West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and Its Working Girls (21 page)

This type of uniform in the kitchen would, of course, be enough to cool the passions of the most ardent customer, so I had to make sure the door was shut tight. I learnt this lesson after a client once crept up without my hearing him. He peeped through the gap in the door and alerted us to his presence with a sudden intake of breath. By the time we’d turned, he was scampering down the stairs at breakneck speed. The friendly bobby gave a snort of amusement.

‘If he was better acquainted with the law, he’d know that what he was about is quite legal.’ The front door slammed very loudly and he added, ‘I suppose I could book him for disturbing the peace.’

The police had a tolerant attitude towards the girls, whom they regarded as necessary evils. Over the years an agreement had been reached whereby it was understood that arrests must be made (because it was the done thing), but not too often (because that wasn’t kind). It wasn’t particularly warranted, because those girls who did break the law by soliciting on the street seldom got desperate enough to actually accost a man; they hardly ever blocked the pavement, stripped in public or hurled abuse after men who weren’t interested. A girl could advertise herself simply by doing nothing more than twirling her keys. Likely men were sometimes asked if they were looking for a good time – even then a cliché – or sometimes, more candidly, a short time.

Mae’s old friend Rita was one exception to this code of conduct. I was on an errand when I was treated to the sight of her making a most ladylike approach to a passing man. After he’d given her a short brush-off, she persisted, walking beside him a little way, making sweet blandishments in a wee, demure voice. The man told her to get off the pavement, and in an instant Miss Sweetness turned into a shrieking banshee.

‘Get off the pavement? I’m not fucking getting off the fucking pavement, you fat sod!’

Assault and battery followed, using her handbag to emphasise her point. I don’t think she normally went that far and I wondered if the violence had been provoked by her embarrassment at my having seen her being refused.

Every now and again a newspaper, short on lucrative horrors, would ‘discover’ that Soho was full of prostitutes. This revelation would necessitate some Member of Parliament or other proclaiming that something must be done. Senior police officers would be told to do it – whatever it was – and then everybody could forget about it again. Everybody, that is, apart from the police rank and file, who had their orders and must be seen to be carrying them out. They endeavoured to do this without allowing the scandal sheets, the MPs and their own superiors to do any real damage. Being on the game therefore meant knowing the rules and occasionally landing on ‘Go directly to jail without passing Go’.

Naturally, some kind of balance had to be reached. Just as the police didn’t want to hang around all day waiting for a catch, the girls didn’t want them there, frightening off the customers.

To solve this problem, a sort of rota system developed whereby every two or three weeks – depending on age, circumstance and convenience – a girl was expected to more or less deliver herself up for arrest. The procedure was that, in a perfectly friendly fashion, the policeman would approach the girl and say, ‘It’s about time we took you in, you know.’ The girl then had to accompany him to Bow Street police station for a charge to be made out. She had the choice of walking with him all the way along Long Acre, gauntleted by the curious glances of passers-by, or paying for a taxi to take them there. Mae occasionally came rushing up from the street saying, ‘Quick, give us some money. I’ve just been nicked.’ I would hand her a couple of pounds from the takings and off she would hurry. About an hour later she would be back with her bail slip – and another client.

Paradoxical though it may seem, the arresting officer would be quite sympathetic to the excuse that there were far too many men about to waste time going to the police station to be charged with prostitution. Accommodating this would mean the girl was morally obliged to be caught in the act the following day. This respectable arrangement kept both sides happy until one or the other party attempted to cheat.

Mae often came close to risking the wrath of the local police, especially now she’d started borrowing from Betty Kelly and had to work solidly. If she knew her arrest time was due and the expectant officer was hovering about, she would avoid him by walking in the opposite direction. Sometimes she would only go out as far as the front door and entice men in from there – or even from the window on some occasions. However, these were simply delaying techniques, and she would take her turn at Bow Street as soon as she could fit it into her busy schedule. Younger and newer girls, who perhaps didn’t appreciate the beauty of the system and avoided arrest indefinitely, found themselves taken in as often as twice a week until such time as they learned.

From the girls’ point of view, the drawback of getting nicked was not the stigma of the public seeing how they earned a living, nor was it having to fork out for a fine or even the taxi fare to the police station: it was having to get up early to appear at the magistrates’ court. It must be said that even in this, the Law might have been thought reasonable, but ten o’clock – the usual appointed time – was the middle of the night to these women, and lack of sleep would seriously affect their work. A man is not likely to choose a prostitute who propositions him with a yawn.

At court, notwithstanding the unsociable hour, the girls chatted away together cosily while they waited for their names to be called. Their real names, bellowed from the mouth of a burly sergeant-usher, were distinctly less colourful than their professional ones. This was, essentially, their ‘backstage’, and they didn’t bother to wear make-up or to pout prettily at a magistrate who had seen it all before so many times. (In fact, very few prostitutes ever bothered to wear make-up outside of business hours.) Appearing after the drunks, they would exchange news and catch up with each other’s gossip before enduring the ten seconds or so it took to put their crimes to them and decide on suitable punishment (usually a two-pound fine with the alternative of a week in jail if they preferred ). Exactly what public good it all did is hard to say, but it seemed to keep everyone happy.

First offenders could be a bit of nuisance, for in deference to the older, more experienced members of the sisterhood, the Law found it necessary to point out their status. As an apprentice, the fine was reduced to ten shillings, after which it became one pound, only reaching the full two pounds at the third ‘offence’. Very occasionally, the conga-like procession was disrupted by a girl being pedantic enough to plead not guilty. This foolishness, of course, led to the need for evidence and cross-examination. True, as there were never any independent witnesses – especially a curious absence of the men who were supposed to have been annoyed – it was likely that the accused would be vindicated. However, the arresting officer was robbed of the notch on his truncheon, the court’s coffers were denied their two pounds and the magistrate was annoyed at the waste of the court’s time. Again, repeated arrests over the next few weeks generally persuaded the miscreant that pleading guilty from time to time was the right and proper thing to do.

