GARY COCKERILL

From Coal Dust

to Stardust

To my mum, dad and sister Lynne, all the strong, inspirational women who I have been lucky enough to work with over the years and to Phill, my husband and the love of my life

CONTENTS

ONE Doncaster Dynasty

TWO Drama Queen

THREE Girl Crazy

FOUR Hell on Earth

FIVE Bright Lights, Big City

SIX Love at First Sight

SEVEN Tiffany Towers and Tawny Peaks

EIGHT The Superbabes

NINE My Real-Life Girl’s World

TEN Bailey and Beyond

ELEVEN Legends

TWELVE Celebrity Circus

THIRTEEN Tantrums and Tiaras

FOURTEEN Two Weddings, One Bride, Three Grooms and a Dog

FIFTEEN Heartbreak

SIXTEEN A Midsummer Night’s Scream

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE Doncaster Dynasty

I never forget a frock. This one was pumpkin-orange with a pattern of tiny yellow flowers, smocking across the bodice and a flourish of gypsy ruffles. It must have been the height of fashion in early Seventies Yorkshire. It was also far too big for me, and clashed with the frosted pink lipstick that was now smeared across my five-year-old face. My big sister Lynne took a step back and – head cocked to one side – appraised her handiwork.

‘Go on then, Gary, give us a twirl.’

I obliged happily, giggling as I tripped over the flounced hem. Now this was more fun than football …

My sister was three years older than me, a gorgeous, doll-like little girl with the sweetest of natures. I worshipped her – I still do to this day. For her part, Lynne had always wanted a little sister and when she was presented with a rosy-cheeked baby boy she obviously decided that she would just have to make the best of the situation, which is why I grew up with zero interest in cars or soldiers and an obsession with dressing up and dolls.

eauty Pageant was one of our favourite childhood games. I’d make the badges with the contestants’ numbers on them out of old toilet rolls and Lynne and I would take it in turns to be the show’s host.

‘… And here’s the lovely Miss Scunthorpe wearing a very pretty red pinafore dress. Her hobbies are dancing to Abba and watching Rentaghost …’

We’d rope in our cousins on Mum’s side (Lorraine, Julie, Cheryl, Mandy, Kelly – there was one boy cousin, Greg, but for obvious reasons he usually did his own thing) and we’d spend hours putting on concerts and plays and musicals in the garage, a magical place which doubled as Dad’s workshop when it wasn’t playing host to the all-singing, all-dancing Von Trapp children or being transformed into a ghost train complete with sheet-shrouded ghouls.

At the weekend Lynne, me and our girl cousins would troop off to the Saturday morning club at the local cinema together where I’d sit spellbound in front of the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Fairytales were a particular favourite of mine, with a film based on the story of Cinderella called The Slipper and the Rose becoming something of an obsession. I must have seen it at least ten times. Even when Lynne wasn’t around to play with, I would sneak into her room to steal her shoes and dressing-up clothes and then dance round the room wearing this big black wig that Mum kept for best, pretending to be Shirley Bassey.

* * *

At the age of six, I begged my parents to get me a Girls World, one of those slightly creepy-looking plastic heads on which budding make-up artists can practise their skills.

‘Are you sure you don’t want a Scalextric set?’ my father asked hopefully, as he did every Christmas. My poor dad. He tried his best to do the right thing by his only son, bless him. He would take me outside and then lift the bonnet on our green Vauxhall Viva as if he was about to share some incredible secret.

‘Right, son,’ he’d say, crouching down by the car, all excited. ‘Now listen closely, I’m going to help you find your way round an engine …’

If it wasn’t cars, it was DIY. Dad treated his toolbox like it was buried treasure, the spanners and screwdrivers as precious as any diamonds or rubies. I hadn’t the heart to tell him I’d rather be lifting the lid of my sister’s jewellery box and watching the little ballerina spin round. He’d drag me along to watch Doncaster Rovers, even though I made no attempt to hide the fact that I was more interested in the half-time bag of crisps and pop, and occasionally he’d even rig up a net in the back garden to teach me some skills.

‘Come on, Gary, let’s go and have a kickabout!’

On one of the few times he actually got me in front of that net I was so scared of being hit by the ball that when he kicked it towards me I dodged out of the way and it went straight through the picture window at the back of our house, showering my mum and sister with glass as they sat watching Jim’ll Fix It.

I never did get the Girls World. However, my long-suffering parents did buy me the other presents on my Christmas wish list: a little toy Hoover and a pair of ruby red shoes for me to live out my obsession with Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

‘Wouldn’t you rather be the Tin Man or the Lion?’ Dad would ask, an edge of desperation creeping into his voice. But no – I was convinced that one day I would go over the rainbow. There weren’t that many boy-sized sparkly red slippers in Armthorpe though, so Dad ended up spray-painting my trainers and covering them with red glitter.

Without a Girls World to practise my make-up skills, I started to steal my sister’s dolls instead. I would stockpile them in secret hiding places around the garden and when Lynne eventually found them stashed behind the hedge or round the back of the shed she would go mad because I’d have felt-tipped on red lipstick and blue eye shadow and tied their hair into plaits.

If I couldn’t get hold of the dolls, I would find other outlets for my creativity. I would get up early in the morning, long before anyone else in the house was awake, and trace women’s faces complete with pouty lips and one spider-lashed eye (I was too lazy to do a matching pair) into the condensation on the large window at the back of the house, sending my houseproud mother ballistic when she came in to make breakfast and saw all these smeary, drippy faces defacing her nice clean windows. I completely destroyed the covers of Dad’s treasured record collection by biro-ing eyeliner, lipstick and false lashes on the already heavily made-up faces of the ladies of Abba and The Three Degrees.

