West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and Its Working Girls (29 page)

Afterwards, I wished I’d risen to the occasion and bobbed a curtsey, saying, ‘Goodbye, ma’am. So pleased to have given satisfaction, I’m sure.’

Mae returned to work without the slightest trace of a tan, but I had been wrong in assuming she’d been in Blackpool. She said she’d spent most of the time playing cards with Tony’s brother’s girl, Lulu. Otherwise, she said, she would have gone mad with boredom; she wasn’t surprised Tony had left the place.

‘Nothing to do, and that heat! It’s enough to drive you potty!’

Apart from Tony’s brother, Guido, she made no mention of Tony’s relatives. I concluded that he hadn’t seen fit to introduce her to them.

She gave me a Maltese lace tablecloth and a bottle of duty-free Chanel No. 5 and then threw herself into work.

‘I’m really going to get down to some hard graft now. Tony wants me to retire as soon as we’ve got enough money behind us.’

There were two events that marked Mae’s return, the first of which was that the café owner below – still Toffee-nose to us – got done for receiving stolen goods.

‘I always knew there was something funny about him,’ said Mae. ‘What a bloody cheek to act so high and mighty when he’s no better than anyone else.’

A short while later, the ‘bistro’ was taken over and turned into a sensible, no-nonsense caff by someone with a much more realistic eye to business, and from then on, it did a roaring trade, whilst Toffee-nose did time.

The second event – perhaps ‘event’ is the wrong word to use for something that began so quietly and insidiously – was that Mae began to get hooked on a mixture of amphetamines and barbiturates: pills known then as Purple Hearts. During Mae’s boring holiday, Guido’s Lulu had claimed that, besides making her feel lively in the same way that Benzedrine or Dexedrine did, Purple Hearts made her feel sexy. Because of them, she said, she could earn a bomb every day.

On her first day back, Mae was all impatient until Lulu arrived with a small quantity of pills for her to experiment with.

‘You’ll only need one at a time,’ she warned her. ‘They’re very strong.’

‘They might be for you – but not for me,’ Mae boasted – and she swallowed two. ‘These sort of things don’t have any effect on me unless I take plenty. I swallowed a whole Benzedrine inhaler last Christmas, and even that didn’t do much, did it, Babs?’

She caught sight of my face and, very sensibly, didn’t wait for an answer.

She went on, ‘I bet I’ll have to take three or four before I feel any different.’

And with that, a new era dawned – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the effects of being ponced showed themselves in their true colours for the first time. It was money that bound Tony to Mae; it was drugs that Mae relied on to keep up her earning power. We were in the early stages of the endgame and I think I knew it.

In the past, I had sometimes wondered whether I could cope with much more of Mae’s hectic business extensions; I now began to look back on those days as comparatively peaceful and tranquil.

After a month, she was eating Purple Hearts like sweets. Long before that, though, working conditions had become unbearable: Mae had permanently flushed cheeks, her speech was frenetic and she was subject to sudden impulses and the craziest of whims.

Several times I tried pleading with her to stop taking the things, and she would say, ‘All right, love – to please you’ or, ‘But I’ve only had one all day’. Once, she handed me the bottle and told me that she would take no more. All that came of this gesture was that, for a while, she took them secretly from another bottle.

Naturally, business hotted up and there was a larger-than-ever quota of men – sometimes two rows deep – using the spyhole in the kitchen or trussed up in the waiting room. The landing and the staircase above us were pressed into service as a waiting place. The dogs, too – either or both – were appearing more often and adding to the general pandemonium.

But it was the change in Mae herself that I found most difficult to adjust to. She altered terribly, taking to changing at least one item of her clothing between each client; scuffing through drawers and cupboards and throwing things around in her search for some particular article. When it was found, I was faced with the job of putting everything away again before she returned with the next man. This she did so rapidly that merely trying to keep the place tidy was a killing job.

All and sundry took advantage of her drugged state: the other girls came to borrow clothes and money from her, knowing that in her unnatural exuberance she would forget who had had what. There was nothing whatever I could do to stop it and no conceivable way of reasoning with her.

She had odd dietary fancies, too. ‘Do you know,’ she would say, ‘I don’t half fancy a good old-fashioned stew. Let’s have one tomorrow.’ When tomorrow came and, amongst all the daily turmoil, I had managed to produce one, she didn’t feel like eating. Then she would say, ‘Don’t bring anything tomorrow; we’ll eat out for a change.’ The next day she would feel too busy to go out for a meal but would claim to be ravenous.

Eventually, as she became more loquacious and erratic, the Purple Hearts had an adverse effect on her earning capacity. Clients would be treated to her reminiscences and would find it difficult to get away from her. She wasted valuable time by trying to talk men into doing it twice for double fees, which was as wearing as three fresh men would be.

As her takings diminished, her borrowing from moneylenders increased. Betty Kelly became a far too regular visitor in our little flat, interest payments mounted, and the vicious circle spun faster. Mae’s Persian-lamb coat languished in the pawnshop, soon to be joined by a beautiful sapphire and diamond ring that Tony had given her.

‘I’ll do better with that out of the way,’ she said. ‘Diamonds are unlucky for me.’

She searched for ways to raise money. Faithful Fred, the judo expert, came in for a particular trouncing. She took full advantage of his affection and wheedled extra money out of him every time he visited. To start with it was only ten pounds, but her demands grew to twenty, fifty and eventually a hundred pounds. She described these as ‘loans’, although she knew – and he did too – that she had no intention of paying them back.

Soon after his savings were gone, we received a phone call from his brother to say that Fred was in hospital. He had been teaching an enthusiastic novice a particular judo hold and the novice, in a fit of exhilaration, had broken Fred’s back. The brother told Mae which hospital he was in and how anxious Fred was that she should visit him. Mae made sympathetic-sounding promises, but although Fred lay for months encased in plaster and occasionally sent her pathetic little letters containing oblique requests for a visit, she never did go.

