Up West (38 page)

The landings of the various blocks of flats were a refuge for girls without a flat to take their clients to. ‘There were no prostitutes in our flats [Newport Dwellings],' remembers Sonia Boulter, ‘but they were around, you know, and late at night you'd get the ones who weren't the regulars come in, and sometimes you might find them on the stairs. My dad used to throw them out when he came home from work in the middle of the night.'

As I seemed to spend an awful lot of time watching street scenes, I soon came to recognize the regular working girls and they recognized me. You could always tell them from the rest of the female population, because they were much better dressed. What's more, they – or, more than likely, their pimps – had the kind of money and contacts that allowed them to circumnavigate the rigid restrictions of rationing by buying
from expensive black market traders. Some girls would carry a bunch of keys that they would rattle to attract the attention of passing men. Others would simply offer to ‘do business' in quiet voices heavy with a variety of accents.

For me and for others, the girls on the street were a reassuring presence. They seemed to love kids, as did many Sohoites, and I made quite a profit out of my platinum blond curls, big blue eyes and, later, a passing resemblance to the infant Princess Anne. The working girls would take me for ice cream and slip me the odd threepenny bit, silver sixpence or shilling, or sometimes as much as a florin, or even half a crown. How much depended on what they had handy in their purses and how good business had been, I suppose.

I wasn't the only one to profit. ‘The girls used to stand in Newport Court,' remembers Ronnie Mann, ‘and as a kid I went swimming up on Marshall Street and I walked through there, and because I had long, curly hair, one of them used to give me thruppence a week. I don't know why.'

Raye Du-Val, whose parents spent the war years in France working for the Resistance, lived much of his childhood on the Soho streets, and was befriended by several of the girls during the war. ‘They used to buy me things, buy me sweets, and I would keep a look-out for them, I was doing that. Running round the corner for them. Would you get me some fags round the corner, things like that. They adopted me, really. I was like a little errand boy, and they loved me for it.

‘You did things for them and . . . You know, I made quite a bit of cash. In those days, it was like a threepenny old joe or
a silver tanner. Go and fetch the paper for them, something like that. I was busier then than I ever was. I was like a bit of an urchin, really. I got on well with the girls, you know, although I got a few cuffs here and there. Especially when she had a client or something, and I put my head round the door, I got a cuff round the earhole!'

I realize now that some of the women must have had children of their own. Janet Vance grew up in rooms in a top floor flat on the corner of Frith Street and Bateman Street, across from the Dog and Duck pub, which is still there today, and a cigarette factory, which isn't. ‘We had one of the flats on the second floor and the other one, it was girls, prostitutes. They didn't work from there, but different girls did in the two flats on the first floor. There were two maids, Mina and Tina, they were twins, Italians. ‘One of the girls was called Mitzi and she always used to say that she worked as a prostitute to keep her daughter at a private school, and that was where the money was going.'

The women that I came to think of as ‘casuals' would come to London from other places, work the streets for a few days, then go home to their children with enough money to tide them over until the next working visit. Others had had children that they'd been forced, by their pimps and circumstances, to have adopted. Some girls from the country and overseas had children left in the care of relatives back home, and they only got to see them when their pimps allowed them short holidays.

The one thing all these mothers had in common was
that they missed their children dreadfully. They longed to be ‘ordinary' wives and mothers, and snatched any spare moments with local children they'd taken a shine to – like me.

‘They used to take me out,' Jeff Sloneem remembers. ‘Quite a few of them had cars, and they used to park their cars in the car park [on a bomb site in Dean Street] and then do whatever they were going to do. Quite a lot of them took me out to tea at Lyons Corner House, and sometimes in the country, for rides in their cars. I suppose I was the little boy they never had.'