And when I ran out of pop stars to beautify, I started on the Page 3 girls in my parents’ copy of the Sun. I would define Jilly Johnson’s brows or make her lips slightly bigger, and once I’d finished with the faces I would draw bras on them. In my mind I was just making them look prettier, but – as you can imagine – my dad wasn’t best pleased, especially if I got my hands on the paper before he’d had a chance to see it. I would even draw muscles on the men, a skill that would stand me in good stead many years later when I would end up using make-up to shade pecs and abs on a certain singer who would later become one of my clients …

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My story really begins in the very early hours of 30 September 1969 at 67 Burton Avenue in Balby, a suburb of Doncaster, South Yorkshire. This was my parents’ first home, a typical two-up, two-down terraced house in an average Coronation Street-style street.

At the moment there are three people in this little house: Ann and Brian Cockerill and their three-year-old daughter Lynne, soon (far sooner indeed than anyone actually realises) to be joined by me. Ann and Brian are childhood sweethearts who met at the age of 16 at the Gaumont cinema in Doncaster. Brian – devilishly handsome, the spitting image of Tony Curtis – was mucking about with his mates throwing popcorn down the top of the curly-haired, bigboobed brunette in the row in front until Ann – beautiful, ballsy, typical Scorpio – turned round to give him an earful, having apparently already given him an eyeful.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Having both come from solid, working-class families with the same family-orientated values, the couple married at 21 after a traditional courtship and my sister was born two years later. By the time I came along, Dad had a secure job working at the Doncaster Royal Infirmary as a painter and decorator and my mum handled the paperwork in a clerk’s office. My earliest memories of her are in a neat pinstripe pencil skirt and a little ruffled blouse, her wild hair shaped into a bubble of curls – a cross between EastEnders’ Angie and Jill Gascoigne from The Gentle Touch.

Mum never did make it to hospital that morning. I made my appearance into the world at 6 a.m. in the chintzy comfort of my parents’ bedroom with Dad panicking outside the door and one of the neighbours roped in to help poor Mum. It was the last time in my life that I was ever to be early for anything.

My parents didn’t have a very good track record with baby names – my sister was called Tinkerbell until she was a good few months old – and similarly Gary wasn’t the first choice of name for their son. For the first few weeks of my life, I was called something completely different. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Dad putting his foot down, the name on the front of this book would read ‘Ivor Cockerill’.

My attention-grabbing arrival into the world was to prove typical of my need to be in the spotlight at all times. Although I was quite small at birth, about 6 lbs, I would take as much milk and affection as I could get and quickly blossomed into a chubby, red-cheeked little cherub. And so, for the first few days of his life, Ivor-turned-Gary and his folks lived in the same blissful, chaotic, exhausting bubble as any other young family with a new baby. But then, just three weeks later, my family’s lives were turned upside down, inside out and very nearly destroyed.

It was a Wednesday and Mum was getting us both up and dressed when she started to get terrible pains in her arms and chest and then suddenly, without any warning, my slim, active and outwardly completely healthy 26-year-old mother suffered a devastating heart attack and collapsed. When it became clear after a few minutes that Mummy wasn’t going to wake up – even with her new baby brother screaming the place down – Lynne (who, remember, was just three at the time) managed to get out into the garden, climb over the fence and knock on a neighbour’s door to tell them that Mummy was poorly. The ambulance arrived just in time.

The attack had been caused by a massive blood clot, which was eventually linked to her being on the Pill. She was one of the first women to try this revolutionary birth control drug – almost a guinea pig. The damage to Mum’s heart was so extensive that the doctors at the hospital in Sheffield where she lay in intensive care warned that her life was hanging in the balance; even after she made it through the first few days they gave her five years, max. With a job to hold down, two very small children to look after and no idea whether his young wife would ever make it out of hospital, my distraught dad moved us all in with Mum’s parents, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Jean.

Just five months later, Mum – with typical bloody-mindedness – proved all the doctors wrong by being well enough to leave hospital, but the attack had left her seriously weakened and she was warned that the slightest physical exertion could kill her. Even today she gets out of breath very easily and has to have regular check-ups. I don’t actually think the doctors really understand why she’s still alive. So throughout my entire childhood my mum’s poorly heart was at the back of my mind. Whatever we were doing, from swimming on family holidays to going on the swings at the park, I was aware that we had to watch out for Mum – well, someone had to because she certainly didn’t seem that bothered about herself.

Far from taking things easy, she became obsessed with TV-AM fitness queen Mad Lizzie, putting on her tracksuit every morning before work to do star jumps in front of the telly. But it was because of Mum’s heart that a few months after her return from hospital my parents sold our two-storey house on that steep street in Balby and bought a new-build bungalow on a private estate in the nearby mining village of Armthorpe, where they still live to this day.

To me, that three-bedroom semi-detached bungalow with its neat front and back garden will always be home. My memories of growing up there are coloured with love, laughter and food; my parents might not have had much money, but they always made absolutely sure we had the best of everything.

Sundays were a particularly happy time in the Cockerill household. Dad would cook a huge breakfast of eggs, bacon and sausage to keep us going until one o’clock, when Mum would serve a traditional roast with all the trimmings. Our modest dining-room table would be crowded with guests. There would be all the cousins, my aunts and of course Granddad Joe (former ICI factory foreman who loved a flutter on the horses) and Grandma Jean (golden-blonde bingo queen).

My grandparents argued non-stop; an outsider would have probably found it upsetting, but to us kids it was better than a sitcom, like Victor Meldrew and his wife.

As soon as Mum had cleared away the lunch things she would tie on a pinny and start baking, so at teatime we would have fluffy sponge cakes fresh from the oven and rounds of perfectly trimmed sandwiches. My sister and I would listen to the Top 40 countdown on Radio One in our pyjamas and then straight after the Number One our mother would swoop.

‘Right, you two, off to bed now.’

She ran a tight ship, did Mum.

Every summer we would have two weeks at the seaside, somewhere like Whitby, Scarborough or Bridlington. Almost as exciting to me as the beach and its many attractions was the prospect of going to see a show. One year we caught legendary drag star Danny La Rue in summer season and I was completely knocked out by this man who was dressed as a fabulously glamorous woman.

Another time we were staying in a boarding house in Scarborough and Barbara Windsor – then a huge Carry On star – was staying in the room next door. I remember walking out on the landing and bumping into this tiny, curvy blonde, probably barely taller than I was back then.

