West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and Its Working Girls (25 page)

After the customers had gone, he washed the glasses while she slumped in a corner, ranting at him in a slurred monotone that came to us via the fug of cigarette smoke wafting out through the open door. Some of her comments were fairly stock ones, not taxing her imagination too much but nevertheless satisfying her vitriolic mood:

‘You’re a filthy, rotten, stinking little bastard. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes, dear.’

Others were marginally more poetic:

‘You’re a smelly, snivelling little snail, a crawling, lousy little worm . . . a moronic coward who should have been stamped on at birth. Aren’t you?’

Whatever the accusation, when his cue came, the answer was always the same:

‘Yes, dear.’

If it was claimed the enterprise went gradually downhill from the opening night, it would be more accurate to say it was pushed off a cliff. After-hours drinks briefly provided a parachute, but not for long. Some six months after that first
‘Da-a-a-arling!’
graced our ears, the police raided the club and took away their licence. We quite missed them, really, but on the whole, agreed that our life was hectic enough without them.

Soon after the club had shut, some men came to remove the jukebox. It became wedged halfway along the passage, where the wall bellied out and narrowed the passageway that vital inch. The two removal men were sweating and swearing. They were only six feet from victory, but no amount of pushing or heaving would budge it. Mae needed to get out to provide something for a peephole punter to be voyeuristic about. Annoyed at being blocked in to the corridor, she surveyed the scene and gave helpful advice.

‘You’ll never get it out that way; the chaps who brought it pulled it up through the window on ropes.’

‘
Now
she tells us,’ said one of the men, wiping a streaming brow.

‘Well I’m not your bleeding guv’nor,’ said Mae. ‘How long’s the damn thing going to be stuck here?’

After a short conference, the two men decided that the only thing to be done was to break the jukebox down into smaller pieces. The man on the door side was the obvious choice to go and fetch a big hammer.

‘God knows where from!’ he muttered as he went.

Mae came and conveyed all this news to me and the expectant voyeur in the kitchen. Seeing his forlorn expression, the ever-resourceful Mae went down and chatted up the marooned removal man as a convenient stand-in.

So Mae got herself another client, the peephole functioned again and everyone was happy, except the owner of the jukebox – although it hadn’t done the hearts and coronets on the wall much good either.

Twenty-Four

Mae always spent her Sundays at home, washing her hair and her undies and lying around reading the
News of the World
and the
People
– newspapers that served the underworld as trade papers. She often arrived on Mondays, flapping a copy and chortling over how the doings of someone she knew had been reported before giving me the real story. I think Sundays bored her; she had no hobbies or real interests and Tony wasn’t the most exhilarating of companions. She lived for her work and looked on time off as an irritating interruption to her life.

Most of the girls felt that way and a lot of them preferred not to take time off at all. Because I was known to live alone, my Sundays were treated as ‘on call’ time; I was often asked to deputise for those maids who had deserted their posts in favour of their families. Actually, I found these one-day stands quite pleasant; Sundays were very quiet for business in Soho; there was no real work involved and plenty of time to chat. Besides, having a pretext to leave my room was welcome to me. I still hadn’t so much as opened a tube of paint, or drawn a line on my single precious canvas. If I was being fiercely honest with myself, any thoughts I’d once had of becoming a painter had become mere delusions. Being able to leave my room, lock my door, and go out to work at least provided me with a tangible reason for not touching paint or canvas that day.

Unlike my weekdays with Mae, my ‘Sunday girls’ didn’t tend to hustle on the street. Maybe the shadow of religion prevented them or, more likely, they were very obvious in the quiet streets and they resented being viewed as a tourist attraction. Working on my day off, I at least allowed myself the indulgence of being particular about my employers. Some, I found, were not to my taste.

The angelic-looking Lou, for example: I went to her once and once only. As the only nymphomaniac on the game that I ever met, she would spend at least an hour with each client, which left very little socialising time and made the day drag for me. As if this wasn’t dull enough, she expended so much energy on sex that in the time between, she was in a state of permanent lethargy.

Like most of the girls, Lou was quite happy to regard herself as bisexual, but she was predatory with it. I had first-hand experience of this. After all, I had no boyfriend, so what was I? She would regard me coyly and invitingly through fluttering curled eyelashes, but to no avail. After my Sunday stint with her, she phoned to say she’d got a rich male all-nighter who wanted an orgy with two girls; Mae accepted the job and Lou asked if I’d like to tag along as referee. I thanked her kindly and said no.

It was some time later that Lou’s voracious appetite for sex was to save the day for us. I found Mae counselling a genteel woman, looking distinctly nervous, who had made her way up to the flat after extreme hesitation. She haltingly told us that her husband, whom she’d adored, had died two years earlier. The loneliness was terrible, but she’d coped with that, up to a point, by taking up work in charitable organisations. We waited patiently while she told us all this. Perhaps Mae had already guessed what she was leading to. The woman had, she said, always been a very passionate person, and had reached a point where she could no longer abstain from sex. To practise it alone was abhorrent to her, and the prospect of sex with another man still felt like a betrayal. Lamely, and with some embarrassment, she concluded that perhaps she could find a woman she could visit from time to time.

‘It might just work out for me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what else to do.’

We restored her with a cup of tea, and Mae stopped everything, took her round and introduced her to Lou.

Sadie the Sadist was another of my Sunday stand-ins. She was dark and slim, with a certain natural aggressiveness about her that must have come in useful. Her flat was a veritable temple to ‘Chastisement, Punishment and Correction’. Had the Spanish Inquisition employed women, Sadie would have been first past the selection panel. There were manacles fixed to the walls; there were stocks and pillories – one to take the head and wrists between two planks and one that fastened the prisoner to a vertical stake with rings; there was a rack, a cage and an enormous, sombre black oak cross that she frequently threatened to nail men to.

