West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and Its Working Girls (19 page)

One evening, when I had a day off, Victor took me out to dinner with some of his friends. Occasionally he met my quizzical gaze and I saw mischief dancing in his eyes. This situation offered him at least the semblance of risk, and he was enjoying seeing Vera’s ghost hovering round us in the presence of his straight friends.

On the evenings he was at the flat, he would drive me home in his sidecar. It was after one of these rides that he asked if Vera could sometimes do the housework at my home. Though the prospect was tempting, my bed-sitter was no place to hide a transvestite maid and my neighbours lacked the benefit of my gradually broadening mind.

‘It’s too small a place,’ I said. ‘And besides, the landlord might make a pass at you and then where would you be?’

Vera/Victor represented the palatable face of kinkiness, and by degrees I learnt to accept less genteel manifestations. There was one middle-aged man who had a mother and baby fetish; I found it disturbing but somehow touching.

He would take all his clothes off and then, while he sat cross-legged on the bed, Mae would dress him in a large baby’s bib and bonnet that he brought with him. In the role of his nanny, she would then get to work until the moment when he would shriek out, ‘Mummy!’ That was my cue to rush in and catch them red-handed at what he saw as the most degrading moment.

Even if, as I supposed, this fantasy had been caused by a mother’s actions (whether too much or too little love I don’t know), I still baulk at it. I didn’t feel the revulsion that many of my ‘respectable’ compatriots would, but a kind of sadness swept over me and I felt how important it was that accommodating people like Mae should exist to cater for such needs.

When I first met Mae, I had been so taken with her warmth, immediacy and sheer charisma that I had been unable to see anything dark in her. Whether it was the dazzle fading or whether she did indeed change personality a little as the kinks returned to her welcoming fold, I did start to see more of that side of her that had been in evidence on the evening we went to torment poor Alphonse.

There was, for example, a very pleasant little regular – complacent and gentle – who without fail visited Mae once a week. He was short and plump, with black patent-leather hair and an affable smile. He wore a ring on his little finger, which Mae coveted for Tony. If Mae wanted something, she got it. She campaigned for the ring every time he visited: she wheedled for it; she was petulant; she was pleading . . .

One day she called me in to look at it. He stuck his hand out to show me and I obediently admired it. It was a heavy gold signet ring with a fair-sized diamond and it was embedded in the plump flesh of his finger.

He was gazing at his own hand in admiration when Mae suddenly declared, ‘You come up here giving me a measly few quid and all the time you tell me you love me! I don’t believe you. You’d better not come any more.’

He looked from one to the other of us, trying to detect if Mae was joking. She turned her back on him, her shoulders heaving, and put her hands to her eyes. He knew what would be required to prove his affection to be genuine.

‘Look, Mae,’ he began desperately, ‘I never wanted to hurt your feelings but I couldn’t give it to you even if I wanted to; it won’t come off. If I could get it off, you could have it.’

This polite excuse was obvious for what it was, but Mae whirled round instantly.

‘I’ll get it off,’ she said.

I took pity on the man, whose only crime was to gamble on Mae’s sense of decorum.

‘But Mae,’ I said. ‘He’s right. It’s bitten right into the flesh. I don’t suppose it’s been off for years.’

‘I can get that ring off,’ she said firmly.

She promptly sat on the bed and pulled the hapless client down beside her.

‘Soap!’ she ordered imperiously.

When I returned, she had his finger in her mouth and was sucking at it furiously. Whatever had been the precursor to this had brought back his usual placid expression.

She sucked and soaped; she pulled and twisted until the little man began to yelp with pain. After about ten minutes they gave simultaneous shouts: his of agony, hers of triumph. She leapt up from the bed, brandishing her prize, and danced round the room holding the ring at arm’s length and twisting it about so the diamond flashed and sparkled. Then she turned to him and crowed jubilantly, ‘Well, you told me I could have it if I could get it off. Didn’t think I could, did you?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ he admitted weakly.

He was clasping his finger tightly; I went over to him and took his hand. The flesh was churned, torn and bleeding. Horrified, I looked across the room at Mae, who was still crooning joyously over her acquisition.

I think I would have found these proceedings sickening had I not thought of Mae as a beautiful animal perfectly suited to its environment. Her cruelty was part of her, as forgivable as that of a cat who could torture a bird before curling, soft and loving, into one’s lap and purring itself into sleep.

I didn’t think we’d see the little man again, but he confounded expectations by continuing to turn up every week. It was much later that I discovered him to be one of the kinks; as Mae put it, ‘He’d plenty more rings in other places.’

She spoke only the truth. The fact was, the flat was becoming gradually cluttered with chains, ropes, bits of electrical flex, adhesive tape and all kinds of other impedimenta. Rather than carry them backwards and forwards, clients would leave them there ready for the next time they called. I tried to keep them in some sort of order, but it was quite hopeless. Mae would borrow from them and other clients would try them out; they never found their way back to where they belonged. However, as each regular could recognise his own toys, I soon stopped bothering. Besides, I was kept busy enough without all that; the peephole in the kitchen wall was creating its own complications. My apprenticeship as maid had much further still to travel.

Seventeen

In one respect, the peephole proved to be a tremendous success. The number of Mae’s regulars swelled as she introduced straight clients to voyeurism as an hors d’oeuvre before taking their place in the bedchamber. Strangely enough, these amateur Peeping Toms never seemed to mind that they would be part of the subsequent show. Maybe it didn’t occur to them; maybe they had confidence in their abilities; maybe the thrill of voyeurism turned into the thrill of exhibitionism.