‘Ello, darlin’, you alright?’ she said in that instantly recognisable voice:

Funny to think that she’s now one of my closest friends …

Our summer holidays also provided an opportunity for Dad to indulge in his favourite hobby – painting landscapes. He is an amazingly talented artist and I know he would have loved to pursue it as a career, but he put his family first and stuck to the safer, steadier option of being a decorator. In a way I suppose you could say I’m now living his dreams for him, except that I paint on faces rather than canvas.

I grew up surrounded by Dad’s pictures on our walls at home and he influenced me profoundly. We might have failed to bond over Doncaster Rovers and DIY, but we shared a real love of art and he did everything to encourage my passion, buying me an easel, paints and art books. I would sit for hours alone in my bedroom with my sketchbook, usually drawing women’s faces – whoever was famous and fabulous at the time, be it Joan Collins as Alexis in Dynasty, Lady Di, Barbra Streisand or Madonna.

At the age of eight I won a Blue Peter competition with one of these paintings, and Dad was bursting with pride when I had to go on the show to collect my badge from Peter Purves. (This wasn’t my first taste of TV fame. That was on Calendar News, our local teatime bulletin. The Queen had come up to Doncaster for the Silver Jubilee and as the camera panned over the crowd it stopped on a group of little kids waving flags and there was me in the middle, grinning like an idiot. I remember everyone making a fuss – ‘Ooh, our Gary’s on telly!’ – and I remember how good it felt …)

To this day, Dad is a massive inspiration to me. He’s a real Mr Nice Guy: sensitive, kind and very laidback. He rarely loses his temper or raises his voice. Without a doubt, it’s Mum who rules the roost. She’s a calm, quiet, almost shy person most of the time, but boy can she lose her temper quickly – and God help you when she does. Although discipline was usually of the verbal variety in the Cockerill household, I remember her grabbing a tea towel and giving my bum a good slap on more than a few occasions when I was growing up.

I once brought our class stick insects home from school and hid them in my bedroom, as I knew Mum wouldn’t be keen on having a tank full of creepy-crawlies in her pristine house. Well, I can’t have secured the lid properly and while I was at school they escaped all over the house and got busy breeding in the comfort of our soft furnishings. We were still picking stick insects out of the curtains weeks later; I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from the ear-bashing I got from Mum for that particular little episode.

If I get my artistic talent from Dad, I get my determination and strength from Mum – and also my addictive personality. She smoked like a trooper when I was little – despite the heart attack – eventually quitting when I was in primary school. But she quickly found something else to replace her nicotine addiction …

When I was nine, my family went on our first holiday abroad: two blissful, sun-soaked weeks in the South of France. We stayed in a campsite just outside Antibes and went on a coach trip to Monte Carlo for the day, visiting the famous casinos and drinking ice-cold citron pressé with little jugs of sugar syrup in the lobby of the famous Hotel de Paris.

‘One day I’m going to come back and stay here,’ I told my parents. For a little boy fascinated with glitz, glamour and fairytale it was heaven on earth.

Mum, too, was very taken with the French lifestyle – especially their love of wine. At this time in the late Seventies us Brits hadn’t yet taken to vino in the same way as our Gallic neighbours, and the French habit of sharing a bottle over the evening meal proved a revelation for Mum and was one she kept up with enthusiasm long after our holiday tans had faded. She started making her own wine with kits from Argos and very soon was polishing off a couple of bottles of Chateau de Cockerill every single night.

After the first glass she’d be nicely merry, but as the evening wore on and the bottle emptied, her personality would suddenly change. I know she would be horrified at the suggestion that she had a drink problem; after all, she never drank during the day, she didn’t touch hard spirits and she never went boozing down the pub. But even today, Mum can’t leave a bottle unfinished. So whereas most kids grow up thinking of alcohol as something exciting and glamorous, to me it was the stuff that turned my mother into a totally different person – someone who I didn’t want to be around. As a result of her drinking, I’ve been a lightweight all my life.

Mum never used to wear much make-up. Just a touch of lipstick, a bit of rouge and that would be it; not even any mascara. Her two sisters, however, were a very different story. While Mum was the academic one, my Auntie Maureen – or Mo – and Auntie Janice were beauty queens in their youth and even today, Janice treats every day like it’s the grand finals of Miss Doncaster. They wouldn’t be seen dead without full-on make-up and perfectly styled hair and were always disappearing off to the plastic surgeon for sneaky nips and tucks. The pair of them were having Botox before anyone else had even heard of it. I thought they were impossibly glamorous. Auntie Janice wouldn’t think twice about spending a fortune on a designer outfit, whereas Auntie Mo might wear a six-quid outfit from down Doncaster market but, honest to God, she would work it like it was Chanel couture.

Mo was known as The Big Red because of her shock of dyed scarlet hair, fiery temperament and huge boobs. Her signature look was orange-toned lipstick and a slick of eye shadow in iridescent blue or purple, but somehow it all worked. Her sister Janice – the much doted-on baby of the family – had platinum blonde hair and a deep perma-tan that she set off with frilly white dresses, pink frosted lipstick and long nails that were always painted glossy red. When Dynasty first appeared on TV in the Eighties I was instantly smitten, immediately recognising Alexis Colby and Crystal Carrington as a slightly more polished version of Mo and Janice.

But it wasn’t just their flamboyant appearance that made such an impression on me. They were both truly strong women, real survivors who suffered a lot of tragedy and ended up carrying the men in their lives but never losing their fighting spirit.

‘Whatever you want in life, Gary, you go get it,’ Mo would tell me, eyes blazing.

Both Janice and Mo were pub landladies, a real couple of Bet Gilroys, each running a succession of establishments in the Yorkshire area. Their lives seemed full of drama and mystery – especially compared to my humdrum upbringing in Armthorpe.

