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The Lynn Selby and Phil Winston School of Dance and Drama was located in Doncaster town centre, about five miles from our home in Armthorpe. It was an offshoot of the prestigious Sylvia Young school in London, offering classes in drama, mime, tap, ballet, modern jazz and singing to 6-16 year olds, and had a great track record in getting local kids into the entertainment industry.
I spotted an advert for the school in the paper and after weeks of begging my resolutely untheatrical parents to let me attend, I started going to classes every Thursday after school and on Saturday mornings, although pretty soon I’d be making excuses to be there as much as possible.
The school was run by a professional couple in their late twenties, actress Lynn Selby and Phil Winston, a dancer and choreographer. It was Lynn I really looked up to. She was successful and sexy, all black hair, voluptuous curves and violet eyes – for a time I thought she actually was Elizabeth Taylor.
Inspired by Lynn, I quickly became a regular on the local speech and drama festival circuit, blossoming from a shy little boy into a regular Laurence Olivier. The Barnsley Music Festival, Worksop and Pontefract Speech and Drama Festival – there wasn’t a competition in the greater Doncaster area where nine-year-old Gary Cockerill didn’t turn up to dazzle ’em with a poetry reading or mime solo and leave clutching a medal.
My festival crowd-pleasers included a poem called ‘Colonel Fazackerley Butterworth-Toast’ by Charles Causley:
‘Colonel Fazackerley Butterworth-Toast
Bought an old castle complete with a ghost
But someone or other forgot to declare
To Colonel Fazak that the spectre was there.’
and a reading from My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. I also did well with a group mime called ‘Fickle-Hearted Sally’ with my best friend at drama school, Gavin Morley – a stocky little bruiser with an angelic face and a halo of golden hair – and his girlfriend Nicola Simpson. But it was my performance of ‘I’ve Got an Apple Ready’ by John Walsh at the Barnsley Festival that really caused a stir and is possibly still talked about to this day. At this particular festival there was a choice of two poems for the age group I was in, and the one that I set my heart on started like this:
‘My hair is tightly plaited, I’ve a bright blue bow.
I don’t want my breakfast and now I must go.
My satchel’s on my shoulder, nothing’s out of place,
And I’ve got an apple ready just in case.’
It’s basically about how a little girl gives this bully her apple to stop him chucking her beret up in a tree on her way to school.
When I told Lynn Selby I wanted to do this particular poem for the festival she said gently, ‘Gary, you realise that this poem is actually meant for a little girl …?’
My parents were even more tactful: ‘Are you sure you don’t want to try the other poem, love? You might find it a little bit … easier.’
But I was determined. I knew I could ace ‘I’ve Got an Apple Ready’ and I didn’t care what anyone else thought.
I clearly remember the festival adjudicator’s expression as I climbed up on to the stage and announced which poem I would be performing. I can still see the other parents in the audience looking embarrassed and shaking their heads at this strange little boy as the other kids sniggered at me. But I didn’t care. I was that coy little girl with the blue bow and beret, goddammit! I’d show them. Ninety-eight points and a gold medal later and my cockiness levels had shot through the roof.
* * *
When I started at Lynn Selby’s, I absolutely idolised two of the eldest students. Carl Gumsley and Gracinda Southernby were good-looking, bubbly, confident – your archetypical stage school kids. He was as dark and handsome as she was blonde and pretty. The pair of them were more than just an inspiration to me, I wanted to be them – well, more Gracinda if I’m honest. Even her name was fantastic. So when I turned on the telly one night and saw Gracinda pop up in an episode of top police show Juliet Bravo my mind was made up. Cleaning up at the local speech and drama festivals had been fun for a while, but I fancied getting my face on the telly.
I’d been going to stage school for a year when I had my first professional audition – a TV ad campaign for English Apples. Lynn took a group of eight of us from the school down to London on the train. The tickets weren’t cheap, and I remember my parents had to dip into their savings to pay for them, but they knew how badly I wanted to go. It was my first visit to London and by the time the train finally pulled into Kings Cross I was buzzing (and quite possibly flapping) with excitement.
