Rebel Writers by Celia Brayfield

Author:Celia Brayfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Men Friends

One of the shockingly innovative aspects of A Taste of Honey is that Jo, the 15-year-old protagonist, lives with a gay man, Geof, an art student. The opening of the second act of the play is dedicated to exploring their relationship. It begins with them coming back from a fairground with balloons, like two children. In a taunting conversation Jo asks Geof if his landlady has thrown him out because she caught him with a man, and then tells him he can move in with her if he will ‘tell me what you do’. When he is offended and gets up to leave, she apologises and he stays.

The tender and supportive relationship soon becomes the most positive force in both their lives, although they are both struggling to find ways to live. Geof assumes a maternal role in her life, helping her resolve her conflicted feelings about her pregnancy, cooking for her, cleaning their apartment, worrying about her, nagging her about pre-natal clinic visits and buying her a book about pregnancy. While she wavers from excitement at first feeling the baby move to anger and thoughts of suicide, he is thinking about baby clothes and getting someone to make a cradle for the newborn. ‘You’re just like a big sister to me,’ she says.

In an extended scene they explore the nature of their relationship. To both it is a family connection of some kind, although they can’t fit their reality into the form of any of the conventional family bonds. She puts her arms around him ‘playfully’ and says, ‘Would you like to be the father of my baby, Geofrey?’ to which he replies, ‘Yes, I would’.

Geof then introduces the idea of a sexual relationship, saying ‘What would you say if I started something?’ which Jo dismisses jokingly. He does not drop the issue, but reveals that he has ‘never kissed a girl’ and then asks to kiss her. It’s clear from the text that he is holding her at this point. She struggles, but he kisses her, saying:

GEOF: How was that for first time?

JO: Practise on somebody else.

GEOF: I didn’t mean to hurt you.

JO: Look Geof, I like you, I like you very much, but I don’t enjoy all this panting and grunting…

GEOF: Marry me, Jo.

JO: Don’t breathe all over me like that, you sound like a horse. I’m not marrying anybody…

GEOF: I wouldn’t ask you to do anything you didn’t want to do.

JO: Yes, you would.

They eat some chocolate then Jo tells Geof that she doesn’t think that living with her is doing him any good. He agrees, but he also says, ‘I’d sooner be dead than away from you. […] Before I met you I didn’t care one way or the other – I didn’t care if I lived or died’.

In his anxiety to do all the right things for a mother-to-be, Geof has tracked down Jo’s mother and told her that her daughter is pregnant. In the second half of this act Helen crashes back into her daughter’s life, trailing the drunken Peter after her.

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