West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and Its Working Girls (15 page)

‘What’s that you say?’ said the chemist, cupping an ear with his hand and leaning over the counter towards me.

Feeling myself going hot with embarrassment, I repeated it a little louder.

‘Oh, Blue Unction!’ he boomed and went off to get it from the back of the shop.

For the short while he was gone, I felt sure every eye in the place was upon me. I could hardly count out the money when he returned to plonk the pot on the counter with uncalled-for abandon. I departed, head down like a charging bison, through what now seemed to be a vast, goggling crowd.

At least when I got back I was pleased to see the stuff actually worked. In fact it was an instant success, for, as Mae explained:

‘The little buggers haven’t had time to get a hold.’ Mae was extra cautious afterwards, but that didn’t mean I was off the hook: unusual requests from clients often meant I had to buy all sorts of odds and ends. I might still have been naïve, but I was no longer the complete innocent who had met Mae that day in The Mousehole.

Thirteen

I hadn’t been with Mae for very long before other girls – who hadn’t dared to come when Rabbits was there – began dropping in and adding to the general chaos.

Strictly speaking, visiting was taboo, as according to the law, more than one convicted prostitute on the same premises constituted a brothel, which was illegal; and anyone watching the place could easily think that clients coming up were taking their pick from the girls. If the police decided to swoop, it was possible that the maid would be convicted as a brothel-keeper, and the premises closed down – though the girls themselves were in the clear. This could be one reason why Rabbits had forbidden Mae’s friends to call. At this point of my ‘maidhood’, I was as blissfully ignorant of this risk as I had been about everything else; and by the time one of the other maids did think to warn me, the rot had set in, and Mae’s friends were treating the place like a Women’s Institute. By then, I hadn’t the guts to put my foot down, or the heart to spoil their fun; and philosophically comforted myself with the thought that if I landed up in prison, it would be yet another experience to learn by.

Mae would greet each visitor with crows of delight and call for tea all round. Soon the floor and the bed would be littered with practically everything she possessed, cupboards and drawers would be gaping open, and Mae would be holding up a skirt and declaring:

‘Here it is: this is my lucky one – I always make a bomb when I’m wearing this! Don’t I, Babs?’

It was very often a garment I’d never seen her wear before, but she wouldn’t be waiting for answers.

‘Borrow it if you like . . . but bring it back. Here, this blouse goes nice with it. Put ’em on. Let’s see what they look like on you.’

I still have her ‘really lucky’ skirt. It was grey worsted, pencil-line, with a slit on one side. She decided one day that it wasn’t quite so lucky any more and gave it to me. Even now, I wouldn’t part with it for the world. The sight of that skirt with Mae’s bottom inside it has stirred so many emotions and caused so much money to change hands that I have come to regard it as of historical importance: like the Black Prince’s armour. This – and a pair of the handmade shoes in which she walked so many miles – still helps to clutter my home.

The other girl’s clothes would promptly be shed and added to the pile on the floor, and Mae’s skirt and blouse would be donned in their place. Then Mae would eye her friend up and down in a critical manner. She would give a tweak here and there and perhaps add a necklace or a patent-leather belt to the ensemble. At last, satisfied, she would say, ‘Fucking lovely. You’ll make a bomb in that.’ Then, amongst all the debris, we would sit, drink our tea and exchange the latest gossip.

In the middle of this, a client, tired of waiting outside for Mae to emerge, would creep up the stairs. His arrival would cause Mae to sweep the bed clear while the other girl and I would snatch up our cups and migrate to the kitchen. Eventually, the girl or girls – there was often more than one – would leave and I would be left to clear up the mess at breakneck speed before someone else came up.

The most frequent of these visitors was a girl called Rita. She and Mae were as close to being real friends as was possible under the circumstances.

Rita had very fair skin, jet-black hair, vivid blue eyes and a fascinatingly large bosom. On first sight, she was icily beautiful, but the effect was altered by her strident cockney accent. There were two things I found disconcerting about her: one was the fact that her eyes had a hard, insolent stare and the other was the scar that ran down the length of her face. It wasn’t unsightly, just a raised white seam; in fact in a strange sort of way it added to her good looks. It turned out that the stare was caused by extreme short-sightedness; while the scar was the work of another girl and a razor, not long after Rita had started on the game.

‘Nasty it was, for a long time,’ she told me. ‘It went right through me cheek. But I was a lairy little bastard; I asked for it and it taught me a lesson.’

She stared for a while into space, reliving the moment and the lesson it had taught her, but said no more about it.

On the first occasion she came round, she had not been seen for several years after having disappeared suddenly. Everyone had supposed the absence to be one of her periodic retirements – which in a way it was – until word got round that she’d married one of the bigger racketeers. She’d had a daughter by him and they’d recently divorced. She was now living with a burglar and was hustling again to raise money so they could get a nice home together.

‘It didn’t work out with Billy,’ she said. ‘’Cos really, I only like thieves.’ (Or
feeves
, as she pronounced it.)

All her feeves had been English; the Maltese never bothered with her because her preferences were well known, and more so because she was forever ‘resting’ rather than out earning them some money.

Early one Saturday afternoon, accompanied by her new feef, she brought her little girl to visit. The child was about three years old. They were about to go to a cartoon cinema, after which the daughter would be put to bed and Rita would go off to work. I felt sorry for the little tot. She sat demurely on a kitchen chair, wearing the working-class notion of a rich child’s apparel: leggings under a coat and bonnet of thick velour. Rita and Mae, at their ease in normal sweaters and skirts, sat and chatted for an hour or so while this plain, pale child, encased in her thick finery, sat fidgeting slightly, solemnly watching her mother and new ‘auntie’ talking. Over the following years she was to observe the arrival and departure of three legitimate stepfathers, a host of temporary ‘uncles’ – all feeves, of course – and the arrival of two half-sisters and a brother. Bewildered and largely neglected in favour of the newcomers, she was to run away from home many times.

