A Cock-Eyed Optimist: An Intimate Memoir of a Gay Film Fan Born in 1939 in South London by Nigel Quiney

Author:Nigel Quiney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: eBookPartnership.com
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

My parents and me wearing mum’s hand-knitted, stretched pullover.

We departed the beautiful Lausanne for Montreux, which father said was even prettier having visited both places before the war. We took the lakeside road with snow-capped mountains rising steeply from the other side of the shimmering water, until we arrived at the Bristol Hotel situated right on the bank of Lac Limon and very close to the Chateau de Chillon. It was a wonderfully picturesque place. As I wrote in my diary, we all felt that we were playing in a scene from Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” and we set off on the short walk to the Chateau.

There were a few other English visitors taking the tour of the Chateau and I was embarrassed to see them wearing cheap souvenirs in the form of plastic edelweiss brooches and “art” silk scarves, painted with edelweiss floral designs. I think I was becoming a terrible snob. I talk of the other tourists as “a bunch of English horrors”. I conclude that trip writing about the appalling torture chambers in the dungeons of the Chateau. The guide finalises with, camps”.

“But now, tank gootness, tinks like dat are ofer”

Mother promptly chimed in,

“Are they? I’m not so sure when I think of the concentration camps”.

Apparently silence reigned.

Back at the hotel we had a delicious meal and went to bed early, after a walk in the town where we bought some cigarettes.

The fourteenth of May was cloudless and the mountains looked fantastic. We had our breakfast on our balcony overlooking the lake with the Chateau nestling to our left. We shopped for a picnic and I was delighted to find a bar of Toblerone containing rum. The wrapper bore the warning “adults only”. The countryside around the lake is flat and the roads were excellent, so cruising between ninety and a hundred miles per hour was no problem. We stopped for a break, where I had a double portion of mocha ice cream and I also purchased some coloured, oval, Egyptian cigarettes, which apparently I had enjoyed before at a Dulwich College Ball. Without doubt I thought these very stylish and perhaps Noel Coward was the influence. We started to drive up narrow winding roads with terrifying drops on one side, and the temperature fell considerably until we reached snow level. At one point the road was not even made up properly and there we came across workmen by a truck, which was completely blocking the way forward. We took many photos and were delighted to find wild flowers everywhere including swathes of lavender-blue blanda anemones. Passing the truck in the Riley was very alarming and our wheels were only six inches from the edge of the precipice. Finally we reached the pass, an area of blinding snow-whiteness topped by blue sky.

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