This callousness clouded my feelings towards her. Although I tried to excuse it by the fact that she was in a permanently drugged condition, I knew in my heart that she would have been exactly the same without drugs. I had the cynical feeling that, had Fred not lent her money – which conceivably he might now need back – she would have been willing to visit him.

Nevertheless, I still loved the girl, and although things grew steadily worse, I stuck it out because I felt she needed me. It had always horrified me that apart from Fred and me, everyone else saw her as a glorious, super-deluxe money-making machine. She was such a master of charm that when I felt I couldn’t go on a minute longer, she would slip an arm round me and, rubbing her chin in my hair, say, ‘Poor old Babs. I don’t half give you a time, but you know I love you, don’t you?’ And of course, I was soft putty once more.

Every night when I got home, I fell asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow – and sometimes before. However, there was nothing I could do but follow the path that Mae was marking out.

Twenty-Eight

Tony’s time in Malta had persuaded him that he was no longer safe in Rickmansworth, and so, on their return, he and Mae rented another furnished house, this time in Slough. He didn’t rush into buying another car; instead, he hired different ones, reckoning that continually changing number plates would make it harder for the police to keep tabs on him.

Mae kept pestering me to go and see their new house. ‘You must come and see it,’ she said. ‘We’ve got chickens in the garden. You could stay for the night and have a nice, fresh chooky egg for breakfast.’

I could imagine what sort of a break it would be and avoided her repeated invitations for as long as I could, but the day came when I couldn’t put her off any longer.

‘I’ll think you don’t want to come, soon,’ she complained. ‘I’m fed up with going home and Tony going to bed. I’ve got no one to talk to.’

Obviously, the effects of the Purple Hearts didn’t wear off until long after she got home.

‘All right,’ I said, giving in as cheerfully as I could. ‘What about tonight?’

‘Done.’

At about one thirty in the morning, we arrived outside a seedy-looking semi-detached with a
Chez Nous
-type name board hanging from rusty chains in the porch.

Inside, the wallpaper had taken on a uniformly dun glaze and all the furniture had the appearance of worn suffering. Tony, as usual, had dined out at a reasonable time and was ready for bed. He was more morose than ever and had not spoken at all during the whole journey. Yawning loudly, he ambled across to the chipped stone sink and, leaning against it, gazed around moodily as he drank a cup of water. Then, without a word, he took himself upstairs.

Naturally, the place was superbly messy – Mae lived there, so it would be – and the sink was full of washing-up.

‘Shall I do that for you?’ I asked, gesturing towards it.

‘Certainly not,’ said Mae, indignantly. ‘You’re a guest. Sit down and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea, and then I’m going to cook you a meal.’

With that, she shot a heap of junk off a cottage-type armchair and pushed me into it. She decided we would have cold chicken with bubble-and-squeak.

‘Oh, that’s good. A nice quick meal,’ I said. I was ravenous.

‘Well . . . not really,’ she replied. ‘I haven’t cooked the cabbage and potatoes for the bubble-and-squeak. I thought while they’re boiling I could bleach my hair and do a bit of washing while I’ve got someone to talk to.’

My heart sank. After an hour, I was gnawing at a piece of curling bread and butter and a couple of soft biscuits, still waiting for the bubble-and-squeak – Mae had firmly declined all my frantic offers to help speed things up. For one thing, I was a guest, and for another, she wanted to show me she was capable of being domestic. She bleached her hair, washed her undies and when, at four in the morning, we sat down to our meal, I was almost too exhausted to eat.

I fell into a doze in the armchair, only to be woken – it seemed like minutes later – by Mae telling me brightly that it was time to go into the garden and hunt for my nice fresh chooky egg.

After that night’s ordeal, I tried desperately to avoid further invitations, but despite all my efforts, every three weeks or so I found myself inwardly groaning whilst being transported Slough-wards.

On top of all the other trials caused by the drugs, Mae was not as careful and watchful with clients as she needed to be. Although I could keep a wary eye on those in the waiting room and kitchen, the ones with her in the bedroom were another matter. I had no illusions that any of those squinting through the two-way mirror would rush to her aid if they saw any violence; they were more likely to beat a hasty retreat. As it turned out, when trouble did strike, I was the one who got struck.

Mae had brought a very large bearded chap back and had got as far as taking his money and handing it to me. She was chattering away to him while she undressed, not noticing that he was making no move to do likewise – then, at the point where she was removing her skirt and was therefore hobbled, he rushed out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, in time to see where I was putting the cash. I spun round in surprise, only to meet with a great fist that landed on my jaw and knocked me out. (Afterwards, I learned that he’d stepped over my slumped body, grabbed all the available notes and bolted.) With amazing clarity of mind, Mae rushed to the window, grabbing one of her china cats on the way, threw it open and hurled the cat out, shouting, ‘Stop, thief!’

The man’s timing was ill judged: he ran through the front door and straight into the arms of a policeman. A struggle ensued, during which the policeman lost his helmet and got hit as well. A second policeman arrived on the scene and it was all over. They marched the thief up the stairs and presented him to us, demanding to know what had happened. By this time I had recovered and was nursing my swollen jaw. I glowered at their prisoner and told my story while he glowered back. He was a vicious-looking specimen.

As she had her money back, Mae was all for letting the matter rest. The policemen pressed us to lodge a complaint, but in the period before the court case, they changed their minds. We were told that the bearded giant was about to become an art student; he was down on his luck and was already on probation for robbery. Allegedly, his widowed mother had taken to charring to support him. The policeman who related all this to us had apparently fallen for the man’s sob story.