Letter to Julian

Dear Julian Clary,

I've been trying to think of a way to start this letter that isn't 'I hope you don't mind me writing to you’, but I hope you don't so it will have to do. I'm writing because I’m hoping maybe you or someone in your family could shed some light on something that’s been puzzling me since you first walked on to my TV screen on Friday Night Live rather a lot of years ago.

It concerns a memory from 1969/70 when I was 11 or 12 and living in the ground floor flat of a big double fronted house on Avenue Elmers, Surbiton. My mother, Margaret, and I hadn’t been there very long but my father George Minnis had stayed in digs in the area during term time for several years as he was a lecturer at Kingston College/Poly. One day we had a visit from a family I’d hear of from time to time that I remember as being called Cleary. They had a daughter just a bit older than me and she shared my given (but no longer used) first name Beverley, and there was another older daughter and a boy slightly younger than me called Julian.

We had some kind of meal together and then the grown-ups retired to the lounge area which could be separated from the dining room by curtains pulled across a large oblong ‘arch’. My mother was always joking to visitors that we should put plays on using these curtains to make a stage, and we four children decided to do just that. I don't remember the details but I remember much laughter and particular delight in the costume and make up side of things from Julian. He was definitely the ‘star of the show’...but cute and funny enough to manage it without being obnoxious and, though it's mostly a vague but pleasant childhood memory, one bit is clear... sometime after the show was over and the rest of us were on the audience side of the curtains talking or whatever, Julian stuck his head through the gap holding them shut underneath so that his face was floating Cheshire cat like and when we saw him we all burst out laughing. That image became a snapshot in my memory the way things sometimes do...but filed away and forgotten until...

...someone the spitting image of that lad started appearing as the Joan Collins Fan Club. When I first heard your real name I thought I must have misheard it, or maybe you’d changed the spelling for some reason. And then I heard your father was a policeman and I couldn’t see how my dad, who didn’t drive, would have got to know a traffic cop so tried to dismiss it as a bizarre coincidence. Recently I’ve been reading your autobiography however and I realise you are indeed a little younger than me, with a sister Beverley a little older, and another sister older than that, and that you lived not far away in Teddington during the time in question after having lived in Surbiton before.

I think it's fair to assume there must be at least half a dozen camp and theatrical 11 year old Julians on the Surrey/Middlesex border at any one time...but the Cleary/Clary/Beverley thing and your remarkable resemblance to the Cheshire cat boy... Can you tell me could it possibly have been you or was there a doppelganger family down the road and does this happen all the time? My own parents have been dead for many years so there's no one else I can ask for ‘clarification’.

With best wishes anyway...whoever ever you are!