From Coal Dust to Stardust

It was only recently that I found out that when I was younger my Granddad Joe would tell anyone who would listen: ‘I’ll go to the foot of our stairs if our Gary doesn’t bat for the other side when he’s older …’

* * *

I breezed through secondary school. Bar a few girl-related incidents (I had a lot of lectures from a lot of different dads during my teenage years) I was a hard-working and well-behaved student, even being made a prefect in the final year. I did well in my O-levels – apart from Maths, which I took at CSE level and barely scraped a grade 5 – and gained A-levels in Art and English, taking Art a year early and still getting an A grade.

While my friends were planning on becoming electricians or plumbers, I was dreaming of a career as a graphic designer or illustrator. The school career advisers were quick to sound a note of caution – ‘There aren’t that many opportunities round here for that sort of thing, Gary. Why don’t you get a trade?’ – but I was determined I wouldn’t end up on the YTS or in an apprenticeship. I was going to go to art college.

Mum and Dad were as thrilled as I was when I won a place to study design and illustration at college in Doncaster. They certainly weren’t the sort of parents who would have supported the idea of dossing around India on a gap year. Sure enough, although I had three months off before the course started, any hopes I might have had of enjoying my last summer of freedom were dashed on day one of the holidays when Mum came into my room, dragged me out of bed and said, ‘Right, time to get off your arse and do something useful.’

I signed on the dole, but that wasn’t enough for Mum, who was still badgering me about getting a job, so I decided to do a City and Guilds course – that way I’d earn a bit of money and learn a new skill at the same time. I flicked through the list of dull-sounding courses until I spotted one in Hairdressing. It certainly wasn’t something I wanted to do as a career, but it sounded slightly more artistic than other options like ‘Warehousing and Storage’ or ‘Drink Dispensing’, which is how I found myself in a Doncaster city-centre salon called Mr Terry’s, learning how to cut, blow-dry and set hair.

Getting a formal training in what had up until then been just a hobby set my creative juices flowing and triggered a period of serious experimentation with my look. One particularly striking style was a sort of mullet with benefits: short and spiky on top, arrowhead-shaped sideburns and longer bits at the back that I would then perm. It was the Eighties after all. I also put streaks into my mousy hair with Sun-In spray, although they ended up a garish orange rather than the sun-kissed surfer blonde I had envisaged.

Still, I thought confidently, at least my daring new look would help me fit in with all the cutting-edge creatives I would be meeting at art college …

* * *

Doncaster Art College was housed in a forbidding red-brick building – more Victorian lunatic asylum than vibrant centre of creative excellence. Inside it was always dark and cold, even on the hottest summer day, and the warren of gloomy corridors echoed with the drip-drip-drip of long-neglected plumbing and the lingering smell of damp and disappointment.

I had assumed art colleges would attract exciting, passionate people, bubbling over with creativity and imagination. That may well be true, but not at the one I went to. It quickly became apparent that my course was a dumping ground for wasters who had gone to college because they couldn’t be arsed to get a job and reckoned art would be a soft option.

The teachers weren’t much better. I was there for five full days a week throughout term-time, but the work I actually did in that time could have been completed in half an hour. I had gone on the course to prepare me for a job in design, but the teachers were completely out of touch with the realities of the industry. They convinced us that we would walk into an amazing career as a designer or illustrator on graduating, but there was no preparation for how tough things were in the job market for new design graduates – particularly ones from the North.

I can’t even look back fondly on the social side of college life, as I only made two friends on the course and went to perhaps a couple of functions a term at most. This wasn’t me being unfriendly: most of the other students were only interested in getting drunk or high, and to be stuck in a room full of people off their tits on Ecstasy when the strongest thing you’ve had is a couple of vodka tonics is to experience a new level of tedium.

Perhaps my own expectations had been unrealistic – and I’m sure things are completely different these days – but I can’t tell you what a disappointment those two years at college turned out to be. True, I gained a BTEC diploma in Design and Illustration, but I can’t think of one useful thing that I learnt. The only positive to the whole experience was that it kept me off the YTS.

* * *

Thankfully, I had something to keep me sane during those dark years at college – Kim Foster, the girl who would very nearly become my wife.

