West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and Its Working Girls (24 page)

Ten minutes later, we were sitting side by side in the casualty department of St Thomas’s. It was just forty-eight hours since she’d drunk that awful cup of tea, but it seemed like weeks ago to me. There were several rows of chairs in which people were dotted about; I gently pushed Mae into one in the front row, instructing her to stay there while I went and spoke to the nurse in charge.

‘All right, Mum!’

She grinned at me. Her new soubriquet for me might have been meant as a joke, but it seemed accurate all the same. The dark hollows of her eyes showed clearly now through the make-up, but she still tapped out a rhythm on the floor with her heels and drummed her fingers on the vacant chair next to her.

I gave a few slightly vague particulars to the nurse, who nodded, looked over my shoulder towards Mae and wrote some notes on a card. She told me to sit down; she’d get someone to see us, so I returned to Mae and collapsed into the chair beside her, relieved that she had stayed put.

The tapping and drumming continued, broken by the occasional ‘Bu . . . u . . . t . . .’ Suddenly she leaned forward, craning her neck to look past me. Then she gave one of her deep, infectious chuckles and clutched my arm.

‘Just look who’s coming,’ she gurgled.

She pointed towards one end of the vast room. Approaching us was a consultant, followed by a gaggle of students hanging on his every word. With white coat fluttering, he was making his awe-inspiring progress along the length of the department; his acolytes walked reverently behind him with hands clasped behind their backs. He had one on each side of him: favourites, no doubt, whose job it was to nod their heads gravely whilst keeping to his exact pace.

‘Recognise who it is?’ Mae chortled, as he came nearer – the procession was soon about to pass right in front of us.

I did indeed. The great man was one of Mae’s regular clients. And only three days earlier, he had presented a ludicrously different image. He had wanted a witness – me, of course – and my memory of this majestic creature was his bare bottom bent over the end of Mae’s bed. He was a pretty experienced masochist and I knew his behind to be a complex road map of scars. Halfway through the session, Mae had thrust the knotted whip into my hands and instructed me to have a go because she was getting tired. The thought of touching those terrible lacerations with anything harsher than cotton wool had defeated me, and I had whispered, ‘Honestly, I couldn’t, Mae.’ She’d snatched the whip back – scornful of my concerns – and proceeded to lay it on with renewed zest in an effort to get the job over with more quickly. A particularly vicious blow proved to be the crowning glory of the session.

‘Oh, that’s wonderful!’ he’d said gratefully.

And now here he was: the high priest in his temple. The moment, he caught sight of Mae’s bouncing blonde curls, her grinning face and my incredulous expression, he turned brick-red and his head attempted to collapse into the safety of his white collar. Had Mae not still been as high as a kite, she doubtless would not have let on that she knew him, but she
was
as high as a kite and it was all great fun.

As he was about to draw level, she gave me a hefty dig in the ribs with her elbow. The red face was now an ugly purple and his waistcoat button appeared to have become the most interesting thing in the whole world.

‘Oh, if only his trousers would fall down and let those young chaps see his arse!’ Mae announced.

At last we were called into a cubicle with a doctor who was, happily, unknown to us. I told him the story of the inhaler. Mae lounged voluptuously in the doorway, ogling him and rolling her hips gently. He blinked at her uncertainly and, transferring his gaze to me, said, ‘You say a whole inhaler?’

‘S’right, love,’ said Mae, smiling provocatively.

‘Do you realise that it’s a wonder you’re not dead by now?’

‘Can’t kill me; I’m as strong as a bleeding horse.’

‘You must be,’ he muttered.

Between us we persuaded her to sit down while he took her blood pressure and sounded her heart. He was the perfect fall guy for her lewdness, and she managed to get him blushing furiously as he hurriedly gave her an injection and declared that he was ‘all done now’.

It was with extreme thankfulness that I unloaded her on to Tony, who collected her now snoring corpse and took it home to bed.

Twenty-Three

All round Mae’s beat there were quaint little shops selling antiques, jewellery and second-hand goods. Here, you could buy a diamond ring, a Georgian washstand, a rusty flat iron or a mouldering top hat. When Mae was bored with walking or standing about, she would browse these displays. This was not, as it might have seemed, a purely idle pursuit; from time to time she did make purchases on the premise that it was good policy: as a fairly regular customer, the shopkeepers would be less inclined to complain about her.

Nevertheless, she had a keen nose for a bargain and an unerring eye for quality. When the same object attracted both nose and eye, she pounced. She could never ‘pass up a snip’, whether she wanted it or not, and because of this – and the fact that she didn’t like Tony to know how much money she was spending – a lot of her ‘finds’ got passed on to me. All sorts of strange objects would nonchalantly be tossed to me with the one word:

‘Present!’

Among these treasures were exquisite items of jewellery, pretty bits of china and glass, a Chinese peasant carved from ivory, a mirror in the shape of an artist’s palette held by a serpent stand . . . The
pièce de résistance
arrived at the tail of a little procession led by a client, followed by Mae, with the shopkeeper bringing up the rear. He was carrying something large, covered with snowy tissue paper. Even on this occasion, Mae didn’t pause on her journey to the bedroom, but with a grin and a backward jerk of her head said:

‘Your birthday present – hope you like it.’

The shopkeeper insisted on staying and unwrapping it, saying proudly, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before, you know. I should think it’s unique.’

When he took the last wrapping off, I gasped at the glitter of porcelain, silver and cut glass. It was a tray: but what a tray! All the paraphernalia for breakfast in bed nestled between silver railings; the little cup was cut glass, resting on a silver saucer, and the silver eggcup was perched on a silver bridge, above a cut-glass dish.

