West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and Its Working Girls (7 page)

‘Rabbits!’

‘No!’ I gasped, impressed with my ability to act my part. ‘What did you do? Walk out?’

‘Me? I don’t think so. She’s the one who should’ve walked out.’

‘What happened?’

Mae chuckled. ’Nothing, for about ten minutes – until I’d got me grub served. She had to wait till then, didn’t she? I was having spaghetti and she couldn’t resist it. So I got the lot in me face!’

‘Strewth!’ I said, using Syd’s catchphrase. ‘Then what?’

‘Well, you can imagine: I fairly boiled over. I fetched her such a clump behind the earhole it spun her round. I got both hands in her hair from behind and nearly pulled her bleeding head off. You should have heard her scream! But the bitch kept kicking back at my shins and I didn’t know what to do about that. Just look at my legs!’

I looked, and through her nylons I could see that both legs were black and blue, with several bumps and a gash.

‘Ugh!’
I winced. ‘Nasty!’

She leaned over, picked up the cup in front of her and took a swig, which she hastily spat out. It was the wrong cup, containing dregs from goodness knows when.

‘I bet that’s her cup too!’ she said. ‘Anyway, Luigi came up and put a stop to it and threw her out. He offered me another plate of spaghetti after I’d cleaned myself up, but somehow I didn’t fancy it.’

‘Do you think you’ll have any more trouble with her?’ I asked.

Mae shrugged. ‘I’ll try to keep out of her way, but if she comes here again, she’ll be sorry, ’cos I’ll be ready for her next time.’

She reached for her handbag and, opening it wide, held it out for me to see inside. There, besides her purse, keys and miscellanea, lay a large penknife. She removed it and clicked out a wicked-looking blade.

‘Next time,’ she said ominously, ‘I’ll carve her, I swear I will!’

Ronnie’s words came back to me as I watched Mae retract the blade and drop the knife back into her bag, but this time I feared his warning might have been well placed.

Mae took a sip out of the right cup and said, ‘We’re going to have such fun, us two!’

It sounded a weird sort of maid-and-mistress relationship to me, but I was all for democracy.

I pushed the thought of the knife to the back of my mind, hoping it was just for show. ‘I’d like to do a bit of spring-cleaning,’ I ventured. ‘You know: get the place more comfortable.’

‘Go right ahead, love. Anything to make you happy. That is, if you have the time; we get a bit busy, you know.’

Surely, I thought, all the clients don’t come at once. Aloud, I said, ‘Do we?’

‘Well, let’s hope so,’ she answered, lounging back on the bedspread and puffing out great clouds of cigarette smoke. ‘As soon as I’ve finished this fag, I must put me face on and get cracking.’

And get cracking she certainly did. It wasn’t long before she was made up and ready for action. I was in the tiny kitchen, trying to decide how to tackle its filth, when she went shooting past me out of the door and clacking down the stairs, tossing a breezy ‘See you, love’ over her shoulder as she went. I was alone in the flat. My mind, I think, still refused to get to grips with what was about to happen. The entire flat was hardly large and the wall was only a partition, with plasterwork on one side and bare on the other. Sounds from one room were almost as audible in the other. Mae was about to . . . to do
it
... and all I could think about was whether to deal with the sink first, or the floor, or the overflowing bin.

I had made some sort of start on the clutter when, in what seemed an astonishingly short time, I heard footsteps ascending the stairs, a male set closely followed by Mae’s own. I swept the cigarette butts on the floor into a pile, using anything that came to hand to do it. (There was, of course, no broom). Then the door to the flat shot open, and the two pairs of footsteps swept through into the bedroom. Encased in my little kitchen as I was, I saw nothing.

I began to tackle the detritus littering the sink and its surround.

There must have been sounds from the room beyond, but I think I can honestly say I heard none of them, so intently was I concentrating on the task at hand. I was thankful to have my work in the kitchen to focus on. Then Mae’s voice sang out to me and her arm appeared through the bedroom door, bearing cash. I took the money and scuttled back to the safety of my kitchen, feeling like a rather nervous stage hand. I continued to make a tiny dent in the mess surrounding me.

In what again seemed like a remarkably short space of time, doors opened and closed, and I heard male footsteps leaving the apartment, followed very soon after by Mae, who shot me some cheerful parting expression – ‘cheerio’, ‘see you’, ‘bearing up?’ – as she darted away. Apart from these few moments of friendly contact, and always of course the moment when her hand appeared through the bedroom door to bring home to me the money that lay behind all this, I saw neither Mae nor her clients, and avoided thinking about what was happening. The sink and the floor and the stains on the wall and the piles of rubbish occupied me completely.

After half an hour or so, Mae had seen three clients. Within an hour she had dealt with half a dozen all told. It was towards this point, and utterly bewildered, that I began to realise what prostitution really was.

‘But Mae,’ I wailed, as she started for the stairs once more, ‘I read in a book once that eight or nine men in succession could kill a woman!’

She paused with her face just above the banister rails. ‘It’s a good thing they’re wrong then, isn’t it?’ she said, grinning at me. ‘Ta-rah, love; see you.’ And she clattered off again.

When she returned with the next client, I could hear her laughing like mad and repeating my words. On the way into the bedroom, I caught sight of ‘the punter’ for the first time. He seemed like a very ordinary man of about thirty, suited and safe-looking – certainly nothing like the picture my imagination had created. He glanced at me and smiled. Afterwards, he saw fit to lash out with a ten-shilling note as a tip for me.

That was another thing I’d got wrong: I had thought that the wage of two pounds a night was to be my main income and the tips would be tiny extras. In that first hour, it would have taken a brain a lot denser than mine not to realise that the truth was the reverse. Every time Mae’s arm shot out at me with her fee of a pound or more to protect, there, amongst the paper money, was silver for me, usually half a crown’s worth.