I met Kim at a youth club party during my last months at Armthorpe Comprehensive. I had gone to the party with Robert Connor (we were still friends, having made an unspoken vow never to talk about what had happened on that summer evening bike ride) and we were hanging around by the edge of the dance-floor, nodding along self-consciously to ‘You Spin Me Round’ by Dead or Alive, when I spotted a girl I had never seen before. She was petite and girl-next-door pretty with lots of curly blonde hair, a sprinkling of freckles and very white teeth. In other words, right up my street.

‘Rob, check her out.’ I nodded towards where the girl was standing with some of her friends.

‘Oh yeah, that’s Kim Foster,’ said Robert. ‘Her dad’s a building contractor, does a bit of work with my old man. You’ve got no chance, mate.’

I turned and grinned at him, then went straight over to where Kim was standing and introduced myself, with Robert trailing sulkily along in my wake.

Kim was a year younger than me and lived in a village called Bessacarr that was only a few miles from where I lived but might as well have been on a different continent. I had known nearly all of the girls of my age in Armthorpe since infants school so there was an air of mystery about Kim, an alluring sense of the unknown that seemed almost … exotic. She knew nothing about me either, and I really liked the fact that I could reinvent myself when I was with her. I can’t say it had exactly been love at first sight, but cycling home from the party that night I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

Although we hadn’t had a kiss that first evening – despite my best efforts – over the next few weeks Kim started to hang around with my group of mates and we gradually became closer. I knew that Robert fancied her too, and there was a bit of friendly rivalry over which of us could pull her first, but walking her home one night I took my chance, leaning in for a kiss, and from that moment on we were inseparable.

Kim lived a half hour bike ride from my house, but I would bomb round to see her on my racer every afternoon after school. Not only did I love spending time with her, I really enjoyed going to her house too. Her family lived in a big detached house on a private lane – much posher than our little bungalow – and I got on brilliantly with her mum and little sister Clara. Her dad was away working most of the time so I would be in my element, surrounded by females.

We had a really sweet, romantic relationship, always sending cards and leaving little love notes for each other, having cosy nights in watching videos or occasionally going out to local pubs and restaurants on double dates with our best friends Joanne and Martin. We had sex for the first time on her sixteenth birthday and – it being the first time I had slept with someone I had actually loved – it felt really special. I was experiencing that heady falling-in-love high of wanting to spend every moment with someone and I began to think that Kim could be The One.

* * *

One of the things that first attracted me to Kim was that she was a real girly girl; we bonded over our mutual interest in fashion and style. After we had been going out for a year or so she started highlighting her hair and experimenting with her look, and it was around this time that she first asked if I could have a go at doing her makeup. Although I had been sketching women’s faces for years, I hadn’t had much hands-on experience with lipstick and eyeliner beyond those early experiments on my sister’s dolls, but my artistic talent and lifelong obsession with glamour was more than enough to get me started.

Well, after that there was no stopping me. I’d transform Kim into Madonna from her ‘True Blue’ video one day, Cyndi Lauper in ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ the next. Stylewise, the Eighties were all about bright, clashing make-up, trashy clothes and frizzy perms – and I certainly didn’t hold back in those early makeovers. The results are pretty horrific in hindsight, although it seemed fabulously cool and creative at the time.

By the time I started college Kim had blossomed from a pretty girl into a stunning young woman with a gorgeous figure, and when I needed a model for the photography module of my course she was the obvious choice. She had left school by this point and was doing office temp work while she decided on her future direction, so when she turned out to be extremely photogenic and a natural in front of the camera it got her thinking about modelling as a possible career.

As she was a good few inches too short for the catwalk, I suggested she might think about glamour instead; I remember showing her a picture of Linda Lusardi in the Sun and telling her: ‘You could so easily do that.’ Kim just had the right smile, the right look – that magical blend of sexy yet wholesome essential for Page 3 models. The thought of my girlfriend getting her kit off in front of the camera honestly didn’t bother me; having been at stage school I knew it was just a performance. In fact the idea seemed impossibly glamorous to both of us, and I happily took a few topless photos of her that she sent to a local agency in Doncaster who then snapped her up.