I actually think one of the reasons my cousins, especially Lorraine and Julie, spent so much time at our house was because it gave them a bit of normality after the craziness of their own lives, but for me hanging out at Janice and Mo’s pubs gave me my first taste of the world of showbiz. Okay, so the Bluebell in Gringley-on-Hill probably wasn’t the most glamorous place on earth, but once I was through those doors it might as well have been Las Vegas.

My aunties would never come down to the bar at the start of the evening. Like the stars of the show they truly were, they timed their entrance for maximum impact – which was when the pub was full and they’d had enough time to make themselves look fabulous. At around 8.30 they would suddenly appear behind the bar, all sequins, big hair and even bigger cleavage, smiling and waving at the punters like they were strutting on stage at the London Palladium.

Once on the floor they’d pull the odd pint, but mostly it was just lots of chit-chat with the regulars, a bit of flirty banter here and there, and then, after just a couple of hours of razzle-dazzle, they’d disappear upstairs again. Although I was obviously too young to be drinking in the bar, during the evening I would always sneak downstairs to get a bag of crisps so I could have a peek at everyone and bask in my aunties’ reflected glory.

Even at that age I gravitated towards the limelight. ‘I’m on this side of the bar with my glamorous Auntie Janice and you lot are stuck on the other side,’ I would think, feeling special and, yes, probably more than a little bit smug. It was the same feeling I got years later the first time I was ushered into the VIP section at some fabulous celebrity party or other.

Sadly Mo passed away a few years ago, although she was so larger than life I still find it hard to accept that she’s gone, but Janice is still with us and just as glamorous as ever, bleaching her hair and dressing half her age (and carrying it off) despite being well into her late sixties. Janice and Mo taught me the power of make-up to transform and seduce – and instilled in me a lifelong love of strong, glamorous women.

TWO Drama Queen

All children have their little quirks. Some carry a security blanket, others suck their thumb – I, on the other hand, used to flap. Whenever I got excited I would start waving my hands in front of my face as if I was rubbing chalk off an imaginary blackboard, then I’d run round and round on my tiptoes, frantically flapping all the while. This would sometimes happen several times a day, frequently in public.

‘Gary!’ Mum would hiss under her breath as I tore round a shop. ‘For God’s sake will you stop that flapping!’

If a child behaved like this nowadays he would probably be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and promptly put on a course of Ritalin; in Seventies Yorkshire, however, the solution was tap-dancing.

Looking back, I was always destined to be a stage school kid. The endless shows and musicals our little gang put on in Dad’s garage had left their mark: my cousin Julie had blossomed into a talented performer (later becoming a dancer on cruise ships) and cousin Mandy was attending the Italia Conti stage school in London. But it was my Auntie Ann who inspired me to take my love of the spotlight to a whole new level.

By the time I was eight or nine, my days as my sister’s best friend, dress-up doll and number one playmate were almost numbered. Lynn was hitting puberty, blossoming into a stunning young woman, boys were sniffing around her and I suspect that having an effeminate little brother hanging about was seriously cramping her style.

My girl cousins, who were all older, were outgrowing me too, and I had few school friends of my own age to play with. Unlike most boys of my age I hated sports, so didn’t even have the excuse of a kick-about to get me out of the house. Instead, I would spend the weekend with my Auntie Ann and Uncle Michael who lived in nearby Halifax with their son Craig.

For a kid with an overactive imagination and a taste for the dramatic it couldn’t have been a better place to visit. Auntie Ann was a girl-guide leader and Uncle Michael (my dad’s younger brother) worked in a sweet factory. He would sometimes take us to visit and I would watch entranced as rainbow-coloured delights danced past on conveyor belts, breathing in the heady hot-sugar vapours and imagining I was Charlie let loose in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Almost as magical to me were the family’s trips to church. My parents were atheists, but Ann and Michael were regular worshippers and so every Sunday morning we would put on our best and go just down the road to St Martin’s.

I loved everything about those mornings in church: the singing, the stained-glass windows, the gang-like chumminess of Sunday school and the theatre and mystery of the service itself. It wasn’t the religion, it was the drama of the place that really moved me (although a few years later I would appear in a local production of Jesus Christ Superstar and I would cry every single night when the actor playing Jesus was crucified). To me, going to church was almost like putting on a show – which brings me neatly on to Auntie Ann’s other great love: Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Ann adored classic Hollywood musicals with a passion I soon grew to share and the house echoed with the soundtracks to Carousel, Oklahoma! and Singin’ in the Rain. It is she who is also to blame for my Streisand obsession: I remember her putting on the Funny Girl album and just being mesmerised by this incredible voice belting out ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’. Pretty soon Auntie Ann’s kitchen replaced Dad’s garage as my own personal theatre, and I would rope in cousin Craig to star in productions alongside me. Poor Craig, I thought he enjoyed himself as much as I did but my auntie told me just the other day that he always dreaded my visits:

‘Please, Mum, can’t I stay with Grandma when Gary comes to stay? He always makes me dress up as a girl …’

And so, at the age of nine, thanks to a heady blend of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Holy Trinity, my future suddenly and magically became clear: I would go on the stage. I would be a child star. And, for a while, I suppose that’s exactly the way it turned out.

* * *

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

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!

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.

* * *

By the time I had finished my first year at college – one down, one to go – Kim’s modelling career was taking off. She was heading down to London every few weeks for castings and had started to make a few model friends, including a pretty Geordie brunette called Jayne Middlemass who was already becoming known as a Page 3 girl and later, as Jayne Middlemiss, made a name for herself on TV.

Although I had a student grant to help support me through college it barely kept me in pencils, so I got a Saturday job at a hairdresser in a nearby village. The clientele was wall-to-wall Coronation Street grannies and I spent my whole time doing shampoos and sets, but the pay wasn’t bad and I enjoyed hanging out with the salon’s owner, a gay guy called Jason who was best friends with a hugely fat older woman he called Boobs. She was your classic fag hag, always dressed in some outrageous too-tight outfit with everything spilling out. ‘Alright, love?’ Boobs would greet me in her raspy 60-a-day drawl.

