No.20 - Afternoon Tea and Seduction

In November 1984, within a month of moving to London, I attended a music and film show at the Barbican Hall, marking seventy years of the beginning of the Great War, a conflict that had always haunted me. I was alone, but the much older gentleman sitting beside me soon struck up a conversation. The smiling fellow with brilliantined hair and a razor sharp parting was Alan Barnard, and he was nearly as old as my mum.

Ticket stub to the concert at which I met Alan Barnard.

We got on famously he and I, a curiously old-fashioned young man, and someone from an age gone by. He invited me to his rooms in Hampstead for afternoon tea the following week. How very civilised, I thought. What a friendly place London was turning out to be. It wouldn't have occurred to me, a mostly innocent Welsh boy, new to the big city, that anything more than my company was expected .

Calling it Hampstead was a stretch. It was King Henry’s Road NW3, so it's more Primrose Hill. It runs alongside the railway line into Euston - the one that had brought me to London for good only a month before. Like many in the area he rented his rooms from Eton College. Off the main bed-sitting room there was a tiny kitchen and a door through which I never passed, that promised more. The bed-sitting room itself was full of shabby, archaic furniture on a Persian carpet, and it was lined with books, many of them antique. An ugly filing cabinet dominated one corner and there were magazines and newspaper cuttings all over the place. Whenever I visited, Alan had to shift a pile of stuff before I had the space to sit down. He had once worked for British European Airways (BEA) but now made his living through doing the research for other people’s books.

I contributed some quite fancy cream cakes, for which he thanked me profusely before asking the question he would repeat on every subsequent visit, “Remind me dear boy, do you prefer Indian or China tea?” During that initial tea ceremony, between mouthfuls of cake he slipped a phrase into the conversation, as though it was a purely incidental matter, “Of course, if we are to become lovers…”

My response was like one of those annoying slapstick trailers for a comedy film, when somebody suddenly finds themselves falling from a great height - “Noooooooooooo!” I didn’t want to offend my host, but I couldn’t have been more shocked had I been propositioned by one of my mother's church friends over a slice of Battenburg.

Alan was no monk, but with a severe haircut and a slick of hair oil, this wouldn't be a bad likeness.

Rude as I might have appeared, my rejection seemed not to faze him in the slightest and he continued, “Well, I hope you will still visit me and take afternoon tea every now and again.” This was important, because it suggested that he saw something in me worth knowing, even if he wasn’t getting into, or anywhere near my trousers. Had he not taken it so well, I would have left, never to return. But instead, I visited him for the rest of his life, maybe not as often as I should have, and I phoned him every Christmas day, just as I did my mother.

Sometimes over a glass of sherry or Stone’s Ginger Wine, he would offer me sage advice. When there was a debate within my family about whether I should ‘come out’ to Mum or not, he could offer the perspective of someone of her generation. “What you have to ask yourself dear boy, is who would you be doing it for? Would you be doing it for her benefit? Or would you be doing it to make life easier for yourself?” I had to conclude it was the latter and, rightly or wrongly, I never told her.

I'm not saying Alan's corset was exactly like this from a 1917 copy of The Bystander but...(British Newspaper Archive)

Sometimes, when I arrived in King Henry’s Road at the appointed time he would not be there. I would sit on the step and wait until he rolled up on his ancient, pale green Vespa. He would unlock the door, direct me upstairs and remove his helmet and outer clothing to expose the pyjamas he’d been wearing underneath. On one occasion, without any pause in his conversation, he turned his back on me and a curious snapping sound, was followed by the sight of his extended arm casting aside a horrid-looking corset. I’m relieved I was never asked to tighten his stays.

He was fond of discussing sexual matters and was probably a little impatient with my mooning after some boy or other, without getting down to it and sharing the details. I was a particularly hopeless romantic, but he most certainly was not. I recall the mischievous twinkle in his eyes and his smirk while teasing me after I had recounted some missed opportunity. Speaking like an Elinor Glyn heroine he'd gasp in melodramatic despair, “Oh, he’d never look my way!”

He made no real effort to seduce me again, although he’d occasionally disconcert me by letting his genitals tumble out of his pyjama trousers, accidentally on purpose. He would pretend not to notice, and I would avert my eyes and pretend the same, allowing him to discreetly tuck himself away again. He showed me photos of himself as a young soldier, stationed in the Tower of London during the Second World War. I was able to assure him truthfully that he had been good looking, youthfully disregarding that the tense might have stung. I have no reason to doubt his word that even into his eighties, he continued to offer a select band of gentleman callers a little more than afternoon tea or a glass of Stone's Ginger Wine. They were mostly closeted married men in need of release and discretion - and there was no Grindr then.

As he aged, his mobility declined, and his life became more difficult in his Victorian rooms on the first floor. The vintage scooter stood dusty and unused outside until he accepted the inevitable and sold it. Whenever I arranged a visit, I was directed to pick up a copy of the Evening Standard for him - it had to be the West End Final edition because of the share prices. Whenever I carelessly turned up with the West End Latest, he would send me to fetch another.

I showed him my photographs and when one of my friends caught his eye he would ask “Who is that?” followed by “Is he ‘so’?” Plenty of them were ‘so’, but they were rarely the ones he picked out. Sometimes he gave me random books he thought I’d enjoy, so in return I bought him books like Matt Houlbrook’s Queer London and James Gardiner’s A Class Apart, on the life and racy photographs of Montague Glover. As he'd been a part of London’s queer underworld during the 1940’s and 1950’s, I thought Alan might even recognise someone. If he did, he never told me - but he was delighted with the books anyway.

Two books I bought Alan

Talking politics was tricky, because he was a Conservative, but he had little time for Margaret Thatcher and her cabal of blue-suited yes men. He may not have been ‘out and proud’, but I think he believed in our ‘inalienable right to be gay’.

With London in the middle of the AIDS crisis, I became less inclined to hide who I was. Alan never approved of that. He saw no need for Pride marches. I wish I had explained more articulately why I considered them necessary, because he was always prepared to listen, and I am sure I could have persuaded him. I should have said that those who are oppressed simply for being who they are, are entitled to feel proud of their refusal to be erased, no matter what is flung at them.

Some of the badges that irritated Alan.

As it was, I probably lectured Alan arrogantly about it. He in turn would berate me for wearing various pink triangle badges. “There’s no need to force your sexuality on people,” he’d say. “You know, the Blitz was the greatest time of my life. Men got together and actually did it rather than debating it and protesting it. Misbehaving in the dark with uniformed servicemen was such a thrill.”

I think I understand that. No deep thought, no emotional consequences, just base feeling. Tomorrow, we may be no more, so if it feels good, do it. It sounds sexier than working to build ‘a meaningful relationship’.

He had never had a ‘boyfriend’ and he did not consider it a matter of regret. He was perfectly happy about everything in his life, apart from the frustration of the growing number of constraints and infirmities that advancing age was imposing upon him.

In response to the birthday card I sent him in mid-June 2017, Alan’s sister phoned to tell me that he had died that April. The funeral having already taken place, a man who’d been a fixture at the periphery of my life ever since I moved to London in 1984 had gone without trace, apart from a couple of old books and the vivid, eccentric memories he’d left me with.

I’m glad I accepted Alan's invitation for tea all those years ago, oblivious to his lascivious intent. He asked, I said no, and we moved on to form a friendship despite coming from different generations. The anecdotes he shared with me came from a time when life was far more difficult for gay men, and they are a great source of inspiration given the eras that I write about.