Marriages are Made in Bond Street

by Penrose Halson

  ‘Several wanted to talk about sex,’ remembered Mary.

  I found that very difficult. I was twenty-seven but I’d never been married, and my mother had never mentioned the subject. My family didn’t talk about anything interesting! So I didn’t know what to say when a client brought up the subject. I used to sit there nodding sagely when it appeared that I was being asked a question. It wasn’t always a very direct question, more a slightly defensive half-statement, made with a meaningful look, asking for my approval, such as, ‘I don’t think it’s wrong to have two boy-friends at the same time.’ I used to look interested and thoughtful when they went rambling on, as though I was deeply knowledgeable and, with my vast store of experience, was weighing it all up in the most judicious manner. Heather was much better than I was about sex, so I tried to pass on to her any people I thought might want to wax on about it.

  Heather’s approach was matter of fact and practical, as she wrote later:

  Luckily, from the age of eight I went to a boarding school in Devonshire which was near the kennels of the local hunt, and the woman who taught me riding was the girl-friend of the huntsman. I learned to take a keen interest in the breeding of hounds and talked freely about coming on heat and periods of gestation. Many of my fellow pupils came from farming families, and under their influence my interest turned to horses and cows.

  Soon I could hold forth about slipping foals, mastitis and contagious abortion, but strangely enough I did not relate this to humans until I went to my public school, where I heard surprising stories about men and women which did not seem to relate to what I knew were facts in animals. However, after much thought, and reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover (a private edition which was passed round the dormitory so we all took turns reading it, under the bedclothes by torchlight) I got a fairly clear picture of what probably happened.

  That was just as well, since my mother never talked about sex to me, and the only advice I recall her giving me was, ‘Never trust a man with a small nose’! The term I left school I was a bit flummoxed when the headmistress asked me if I knew what was ‘worse than death’. I didn’t, but as my mind had flown to rape, which I did not feel I could possibly discuss with her, I mumbled ‘Yes.’

  Mary, of course, was a farmer’s daughter, not the parson’s daughter we said she was. I rather presumed that she would have acquired knowledge of sex in much the same way as I did, but she hated farm life, she had always escaped to London or Assam as much as she could, and she was squeamish, unlike me. She was wonderful with sick people, but animals, especially sick ones, made her feel quite ill herself. It was strange, but not important as long as I could deal with the clients who wanted to raise the subject. We didn’t always manage to spot them in advance, and once poor Mary got stuck with a person who claimed to be both male and female, so could marry either sex! ‘It’ wanted to have children too!

  Heather was being wooed by several hopeful men. Many male clients were startled to find a glamorous, rather aloof and astonishingly young woman facing them across the desk, and, thinking fast, wrote ‘tall and blonde’ and ‘I would not mind my wife working’ on their registration form. The bolder ones followed up with an invitation to lunch at the Berkeley or dinner and an evening of gaiety in a nightclub. Heather accepted most of the invitations, but kept her client suitors at a distance, assessing them dispassionately while she laid other plans for them.

  Clients were far from the only admirers. Heather was never short of offers of one kind and another from the many men brought to London by the war: debonair Free French supporters of General de Gaulle; Poles who had fled their devastated country, joined the RAF and now flew on bombing missions with cavalier courage and panache; Australians and Canadians who had never travelled to another country, let alone another continent; Dutchmen, Czechs, Austrians, Belgians – men from all over the world who fetched up in a daily more ruined city, and were superficially ebullient, but in private petrifyingly lonely and hungering for love.

  Even at home Heather had suitors. She lived in a small flat above the Mirabelle restaurant, in Curzon Street, Mayfair, a short walk from the New Bond Street office. In the flat above lived a dashing forty-five-year-old officer, Hugo, who was working on something ultra-secret for the War Office. His wife and child had taken refuge from the bombing with her parents in Scotland, so he hardly ever saw them, but was determined nevertheless to enjoy female company.

  In pursuit of Heather, Hugo used to open his window and, paying out a length of rope, let down a basket containing a bottle of champagne. Often, when Heather saw the basket swaying gently outside her window, she leaned out and took the bottle, whereupon Hugo, feeling the loss of weight, would haul up the basket and hurtle down the stairs. If she was about to go out, or was already entertaining, Heather would ignore the basket, which a disappointed Hugo would then haul back up again, and drink the champagne in grumpy solitude.

  If, one sunny day, Heather had not been lunching at the Ritz with a flattering rubber planter for whom she was finding a wife, but who would gladly have whisked Heather herself off to Malaya, Mary would have asked her to interview a sad-faced young woman who drifted into the office. She radiated desolation, thought Mary. Her eyes were cast down, long eyelashes shading the livid bruises which discoloured the hollows below, her skin waxen and taut, her thin form disguised by a shapeless grey coat several sizes too large. She spoke softly in a slow, monotonous voice, as if reciting a roll call of the dead. ‘I must find a man to marry me,’ she implored, transfixing Mary with a penetrating stare from huge eyes as purple as the bruises. ‘I must, I must! Please help.’