After court, everyone had time to kill; it was not worth going back home and it was too early to start work. Mae would usually arrange for me to meet her at the hairdresser’s – Gaby’s in Shaftesbury Avenue. It was where all the girls went; in fact, I never saw anyone ‘straight’ there: just girls and their maids. As it was in a basement, passers-by probably didn’t even know it was there.

Gaby’s had none of the glamour one associates with beauty parlours. It was strictly a ‘three-sink, two-dryer’ sort of place. No two towels were alike; the two laconic women who made up the staff wore different overalls and wouldn’t so much as knock the ash from their fags for you – but they were friendly enough. A newcomer might have supposed that no staff were in attendance at all and a roster system had propelled these two into their role for the day. It wasn’t unusual to find one of them with her own hair in curlers. Perhaps because of this, the place had a cosy, kitchen feel about it, especially as there were always cups of tea on the go, made on the spot by anyone who felt like bothering. The girls sometimes sent their maids to get sandwiches from a little café nearby. Two or three hours spent in Gaby’s was a happy time – a sort of return to the cradle. Tired after rising before midday, we would drowse in the steamy warmth, sprawling amongst the clutter of damp towels, basins, bowls and kicked-off shoes.

The lazy, random conversations that took place in Gaby’s never aimed beyond the mundane but occasionally rose above it. One day, a girl who was in the tedious process of having her hair ‘pinned up’ and was making a half-hearted onslaught on her fingernails addressed the room in general:

‘I had some geezer the other day who brought his wife up with him – only wanted her to watch him perform with me! I told him, “I should bloody cocoa!” Some people just haven’t got any morals.’

All the girls fully agreed with her sentiments and most brought forward other examples of this type of debauchery. They fell to musing on what made couples want to do such a disgusting thing. One girl said that a pair came to her once who were an engaged couple. The man wanted to show his allegedly virginal fiancée what would be involved once they were married. All the girls were terribly shocked at this story; they tut-tutted and gasped their disapproval.

From that, the conversation veered to men who brought their womenfolk to Soho – usually at weekends – just to point out the girls to them. On Sundays, the streets had apparently become so cluttered with these nuisances that the working girls preferred to stay inside and rely on clients calling.

‘Like we was on show at Madame Tussaud’s!’ one girl said.

It would be easy to see these protestations as comic, but in truth the girls had their own dignity and knew when it was being insulted. I never heard any of them tell rude jokes. Perhaps, I thought at the time, it’s because their whole life is really like one big rude joke and telling one would be rather like talking shop – or perhaps the jokes were too close to the truth to seem funny.

It was at Gaby’s that I had my first hairdo, facial and professional manicure, and later, during a mad moment, it was there that Mae persuaded me to go blonde.

‘Go on – it’ll give you confidence,’ she said.

My not replying was taken as assent, and in a flash, my head was smothered with what seemed to be runny plaster of Paris that was left on for about an hour, making ominous crackling and popping noises in my hair. When it was washed off, I arose like Venus from the foam, a dazzling platinum blonde. I could hardly believe my eyes.

The other girls admired the results enthusiastically, and Mae was so pleased with the change it made to my whole appearance that, later, she put me in one of her strapless, long-skirted dresses and made me pose for a photograph. She was, of course, quite right: it did give me more confidence. Unfortunately, it also meant that as well as wearing an apron at work, I now had to wear a headscarf as well to make sure no punters confused me with Mae.

I have been blonde ever since, and often think it appropriate how Mae should have made her mark on me physically, the way she had already done emotionally. I was a new woman now, in more ways than one.

Twenty

For all Mae’s careful instructions to her clients with regard to the Christmas presents she wanted, she wasn’t around to see if any of them bore fruit, because when Christmas came, she was in hospital.

For a while she had complained of sharp pains in her stomach. Then, quite suddenly one night, she had woken in agony and been rushed into Casualty. It was found that she had an ectopic pregnancy that had ruptured.

The phone woke me at six that morning with an agitated Tony at the other end to give me the news. I had no doubt he was responsible for her condition. I felt furious at him, and resented the whining way in which he implored me to go and visit her to ‘help keep her spirits up’. But of course, I took the necessary particulars of where she was and the visiting times.

I went to see her that same evening and was shocked by her waxy face and listlessness. She had tubes running into her from all directions, and was evidently extremely ill. But Tony’s greatest worry was that the flat would be eating rent without producing anything in return. I was not surprised, therefore – though still appalled – when he telephoned me to say he’d found another girl and maid who would be glad to take it over for the month Mae was going to be away. As an afterthought he added, ‘But what about you? Do you want I should find a girl without a maid?’

He sounded so anxious that I shouldn’t upset his speedy arrangements that I toyed with the idea of breaking his heart by saying yes. On second thoughts, I contemplated time off and getting back to my painting: this was my chance. As our replacements were to move in that same afternoon, I raced over to put all Mae’s personal things into the waiting room and lock it. After that, I stayed on in town to get myself a canvas and a few bits of art material. It felt strange to be buying these things from my old life and old ambitions. The empty canvas felt both extraordinarily inviting – a New World of its own, an undiscovered territory waiting for me to map it – and also alien. What had it, after all, to do with the life I led now?