The auditions were being held at an advertising agency on Charlotte Street where our little group queued up behind a line of dozens of kids that was already stretching up the stairs. As I waited, I thought again about my audition piece. In the circumstances, what else could it really be but ‘I’ve Got an Apple Ready’? I was bursting with confidence.
Then suddenly it was my turn and I was ushered into a small room. There was a man standing in the corner behind a camera and another couple with clipboards and a box of apples.
‘Right, Gary,’ said one of the clipboard carriers. ‘What we need you to do is stand over there’ – I was directed to a cross on the floor – ‘take a bite out of this apple, chew and then turn and give a really big smile into the camera, like it’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten. Okay?’
‘Um, don’t you want me to say anything?’ I asked, my heart sinking. ‘I’ve prepared a poem. It’s about apples.’
‘No, just the bite and then the smile, thanks. Right – let’s go, give it all you’ve got!’
It was a green apple, sour and a bit woolly, but I did as they asked and was then shown to a large meeting room filled with a group of other kids.
Over the next few hours, I would go back into that little room and do the whole bite-turn-smile thing several more times until Lynn appeared, gave me a big hug and said, ‘Gary, you got the job!’
On the way back to the station, my head spinning with dreams of TV fame and fortune, I popped into one of the tourist shops on Oxford Street to buy Mum a thank-you present. For some reason I ignored the London-branded trinkets and picked out a decorative plate covered with spriggy little flowers and the words ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. The only money I had on me was the emergency couple of quid Mum had given me in case I got lost, but I figured I could pay her back out of my advert earnings. The plate is still hanging on our kitchen wall to this day, a slightly kitsch monument to my first ever pay cheque.
Well, after that there was no stopping me. Blond, cute and cocky, I became a regular fixture in the nation’s TV ad breaks. I was the voice of the Batchelors Mushy Peas commercial (‘Who’s the champion mushy peas? Batch-batch-batch-batch-batchelor! Champion mushy peas that please, Batch-batch-batch-batch-batchelor!’) and one of the sailor-suited kids in a Birds Eye Fish Fingers ad. I popped up in kids TV shows like Emu’s World and Mini Pops, the cult series in which pre-teens dressed up as famous pop acts to belt out their latest hits. I was in Showaddywaddy – or Showeenyweeny as we were known – and had to sing ‘Under the Moon of Love’ with a fake guitar, shiny purple suit and crepe-soled shoes.
I had been bitten by the fame bug and wanted more. I wanted to be Gracinda starring in Juliet Bravo. But even more than that, I wanted to be Andrew Summers. Ah, Andrew Summers: my nine-year-old nemesis. Andrew was a child star who found fame as the little boy alongside his granddad in a cult tomato soup advert of the late Seventies and at one time was virtually a household name. He was about the same age as me. ‘Ooh, that Andrew Summers is a really cracking little actor …’ people would say. I can remember being incredibly jealous of his success.
He’s not that special, I’d sulk silently to myself, he just gets all the adverts because he lives in London.
It was a desperately sore point for me that I missed out on castings because I lived up North. My parents were amazing, but there was no way they could pay for me to travel down to London for auditions every week – even with the help of the money that I earned.
By this time, I was turning into quite the little performer. As well as acting, I was really getting into my tap-dancing (although I would never quite get to grips with ballet) and I had always had a strong singing voice. Before my voice broke I could belt out a Barbra Streisand or Julie Andrews number and sound exactly like my idols.
A few years ago I went to New York with Barbara Windsor to help get her ready for some personal appearances and one night we went along to hear the famous jazz singer Diahann Carroll in cabaret. During ‘The Age of Aquarius’ she handed the microphone around for a bit of audience participation and when I started singing I can remember Barbara turning to me, open-mouthed, and muttering, ‘Where the bleedin’ hell did that voice come from?’
