HRH The Queen Mother. W. G. Grace. Sir Edmund Hillary. Zips. Japanese Massage.

March 1964. The new Biochemistry and Physiology Block of St Swithin's Hospital was being opened by Her 'Majesty the Queen Mother. At the time, being Secretary of the Students' 'Union, I was invited to join Her Majesty for tea with other representatives of the student body after her tour of the new premises. The Queen Mother had an excellent complexion and was extremely charming. I was very pleased to find out that she had asked to come to tea with the students and not with a lot of old gits in red gowns and stupid floppy hats.

During tea I explained to Her Majesty that I'd had the offer of going to New Zealand as a member of the cast of Cambridge Circus, a revue, but that this would mean taking six months off medicine, and my parents had yelped strongly against this. The Royal Person said, 'It's a beautiful place, you must go.' I used this remark on my parents as if it were a royal command, and it worked. My mother was now able

to go into the butcher's shop and say, 'Oh, the Queen Mother said he must go.'

Ten minutes later¹ I was on a plane to Christchurch. John Cleese had a shower in Karachi, lost his watch, and held up the plane for an hour while he looked for it. I didn't particularly mind the delay, because I was sitting next to a rather nice-looking Commonwealth sailor.

We arrived at Sydney at 'sivun tin' and took the next plane for Christchurch at 'twilve twunty'. Christchurch was a shit-hole of a place, made all the worse because we'd left England in Spring and arrived there in Autumn. It was pissing down rain, and cold. We were taken to a temperance hotel made of wood. After an appalling meal we were shown to our rooms. Mine was so cold and damp that there was mildew on the bed-covers. To try and warm the room up I turned on the hot water tap and lit a small bonfire in my ashtray. The next morning we all complained about the damp and cold, and demanded hot water bottles for the next night.

Breakfast was served from eight to nine in the morning in a damp room the size of a moist barn. We all gathered together at one table only to be told that we had to sit at a table which was appropriate to our room number or we would not be served. That meant that the nine of us sat at separate tables dotted around the room. There were only two other residents. We shouted at each other across the room, saying that if things didn't improve we'd move out.

I looked at the menu. The first course was 'Porridge or cremona'. I asked the waitress what cremona was and she said 'Porridge'. Hardly believing this, I looked at the second course which was 'Fruit or prunes'. I asked what the fruit was, and she said 'Prunes'. That night we all arrived back from rehearsal to find hot-water bottles in our beds. Unfortunately they leaked, which may have encouraged the mildew, but not us. We left.

The whole group moved to a hotel built of brick that served drinks to the residents. (You have to bear in mind that the licensing laws in New Zealand at that time meant that bars could open only between 5.30 and 6.00 pm. This meant, of course, that at 6.10 pm the streets were full of white New

1. Roughly.

Zealanders beating up Maoris, or the other way round, depending on who had managed to get the most drunk quickest.) We felt very privileged at the access to drink and warm beds, and slept quite happily until noon the next day.

John Cleese and myself decided to have lunch at the hotel because we were performing in the theatre that afternoon and evening, and it didn't seem likely that we would get a meal. I asked for a three-egg omelette. The waitress was astonished, and said, 'What?' I said, 'A three-egg omelette' and pointed to the words on the menu saying 'three-egg omelette'. She said, ⁴A three-igg omlut?' and I said 'Yis', pointing again. Five minutes later she returned with a large omelette with three fried eggs on top. Even people three tables away threw up.

We flew to Dunedin, a town in the south of the island, named after a mixture of Edinburgh and Dundee, and with a perceptible Scottish influence. We stayed at a hotel called the Leviathan (where breakfast was served from eight to five past eight) completely uncontaminated by alcohol or women. I even had a tartan tooth-mug; and the surrounding countryside had the nerve to look just like Scotland. But I did see, in one glen, an animal resembling an orange to russet furry pig. John Cleese flatly refused to believe this description, so I put the whole incident down to alcohol withdrawal symptoms.

Tim Brooke-Taylor and I got desperate. We asked the stage-hands if there was anywhere we could get a drink after the show. After a lot of chatting we convinced them that we weren't the police, and they told us that there was one place, but that we had to knock three times and ask for Jock. After the show we arrived, knocked three times, a little shutter in the door opened, and we asked for Jock. From the far side of the door we could hear the unmistakable sound of glasses being hidden. Tim asked, 'Is Jock there?' We were told that he could be, but what ship were we from. I suppose there has always been an affinity between the navy and 'theatrical people', but I can't think what it is. We explained that we were from SS His Majesty's Theatre, and were allowed in. And provided that we bought an orange juice or coca-cola, they would give us a pint of lager each on the strict understanding that we should hide it if there was another knock on

the door. There was a knock on the door. Everyone in the room hid their lagers and stood drinking orange juice as the police walked round. They had a quick scotch with the barman and left, satisfied with our temperance.