  ‘But why must you?’ asked Mary gently, sensing tragedy.

  ‘Because I’m going to have a baby,’ whispered the girl, hunching her shoulders and gripping her handbag in her small white hands, the nails bitten to the quick.

  ‘You poor thing!’ Mary burst out, before collecting herself and offering Martha a cigarette, which she accepted gratefully. Mary lit one for herself, then, bit by hesitant bit, drew out the sorry story.

  Martha Webb lived with her parents in a quiet street in Westminster where, before the war, she had spent many happy evenings with her fiancé, Eustace, a civil servant of her own age (she was now twenty-five). She had been an editorial assistant and occasional translator in a publishing company, a job which suited her very well, as she was an avid and sharp-eyed reader and liked helping people to enjoy books as much as she did. But as paper became scarcer, she feared she would lose her job.

  Then, on 29 December 1940, the Luftwaffe had destroyed everything surrounding St Paul’s. Paternoster Row, home of booksellers and publishers, including the office of Martha’s employer, was reduced to rubble. The numbness with which she gazed at the ghastly scene of burnt-out buildings, charred scraps of paper floating forlornly in the air, soon yielded to a furious desire to do what she could to retaliate. She was quickly recruited to become a postal censor, monitoring letters written by prisoners of war in French, German and Italian, eliminating any scrap of information which might help the enemy if it fell into the wrong hands. She also signed on as a volunteer Air Raid Precautions warden, spending her evenings checking that no windows or doors let any light out into the street, and rushing to the scene of an air raid to pull people out from the rubble, administer first aid and comfort the dying, the wounded and the dispossessed.

  Equally patriotic, Eustace had joined up at the first opportunity, and their comfortable meetings had been reduced to occasional snatched weekends when he was on leave from the army. The last time Martha had seen Eustace was at the beginning of May, in a café near Victoria Station, when all he could tell her was that he was due to be sent abroad – where, he either did not know or could not say. Stricken with all-consuming fear for her beloved, and with his declarations of undying love glowing in her heart, Martha had experienced a passion to match Eustace’s own. It obliterated the scruples of her Catholic beliefs, which forbade sexual relations outside marriage. Martha and Eustace
had seized each other’s hand, rushed into a small, dingy hotel, and consummated their love only just in time for Eustace to catch his appointed train.

  A month later, Eustace’s mother had accepted from the telegraph boy the dreaded telegram telling her that Eustace was dead. He had been shot through the heart: a swift and painless death.

  Martha’s grief paralysed her. But it also intensified her anger, so she refused to abandon her duties, and on the evening of 10 May she went out on ARP patrol as usual. She did not know that it was to be the worst night of the Blitz, and the final one. By the bright light of a full moon, 505 Luftwaffe bombers unloaded 711 tons of high explosive and 86,000 incendiaries on the already-stricken city, killing 1,436 Londoners, seriously injuring 2,000, and totally or partially destroying 10,000 buildings.

  In the hellish inferno Martha heard screams coming from a half-destroyed terraced house, which through the murk she could just see was swaying precariously. She ran, but in the darkness tripped on a sandbag which had burst, spilling its contents onto the pavement. Flinging her arms wide to grab hold of a nearby railing, she lost her grip on her torch. Too anxious to stop and search for it, she followed the eerie howling down the imperilled house’s outside steps, and then into the coal cellar under the pavement. There, in the dust-laden smoky darkness, she stumbled over a woman crouching against a wall, jabbering and whimpering incomprehensibly.

  To Mary’s unspoken question Martha replied, ‘I grabbed her coat and pulled her up, and she could stand, so she hadn’t broken a leg, so I pushed her up the steps. I was desperate to get her out before the house collapsed on top of her. She didn’t make any sense, she was bleeding and crying, and choking on the plaster and coal dust, and vomiting, and when we got out onto the street I could only just make out that she was saying something about a baby. She hit me in the face, screaming at me to let her go back into the cellar, and I realized there might be a baby left down there; it had been too dark to see. Luckily another ARP warden came along and I shouted at him to look after the woman and I rushed back down the steps.

  ‘Down in the cellar all I could do was to shuffle and flounder around, and feel with my hands. I couldn’t see anything. But I thought I heard a noise, and I made out a big hole in the wall where the Council had knocked the cellar into next door, so that if one house was bombed people could escape from their cellar into the next one, and then the next – all the way along the terrace. And—’ Martha stopped abruptly. Her body curled in a profound shudder as a spine-chilling yowl of pain broke from her. Quivering, Mary took the cigarette from Martha’s shaking fingers. Suddenly the girl jerked bolt upright and continued her story.