The salon work helped out with living expenses, but when the summer holidays came round I was desperately in need of funds. Scouring the local papers for work, I spotted an advert that immediately caught my attention: ‘Have you got star quality? Do you love working with people? If that sounds like you, you could be a Red Coat! Butlins Skegness is looking for bright young people to join our award-winning team.’

Well, it seemed like the perfect job for me. Not only did I have all those years of showbiz experience under my belt, I was a huge fan of Hi-de-Hi, the long-running BBC sitcom about a fictional holiday camp. What with the kitsch seaside setting, Ruth Madoc running around in her little white shorts, the beauty pageants and the ballroom dancing, it actually all looked quite glamorous to me.

I was interviewed by one of the camp managers who made working there sound like a trip to Disneyland. Perhaps I should have realised something was up – it was almost as if he was trying to convince me to take the job, rather than the other way round. But I was seduced by the prospect of returning to my showbiz roots, the camaraderie of camp life and the possibility of getting a tan while I worked, and I leapt at the job when he offered it to me, also persuading Kim – who was temping in an office to supplement her modelling income – to quit her office job and come along to live the Red Coat dream with me.

We arrived at the camp on a typical English seaside summer day – grey clouds and drizzle, which would in fact linger for most of our stay. We were shown to our digs. You know that advert where a flat looks like it has been burgled, but in actual fact it’s just a complete tip? Well, that should give you some idea as to the state of our chalet.

I stared in horror as I noticed a cockroach scuttle beneath the wardrobe, praying that Kim wouldn’t notice (she didn’t, although she certainly didn’t miss the rest of his mates who turned up later that night to join the party). The room stank of stale cigarette smoke and rotting food; after a few days we actually found a long-forgotten burger mouldering under the bed. The carpets, presumably once light brown, were now patterned with an incredible variety of stains and dried-up spillages which felt crusty underfoot – if you were stupid enough to take off your shoes, that is. And as for the bed – well, the wafer-thin mattress was bad enough, but the bedding clearly hadn’t been washed since last season’s inmates had escaped. Once I discovered the communal laundry I realised why: the washing machines were so filthy that anything that went inside would come out with a whole new set of stains. Bearing all this in mind, I don’t think I really need to spell out to you what the communal toilets were like.

Desperate not to linger in our chalet on that first day, we went off in search of the staff canteen. I still remember the smell of those huge industrial kitchens and the vats of grey slop bubbling away like some primeval swamp. That night dinner was sausage and chips, but the chips were still frozen in the middle and the sausages were made out of all the unmentionable bits that were left over after all the edible parts of the animal had been removed. You couldn’t even get a drink to ease the ordeal of mealtimes, as the camp’s staff members weren’t allowed to drink alcohol onsite.

We later discovered that everyone got round this rule by having secret parties in each other’s chalets with smuggled-in booze and, as most of the employees were single and bored out of their minds, these illicit gatherings usually turned into orgies. During our short stint at the camp there was an outbreak of crabs because of the feverish partner swapping that went on.

‘Gary, we’re leaving,’ sobbed Kim at the end of that first night. ‘I don’t want to stay here another day. This is awful.’

‘Come on, babe, let’s give it a bit more time,’ I begged. I was as horrified as she was, but I was desperate for the money. ‘I promise I’ll talk to them about the chalet. We’ve committed ourselves now, and I’m sure things will get better once we start our Red Coat training. Okay?’

But at the next morning’s ‘welcome’ meeting for us new recruits there was another shock in store. Any hopes I’d had of revisiting my past glories on stage vanished as quickly as a glimpse of Skegness sunshine when we were told that we would have to earn the right to become Red Coats by working in other positions in the camp first. Forget judging the knobbly-knees contest or teaching tap-dancing, we were going to be waiters. And far from a jaunty scarlet jacket and crisp white trousers with matching shoes, my new uniform consisted of a short-sleeve shirt, too-short black trousers and a name-badge that (thanks to some administrative cock-up) read ‘Hello, I’m Barry!’

And so Kim and I spent the three weeks we lasted at the camp shuttling between the kitchens and cavernous dining room to serve up deep-fried nuggets and over-boiled vegetables to the largely disgruntled clientele. After a few weeks of drudgery, and desperate to salvage something from the whole disastrous episode, I took the manager to one side after our breakfast shift.

‘Hi, Clive!’ I said, dazzling him with my best toothy showbiz smile. ‘I didn’t want to make a big deal about this, but I should probably tell you that I used to be a professional performer.’

The manager seemed engrossed in the paperwork on the clipboard he was carrying, so I pressed on.

‘I appeared in a nationwide theatre tour with Lionel Blair and was in musicals like Carousel and Jesus Christ Superstar, I continued brightly, exuding what I hoped was Red-Coat-like bubbliness and positivity. ‘I’m a really strong singer and I can tap-dance and do a bit of ballroom as well! So basically, given the chance, I think I’d make a great Red Coat and be a real asset to your team.’

Clive finally looked up from his clipboard, scratched his crotch and squinted at my name-badge.

‘Barry,’ he said slowly, with the look of a man who’d endured a lifetime of economy sausages, stained carpets and broken dreams. ‘I really don’t give a shit.’

FOUR Hell on Earth

‘So, lad, why d’you want to be a miner?’

The three colliery bosses – proper salt-of-the-earth Yorkshire men, with flat caps and flatter vowels – were looking at me expectantly from behind the trestle table that dominated the cramped office where the interviews were being held. Even in the dingy light of the room I could see the coaldust trapped under the men’s fingernails and their leathery, calloused hands. Miners’ hands.

I had queued up all morning with dozens of other local lads for my chance to be here, but now that I finally had my moment in the spotlight my mind had gone blank. Exactly why did I want to join the workforce at Markham Main, Armthorpe’s colliery?

I’d never had a problem with interviews – years of waltzing through stage school auditions had left me confident to the point of cockiness – but today was different. Today, I was going for a job that I urgently needed, but was absolutely dreading getting.