With a few adverts under my belt, at the age of ten I appeared in the chorus of a stage show called The Marti Caine Christmas Cracker at Sheffield City Hall. It was a proper old-fashioned variety show – lots of big musical numbers, comedy skits, a bit of audience participation – fronted by the comedienne and singer Marti Caine, who had shot to fame winning the TV talent show New Faces a few years earlier. Marti was this incredibly thin woman with a tumbling mass of deep red, almost purple, curls and a broad Sheffield accent. She wore slinky jewel-hued gowns that emphasised her pipe-cleaner figure.
Ever the sucker for ballsy, glamorous women, I worshipped her. She was so lovely and warm, plus she had a mouth on her like you wouldn’t believe which made me love her even more. My parents never swore in front of us when we were growing up, so to hear someone so famous and fabulous effing and blinding just added to Marti’s exotic glamour. (The one and only time I swore at my mum in my life – telling her to ‘fuck off’ in a rare moment of early teenage rebellion – she grabbed me by the hair, dragged me to the bathroom and literally washed my mouth out with soap. I never did it again.)
* * *
Occasionally Sylvia Young would come up to our stage school in Doncaster to scout for talent, and it was on one of these visits that she put me forward for an audition for another stage show. Once in a Lifetime was billed as ‘The brightest musical evening in the country’ and was to be a vehicle for the talents of singer, dancer and all-round small-screen superstar Lionel Blair, who at this time was wowing TV audiences on the hugely popular charades gameshow Give Us a Clue, alongside fellow team captain (and star of Worzel Gummidge) Una Stubbs. This magnificent stage spectacular was set to go on a nationwide tour, from Bournemouth to Sheffield and everywhere in between, and they were looking for 20 talented youngsters – ‘The Kids’ – to star alongside Lionel.
For my audition I performed a song and tap-dance routine from 42nd Street and did my Noah (of Bible fame) solo dramatic piece, which always used to go down well at the speech and drama festivals. Well, I tapped my little heart out and I got the gig, along with three girls – including my mate Gavin’s girlfriend Nicola Simpson and my first-ever girlfriend, Kerry Geddes – and one other boy from Lynn’s school. It was all over the Doncaster papers that these local stage school pupils were to be in Lionel Blair’s new show, even making it into the Yorkshire Post. Move over Andrew Summers, Gary Cockerill had hit the big-time.
Rehearsals started in earnest just before the school summer holidays. The show was to open with ‘The Kids’ belting out the Anthony Newley number ‘Once in A Lifetime’ and as we launched into the final chorus a beaming Lionel would make his entrance through our carefully choreographed ranks, wiry arms flung wide, to rapturous applause. Then it was onto a Fred and Ginger number, something from Cats, a routine from Bugsy Malone: in short, an evening of back-to-back crowd-pleasers. Or, as the show’s programme described it: ‘a rollicking, rumbustious night, Gay Nineties style’. (I should probably point out that ‘Gay Nineties’ is a nostalgic term that refers to America in the 1890s, a period known for its decadence, rather than anything to do with Lionel’s passion for tap-dancing and improvisation.)
There were other acts too, including a pair of incredibly beautiful Italian acrobats called Angelo and Erica. Every night I would watch mesmerised from the wings as they ran through their routine, with the lovely blonde Erica balancing on the Adonis-bodied Angelo’s upstretched hand, always thinking that this would be the night when he dropped her – although he never did. At the time I assumed they were married, but looking back, it’s now obvious to me that no straight man has eyebrows that perfectly groomed …
It was during rehearsals for ‘Once in a Lifetime’ that a chink started to appear in my otherwise armour-like confidence. One of the song and dance numbers we were doing was ‘Matchstick Men’, in which we were dressed in caps and braces like the little stick figures from the famous L. S. Lowry paintings. For some reason, I just couldn’t get the hang of this one dance move. It wasn’t even particularly difficult. Thumbs hooked in braces, I had to kick up my left heel behind me to touch the right heel of the girl next to me, but I always ended up kicking the wrong foot, which meant I ended up standing out like a sore thumb amongst the ranks of perfectly drilled little stick figures.