I learned later that the temperance societies in New Zealand were largely financed by the breweries, and that the reason for this was that if the licensing laws were extended they would have to spend more money on pubs and staff to run them. They made a better profit the other way, out of off-sale bottled beer and spirits.

We flew to Timaru, a town about the size of my house -the only difference being that there is no seafront in Highgate and Timaru doesn't have a theatre as big as mine. We arrived with our costumes, props, and lipstick, walking down the aisle of an auditorium that held a paltry 2000, to find Humphrey Barclay, a producer not commonly known to be related to a bank. He was setting up the lighting for the evening's performance which was particularly important because it was being recorded for New Zealand Television, an organization slightly bigger than the New Zealand Navy. He was shouting at the electricians for more light. They turned all the available stage lighting up to full. He screamed at them again that this was not good enough. The cast by now was on stage, arranging props and doing a walkthrough. None of us could quite understand the need for extra lighting in that we were already being blinded by the fierce glare from every part of the theatre. Humphrey, now in a frenzy, foamed at the nostrils and roared for more light. He threw off his sunglasses in anger, realized he'd been wearing them, sat down, and went puce.

I wanted to see the mountains, the New Zealand Alps, and managed to persuade John Cleese and Tim Brooke-Taylor to join me in paying for a flight around them. It was a spiffing flight, with heavenly views that really gripped you by the balls - well actually the bit between your balls and your arsehole - they were Great with a capital ⁴G', one V, one V, an 'a' and a Y (in lower case). The single-prop four-seater Cessna's engine purred as Captain W. E. Hillary flew us across mountain ridges, emerald green chasms in the ice, and

countless glaciers. We landed on one of the glaciers that had been counted.

'Crikey!' whistled Ginger Brooke-Taylor. 'Damn good thing old Groupy put the skis on the old underbelly!'

'Yes. Eeuuurp!' confided John 'Algy' Cleese into his airsickness bag as we came in to land on the Fox Glacier. Tim and I stepped out of the plane, exhilarated and confident, and sank into four feet of snow. Apart from that nothing happened. Group Captain W. G. Grace taxied the 'plane round for take-off, the engine revved, and the Cessna shot off for all the world like a gannet into the blue with bits of white.

We yelled and stamped so much with indignation that we sank another foot into the snow and, as luck would have it, thereby attracted the attention of Sir Edmund Hillary and Uffa Fox who had been playing poker for several months in their marooned Ford Anglia while waiting for the snow to thaw. At first they were alarmed at our intrustion. They wanted to be alone together. The atmosphere was tense.

'Excuse me, ahem, ahem, can you tell me the way to Timaru?' I volunteered.

They tried to cover up their embarrassment with small talk as they rearranged their clothing. 'Just have a look at that gearbox,' as zips were zipped and duvet jackets velcroed. Eventually the newly-clothed pair made us a delightful tea of cucumber sandwiches with drop-scones and clotted cream. They apologized for the lack of honey, and we had three charming months of witty small-talk as we glid genteelly down the mountainside to Timaru.

In Wellington, the capital city, we did what amounted to a Royal Command Performance, since Sir Bernard Ferguson, the Governor General, was coming to see the show. The entire audience had to stand until he arrived and the national anthem had finished. As soon as he sat down so could everyone else. He told us later that he'd once unfortunately been twenty minutes late in appearing, that the entire audience stood to attention the whole time, listening to the national anthem played nine times through. They still hadn't realized that they weren't part of an empire.

Auckland is a larger town than Wellington, and there is even one building you could describe as a restaurant. Their

most splendid nightclub, boasting fine views over the South Pacific, and called 'The South Pacific', did overlook the South Pacific. But verisimilitude ended there. We did a cabaret there in exchange for a free meal and drink. The waitresses were startled when we asked if we could possibly have some rolls to go with our soup. We then tried 'bread' or 'toast', and after a lot of uneasy consultation they eventually came up to the table with a half-empty packet of stale pre-sliced loaf. The rest of the meal was worse.

So little happens in New Zealand. They had just had a visit from The Beatles, so entertainment from England was the thing. And being the young cast of a popular show we were followed everywhere by keen fans. Mine was Mike Cormack, a handsome eighteen-year-old student. He showed me round the town in a car borrowed from his parents, and took four of us to his father's batch¹ near Lake Taupo. I liked him, but I didn't know I was gay, and I don't think he knew he was. And so I missed out on my first real opportunity, when there were just two of us together, looking out on a view of Auckland Harbour, a beautiful sunset, and a gents bog.