As well as these items of furniture, she kept whips of every description – tawses, cats-o’-nine-tails, birches and a range of canes. The first time I saw Sadie’s flat, I marvelled at the things men would pay for. But if you like that sort of thing, I had to admit that it was a beautiful set-up.

The Sundays I spent with sweet, innocent Cindy were like days spent with a younger sister. She was only eighteen and Scottish, with that lovely, soft ‘D’ye no ken?’ sort of accent. She was coltish and pretty and I was very fond of her.

On those long, quiet Sundays, she told me many things about herself. Not so very long before, when she was a kid in Scotland, she had belonged to the Salvation Army and had to sing in the streets with them – ‘Wi’ one o’ the bliddy bonnets on me haid.’ She’d been brought up in an ordinary working-class home, but longed for the gorgeous clothes she saw in magazines. She’d come to London with the sole purpose of acquiring them by whatever means was quickest, and prostitution was exactly what she’d been looking for.

She had no regrets – none of the girls I knew had – and her ambition to own a dress shop was looking attainable. Her ponce was a real rarity: a young Maltese who was fond of her, a nice man who made sure she was happy all the time. He always left her with more than enough money and she always looked like a fashion plate. That, and her youth, ensured she had plenty of clients, without making much effort – if any at all.

In contrast to Lou, Cindy was undersexed and told me that she didn’t get anything at all out of ‘this sex lark’. Sometimes, when she had a young, good-looking client, she let him stay longer in the hope he might give her some sort of thrill, but it was never any good. She knew sex was supposed to be exciting, and she felt deficient. She acted her part well, the mask only slipping when those same handsome young men came again and, thinking they’d made a hit with her, expected to pay less. They were sent packing, wondering what they’d done to inspire her rage.

Her sharp temper was typical of those demure people who flare up only when necessary. I saw it in action when she bundled one client out through the bedroom door. He had arrived looking very smart but was now the stuff of Whitehall farce: he was trying to rescue his trousers from below his knees with one hand, while the other made quick, nervous snatches at the jacket she thrust at him. His crime? He had apparently ‘tekked off his trews and felt ma titties’ before he’d paid her. He wasn’t allowed back.

There was a modesty to Cindy that I found touching. Once, there was a particularly risqué film on at one of the West End’s more notorious cinemas. It caused a furore, though today it might be the stuff of Saturday-afternoon TV. I asked Cindy if she’d seen it. ‘No,’ she said, utterly seriously, ‘my boyfriend says it’s not fit for me to see.’

One late Sunday in December, business was extremely quiet. The run-up to Christmas had led men to suppose they should be spending money on their families rather than on Soho prostitutes. Cindy said that she’d like to try out the efficacy of an old whores’ superstition: scatter salt, pepper and mustard on the stairs and it would magically draw customers. We each mixed half a cupful and, like flower maidens strewing petals, gleefully threw little handfuls about. To our astonishment, it worked! No sooner had we done it than we heard footsteps. We were slightly nervous about our success, but we continued to flavour our stairs till they got quite gritty and nasty – and each time we did it, it worked.

Cindy’s boyfriend didn’t have to spend an awful lot on her clothes. Of those she actually purchased, most were bought on impulse and usually weren’t very expensive things. The really snazzy section of her wardrobe was built up in quite a different way. She got on extremely well with a contingent of gay men who, apart from adoring her, also happened to be proficient shoplifters.

She spent part of each day browsing round her beloved dress shops, noting the details of a dress here and a coat there . . . All she needed to do was describe these garments, and in virtually no time at all they would be laid at her feet. She usually gave her shoplifters a small fraction of the actual price to keep them happy, and in this way she acquired the most fabulous wardrobe

Working for so many different girls on Sundays made life even more of a variety show. I must have run the gamut of every type of girl there was and every sort of working place that had a roof over it. The next act was more suited to the Grand Guignol than cheery music hall.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me present Tearaway Tina!

If there was anyone more outrageous than Mae, it was Tina. To say she was an undesirable acquaintance is no exaggeration, but I did not know how undesirable until she had become fascinating to me and it was too late to avoid her. Every bad character trait it is possible to have – venality, mendacity, malevolence – Tina had. Any therapist trying to rehabilitate her would have had to go back a long way before he found any signs of bedrock to start building upon.

Tina seemed to be larger and taller than she really was; her figure was better in appearance than reality and her looks were deceptively attractive. Behind this impression there was nothing more than a lot of black hair and a gigantic, drug-induced personality. She loved false eyelashes to the extent that she always wore three pairs at a time. As a result, her eyelids were so heavy she had to tilt her head back to see. This gave her a challenging, aggressive appearance that was at least in keeping with her challenging, aggressive personality.

She loved wigs and hairpieces as long as they were black. Assisted by these, she built her hair into massive edifices set off with huge rococo gilt earrings. Her offstage self was disconcertingly different: in dowdy clothes, she turned into a sallow, sharp-faced, suspicion-ridden mouse to whom no one would have given a second glance. This was probably necessary, because, like Cindy’s gay friends, most of her mornings were spent in shoplifting.

She came from a perfectly respectable family, and it was from one of her sisters that I gleaned facts about her background. Tina had begun life in a large family in the north of England. Her father was immensely respected in his neighbourhood and her brothers and sisters all grew up to be solid citizens with responsible jobs. By the time I got to know Tina, her sister was the only member of her family still speaking to her. The sister was a nicely spoken, intelligent woman who regarded Tina with awed puzzlement, no doubt wondering whether it was totally wise to remain on friendly terms with her.