On the day of the final dress rehearsal we were running through the number with the choreographer on stage, while Lionel and the producers sat watching in the auditorium. It came to the chorus -‘And he painted matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs … – and, regular as clockwork, I kicked up to the wrong side. Suddenly there was a yelp from the auditorium, the orchestra stopped playing and then Lionel was bounding up on stage, this incredibly wiry streak of energy. I remember being very much in awe of him because he was on television every week. I also remember him having the most terrible breath. I have no idea whether it was garlic or cigarettes, but these are the sorts of things that stick with you when you’re a kid. (I should say that I’ve met Lionel a few times since and his breath has been absolutely fine.)
All the kids waited nervously as he strode along our ranks before coming to a halt in front of me. He was almost always smiling, which made it all the more terrifying now that he had a face like thunder. He pointed straight at me.
‘This boy’ – he said to the choreographer – ‘is getting the step wrong every time. You’ll have to move him to the back of the chorus.’
‘Of course, Lionel.’ The choreographer turned to me, furious that this little brat was making him look bad in front of the talent. ‘You, Gary – swap with Mark.’
And with that I was shuffled to the back, my cheeks burning with shame at my public humiliation.
‘Right, everyone’ – Lionel clapped his hands theatrically, then swept off the stage – ‘From the top. A five, six, seven, eight …!’
As the music started again I went through the motions, but my mind was elsewhere. A thought had suddenly wormed its way into my head. There are people here who are better than me at this. And that thought terrified me.
The Once in a Lifetime tour was to prove a bittersweet time for me. On one hand I was appearing in a major production and lapping up the nightly applause and attention. We were treated like celebrities – staying in the best hotels, accompanied by chaperones and even getting asked for autographs at the stage door. (I would always sign mine with a big swirly ‘Gary’; I never put my surname as I found it a bit embarrassing.)
I had a laugh with the other kids and, of course, my little girlfriend Kerry, although it was all very innocent – some kissing, a bit of hand-holding and one night a slightly awkward ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’ session in a deserted dressing room. On the other hand, however, appearing in the show marked the end of my friendship with Gavin Morley, who had become my best – and up until then only – male friend. When he didn’t get a part in Once in a Lifetime with me, Nicola and Kerry, he left Lynn’s stage school and, as he lived in another village ten miles away, we drifted apart.
I needed all the friends I could get, as I had very few of them at school. When I was younger I’d always preferred to play with my sister and cousins, and then stage school became such a huge part of my life that I missed out on all the usual socialising kids do, the playing-out after school and the sleepovers. But it wasn’t just that; I had this strong feeling that I was different from my classmates – special even. After all, I often missed school for some audition or performance, I was occasionally on the telly, I even spoke differently from the other kids after all the ‘Red lorry, yellow lorry’ elocution exercises at Lynn Selby’s softened my accent. I hate to admit it, but I almost felt I was better than them – and, of course, that didn’t go unnoticed by my peers.
The bullying started harmlessly enough.
‘Oi, Gary, can I have your autograph?’ some kid would shout after I’d popped up in another advert or the local papers. Being a mouthy little sod at the time, I would never just ignore it.
‘Yeah, course you can!’ I’d shoot back, cocky as ever. ‘Bet you’re jealous, aren’t you?’
When I was ten my teacher contacted my parents to tell them I was getting a bit of hassle from the other kids, so my dad started taking me to karate lessons to help me take care of myself if any trouble kicked off. I loved the karate; it was just like another dance class for me, plus it was really lovely spending time with Dad. As I was to painfully discover, however, the whole self-defence aspect of karate – which had, of course, been the aim of the exercise – was pretty much lost on me.
I was on the school playing fields one day with Joanne, one of the few friends I had at the time. Joanne was a really lovely girl: funny, sweet natured, always smiling. She was also a quadriplegic, with neither arms nor legs, and confined to a wheelchair. It was one of the things that drew me to her, I suppose: in my eyes we were both different from everyone else, both outsiders. So on this particular day I was pushing Joanne and we were chatting when a group of three lads from my class came over and started making the usual cracks about me being in the local paper.