I suppose the fear of labelling myself homosexual held me back. There was certainly no-one to watch us, and I was 12,000 miles from my father's binoculars. Mike, I'm sure -he has written to me since - was even more keen to get his rocks off. But parental sexual repression and a bigoted government and social climate (probably influenced, by the bad food) meant that the two of us stood there, quivering, neither wanting to make the first move. I pretended to have a pee, we exchanged some comments about the lack of bulbs in the light-fittings, and drove back in silence to Auckland.

'What a bloody fucking waste of time,' I thought three years later when I was in Ibiza, hugging David in a tent, feeling more liberated and happy than ever before in my life. I realized then that I didn't have to have women all the time, and that guilt is the weapon used by a muddled society to stop people having a good time. 'All the world loves a lover.' What crap! Even in the sexually liberated 'seventies young people still had to get pissed or high to do what they really wanted to do in the first place.

Weekend retreat.

My own strategy then in the fight against guilt was to go out and do what I felt guilty of again and again, and again the next morning if I felt like it - an anti-aversion therapy therapy, but this meant a liver-boggling amount of drinking.

On the way from Auckland to Hong Kong, we stopped off for a few days in Sydney, which compared with any city in New Zealand seems like Gomorrah... or was it Sodom? No it wasn't, bugger it.

John, Tim and I were met in Hong Kong by a rich doctor's widow, whose son, Benny Chi Ping Lee, had trained with me in the bar at St Swithin's. We were treated extremely well, with exceptional food cooked by the authentic Chinese-type Chinese maid, and with a lackey who would pick up the dog for anyone who felt like stroking it. We didn't use this service very often as it was an extremely fierce dog. Mrs Lee took us to the best hotels for cocktails, and to lantern-lit floating restaurants with really fresh fish swimming in cages over the side. You pointed out the one you either liked or hated and it would be killed in any way you wished. I had one of my fish killed in a white wine and green ginger sauce, although it was the stuffing of finely chopped scallions, fried almonds and lemon juice that really finished it off. John Cleese's fish was so fresh he had to batter it over the head with an empty sake bottle before it would agree to go down his throat. We restricted ourselves to twenty-nine more courses and seven bottles of strawberry liqueur, and then, as on most evenings, we would travel round the town in rickshaws, abusing the natives, popping into nightclubs for a swiftie, don't you know, what!, then off to the Hilton where we sat for dinner on leather-lined air-conditioned commodes overlooking the authentically squalid sampans in Kowloon harbour, just like the ones on the British Airways¹ pamphlet.

On our last day we were allowed to roam the streets a little on our own while Mrs Lee went shopping, and we soon noticed that ninety-nine point nine per cent of the population weren't spiffingly rich. In fact three million of them were living on tiny boats as big as a medium-sized cucumber frame, with tattered linoleum instead of glass. A few of the sampans, with untattered roofs, were owned by the Chinese i. Nee B.O.A.C.

equivalent of the middle class. These families had become 'wealthy' by selling their bodily orifices to foreign tourists. And when I was showing an 8 mm film of Visit to Hong Kong by G. Chapman, I found it rather difficult to explain to my mother what all those little children were doing backing towards me patting their bottoms.

It was our last day in Hong Kong, fuck it, and that's what Tim and I decided we should do. While John was buying another camera we explained to Mrs Lee that we had to post some letters and would meet her back outside the camera shop in a 'few minutes'. We ran off down the street and found the Japanese massage parlour that we'd both not noticed earlier. We ran up the stairs to find ourselves in front of a door with a tiny spy-hole in it. Tim wanted to run away, so did I, but being foolish I pressed the bell. Someone looked at us. Tim was by now giggling with fear, and the thought that he might have his prick rubbed. 'Bring bring bring!' went the bell, because they always do in stupid lying narratives like this. The door opened. 'Creak creak,' it went, again as they always do, and we both rather staggered at the sight of a Japanese-style Chinese girl wearing a kimono and a bottle of scent. We both fainted. But the heavy scent and the overwhelming hint of sex soon roused us. Tim was taken off to have a Turkish bath, and I was taken in to be massaged.

I wasn't exactly sure how many clothes to take off while the young lady was out of the room, but on balance thought that all was a good idea. And I lay back downwards on the couch with a small towel over the naughty bits. The performance started. First the oil, scented with secret balms, was rubbed into my flesh. I was caressed and beautifully pommelled, followed by an application of some form of talcum powder, and then stroked with such ambidexterous erotic fluency that I thought I'd even embarrass myself. She paid no attention to anything I could muster, and I was wondering if I should grab her and force my by now obvious intentions on her. But then I was English, and I only wondered. She said, 'Turn over.' I didn't quite know what to expect at this point but I obliged. She left the booth, and I wondered for a moment as to what she would come back with. She didn't. A young Chinese gentleman came in and gave my back a right

pasting, culminating in him walking up and down both sides of my spine. Absolute bloody agony. But I didn't dare cry out as I knew Tim would hear me.

