ABSENT FRIENDS

The culture sets great store by anniversaries and so it is not surprising that my thoughts have recently been turning to melancholy events thirty summers ago. To rehearse this narrative, though, I need to go back yet further, another four and a half years.

Early in 1978, I had just begun a stint as a producer of television plays at the BBC’s Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham. A chum was appearing in a production at the Rep and had met a young man who would be needing a base in town later in the year. I was short of a lodger at my London flat, to which I repaired every weekend while at Pebble Mill, and was persuaded by my chum’s conviction that this lad would appeal to me.

We met at some social event. He was twenty, ten years my junior, and was called Phil Taft. His family lived on the Kent coast and he was one of three or four brothers, I don’t now remember which. Phil was soon to go on a European tour as part of a skating troupe. I was to learn that he was game to have a go at anything and that he could persuade people that he was just the person they were looking for. But we genuinely took a shine to each other and quickly agreed that, upon his return from the tour, he would present himself at my door.

I don’t know if Phil was expecting to be installed as my live-in lover. As I got to know him later, I found that he was very apt to fall for potential daddy figures. He was also perfectly secure and happy in his homosexuality. Ten years after the change in the law, being gay was still not generally accepted in society though the gay liberation movement had made great strides.

The first Gay Pride march through London had been organised in 1972, when I was still trying to convince myself that I was heterosexual or at least bisexual. A number of factors led me to embrace my nature, not least of which was a relationship with the writer and actor Drew Griffiths, whom I met in 1975 when covering for Plays & Players the launch of the theatre troupe Gay Sweatshop. By 1976, I was out in my journalism and joining the Gay Pride march.

A decade younger, Phil Taft hadn’t spent his teens as an outlaw. He had no need to pass through the period of adjustment that so many of my own contemporaries experienced, though of course for every happy gay teenager there was then – and there still is – a fearful one, just as for every innocent child there is another chomping on the bit to be out and doing.

While Phil was touring Europe, another man came into my life. I have written before about my “meeting cute” (as they used to say in Hollywood) with Aziz Yehia at the Edinburgh Festival: see Lying Fallow December 20th 2010 below. So when Phil showed up at my door in the autumn, his nose may have been put out of joint. But I cannot be sure of that; we never discussed it. At any rate, he moved into my spare room and soon made himself at home, both in the flat and in London.

Over the next four years, Phil was a charming flat-mate. He was my little brother, occasional date and fuck buddy. My friends adored him and he made his own friendships among them and beyond. He was young and bold and confident and soon clocked up a string of lovers, including Derek Jarman and Bruno Tonioli. He didn’t seem to be looking for a regular squeeze, though I know he carried a torch for one of my pals who certainly returned the feelings for a while.

He tried to make a go of showbiz, particularly as a dancer, but he hadn’t had the training and wasn’t competitive. But he could certainly turn his hand to anything and, by the summer of 1982, he was an adored carer for several regulars at a centre for those with various disabilities.

There was an awkward moment early in the year when I hadn’t seen Phil for a few days and then he turned up rather sorry for himself and complaining that no one had come to visit him in hospital. Eventually I got from him the intelligence that he had been knocked off his bike, on which he zoomed around the city in skimpy clothing and no protection. I also got from him the concession that as he hadn’t let anyone know of this accident – which seemed to have done no lasting damage – he could hardly expect us to guess what had happened (we had no mobiles back then). In any case, I hadn’t worried. Phil led his own life and days often went past without our paths crossing.

Then there came the weekend when I started to fret about his absence. His mail by the front door mat indicated that he’d not been home for a week. I phoned around but no one had seen him. I consulted my mother and followed her advice to alert his parents who also had had no word. After another week with no sightings, I got in touch with Gay News who, to my surprise, ran Phil’s disappearance as its front-page lead. But this stimulated no further information.

At some point after this, I reported Phil’s disappearance to the police. Predictably, they were not unduly concerned. Phil was 24. He was free to go as he pleased. The concern of his friends was not sufficient to spark the commitment of police time.

Weeks passed with no news. Everybody continued to make enquiries. Gay News published Phil’s photograph again. A friend who reckoned to be psychic communed with whatever psychics commune with and declared that he was safe but “over the water”. Dutifully, I reported this to his Mum.