‘You think you’re so much better than everyone else, Cockerill … Nancy boy … Pansy …’
I gave them a mouthful back and kept on walking, but today it didn’t stop at verbal insults. Suddenly I felt an almighty shove and was knocked to the ground. Before I could move – or remember any of my months of karate training – I was roughly pulled up and held between two of the lads. I was vaguely aware of Joanne screaming, ‘No, leave him alone!’ Then an agonising explosion of white-hot pain as this kid kicked me in the balls with all his strength.
I lay on the floor, sobbing, winded, dizzily nauseous. I was still in agony when I got home that afternoon, but I didn’t tell my parents what had happened. Instead I pretended I’d fallen off my Raleigh racer. I suppose I was embarrassed what Dad would say if he found out I hadn’t stood up for myself.
* * *
13 February 1983. I still remember the exact date to this day. It was 10 a.m. and I was at London’s Olympia for the biggest audition of my life. Just me and 10,000 other kids going for 46 parts in the debut West End production of Bugsy Malone. Every corner of the cavernous space was filled with wannabe Bugsys, Fat Sams and Tallulahs. It was exactly the sort of scenes you see at the audition stage of The X Factor, except with shrill-voiced pre-teens and pushy parents.
By the end of the day I was covered with a mass of the little coloured stickers they gave you when you successfully completed each round of auditions. I was recalled again the next day, and the following day I found out that I had got one of the parts. It was like finding one of Wonka’s golden tickets. A role in a West End musical! I was ecstatic, telling anyone who would listen that I was going to London to be a star.
When you’re 13 you think the world revolves around you – well, I know that I did. But while I was busy dreaming about seeing my name up in lights on Broadway, the rest of my family were falling apart.
My sister, by then 17 and working for a local knitwear manufacturer, had been seeing a boy called Simon whose parents ran our village off-licence. He was a bit of a lad and my parents were adamant that he wasn’t good enough; they wanted a doctor or a lawyer for their cherished only daughter. So when the relationship started to get more serious, Mum put her foot down and gave Lynne an ultimatum: either you stop seeing this boy or you leave home.
We’d always been really good kids and had never rebelled, so it must have been a huge shock to my mum when Lynne suddenly turned around and snapped: ‘Fine – I’ll move out.’ And the next day she was gone. Without much money to find a decent place to live, she ended up in Hyde Park, the red light area of Doncaster, sharing a shabby bedsit with a prostitute and a scarily butch lesbian.
Devastated that her daughter had gone, but too stubborn to change her mind about Simon, Mum stuck her head in the sand. Lynne wasn’t coping well either; each time I went to visit her she looked thinner, paler and more miserable. In the end she moved back home after four months, but although she gradually rebuilt her relationship with Mum, my sister stuck to her guns and refused to stop seeing Simon. And now, after more than 20 years of marriage and two beautiful sons, my parents realise that Lynne couldn’t have made a better choice for a husband.
This emotional chaos was all going on when I landed the role in Bugsy Malone, so you can imagine that when my parents found out I would have to move to London for the show they weren’t entirely enthusiastic. A few days after I’d heard I had got the part, Mum came into my bedroom and sat me down on the bed. It was immediately obvious we were going to be having A Serious Chat.
‘Gary, your dad and I have been having a talk.’ From her expression I knew this was going to be bad. ‘I’m sorry, love, but I’m afraid we both feel that it isn’t a good idea for you to do Bugsy Malone.’
She went on to explain that they were worried about me having to live so far away in London on my own and missing so much school. She told me that she knew how important the show was to me, but that my education was ultimately the most important thing and I would understand this in the future. I think she even said something about the fact that I would miss my friends. But I’d stopped listening at the point when my world had collapsed on hearing: ‘It isn’t a good idea for you to do Bugsy Malone.’
As you can imagine I was devastated. I cried, I screamed, I banged doors, I sulked for a week, but their minds were made up. To make matters worse, there was so much hype around the production that it seemed like every time I opened the papers or turned on the television there was some mention of the show. And looking back, I realise that it was the Bugsy Malone fiasco that marked the beginning of the end of my performing career.
