from Liverpool. She went into the kitchen and I remained sitting against the wall in the living room with David P. from my year. Things looked bad. I carried on a conversation I'd been having with the man with the air of sadness - he was actually quite cheerful that night - hoping that inspiration would strike from somewhere. Five minutes passed. I looked up and there she was with her hand outstretched. I took it and she pulled me up. We left the party immediately and were inseparable for two years.