I was determined to be a proper maid and bring some sort of order into the place in the incredibly short space of time it took her to come bustling up the stairs with another ‘boyfriend’. As I became braver, whenever she left the bedroom to go on one of her swift sorties into the street, I dashed in, madly collecting armfuls of the accumulated rubbish. After the rush of that first hour, Mae started not to slow down exactly, but to allow breaks for cups of tea and gossip and sly comments on the quirks and peculiarities of the men she’d seen.

On that first day, I ran the gamut of every known emotion. When at last, somewhere around midnight, Mae shoved me into a taxi and sent me home, I threw myself back on to the seat in a state bordering on bewilderment. I thought I ought to feel thoroughly shocked, nauseated and dirty, but I was amazed to find that I didn’t. All I could feel was the ache around my stomach muscles caused by laughing at the flippant way in which Mae conducted her business. I had learnt a lot that day, but the most wonderful thing was that I’d learnt how to really laugh.

Six

The following day, when I arrived at the little alleyway, I was surprised to find myself regarding it with something like affection. Nothing had changed, but in some subtle way, I had. The rubbish still lay about in rotting heaps; in their aimless shufflings, the pigeons and the people were just as uncouth as they had been the day before, but I no longer regarded them with distaste. It was as though I had finally found my own people. I walked slowly along, relishing this fact. I was amongst fellow outcasts. That day the flat felt homely and lived-in, and it was warm with yesterday’s laughter. Mae, who had arrived only a few minutes before from where she lived in Paddington, had already put the kettle on and greeted me cheerily. Everything felt good.

‘You know,’ I reflected, as we were drinking our tea in the bedroom, ‘if I had a key, I could get here before you and do some cleaning. The stairs and this room, for instance: I could never do them while you’re working – at least not the way you work. The place gets like Victoria station!’

‘Well, don’t kill yourself; it’s already looking miles better than it did.’ She glanced at her bedside table, which now held only one cup and one ashtray. ‘I’ll get another key cut if it makes you feel any better – had to give Charley the spare one. Let me know what cleaning things you want – I don’t s’pose there’s any there – and I’ll drop a list in at the oil shop.’

On her first trip out, I reminded her of this, and an hour later, I was presented with a shiny new Yale key (as we were the only people in the building, only the front door was ever locked). I then listed all the things I needed to assist me in my battle for hygiene. It was a long list. Mae had been right: we had nothing. The only cleaning implements consisted of a mop in a bucket of turgid liquid – as I pulled it out, its strands fell off with the weight of the water – and an old broom whose bristles were practically worn down to the wood. She took the order to the shop at the end of the alley, and during the afternoon, an elderly man in a grey overall delivered everything I needed.

‘Looks as though someone’s going to do some cleaning,’ he said, as he dumped the large cardboard box on the kitchen floor and divested himself of the new broom and mop. When he straightened up, he spoke the words I was going to hear over and over again during the next few weeks;

‘New here, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s only my second day.’

‘You’re on to a good thing with that girl; she hustles like nobody’s business. The wife and I watch her sometimes. Cor blimey, must be in and out like a fly!’

Just then, we heard the ‘fly’ returning. After tactfully letting her and her new acquisition get into the bedroom, and with a wink in my direction, the hardware man left.

He was right: Mae
was
in and out like a fly. There was something metronomic in the way she worked. She marched up the stairs behind each man – never in front of him, in case he changed his mind halfway up and ran off. When she had safely landed him in her room, they would stay there on average for five or ten minutes, and then the man would depart on his own. A couple of minutes later, he would be followed by Mae. Only a minute or two would elapse before the process was repeated.

During those first days, I drew a sort of blackout curtain over my thoughts: at least in regard to what went on in the bedroom. Mae, without knowing it, made it easy for me to do this, or perhaps I had Rabbits to thank, because out of habit, Mae was still working to the rigid rules that her tough former maid had laid down. This state of affairs was to be short-lived, but it did help me over the initial stages of what was to become an extraordinary partnership.

On this, my second day, some of the initial startling strangeness had worn off, and not receiving any further shocks to the system, I began to sit up and take notice of everything going on around me.

Now aware that men who consorted with prostitutes were not the outwardly sinister and debauched creatures I had supposed, I no longer tried to keep out of sight. After glimpsing the first customer by accident, I had realised that one of the reasons I was there was to be seen, so that the clients would know Mae wasn’t alone. I began – albeit it with extreme shyness – to glance at them as they passed the kitchen door.

To my bewilderment, one after another turned out to be as unthreatening as the first. These were men I had seen all my life, on buses and trains and out shopping with their wives. I saw men who had been sent out in the morning in clean shirts and polished shoes – men who had kissed their children and their wives a fond goodbye as they left for work. Some wore trilbies; some wore caps; some even wore bowlers and carried rolled umbrellas. I was shocked to realise that any of the men I had ever known, even my own relatives, could be doing this.

In they came and out they went, all these respectable men. Here and there, a roughneck was thrown in for variety. Gradually, the shock I felt metamorphosed into the attitude most women adopted towards the opposite sex. I quickly came to know the meaning of that shrug of the shoulders and the scornful utterance: ‘Men!’

During the afternoon of that second day, I was somewhat disconcerted by a man who came up during Mae’s absence. He breezed up to the landing door, eyed me up and down, and said crisply, ‘How much?’

When I realised what he meant, I blushed furiously. For a moment I was speechless with indignation.

‘I’m the maid !’ I said at last.

He retreated hastily, leaving me feeling that I had narrowly preserved myself from a fate worse than death. I decided that a shapeless dress wasn’t effective enough. It was evident that this kind of maid
did
need a uniform after all: an apron at least. With some regret, I also decided to abandon my new toy: my make-up.