* * *
A few months later I auditioned for Rotherham Operatic Society’s production of Carousel on the urging of my form teacher, a lovely lady called Mrs Empson who had always been a huge supporter of my passion for performing. I landed the role of Enoch Snow Junior, quite a principal part, but it was a disaster. For the first time ever I suffered from crippling stage fright, exacerbated by the fact that I fluffed my lines on the opening night.
Overnight my confidence and self-belief literally vanished. It didn’t help that adolescence was kicking in; I had turned from this cute blond kid to – well, a bit of a geek. My hormones were all over the place, my hair was going from angelic golden to plain old mousy, I was getting a few teenage spots. I went from desperately needing to be the centre of attention 24/7 to not being able to bear the thought of people even looking at me. Almost overnight I realised that I wasn’t going to be a child star after all; I wasn’t going to be famous and live in London like Andrew bloody Summers. At the age of 13, I faced up to the prospect that I was probably going to have to find myself a proper job, one that involved neither tap shoes nor TV cameras, and later that year I left Lynn Selby and Phil Winston’s, never to return.
Thankfully I still had my love of art to fill the void left by performing. At school I would find any excuse to liven up classes with a bit of drawing: my French vocabulary exercises were carefully illustrated with mini French loaves and bottles of wine and my geography books were filled with intricate sketches of volcanoes and fossils. I would often get my schoolbooks back from the teacher with a big red ‘This is not an art class, Gary!’ scrawled down the margin. But a career as a designer or illustrator seemed like a far more realistic goal than acting, and my parents were thrilled that I was focusing on what they had always considered to be my real talent. Without drama to distract me, I knuckled down and became a model student – until I found something else to distract me. And that new obsession was girls.
THREE Girl Crazy (#ulink_535c06e4-b5a7-507b-bd27-fd83684724cf)
In my teens my future seemed all mapped out. I was going to meet and fall in love with a girl, get married and have kids; just like everyone else in Armthorpe. Having a girlfriend was the normal thing to do for lads my age – and after the drama (both on and off stage) of the past few years, all I craved right now was a bit of normality. So from the age of nine and those first shy, secret kisses with Kerry Geddes I was never without a girlfriend until I was into my twenties.
When that first romance with Kerry fizzled out I started going out with a girl who lived round the corner, Michelle Chappell. Again, the relationship was predictably sweet and naive (a bit of kissing, some hand-holding, the odd fumble – real puppy love stuff) and my fledgling love life would have probably continued in the same innocent fashion if, at the tender age of 13, fate hadn’t intervened in the form of my 15-year-old babysitter.
I had gone for a sleepover with my mate Scott Phillips, who lived at the other end of my village from me. His parents had gone out for the night and left Jennifer, a friend of Scott’s older sister Mandy, in charge of us two boys. Jennifer was 15, extremely skinny and as far as I remember pretty average looking. I’d met her once or twice before this particular night but hadn’t given her a second thought. Anyway, by about 9 p.m. Scott had already sloped off to bed, leaving Jennifer and me sitting alone together watching the end of a film. I was just thinking about going up to Scott’s room when I became aware of Jennifer shuffling a bit closer to my side of the sofa.
‘Gary?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Do you fancy me? ‘Cos I think you’re really nice.’
I sort of shrugged, folded my arms across my chest and continued to stare at the TV. I had barely spoken to this girl before and certainly didn’t find her attractive; besides, she was so old. I was out of my comfort zone and I hoped that keeping quiet would mean the end of the conversation. But it seemed Jennifer had other ideas. I could tell she was still staring at me, and when she realised I wasn’t going to answer she swiftly pulled off her T-shirt, undid her bra and then grabbed my hand that was nearest to her and crushed it up against her tiny breasts.
Alarm bells went off in my head. Wide-eyed and barely daring to breathe, I continued to stare at the telly with one hand still stuck awkwardly against Jennifer’s chest. Nothing in my 13 years had prepared me for this situation. Of course, I should have made my excuses and gone upstairs to join Scott on his Doncaster Rovers bunk beds, but I was frozen with fear and confusion – a rabbit caught in a pair of (very small) headlights.