* * *

Growing up, the view from my bedroom window was dominated by the hulking, coal-black silhouette of Markham Main. To my overactive young imagination, the distant outline of the colliery buildings was a vision of hell, with the mine’s vast wheel and clanking conveyor belt rearing up out of the slagheap like some nightmarish fairground ride. The pit was only a mile from my home, but it might as well have been in a different hemisphere. Although the colliery was the reason for my hometown’s existence and the main source of income and community for the majority of its residents – including most of my school friends’ families – as far as I was concerned it had absolutely nothing to do with me. There were few mining families living in the smart new estate where we had our semi-detached bungalow, and my parents had drilled into me from a young age that I should never even think about joining the local industry.

‘No son of mine is ever going to put his life at risk working down the mines,’ Dad would lecture, stony-faced – and that was absolutely fine by me. I’d go round to friends’ houses for tea and stare with barely concealed horror at their fathers’ ruined hands and coal-blackened faces. And although I would see the miners trudging past my school every day in their luminous safety vests, helmets and hobnail boots, always covered in a blanket of coaldust, they might as well have been aliens for all the relevance I thought they had to my existence.

It wasn’t just the thought of working in such dark and dangerous conditions that seemed so strange and scary to me, it was the whole lifestyle that came with the job. After a day down the pit I’d see my friends’ dads head off down the pub or the miners’ welfare club for pints of beer and games of darts and snooker and banter about birds and football, and I would silently vow to myself, not me. Not ever.

* * *

I had spotted the advert in the Doncaster Free Press when I was doing my weekly trawl of the job section.

WANTED – A NEW GENERATION OF MINERS FOR MARKHAM MAIN COLLIERY, ARMTHORPE

It was the early Eighties, Arthur Scargill was raising hell and there was a drive to revitalise the colliery, a last-ditch attempt to save the local industry by injecting a burst of youthful energy. But it was the last line of the advert that jumped off the page and grabbed my attention.

EXCELLENT RATES OF PAY

I was 18 and in desperate need of money. When I had graduated from art college a few months previously I had assumed I would walk straight into a design job in Sheffield or Doncaster, but despite what the tutors had promised us the opportunities just weren’t there. I knew that my only hope of success was to go to London, that magical place where the streets – if not quite paved with gold – were at least paved with advertising agencies and trendy design studios where an ambitious graduate might make their fortune.

Kim had by now secured a modelling agent in London, so we had decided to move down South and get a place together. Besides, Armthorpe no longer held any appeal for me. Most of my friends seemed content to remain in the village forever with their apprenticeships and girlfriends, their lives comfortably mapped out, but in my mind I was destined for bigger and better things.

I’ve got to get out or I’ll be stuck here forever, I would panic as I sat through another night down the pub with people with whom I increasingly felt I had nothing in common. But to start a new life in London required serious funds, which is why, when I spotted the newspaper advert, I shrugged off a lifetime’s prejudice and dialled the number without a second thought.

I didn’t tell my parents I was going for a job at the colliery. There was no point; I knew what their reaction would be. Kim wasn’t keen either, but she understood we needed to get some money together in order to start our lives together in London. Which is why I found myself here, within the gates of Markham Main for the first time, sitting nervously in front of the colliery’s three wise men.

‘I don’t come from a mining background and I haven’t had any experience of this sort of work,’ I told the panel of flat caps. ‘But I want to put 100 per cent into this. I’m a hard worker and a quick learner, and I’m really interested in a career in, um, coal.’

‘Well, Gary, you’re a bit … over-qualified for this job,’ said one of the men, glancing over my cv. ‘But you’ve got a good attitude and seem like the sort of lad who’d do well here at Markham. You’ll start the training next week. Well done, lad.’

On the walk back home, I thought about bottling it. Now I’d actually been offered the job all my old fears bubbled back up to the surface: I was convinced I would die or be hideously maimed in a tragic accident – at the very least end up with permanently blackened fingernails. But by the time I arrived back at my front door I had made up my mind to accept; if I’m honest, there had never really been any doubt that I would after they’d told me the dizzying figures I could earn by clocking up double shifts and over-time. For five hundred quid a week Mum and Dad would understand. Eventually.

* * *

There was no sign of the dawn when I got on my bike just before 5 a.m. and pedalled furiously through the freezing winter darkness towards the colliery for my first day down the mine. I was carrying a flask of strong tea and the sandwiches my mum had left out for me the night before. She might not be happy about her son’s new career (in fact that would be a considerable understatement) but after a screaming argument she and Dad had at least grudgingly understood my reasons for taking the job.

I’d already sat through four weeks of classroom-based training to prepare me and my fellow recruits for pit life. There were a few lads who, like me, saw this as an opportunity to earn a fast buck then move on to bigger and better things, but the rest of them were from mining families and landing a job at the colliery was the pinnacle of their ambition. I just couldn’t relate to their mentality: go underground, do the job, get pissed – that was all they seemed to want out of life.

I thought they were thick and lazy, and I’m quite sure they hated me in return. They certainly thought I was a snob and picked up on the fact that I was a bit more sensitive and softly spoken, as I got called a ‘fucking poof’ on more than one occasion. Some of them had been to school with me and knew all about my dancing and singing career as a kid, so they had plenty of ammunition. They’d even take the piss out of my sandwiches, because Mum would put a bit of salad in with the filling instead of their bog-standard plain cheese spread or fish paste. But I really couldn’t give a toss. I was impatient to start raking it in as quickly as possible so I could escape this hellhole.

I passed through the colliery gates, locked up my bike and reluctantly joined the mass of men clocking in for shifts, our breath showing like puffs of steam in the icy morning air. Then it was straight over to the changing rooms where I jostled through the throng of bodies towards my locker, avoiding eye contact as much as possible. I remember the smell of that room to this day – damp, dirty, earthy. It was the smell of the mine.

I tried to calm my ever-increasing nerves by focusing on the process of getting myself dressed in my kit: first the thermal pants, vest and leggings, a rough cotton shirt that felt like it was made from hessian then a one- or two-piece overall over the top. Big socks and those hard, heavy boots. And finally a big navy overcoat, the Armthorpe logo proudly stitched on the breast, and a white helmet with a torch. Nothing fitted me properly. I was a skinny thing when I was younger – tall, but with hardly any meat on me. I wasn’t bred to be a miner like most of them down there.