During the early days, Mae pushed the would-be watchers into the kitchen without taking their money first, relying on my restraining presence. This, of course, required a metaphorical hands-on approach from me. As I stood guard, listening to the hoarse, ecstatic whispers, I was still innocent enough to be embarrassed.

‘Crikey! What a whopper! Oh, my – that is good! Oh, well done, old man! That’s it: harder – harder! Go on, give her what for.’

Sometimes they’d be more graphic. The more gentlemanly of them might remember I could hear them and apologise, but they were in the minority. It was all a bit much, especially as, being in darkness, I couldn’t pretend to be engrossed in some chore or other so as not to notice their remarks. All I could do was stand with my back to the sink and peer into the gloom, coughing slightly if they got too worked up.

The last straw was when a spate of the more enthusiastic peephole aficionados decided, one after the other, to include me in their sport. After the first hand came groping, tarantula-like, towards me, I armed myself with a large, heavy spoon with which I rapped the next over the knuckles. After the fourth man had been sent yelping away, I told Mae she’d have to take their money before putting them into the kitchen; I was strictly front-of-house and wished to remain so.

Establishing a ‘cash before delivery’ system proved to be no problem, and money poured into Mae’s coffers like coins in a What the Butler Saw at high season. She would gauge exactly how long any particular man needed to look through the hole before she took him into the bedroom (some she’d let watch several programmes). By the time she had her client in front of her, he was so excited that her time and effort were halved. True to form, instead of relaxing, she doubled the number of clients. Henry Ford would have been proud of her.

‘Jolly good job you made of that mirror,’ she said at the end of the first week. ‘I don’t know how I managed without it.’

‘It’s all very well for you,’ I complained, ‘but it’s put years on me.’

She took my face between her hands, kissed me on the forehead and scurried down into the street once more. In the twenty-one years I had spent on earth before arriving in Soho, I had never encountered such a kiss as I did then.

Straight clients in my charge were difficult enough, needing a great deal of tact and observance to keep them on the simmer without allowing them to either boil over or cool off. My conversation being often misunderstood, I had to be very careful what I said. In my early days, it was not unusual for a man to adopt a shifty expression and edge nearer, saying, ‘Don’t you do it too?’

I liked to get waiting clients seated so the distance between us could not be surreptitiously diminished. I had learned that a seated man gave indications of when his thoughts were bringing him to a dangerous level of excitement. I also discovered the knack of conversing in such a way as to keep a man’s ardour alive but static. The weather was a good subject, in that it left a large enough chunk of his brain free to anticipate sex but not sufficient to make him a trial to me.

With the ‘cash first’ plan working admirably, I supposed I’d be free to sit in the waiting room whenever the kitchen was occupied, which was most of the time. The difficulties came along with the increasing number of ‘slaves’ arriving every weekday (Saturdays were reserved for straight in-and-outers because of the fast trade they provided). Monday to Friday saw the place littered with trussed-up naked men. There was always one in the waiting room, one on the stairs, one in the kitchen . . . Once, when putting a garment away in Mae’s wardrobe, I found one in there too. I was so surprised I said, ‘Oh, I beg your pardon’ and shut the door hurriedly. For a moment, I wondered if I should have knocked. The situation continued to develop until it became necessary to hunt all over every night, prior to going home, in case she’d forgotten to release one or two of her prisoners.

One chap asked to be tied up, covered with a blanket and left in the bedroom while Mae carried on working. This caused no problem for three or four customers, but then one arrived who objected to the inert, breathing lump in the corner of the room.

‘I know he can’t see anything,’ he explained patiently. ‘But I don’t like eavesdroppers.’

So between us, Mae and I carried the unwanted bundle into the kitchen and dumped it next to the man who was then currently at the peephole.

When having to share the waiting room with any of these roped, handcuffed or fettered figures, I would try to read or do a crossword puzzle, but it was very difficult to concentrate. Sometimes I recited to myself the bracing words of Kipling’s ‘If’, but to no avail. One of the things I didn’t like about them was the baleful way they stared at me. I found the whole thing so silly; after all, they had brought the ropes, they had paid to lie bound on my waiting room floor or hang crucified in the doorway, and yet as soon as they had achieved their heart’s desire, they seemed to be blaming me for their predicament – at least, those of them who retained a spirit of aggression in their degradation, as distinct from the small minority of out-and-out masochists.

Ever the artist, I recall studying one of our victim’s contours, wondering if I might one day paint a heroic picture full of roped prisoners. Suddenly I realised, with a twinge of excitement, that no painter I’d seen had ever depicted a tied-up man truthfully. They hadn’t caught the correct colours of the hands and feet – ours were always blue. I was so thrilled with my discovery, I wanted to share it with someone there and then. Naïvely, I was about to tell the man himself, though since he was strung up to a hook in the ceiling, maybe a chat about art was not paramount in his mind. As I looked up eagerly to his face, he spat at me. What he wanted, of course, was that I should leap across the room and belt him one, but he was wasting his saliva.

I wiped myself clean and pondered. I was here in a prostitute’s waiting room, contemplating the colour of a masochist’s trussed feet. Would I ever stay true to my vocation and return to art, or had I truly forfeited all of that by my choice of lifestyle? This was not, or not yet, a question about whether I would stay in Soho. I would; I knew I would. I would no sooner abandon Mae and Rita and Benzy Nell and the ever-capable Prudence and the cross-dressing Vera and all the rest of that colourful crew than I would choose to go and live on the moon.

I went home that night in quiet and reflective mood.

Eighteen