‘Well, what do you think of these, Gary?’ Jennifer was getting impatient.
‘Um …’ I eventually mumbled. ‘They’re alright, I s’pose.’
Well, that was all the encouragement she needed. Off flew the rest of her clothes and then she was down on the floor and telling me to take off my trousers. I remember the musty smell of the carpet and the light from the TV flickering on the wall as we lay there, Jennifer rubbing awkwardly against me while barking out orders. There was no kissing or caressing: it was cold and mechanical – I certainly wasn’t enjoying myself and I don’t think she was either. There was just a strong sense of embarrassment mingled with a vague curiosity, a feeling of what the hell is happening here?
Nonetheless, after a short while all the rubbing and touching led to its obvious conclusion, which seemed to satisfy Jennifer as she immediately sat up and got dressed then went back to watching the TV as if nothing had happened. I didn’t mention a word of what had happened to Scott and after that night I never saw Jennifer again. At the time, I don’t think I even realised that I had actually lost my virginity down there on that musty carpet.
* * *
Despite a few years of adolescent gawkiness and confusion, by the age of 15 it had all started to turn around for me. Physically I had filled out and mentally I had rediscovered some of that old Cockerill cockiness. Not only that, but I realised that I had in my possession a rare and precious gift: I knew how to talk to girls. After all, we had exactly the same interests – hair, make-up and fashion.
Well, after that there was no stopping me. I became obsessed with girls. Obsessed! Honest to God, Mum would come home at lunch-time during the week and catch me with my latest girlfriend. My usual type was blonde, blue-eyed and petite, and when the popular boys in school saw me hanging around with the prettiest girls they started to wonder, ‘What’s Gary’s secret?’ and I began to get lots of boy mates, too. I might have been useless at football, but I certainly got kudos for being a babe magnet.
At this stage of my life I didn’t know anyone who was gay, openly or otherwise. The only exposure I’d had to gay men was watching the likes of Larry Grayson and John Inman on telly, those Eighties stars of the small screen who camped it up for laughs, but even then no one actually referred to them as being gay or homosexual. I just could tell that they were a bit … well, different. But from an early age I had known that the feelings I had for my idol Madonna were very different from those I had towards the movie star Rob Lowe, whose poster also graced my bedroom wall. I worshipped Madonna and loved her music, but when I looked at Rob Lowe … I didn’t know if I admired his talent, wanted to look like him or even to be him, all I knew was that I just found that face incredibly appealing.
Throughout my early teens the thought occasionally crossed my mind that I might possibly be bisexual, but I wasn’t tortured by it. There was no particular angst or guilt that I was living a lie. When I was with my girlfriends I certainly wasn’t pretending they were blokes – I really did fancy them. But just before my sixteenth birthday something happened that would drastically shift my whole perspective.
It was one of those incredibly hot summer evenings, 9 p.m, but still light, and I was riding my bike back to Armthorpe after visiting friends in a neighbouring village with my mate Robert Connor. It was getting late, so we decided to take a shortcut home across a stretch of rough ground. Soon the grass got too thick to ride so we got off the bikes to push.
I think we may have had a couple of sneaky beers earlier in the evening and the conversation quickly turned to girls and sex. The heady combination of underage booze and the sultry heat of the evening had an immediate effect, and it was soon obvious that both of us were getting turned on. Minutes later we ended up behind a hedge touching each other.
It was almost over before it started, but I remember thinking it didn’t feel wrong. Quite the contrary: it seemed completely normal and natural to me. For the first time in my life I thought, ‘Hang on a minute – am I gay …?’
Robert and I both picked up our bikes and continued the walk home in sheepish silence. But as I lay in bed that night going over and over what had happened I made a conscious decision. Okay, so I might well be attracted to guys, but I knew that I definitely wanted to get married and have kids. Besides, I still really liked being with girls. I vowed the events of that night would remain a secret – after all, it wasn’t as if anyone would suspect that Gary Cockerill, Armthorpe Comprehensive’s answer to Mick Jagger, was actually gay!