My heavy boots rubbed and the helmet dug into my scalp as I followed the army of navy-coated clones trudging across the yard to a low concrete bunker. This nondescript building held the lift that would plunge us over a mile and a half down into the blackness. One of the foremen counted us as we filed past him so they’d know how many of us went in and (I realised with a stab of fear) how many of us came back out again.

You’re going to die in there! screamed my inner drama queen, always alert to potential disaster. But it was too late to turn and run, as I was carried along by the tide of bodies into the bunker, through the double set of metal lift gates and into the mouth of hell. The lift was only a couple of metres square, but there must have been about thirty men crammed into the tiny space. A packed Tube at rush hour has absolutely nothing on a colliery lift. Bloody sardines, we were, squeezed so tight that it was impossible to take a deep breath -which was probably lucky what with the reek of farts and stale beer fumes. When every last millimetre of space was filled the heavy gates were shut with a deafening clank, a siren sounded, lights flashed and then – terror. Sheer bloody terror as we fell at unimaginable speeds down, down into the bowels of the earth …

After what seemed like a few seconds the brakes kicked in with a squealing, shuddering shriek and the lift lurched to a stop, my stomach arriving a moment or two behind it. Before I had time to recover, the doors slid open and a blast of icy cold air rushed into the stuffy lift as I was carried out by the crowd into … God knows where.

Once my eyes had adjusted to the unexpected brightness, I could see I was I was standing in a vast underground cavern lit by huge florescent lights. Coughs, occasional shouts of laughter and the constant drip-drip-drip of water echoed around the cavernous, freezing space. Under my boots the floor was slushy and damp, like it was covered with melting black ice. From here, tunnels radiated in every direction – some like subterranean super-highways supported by soaring steel arches, others (I would discover to my horror) so tiny you’d be forced to get down on your hands and knees and crawl over the icy gravel.

You could be trudging for miles, often in complete darkness as the lights frequently failed – and at the furthest point from the lift shaft was the blistering-hot black heart of the mine, the coalface.

* * *

Life down the mine was one of extremes. You were either working in the freezing cold, or – depending on how near to the core you were – unbearable heat. It must have been 100 degrees at the coalface. The machinery used for cutting away at the rock got so hot that you constantly had to pour water on it to cool it down, one of my jobs as it turned out. Similarly, it was either completely silent or so deafening that despite wearing ear protectors you’d still have tinnitus by the time you got up next morning.

As I was one of the brighter of the new recruits – and possibly because I was built more for tap-dancing than rock-smashing – I was assigned a job that relied on brains rather than brawn. My responsibility was safety: making sure machinery was running smoothly and official procedures were correctly followed in whichever area I was assigned to that day. Sort of like the swotty school prefect who checks all the students’ ties are done up and shouts at them for running in the corridors, except I was having to boss around men twice my age and size. Unsurprisingly, this role did little to improve my reputation with the other miners, especially as most of the time they paid next to no attention to the rulebook.

‘Er, sorry, but you really should be wearing your helmet in this area,’ I would mutter to some huge hulk of a man.

‘Why don’t you just fuck off, Cockerill?’

‘Um, right. Okay.’

The men tended to do exactly what they wanted, which is probably why there were so many accidents. What with the very real threat of fire, explosion, poisonous gas leaks, suffocation, roof collapse and the terrifying machinery – including an enormous corkscrew-like drill that could shear off layers of rock to reach the seam of coal as effortlessly as slicing through a joint of ham – a mine is hardly the safest working environment at the best of times. There were enough ways to die down there without some wanker lighting up a cigarette or forgetting to apply a safety brake. It didn’t take me long to realise why the pay was so good on this job: that 500 quid I was pocketing at the end of each week was actually danger money.

One day I was working by the side of the tracks that carried the carts of coal up from the depths of the mine. Each of these wagons was the size of a small car and, filled to overflowing with its black cargo, unimaginably heavy. Suddenly there was a yell and a clatter and I turned, terrified, to see one of these monster trolleys careering out of control down the slope towards where I was standing. I threw myself out of the way, ending up with only a gash across my forehead and a few bruises. The lad I was working with wasn’t so lucky – poor kid was stretchered out with a shattered leg, sobbing and screaming for his mum.

During my seven months at Markham Main a bloke had his arm severed in an accident and another, tragically, was decapitated when he became entangled in machinery at the coalface. I wasn’t there when he was killed and I barely knew the guy, but I remember standing by the side of the street with the rest of the village as the funeral procession went past, an entourage of dozens of black-clad mourners following a magnificent horsedrawn coffin, barely visible for all the wreaths.

Death was a fact of life down the mine. The older miners would take great pleasure freaking us out with tales of ghosts haunting the tunnels and distant caverns of Markham Main. You’d be on your own, dozing off in the gloom, when someone would creep up on you – just to get a laugh by scaring the shit out of you. I began to dread the mine’s dark corners as much as its more obvious dangers. Honest to God, every single day I went down there thinking that I wasn’t going to come back up again. The only thing that made me stick it out was the money and the thought that with every day I was a little bit nearer to London and a glittering future.

Almost as bad as the fear, however, was the boredom. The way that some of the men dealt with the tedium of long days stuck underground was by having a wank with one of the stash of well-thumbed girlie mags you’d find in the systems booths. My sexuality was all over the place at the time and it didn’t even cross my mind to involve myself in anything like that. But, as it turned out, one of my colleagues had other ideas …

One of the unwritten rules of colliery life was that all the men showered together at the end of a shift. It was all part of the blokeish camaraderie – washing each other’s backs, slapping each other with wet towels, bonding over banter about birds and football. Like a sports locker room, I suppose, but cruder, grimier and more threatening. As you can imagine, I was way, way out my comfort zone. When I got home I always got straight in the bath to wash off the filth of that grim communal shower room.

