Read Online Still Standing: The Savage Years by Paul O'Grady - Free Book Online Page B

there.’ I was really surprised she was like this as she’d worked the clubs for years before Coronation Street .
    ‘What am I going to say?’ She was slowly inching her way back to the dressing room. ‘What am I going to do?’
    I was genuinely concerned for this lovely lady’s distress and tried my best to calm her fears with a few encouraging words. ‘They love you, just be yourself, sing a few songs, tell a few gags, you’ll be fine.’ From behind the curtain we could hear Diamonds out on the dance floor.
    ‘Listen to them,’ she gasped, gripping my arm even tighter. ‘He’s going down a storm, I can’t follow that.’
    ‘So, he said to me, “If you can guess what I’ve got in my hand you can have it,”’ Diamonds was saying, the audience loving every minute. ‘So I said, “If you can get it in one hand I don’t fucking want it.”’
    Uproar.
    ‘I can’t,’ Liz said again. ‘I really can’t go on, honest to God, cross me heart.’
    ‘Come on, Liz,’ Don was saying. ‘Don’t be daft, get out there.’
    ‘Let’s hear it,’ Diamonds was shouting, ‘for our Vera herself. Miss Liz Dawn!’
    ‘I want to go to the lav’ were Liz’s last words as we pushed her on to the dance floor.
    Needless to say, she brought the house down and you’d never have guessed that the confident, smiling, totally natural performer under the spotlight was the same person who a moment earlier was on the verge of collapse backstage.
    As the Fun House was closing, Sid turned up and Diamonds suggested that we all go on to the International Club onLumb Lane, a notorious thoroughfare in the heart of Bradford’s red light district and teeming with ladies of the night of all ages, shapes and sizes, regardless of the fact that Peter Sutcliffe, alias the Yorkshire Ripper, was out looking for his next victim. Diamonds knew the owner of the club and said we’d be OK for a couple of drinks.
    ‘Stay in drag,’ Diamonds advised. ‘We won’t have to pay for our ale that way.’
    Diamonds wore a black sequinned dress slit to the hip and a lot of jewellery and I couldn’t help feeling concerned at the amount of gold rings, bracelets and diamonds he was wearing, especially in a place like Lumb Lane. Diamonds was nonplussed. ‘I’d like to see the one who’d try and take it off me,’ he growled. So would I.
    Since it was my first trip down Lumb Lane I put my tart’s outfit on, the usual ensemble of leopard-skin mini, ten tons of cheap beads and bangles, the platinum blond wig modelled on Vivian Nicholson’s hairdo, a tote bag with a tassel hanging off it and a ratty old leopard-skin coat. Dressed like this, a lad could slip into Lumb Lane and blend in with the crowd beautifully. Hush stood out like a sore thumb. He didn’t want to go at first but after a few drinks and plenty of encouragement from Diamonds and me he agreed and found himself stepping into the back of Sid’s car in an emerald-green-velvet retro swingback coat complete with wicker basket, the type that schoolgirls used to take to their domestic science lessons. To complete this look he wore a red Doris Day-style frock with a green polka dot headband. He wouldn’t have looked out of place on the set of Mad Men and apart from his height could’ve easily passed as a well-preserved WASP housewife on her way to a ladies’ charity luncheon.
    The clientele of the International all looked like they should be helping the police with their enquiries, which on reflection they probably were, and to describe the club, which was in the basement of a house, as a dump would be a gross understatement. It wasn’t very busy at first but when word got round that four drag queens were in residence the place soon filled up with working girls popping in and out, curious to have a look at us. We soon got chatting and after a bit of persuasion, not that it took a lot, I was out on the street with them standing alone under a lamp-post sucking on a fag, blowing plumes of smoke