Eventually the torture was finished, and I went through to the Turkish bath, passing Tim on the way. We both gave indications that we were enjoying things tremendously, and while in the bath I waited to hear Tim's screams when the man walked all over his back. He didn't scream. Damn the British. I left the bath and was asked by the young lady whether I would like to be assisted in my shower. I replied automatically, 'Oh, no, quite all right, thank you. Oh. Wait a minute. Um. Well, perhaps.' Too late. She had taken me literally.

Tim and I left feeling radiant - well, not radiant, horny really. I found out that he had also refused 'assistance'. We both regretted that we were English. We had to rush back to meet Mrs Lee, but quite honestly I could have fucked a letterbox. As opposed to fiction, I wanked three times within an hour of the plane leaving Hong Kong.

After my tour of New Zealand and three months in New York with Cambridge Circus (vide supra et infra) I came back to St Swithin's to pass Pathology and Therapeutics extremely well, narrowly missing one of the two 'prizes' in Therapeutics - well, at least, I was in the last six. Then came my final exams: Medicine, Surgery, Midwifery and Gynaecology. Medicine I felt I didn't deserve to pass but did; realizing how little you know is the first step towards....

Surgery I should have passed but didn't. I knew that I'd passed on my paper and my short cases were simple enough; a row of about ten patients you have to diagnose quickly and suggest possible treatment for, and for my long case I had an extremely cooperative patient who told me much more than she should have about her thyrotoxicosis and its surgical treatment. Unfortunately for me a rather silly man, a pompous surgeon, wearing a scarlet gown and a silly floppy hat for the sole purpose of intimidating examinees, asked me where I'd been trained. He took exception to the fact that it was St Swithin's and in particular had great personal animosity towards the Beast. I failed.

Midwifery I felt I should have passed, but did rather mess

no

up my long case, never having encountered a pregnant dwarf, with unusual hip deformities as a result of a road accident, during any of my tuition, even in any text-book small print. This meant that I had six months to spend before I could take the examinations again. I didn't need to do a great deal of work on Surgery, just to keep my revision topped up. I read for about an hour a day and went to the occasional ward rounds. My tutor in Gynaecology and Midwifery was so enraged at my failure that he gave me a third degree grilling in his weekly tutorials that I attended. This left the rest of my time free to write with John Cleese and go to script-conferences for The Frost Report, a programme featuring D. Para-dine Frost, J. Cleese, R. Barker and R. Corbett.

My introduction to fellow-writers Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Barry Cryer, Dick Vosburgh, David Nobbs, etc. was a very happy one and at the end of a very successful run of thirteen half-hour programmes I had no problem with Midwifery and Gynaecology and passed quite easily. Surgery too, seemed to be easier this time with the exception of an extremely uncooperative patient for my long case, a fat lump of a man of forty-five years of age whose only complaint was painful ankles, and a mild, chronic bronchitis. This could have been arthritis because of his obese condition but that just wasn't enough to discuss for my main case. I started again, asking him about his weight; whether he had lost or gained any recently. 'No,' he insisted he hadn't, his weight had remained the same for years. After a complete re-examination I'd nothing to add to my findings and the prospect of failure loomed as I approached the Professor of Surgery. I told him what I'd found, he agreed and simply said, 'And?' 'Well, and that's all, sir.' 'Did you ask him about his weight?' 'Yes, sir, he said it's been the same for years.' 'Did he? Are you sure you asked him about his weight?' For some reason my confidence returned. I didn't want to go through all this again. 'Yes, I asked him several times. He said it had stayed the same.'

'I don't think so,' added another examiner at the Professor's side.

'Wellgo and ask himV I almost shouted.

in

This they did and came back and the professor said somewhat apologetically, 'What would you have thought if he had told you that he had lost two stones in weight in the last month?'

'Cancer, sir!'

'Where of?'

'Lung, sir.'

'Look at those X-rays.' I did. There was the growth. This man had been selected as a difficult 'long case', purely because the only indicative symptoms were recent weight loss accompanied by swollen ankles - a variant of peripheral pulmonary arthropathy, commonly seen in the fingers, but then only recently described as a diagnostic sign in the ankle.

After this I happily went through the suggested courses of treatment and the prognosis for the patient. They were pleased. I passed. I was pleased.

CHAPTER SIX

Ibiza