As well as giving me many of her barely worn clothes, Mae also bought garments especially for me – luxurious ones that I would never have dreamed of buying for myself – and several cuddly toy animals with musical boxes hidden within their anatomy. Also, she had clients who travelled in cosmetics and, via them, often received bottles of perfume, many of which she passed on to me. (Contrary to the popular myth, the scent that prostitutes admittedly were smothered in was certainly not cheap.)

All her suits and coats were bought from Kravetz, an expensive, wonderful ladies’ tailor in Wardour Street. She had them make a beautiful coat of chestnut-brown velour to her own design. I fell in love with this coat instantly. It was the first time I’d actually coveted anything; I was wild for it and would have lived on scraps for a month to possess it.

‘Please, Mae,’ I begged her. ‘Promise me when you’re fed up with it – even if it’s threadbare by then – you’ll let me buy it from you.’

She laughed and pirouetted, making it flair out even more. ‘’Course, love. I won’t forget.’

But despite her usual largesse, she was unpredictable, and only a few months later, she gave it away to someone else. I don’t recount this out of any pettishness, but to illustrate the sort of inconsistencies that were common among all the girls: strange, incomprehensible quirks that would lie in wait for your assumptions and trip them up. Conventions like punctuality and keeping promises were ignored; lies and excuses tripped off the tongue with the ease and lightness of birdsong. Life in Soho had different rules.

These facts were to be accepted and that was that. The best you could do was look after yourself. I always arranged to meet friends in a café rather than the street, so that their lateness – or, as like as not, non-appearance – didn’t matter so much. Excuses were always heartfelt, profuse and totally untrue, but the golden rule was to accept them courteously. Any other reaction led to the bother of being marched round to a third person, who would happily vouch for the truth of the lie, without having the vaguest idea of what it was all about.

Following the maxim of keeping in with the local shopkeepers, Mae and myself were almost literally keeping ‘Toffee-nose’ – the café proprietor below – in business.

Having predicted the failure of his venture, Mae took a morbid interest in seeing herself proved right. The succulent turkey in the window had given way to a chicken, and the lobsters had been replaced by two small dishes of prawns. Before summer came, these meagre offerings were in their turn to give way to a few long-lasting salami sausages. There was now no sign of the bay trees: passing merry-makers had broken the hardier one of the two, even though, unlike its neighbour, it had managed to survive being used as a urinal.

Soon, though, the sounds of activity on the floor immediately below us took our minds off Toffee-nose and his problems. There were stepladders, pots of paint, all sorts of tools and a couple of men hammering, banging and sawing like mad.

We were both eaten up with curiosity, and in the end, Mae cornered one of them and asked what was going on. The answer was that it was going to be opened as a private drinking club. It was an exciting idea, and henceforth we enjoyed all the noisy sounds of construction going on beneath us.

The future proprietor and her husband came up to introduce themselves. He was a grey-haired little man, who almost never spoke, was constantly chewing his nails and looked uncomfortable. The woman was big, florid and very theatrical, always saying ‘my
deah
’ and calling everyone ‘darling’ and ‘lovey’.

All her remarks were carried to the limit of probability. If asked if there was enough sugar in her tea, she would answer:

‘Oh, my
deah
, it’s absolutely perfect, really heavenly – a quite, quite wonderful cup of tea!’

They were rather a sickening couple.

Eventually, the club was finished – all concealed lights, illuminated brocade, bows and potted plants vying for space around a domineering bar in a clubroom that could never be accused of spaciousness. On the other side of the landing – and directly under our waiting room – was the toilet (which until now had been ours alone) and a storeroom.

A visitor to the clubroom had to find his way along a newly painted corridor, where embossed hearts and coronets attempted to lend the walls a regal, romantic air and the red lino on the floor was at least easily cleanable. This last went a little way towards appeasing Toffee-nose, the café owner, who had noted every occasion when one of our clients had spent a surreptitious penny in our passage. This was understandable, since it had gone straight through the bare floorboards and on to his electrics below, fusing all his lights.

On the afternoon of the club’s opening, there was a continual procession of bouquets and telegrams, and then, as the day turned to night, a plethora of guests began arriving. Above all this, like children allowed up late, Mae and I hung over the banister rail, drinking in glimpses of the spectacle and neglecting poor old Houdini, who was tied up in the waiting room.

Accompanied by the music of Nat King Cole, Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, amorphous pleasantries grew briefly louder as the door opened and closed on yet another . . .

‘Da-a-a-arling!
How wonderful you could come to our little
thingummy
!’

Mae and I were not invited to the little
thingummy
– although I seem to recall that a glass of something was sent up to us. Each time that door shut us out, Mae expressed her displeasure by walloping Houdini.

It was, perhaps, unfortunate that this gathering was the club’s one and only moment of glory – and
Schadenfreude
aside, Mae was probably right in suspecting that it only achieved that much by serving free drinks. During the week that followed, we continued to hear Nat, Peggy and Ella, but without the accompaniment of ‘voices off’. Most of the footsteps we heard on the stairs continued on past the club door and came up to us.

Actually, the club being there helped our business enormously, as it erased any embarrassment that might have been felt at the front door. The few people who actually did go into the club were mainly chorus boys and other tired theatricals.
‘Da-a-a-arling!’
rang out like infrequent door chimes every time a newcomer arrived.

Mrs
Da-a-a-arling
must have drunk all the profits herself. Around nine thirty every evening this caused her to become cantankerous, and her husband was an easy, obvious and perhaps justifiable target.

The reason for his nervous nail-biting became clear. When she became nasty – and she
did
become nasty – he had to ease her out to the landing so she could swear at him and hit him without disturbing the clientele. When she had verbally and physically abused him for about ten minutes, she was perfectly all right again and business continued as usual. By the end of the evening, when she was pretty far gone again, she was too tired to bother with a repeat performance.