The girls also made it their business to protect the local children. My father was in the habit of abandoning my mother for various periods of time to take up with other women and I remember cowering in my bed when Father was terribly drunk and engaged in a furious and violent row with his latest mistress. They were going at it hammer and tongs and the altercation culminated in my father throwing her down the stairs. The fall broke several of her ribs, or so she claimed; it had certainly been a very violent row. I was so frightened that I ran in to the street in my nightie looking for help. The local prostitutes rescued me, calmed me down, organized a taxi to take the woman to hospital, forcibly relieved Father of the money to pay for it and, when he looked as if he was coming up for round two, slung him down the stairs for good measure. Then they took it in turns to sit with me until Father had sobered up enough to be thoroughly chastened and, more importantly, safe to resume his childcare duties.

‘They were very good, actually, to us kids,' remembers Sonia Boulter. ‘They knew us, a lot of us, by name. If anybody spoke to you – and you did get that, in those days, like a dirty old man – they would say, “Leave them alone.” They would, you know, protect us.

‘I was going down Gerrard Street to school, and there was a tramp sitting outside the post office there. She had everything around her, and a cup of tea in her hand, and as we walked past her, she started swearing and saying things, and she threw the tea over us. One of the prostitutes saw it and she came down and she really tore her off a strip for doing it, you know, “Leave those kids alone!” because she wasn't a regular, the tramp.'

Janet Vance agrees. ‘They were always nice to us kids. If they were working and anyone came up to them when the kids were there, they'd just tell the blokes to move off. They were great. We never had any arguments with them and they always kept an eye out, and your parents, my mum, when she used to go shopping, used to ask them to keep an eye on me, and they'd keep an eye, as simple as that. They were great. No hassle whatsoever. Nobody interfered with them, and they didn't interfere with us.

‘The decent ones didn't come out 'til seven or eight at night, when they knew near enough that the kids were on their way indoors. On winter nights, obviously, the kids went in early, but they were out – they didn't work while the kids were around that little bit.'

The working girls were not only protective of us little girls.
‘They used to be on the corners, and they used to know us,' John Carnera recalls. ‘Because we lived there, they'd see us every day. And sometimes, when I was a bit older, and got a little bit tipsy, they'd take me home. “You live at number 45. This is where you belong.” They were very good. Lovely ladies.'

Mel Edwards, whose father was landlord of a Covent Garden pub, had cause to be grateful to a prostitute. Apparently, there was a vicious knife fight going on in an alley that he was about to use as a short cut. A woman stepped out of a doorway and barred his way, recommending as she did so that he take the longer route. ‘If I'd walked in to that lot, I could have wound up dead, and she knew it,' he told me.

One or two of the girls did very well for themselves. Raye Du-Val remembers ‘a little one called Fifi – it really was her name – a little French girl, she was beautiful. She would come up to my flat, I would go up to hers. No monkey business, like – I didn't want to know. She used to come down to my place, the nights she wasn't working, and she told me a wonderful story.

‘This guy would come up once a fortnight, a very wealthy guy, and he'd give her 300 in readies, didn't want to know about sex, didn't want anything. In fact he tried to wean her off. The story goes, lovely man, his wife was a cripple; he'd tell Fifi straight, “I'm not here for sex, or anything like that, I just want to talk. I go home, she doesn't even know who I
am.” He was a businessman, and do you know, he left her two million pounds. She got one of her kids educated at Roedean, and she had another girl at another posh school.'

Jack Glicco remembers a French girl called Jeanette, in
Madness after Midnight
, who had a ‘fascinating accent and a body that was sheer perfection'. She stood out because of her charm and loveliness, but also because she escaped what he considered to be a virtually inevitable end. She kept her career brief, ‘about a year, during which time she must have made a small fortune, then she left to marry a wealthy and respectable stockbroker. Wise girl. She made sure that she didn't go the same way as many of her friends: to drink or drugs and a poverty-stricken old age when her looks had gone.'

Fifi and Jeanette were very much the exceptions, though. Marthe Watts was originally drawn in to prostitution by the promise of jewels, furs, fine food, good wine and expensive holidays. Although there was an element of this in her life, there was also plenty of squalor, drudgery and misery. The passages in her book,
The Men in my Life
, that cover the Messina years give a flavour of just how uncertain the times were. She estimates that she earned in excess of £150,000 for Gino Messina in an association that lasted more than fifteen years, yet finished her working life with little more than she had begun it with: the clothes she stood up in and maybe a suitcase or two. Certainly, Gino kept the flat she'd paid for, and everything in it.