One evening I was doing my usual thing of soaping up and getting out as quickly as possible when I noticed that one of the men was smiling at me. Chris Johnson. What the hell did he want? I had few friends in here – and Chris Johnson definitely wasn’t one of them. Hard as nails and built like Mike Tyson, everyone in the village knew you didn’t mess with him.

‘It’s Gary, isn’t it?’ he smiled, sauntering through the wet bodies to where I stood. He must have been in his mid-thirties, and with his black hair and pale blue eyes he looked a bit like an ugly, pumped-up Oliver Reed. ‘You alright, lad?’

I might have imagined it, but it seemed that the men who had been showering near me moved a little further away.

‘Fine, thanks.’ I tried to keep my eyes fixed on the grimy water swirling down the drain.

‘How was your day?’ Chris was steadily soaping himself as he talked. I couldn’t help but notice he had the biggest dick I had ever seen. Massive it was, halfway down his leg. I was too terrified to speak.

‘You know, Gary, I’ve been keeping an eye on you down the mine,’ he said. ‘I know it can be bloody hard when you’re new. I remember what it was like when I started – scared shitless I was!’

He chatted away for a bit, telling me about his wife and kids, asking about my girlfriend, and I started to relax a little. He did seem genuinely friendly, and God knows I could do with having the colliery’s resident hard man on my side.

And then it happened.

‘Can you wash my back?’ he asked casually, turning round. I quickly rubbed the greying bar of soap over his vast shoulders to get the worst of the soot off.

‘Thanks, lad. Your turn now.’

I knew something was wrong almost immediately. Rather than the usual perfunctory scrub, Chris was moving his hands over me with slow, tender strokes, caressing my shoulders and exploring my chest almost like a lover. Exactly like a lover, I realised in horror as his hand moved lower down my back towards my bum. Then suddenly his fingers were everywhere. Touching, grabbing, probing … Horrified, I wriggled out of his clutching paws.

‘Thanks!’ I spluttered. ‘Got to go now!’

‘Bye then, Gary,’ he said calmly, an amused glint in his eye. ‘See you next week.’

It wasn’t a question.

From then on, Chris cornered me in the showers every time we were working the same shift. I’d try my best to avoid him, but several times I couldn’t. It fell into the same pattern: we’d chat pleasantly, he’d offer to wash my back and then try to grope me. I was completely freaked out, but too scared of the guy to tell him to stop – besides, I very much doubted that anyone in those showers would come to my rescue if things turned nasty. Thankfully I never had to find out, as a few weeks later I gratefully clocked out of my last shift at Markham Main.

Although I had only been at the colliery for a few months, I was a completely different creature from the pink-cheeked boy of before. To put it bluntly, I was a complete wreck. Working underground for seven-day weeks, sometimes pulling double shifts (there was no such thing as the Working Time Directive in those days) had left me deathly pale, painfully thin and completely exhausted.

I had a constant hacking cough – and every time I coughed would bring up the most evil-looking green muck you can imagine – and convinced myself that I was going to die of Black Lung, the chronic disease that tragically killed so many miners. Every night when I got home I’d scour my hands until they bled to get the coaldust out from the dozens of little nicks and cuts and from under my nails. That time I fell and gashed my forehead I was so paranoid that I’d be left with what was known as a ‘black man pinch’ – a scar that was permanently blackened from trapped coaldust – that I scrubbed at the raw, bloody wound with a toothbrush for two agonising days to get the soot out.

But the biggest problem was with those boots. All that trudging for miles across rocky, uneven surfaces in ill-fitting footwear left me with the worst blisters you can imagine. I would gingerly take off my socks at night and my entire heel would be a puffy mass of agonising pink and white. Desperate to ease the pain, I would grit my teeth and pop the blisters with a needle – but of course I was always at the doctor’s with infections and blood poisoning.

I admit I had started out at Markham Main a cocky little sod, convinced I was better than the other blokes, but after seven months down the mine I was left with quite a different attitude. As much as I hated every moment of the job and dreaded the miners’ welfare evenings where I’d have to force down a pint and try to join in the banter feeling desperately out of place, the close-knit community of a mining village finally made sense to me. I had learnt how to be a team player.

The miners’ strike had left some families in the village on the verge of starvation, but all their neighbours would rally round, bring them food, help them through the hard times. I now had a genuine respect for these men who every day risked their lives to do a job that had been lined up for them since birth. While I was floating around with my head in the clouds, they knuckled down and unquestioning did what was expected of them, despite the horror stories that they had no doubt been hearing about the mines from their fathers and grandfathers since birth.

And today, when I go back to Armthorpe, I see how these same men have completely rebuilt their lives since the pits closed, retraining as plumbers or builders, keeping their families together while the world they had always known fell apart.

With the few thousand we had saved up – together with a bit of money donated by our parents – Kim and I could finally realise our dream of moving to London. We found a little studio above a bathroom showroom in Ealing, a suburb of West London. The flat was tiny, barely 15 ft square, with a mini toilet in a cupboard (over which hung a shower attachment) and the constant drone of traffic thanks to the M4 Hammersmith flyover which was just outside the window, but it was clean and cheap – and, most importantly, it was all ours.

Dad hired a mini-van and drove us down along with Mum, my sister Lynne and Kim’s mum, who cried all the way about her baby leaving home. We had a suitcase each and a few bits our mums had bought us – some bedding, sugar, tea and a pint of milk – but that was it.

That first night, after we’d waved a final goodbye to our parents, we celebrated with cheap fizzy wine (out of mugs as we didn’t have any glasses) and burger and chips from our local greasy spoon, a place which would become our main source of nutrition as we didn’t have a kitchen and besides, neither of us could cook. That night we stayed up talking into the early hours, a combination of nerves, excitement and the M4 traffic keeping us from sleep. While we were both terrified at being on our own in a strange city, we were incredibly excited about the future. Kim obviously had work lined up and I had already gone through the London phone directories and made a list of advertising agencies, design studios, printers – anyone who might take on an enthusiastic art college graduate with Honours. I was giddy with optimism. It felt like our lives were about to begin.

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