Early in 1983, fully six months after Phil had last been seen, the police began to show an interest. It emerged that they were looking into a case that involved several missing young men. By degrees, the grisly story came out. A man called Dennis Nilsen had been arrested. The remains of several young men had been found in the drains of the house where he had the top flat. The address was Cranley Gardens, at the bottom of Muswell Hill, about ten minutes’ walk from my flat. Nilsen had evidently picked up his victims in town. It was perfectly feasible that Phil might have gone home with an articulate stranger in his late 30s.

The police circulated Phil’s dental records. They also conducted a minute search of his room, untouched since he disappeared. In a plastic bag of rubbish hanging from the door handle, they found a balled-up sheet of paper on which Phil had sketched out what was evidently a suicide note. “I hate myself so much” was the phrase that stays with me. It was unimaginable. Everybody loved Phil, the sweetest, kindest boy. Why would he hate himself?

Some time later the dental records found a match. The police passed on what they had pieced together. Phil had evidently taken himself off to Dover, a place that the family had visited several times when he was a child. He had plunged off the white cliffs. I don’t know how much later his body was recovered from the sea but, having hit the rocks head first and then been washed away, he doubtless would not have been identifiable by conventional means. It seemed that he had been buried in an unmarked grave and, heartbreakingly for his parents, the authorities would not permit them to have him exhumed and buried closer to home. One dismal day, they came to the flat and picked up his few possessions. It was the first and last time I met them and there was so little I could tell them. I always maintained that, had I been given the opportunity, I could have talked Phil out of his plan in five minutes. Impulsiveness was one of his most marked traits.

Perhaps even more dismal than the parental visit was my duty to phone people who had been waiting for news. Several of them were uncontrollably distraught or insistent on my easing their perplexity. Meanwhile, something about the whole story dissatisfied me, a tic that was not stilled for another six months. Then a small jiffy bag arrived. The franking label revealed its sender as the police in Dover but there was no covering note. All that the bag contained was a front door key. It was green. I immediately saw that the colour was as a result of being in the sea. And now, in this mute fragment of evidence, I knew that the story was complete.

Of all the images from my friendship with Phil, the one that comes back to me most often is from a party in Battersea. Phil came to it with Aziz and me. As we bowled along the pavement towards the party venue, arms linked and with me in the middle, Aziz laughed. “You think you’re something, marching along with two cute boys”, he said. He wasn’t wrong.

At the party, I introduced Aziz to Drew for the first time, my current beau to my ex. They were delighted to meet and they hit it off at once. In the image I retain, we stand in a square, Drew to my left and Aziz to my right, smilingly meeting. Phil is opposite me, also enjoying the moment.

I treasure this image because they are all gone now, gone within six years. Aziz, then exiled to Switzerland, was astounded and dangerously intrigued by Phil’s suicide. I knew such an end was always on his agenda and he carried it out in the spring of 1984. Meanwhile, Drew had run into a spiral of craziness, something that had always been part of his make-up – at the aforementioned party, we had found him in floods of tears in the kitchen because someone had guessed his age at two years too many: 33 instead of 31. By 1984, I hadn’t seen him for many months but word had it that he was running around south London, getting barred from pubs and picking up the most disreputable and sleazy men he could find. One of these stabbed him to death in his flat.

This was a couple of months after Aziz had died. And I could not but feel that it was a demise as willed as those of Aziz and Phil. The police came to take my fingerprints, having found me in Drew’s address book. The word from them was that they were pretty sure who the perpetrator was but, by the time they had narrowed their theories to him, he was already serving a long sentence for another violent crime and they decided to drop the matter.

As if all this did not suffice, the party from which I carry that image like a wounded bird was given by Martin Panter. Martin was a member of Gay Sweatshop after Drew’s time, and he and I had shared a night of tumultuous sex in Amsterdam a year or two earlier. He was a charming boy and a brave one, having come out while at school and enjoying the fierce support of his mother who strode in to give the head teacher a piece of her mind when it was suggested that Martin was letting the side down. And Martin was the first to take his own life, some few months after the party.

This self-inflicted carnage, not unknown among the young in every generation, is all the more poignant in retrospect because the full impact of Aids had yet to fall on us. And that scourge carried off many, many more dear friends from our circle.