If Marthe Watts typified the life of the ‘Fifi', Clare's story,
told in the BBC series
Underworld
(first broadcast in 1994), represents the more conventional life of the ‘home-grown' prostitute. Clare came to London as a wide-eyed sixteen-year-old at the end of the Second World War, and soon met her nemesis. ‘He was a very good-looking man: beautiful teeth, gorgeous eyes. He was everything that I dreamed of . . . He asked me would I like a drink. He did, in fact, use the word “ponce”, but I'd never heard it. I was in love, and the material things were very important to me, so I didn't really need much persuading.'

Clare's ponce soon set her up in a flat on the corner of Frith Street and Old Compton Street. On her first day she made about £8. Her ponce called it chicken feed, and lit a cigar with a pleated £1 note. ‘I was broken-hearted. My father at that time was probably earning only eight to ten pounds a week . . . It was a lot of money to me. I wanted to make more. I wanted to prove I was better than other ladies. The more I made, the happier he was, and the happier he was, the happier I was. Stupid.'

Clare worked the short-time rule. The number of clients she had in a day ‘varied: sometimes twenty, it could be thirty. It could even be more. He was a mad gambler, and I would say without a doubt that most of his money would go, in fact, on gambling.'

Her ponce demanded total obedience as well as all the cash, and was jealous of Clare. ‘I wasn't allowed to speak to any of the other girls at that time. He didn't want me to go with the Americans or young men. They had to be, as he called them,
like middle-aged and older.' By the time she quit prostitution she was thoroughly disillusioned. ‘It's a dangerous life, it's a dirty life, and above all you become cold towards men. It spoils you for later on in life, when you could be giving and receiving love.

‘I've seen so many women die in that life – actually murdered – and the girls that I've known to be murdered, up to this present time, I've never ever heard that they've found the person or persons that murdered them. So you're a nothing. You're a nobody.'

In the morally hidebound Britain of the fifties and sixties, when having a baby out of wedlock made a woman a moral defective in the eyes of many, it was often seen as a waste of police time to spend it investigating the deaths of women who were ‘asking for it' by selling sex for money. There would be no public outcry or pressure from the powers that be if the killer was never brought to book. To many of the punters and the pimps, as well as a lot of policemen, the girls were not really human, simply ‘items on the club owners' list of equipment,' commodities to be bought and sold in the marketplace. If they perished, they received about as much attention as the bruised fruit mouldering in the gutters of Berwick Street. Their bodies were simply something to be cleaned up and forgotten about.

A woman I befriended in the seventies told a similar story. ‘I knew a girl, beaten to death she was, and dumped like a sack of rubbish on a bomb site. Everyone knew she was one of Big Frank's girls, but nobody said nothing. Well, you
couldn't, could you? I mean, we all thought that Big Frank had done her, or one of his blokes, and nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of them. Not even the police. But then, Big Frank was paying them a bloody fortune to keep their noses out of his business. Everyone knew that.'

My friend had got out of prostitution by the time I got to know her. ‘I wanted to get out of the game for years before I was able to do it. I felt dirty in the end, you know, sort of rotten on the inside. I was only able to get out when I did because my looks had long gone, and I wasn't making enough money to suit my bloke. He traded me in for a younger girl in the end, and let me go.'

Although it's usual for the girls to regret the life they lived, and most of them have horror stories to tell, literally everybody I talked to who spent their early years in the West End had their own memories of the girls on the streets, and none of them were negative. Some, such as John Carnera, empathized, ‘It was seedy in a way, but yet innocent in many other ways. The girls that I particularly remember were on the corner of Dean Street and Bateman Street. There was a couple there that I knew – I mean, I saw one of them grow old. It was a terrible life. I don't know how many punters they used to see a day, but you could see them visibly age.'