The Diaries of Mr Lucas (eBook)

Preface

WHAT DO YOU think of when you look back to the UK in the sixties? Miniskirts, The Beatles and the Kray twins? Maybe thoughts of hippies, demonstrations against the Vietnam War or England winning the World Cup? Or the Profumo Affair and the birth of women’s liberation? Maybe some or all of these, but what you will most definitely not think of is George Leo John Lucas. A rather timid civil servant, Mr Lucas – never George to me – would turn thirty-four as 1960 ushered in some semblance of multicoloured change to a nation shambling out of the grey shadows of the fifties and the remnants of a collective hangover from the Second World War.

Rationing, for example, continued right up until 1954. The women who had served alongside their male counterparts were expected to return to the kitchens. Gay and bisexual men, who had experienced a brief flicker of equality during the war, despite frequent crackdowns, went from heroes to hunted once more. And then the sixties started; a chance for change as the youth movements of the fifties – the Teds, or Teddy Boys – solidified into the first true generation of youthful rebellion. Suddenly, as Mr Lucas struggled to find a place at his usual lunchtime restaurant, he writes, ‘it was difficult to enter or leave for the hippies, male and female, cluttering outside’.

Society was in flux and Mr Lucas was there to record every detail in his diaries, some sad, some funny and some, indeed, drenched in sex – and, remarkable for then and perhaps even today, gay sex. As a gay man, not ‘out’ by modern standards, but active on the scene of the times, his diaries stand as an unequalled record of same-sex love and desire of the mid-twentieth century. Mr Lucas was our very own ‘gay Pepys’, as writer, actor and director Mark Gatiss once described him. Employed by the Board of Trade by day, at night he would slip out silently along the darkened streets, avoiding both the lights and the police before scurrying home to write up everything – and everyone – he had seen and done. The sheer fact of his sexuality, as he writes in March 1948, at almost the start of his diaries, ‘can turn one who by day is a respected and useful official into a furtive night prowler driven by dark lusts till the fit has passed’.

A mild-mannered man, not quick to anger or seek confrontation, he was the very personification of the buttoned-up civil servant. Not for him, the raffish flamboyant air of a Quentin Crisp, whose 1968 memoir, The Naked Civil Servant, became a popular film seven years later. No, Mr Lucas hogged the shadows, kept his feelings and views to himself, but, fortunately for us, not from his diary.

That is not to say that Mr Lucas was ashamed of or embarrassed about being gay. As he writes in April 1968, ‘[It was] my molecular structure, my genetic inheritance, the environment that shaped me.’ A religious man, a devout Catholic, his sexuality and beliefs do clash and overlap, but ultimately are reconciled by Mr Lucas’s determination that what he gets up to in various bushes, public lavatories and occasionally at home, isn’t morally wrong.

As Mr Lucas muses on his father’s temperament and character, it’s clear that, by dint of his sexuality, he’s had a lucky escape from the horrors of heterosexuality.

The diaries trace these tensions, devoting space – among the millions upon millions of words – to his bowel movements as much as to his nocturnal activities. They are an incredible record of a lost queer London, of a man battling to retain his identity in a world that hated homosexuals.

What, can we say, is the significance of his diaries? For me, they represent the gold standard of diary-keeping: waspish and witty, sleazy and circumspect.

The first question to address, though, is whether we have the ‘real’ Mr Lucas. Is he pouring out his thoughts and feelings in a purely undiluted manner or carefully crafting a persona, the ‘Mr Lucas’ he feels himself to be, unrecognized and unadmired by others? I’d argue the latter. Reading through his diaries, year after year, one thing quickly becomes clear: you are reading the idealized Mr Lucas. The person we know as Mr Lucas is a creation of his own: wittier, cleverer and, crucially for any diary writer, misunderstood by those around him. Which might explain his enthusiasm when I initially broached the idea, when we first met back in 1994, of publishing his diaries at some stage.

To be fair, though, he was always clear this would only happen after his death – and he left them to me with that express instruction on his death in 2014. He never sought fame, but surely such dedication to diary-keeping indicates some desire to be remembered in some form? Or perhaps, more accurately, to be liked.

He and I were friends for almost twenty years, but it is only since I took possession of the diaries that I have truly come to know him. An arch conservative, but social liberal, his views are very much not my own, but I recognize how he has been moulded by the times and the environment in which he grew up. Is he dislikeable? Most certainly, particularly when it comes to class, where his views can tend to an almost cartoonish dismissal of those he sees as ‘below’ him in terms of social standing.

No diary is a perfect record of the time in which it was written, and Mr Lucas’s diaries are no exception. Some dates and names may not be exactly right, though they are always as they appear in the diaries. Idiosyncratic, repetitious and in places incomplete, the entries that follow are his reminiscences, his thoughts and feelings. The entries are verbatim, as much as is possible in terms of making them make sense in their truncated form, and I’ve retained Mr Lucas’s punctuation and grammar throughout. History, in Mr Lucas’s hands, isn’t malleable, but it is personal.

Conservative politician Alan Clark said it best, in the preface to his own published diaries:

I’ve chosen to focus on the sixties for many of the reasons above – the pace and speed with which Britain experienced change, culturally, socially and sexually. As a gay man born in 1926, and who eventually died at the age of eighty-eight in 2014, Mr Lucas’s life marked the milestones of queer liberation: seeing the first fruits of freedom during the Second World War (he was nineteen at its end), to the partial decriminalization of gay sex in England and Wales as he turned forty-one. He even lived to see the first same-sex marriages in the year he died. His life was one of the last lived under threat of arrest; he was one of the few remaining guides to a world of blackmail, violence and police harassment. But it was a life also filled with a sense of community, laughter, parties and the need to protect one another from a society that hated us then and still holds its nose at times today. And it was a life full of sex. Lots and lots and lots of sex.