Rita and Mae had both started on the game at the age of eighteen (‘I was a real little dolly then,’ Rita said) and had kept in touch with one another ever since. They told me how at first, for a long while, they had no flats to work in and had to use taxis instead, and how between them they scared off any little ‘mysteries’ who hung about their pitch. They giggled a lot over their various escapades and had me in fits of laughter too. They described how, twelve years earlier, they had made a striking pair, standing together outside Lyon’s Corner House in Coventry Street with a couple of co-operating taxicabs parked at the ready.

I was puzzled as I pictured the scene. I’d thought Mae was, at the most, only in her mid-twenties.

‘You didn’t tell me you were so elderly,’ I said. ‘No wonder you’re always on at me to swap places with you: you’re past it, aren’t you?’

She told me to hush my lip and said she’d had her last birthday about ten years ago.

‘I’m never going to get old,’ she said. They would prove to be tragically prophetic words.

Other characters crowd into my mind. There was Jessie, who was always in financial trouble but never particularly upset by the fact. She had a profusion of cloudy dark hair, Algerian features and more than a little of the
Mona Lisa
about her expression. I found her quite fascinating (and was later to paint her portrait). Her problem was that she had five children boarded in various convent schools. It seemed a complicated business and I couldn’t quite understand it, but the gist seemed to be that she was only able to afford the fees for four of them and so always had one at home. Care and food for the homebound child was, of course, also expensive for a working mother, regardless of the work she did. Jessie came and went, always untroubled by her predicaments and often amused by them. All she asked of Mae and me was a friendly ear; she never requested financial help. She was known to love her work, and because of this, literally sold herself short.

Penny was another mother, and a relatively good one, but she only saw her two sons for half of Saturdays and all day on Sundays. During the week they were off to school before she got up and, of course, she was working when they returned. She would phone them as soon as they were home and again every hour all through the evening, giving them instructions. It wasn’t a perfect system; her twelve-year-old took to stealing, and much as she punished him, he continued to do so. In keeping with the parenting methods of that time and place, she resolved to knock it out of him in the end, ‘even if I have to half kill him!’ I winced at the thought, remembering my own childhood.

Hilda was well over fifty and looked even more. She was also caught in a vicious circle. Because she was old and couldn’t earn very much, she drank; the more she drank, the less she earned. The problem was simple enough to understand, but its solution was elusive. She was always fighting desperately to get her rent together, and the more desperate she became, the drunker she got. Whenever I saw her, she was staggering slightly and clutching at the men she accosted, as much for support as anything else.

One evening she came up at about eight o’clock, almost sober so she was obviously skint. There was a client in the kitchen, so she sat down with me in the waiting room. Great fat tears were rolling down her cheeks.

‘What’s the matter, Hilda?’ I asked.

‘Haven’t got off once all bloody day,’ she sobbed. ‘And I’ve been out since two.’

‘Oh that’s terrible,’ I said. ‘Poor old Hilda; you must be fed up.’

The tears continued to flow. She was silent for a while, then burst out: ‘It’s not so much the money, you know – though Gawd knows I could do with it – but it makes you feel so low when nobody fancies you any more.’

She gave a great gulping sob and the tears fell faster than ever. Lying nobly, I told her that it had been a bit quiet for everyone that day. While I racked my brains to think what could be done to comfort her, she gazed at me mistily through her tears, sniffling every now and again. She looked a mess and it suddenly occurred to me that the only make-up she ever wore was smudged lipstick.

Inspiration struck: ‘Well, we can’t have all this; we’ve got to do something.’

I popped into the bedroom to see Mae, who’d just said goodbye to her client. I explained that poor old Hilda hadn’t ‘got off ’ all day and asked if I could use Mae’s make-up.

‘She’s been crying,’ I said sotto voce. ‘You have to admit, she does look a bit haggard, one way and another.’

Without a word, Mae pulled out the complete drawer of make-up. ‘Give her the whole works – even these,’ she said. She fished out a pair of false eyelashes, then turned and clattered off downstairs into the street again.

‘The works’ was exactly what Hilda got – from cleansing cream onwards. Doing this I had a queasy premonition of things to come. It struck me vividly that one day my own face would have this loose, crêpe-like texture. I carried on applying the make-up, pulling Hilda’s skin to get it taut enough for the eye pencil to make a straight line, then letting go and finding it crooked. Eventually the eyelashes were stuck on and I did her hair – putting on a bandeau and coaxing a wispy fringe forward to cover the wrinkles on her forehead – then stood back to survey my handiwork. I complimented myself enough to say that she looked quite nice – at least she’d been groomed; in street lighting, she would probably look quite good. She had sat all the way through the renovations with an eager docility, expecting magic to be wrought; I was thankful that when finally I gave her the mirror, she was thrilled.

‘Who’d have thought it? You’ve made a new woman of me!’

With growing confidence, she examined herself from different angles. Remembering some of Mae’s psychology, I fished about in my handbag and gave her a broken key ring shaped like a palette.

‘Here, take this. It’s lucky – you’ll see. Now, you pop off and make some money.’

She made her exit wearing a beatific smile and holding herself as though she were balancing books on her head.

Mae, coming up with another client, had passed her in the street. ‘Looks much better, don’t she?’ she said as she passed. Then she stopped and added absent-mindedly, ‘Poor old cow.’

Half an hour later, Hilda hurried up the stairs again, all smiles and good cheer.