I proposed to Kim on her 17th birthday. We had gone for a romantic curry at our favourite restaurant, the Indus in Doncaster, and I popped the question after we’d finished our dinner. I’d like to say that I hid a diamond in her saag aloo then toasted our future together with vintage champagne while a waiter played ‘Endless Love’ on the sitar, but the truth is rather less impressive. After our plates had been cleared away I got down on one knee and sheepishly presented her with a Cubic Zircona ring that I’d bought at Elizabeth Duke in Argos. Nevertheless, it was an incredibly special moment for both of us and we were in floods of tears as Kim sobbed out ‘Yes!’

When we told our parents they pretty much laughed it off. They knew we were much too young, but I’m sure they assumed it would eventually fizzle out and so, to their credit, they didn’t kick up a fuss. Good job too: if they had, we might well have done something daft like running off to Gretna Green to get married – and God knows how that would have turned out.

As far as Kim was concerned, there was never any reason to question my heterosexuality. I remember one day we were watching some frothy American drama on TV when I nudged her and said, ‘That actor’s really good-looking, isn’t he?’

Kim made some non-committal noise and continued watching.

‘Don’t you think it’s a bit odd, babe,’ I persisted, ‘for me to think a guy is attractive?’

I was genuinely surprised she hadn’t picked up on what I had just said; deep down, perhaps I was even hoping she might guess my secret.

This time she stopped looking at the TV and turned to me, confusion etched across her face.

‘Why would that be odd, Gary?’ she asked. ‘I tell you if I think a girl’s pretty and it’s just the same thing, isn’t it?’

‘Um, yeah, I suppose,’ I said.

And that was the closest we came in our whole six-year relationship to discussing my sexuality. Even towards the end, when I was having such a struggle to maintain the façade of being straight, she never seemed to have any inkling of the fact that I was, in effect, living a lie. My effeminate side clearly hadn’t gone unnoticed by others though …

It was a Sunday morning and Kim and I had taken her Jack Russell Toby for a walk around the boating lake in Doncaster. It’s a nice little park, well maintained and popular with families, and on this particular day it was busy with parents pushing prams, young kids running around and elderly couples enjoying a post-lunch stroll in the sunshine. We were about halfway around the lake when I spotted a kid who I’d gone to school with sitting on the wall with a gang of mates.

His name was Ted Peters and he was seriously bad news. He was always being suspended and constantly having run-ins with the police; everyone was scared of him – even the teachers. He even looked like trouble: well over six foot and built like a brick shithouse with close-cropped black hair and a jagged scar right down the side of his face. At school I’d always given him a wide berth and he’d pretty much ignored me in return; even so, when I spotted him in the distance on this particular day alarm bells started ringing and I immediately said to Kim we should take a different path.

‘Don’t be silly, babe,’ she scoffed. ‘He won’t even remember who you are.’

I figured she was right; after all I hadn’t seen him for a few years. But as we walked towards him it became clear that he certainly had remembered me – and the uneasy truce we’d had at school clearly no longer held.

‘Oi, poofter!’ Ted shouted, nudging his mates, and then deliberately mispronouncing my name. ‘Cockerel, you fucking nancy boy! Cock-a-doodle-doo!’

His mates started laughing and crowing along with him as he jumped off the wall and sauntered towards us.

I was instantly on my guard, but was reassured by the fact that it was broad daylight and there were so many people around us. I grabbed Kim’s hand and started to walk away, but his mates cut us off and surrounded us.

‘Who’s your slag then, Cockerel?’ Ted nodded at Kim. ‘Alright darlin’, what you doing hanging around with this poof? You should get yourself a real man.’

He grabbed his crotch and his mates laughed and taunted. Then suddenly Ted made a lunge at Kim.

‘What the hell are you doing? Pack it in!’ I screeched, trying to push him off her. That was obviously what he had been waiting for and Ted immediately launched himself at me, punching and kicking me to the ground. Kim was hysterical, sobbing and screaming, while Toby (whose lead I had dropped in the scuffle) was jumping around, yapping frantically.

On a relaxed Sunday afternoon you’d think that all the shouting and barking – not to mention a girl screaming for help at the top of her voice – would have attracted a bit of attention, but it was as if we were completely invisible. Perhaps people were scared for their own safety, but it was only when all the boys grabbed me off the floor and threw me into the lake that a couple of men finally stepped in and Ted and his gang sauntered off, laughing and jeering as they went. It was probably just a bit of fun to him, but I have no doubt that if it had been dark Kim could have been raped and … well, God knows what would have happened to me.