. and a whole cabinet of Brut flying up and outwards, into the sea.
The next day Peter purchased a new set of Brut products. Being fresh off the shelf, they made him even more pungent than before. His revenge was sweet, yet also musky.
The towns were rough. Our bush adventure was halfway between Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Wake in Fright. In many places, when we walked into the pub everything would go quiet, and every head would turn. Presumably someone had whispered the unlikely truth: ‘Apparently they’re from the Arts Council.’ I have a sharp memory of ordering a round of drinks in a pub in some cattle town. Perhaps due to my father’s example, I wasn’t much of a drinker and so I loudly requested two beers for my fellow actors while, sotto voce, asking for ‘a shandy as well’. Naturally, the bartender, encountering his first ever order for a shandy, announced it to the room: ‘What did you say? You want a shandy?’ Despite his lack of contact with the world of acting, the barman possessed the sort of vocal projection that Gielgud would have used to reach the back stalls of the London Palladium. Fifty cattlemen turned their hatted heads towards the loudly advertised outrage at the bar.
I stood there while he poured the thing, fifty cattlemen giving me a good hard look.
I did the outback job for about a year, achingly lonely and frankly bored. Theatre can be creative but doing the same hour-long play ten or twelve times a week became tedious, at least to me. Lines from the play were filed in my head as markers: when this line was said, we were halfway through; another line meant we were ten minutes from the end; a third meant ‘nearly bloody finished’. My boredom – my inability to be lost in the plot and the character I was supposed to be inhabiting – was more proof that I’d signed up for the wrong career. Sitting miserably in my pub bedroom one night, I decided to change direction: I would work my way up on the production side of TV drama. If I worked really hard, I said to myself, I might one day rise to become a junior stage manager working on a TV soap opera. It was an ambition that reflected a somewhat limited self-esteem. And one that, in my mind, involved moving to London.
It was at this point, aged nineteen, that I rang my mother – by this time settled down with Mr Phillipps in a distant country town – and requested contact details for her parents. As described earlier, she refused and delivered her speech about how they were posh but neglectful, and really she’d rather I didn’t bother. She did, however, have one point of assistance. She told me she’d write to Lionel Harris, a man for whom she’d worked in 1970 when he tried to set up a film studio in Australia. He’d even taken a photo of me aged twelve, perched in a tree, which had once enjoyed pride of place on my parents’ hallway table. Harris had been an actor in the 1950s and then a relatively important TV director in the 1960s and early 1970s, making episodes of shows such as Upstairs Downstairs and even directing a TV play by Dennis Potter. He lived in London’s Belsize Park, an upmarket suburb down the hill from Hampstead. My mother was enormously keen for me to make contact. Perhaps she saw this as a chance for her son to rejoin British society at a somewhat higher point than the one on which she’d left it, some thirty-three years before.
In her letter to Lionel she suggested that he might have me to dinner. He wrote back and insisted he would meet me at the airport. I could stay with him a day or two and then head off to see my father’s relatives. I accepted the offer.
It was to prove a very poor decision.
Lionel had large bug-eyes. They protruded from a round face topped by a bald head, save for some fluff coming out his ears. He looked like a malevolent koala.
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