  The noise Martha heard was made not by a baby but by a man, who shoved her violently through the opening into the next cellar and back against the wall, seizing her forehead in one hand and clamping the other across her mouth. In a rough voice with a strange guttural accent he ordered her to be silent or he would kill her. Then quickly and very calmly, without uttering a word, he ripped open the buttons of her trousers, yanked her panties down, raped her, and pushed her into the first cellar. He strode back to the steps, bounded up them and melted into the all-obliterating blackness, just as the remains of the house gave a great elegiac groan and disintegrated, hurling dust and bricks and glass and furniture in all directions. Martha staggered up to the street just in time and ran for her life, clutching her trousers, narrowly escaping a flying sideboard and a glittering shower of jagged glass. Retracing her steps with immense caution when she could see that there was nothing still standing, she almost tripped over the ARP warden, cradling the stricken woman in his arms.

  Mary felt as if a bomb had landed on her heart. She sat in silence as Martha faced her, her eyes dry but huge with anguish. ‘So you see, I am going to have a baby, but I do not know if the father is my dearest love or a crook – perhaps a deserter or a pimp or a looter, a black-marketeer or even a murderer. If there was a baby in the house whom I might have rescued, the man is certainly a murderer, for nobody could have survived when it collapsed. It is terrible for me and will be more terrible for my child, so I must find for him (or perhaps it will be a girl) some good man to be a father. My parents are fine people: they will help, even though they will be sick with shock. But they cannot find me a husband, so I appeal to you. One good man, a Roman Catholic, like me. I do not care about anything else at all.’

  Mary had never faced such an impossible request, and was 99 per cent certain she would never, ever be able to produce anyone for Martha. In a profound quandary, all she could do was to stall: she told Martha that there was nobody suitable, but that new clients registered every day, so she would telephone the minute a possible man appeared.

  Martha duly wrote her telephone number on the registration form, and gratefully accepted Mary’s proposal that she should pay the registration fee only if an introduction were made.

  As the door closed behind Martha, Mary burst into tears of commingled despair, pity and fear.

  ‘Chin up, dear Mary! Here’s a letter to rejoice your heart!’ said Heather, glowing from a flirtatious lunch and placing a small close-written sheet in front of her friend. ‘It’s from Gertrude,’ she added as she swept out to greet a good-looking new client.

  As she read, Mary’s spirits revived and rose and overflowed. Gertrude and Teddy had met and fallen headlong in love. As a token of his devotion he had given her his precious ticket to freedom – ‘a gift which goes to my heart’, wrote Gertrude,

  but I am so afraid that I can lose it. Really, I want to give it to him again, but he insists. Also he insists that if he is Polish and I German (and South American and above all British too, of course) it is of no matter, for now we are not citizens of one country or another country but all are citizens of the world, only whether good or bad is of matter. Also, he insists that he loves me – he says ‘luffs’, which is so funny but I must not laugh for he is so serious! And my English is not perfect too! My heart says to me that I love him also. We are to marry and to have many children. So with my heart I thank you, Miss Oliver. I shall send you more news.

  As Mary hastily wiped her eyes and beamed a searchlight smile, the raised voice of the receptionist reached her, apparently remonstrating with some visitor, insisting that Miss Oliver was occupied and not to be disturbed. She did not succeed, for Mary’s door was flung open to reveal a slender young woman dressed in a black skirt and close-fitting dark red jacket. She paused just inside the door, striking a pose, her head tilted theatrically to one side, her back slightly arched, throwing her bosom forward.

  ‘Greetings, greetings! Miss Oliver, I presume?’ she enquired; rather coquettishly, decided Mary as she nodded at the unexpected visitor. She imagined her to be a potential client – but why would the receptionist have discouraged her?

  ‘Miss Oliver,’ the visitor gushed on, ‘my name is Miss Bud. I have read about you and your magnificent Marriage Bureau with considerable interest, and am vastly admiring of your inestimably valuable skill in working matrimonial miracles. I have something to assist you in your labours, something which all your felicitous brides will long passionately to possess. I have the ideal bust bodice! Observe!’

  To Mary’s outraged astonishment Miss Bud swiftly unbuttoned her jacket to reveal two firm, young, naked breasts, the nipples hidden by two small circular pieces of what appeared to be adhesive plaster, the point of each nipple peeping shyly through a hole in the centre.

  Mary was not so taken aback by this eye-opening revelation that she did not judge the visitor’s breasts to be in no more need of support than a healthy stalk of Brussels sprouts. Her immediate inclination was to tell the visitor to do up her buttons and leave forthwith, but Miss Bud’s recital of the virtues of her patent product – pronounced as if making a declaration of peace with honour – had a hypnotic effect on the match-maker. On swept Miss Bud. ‘This avant garde bust bodice sustains all but the most matronly of bosoms, yet in no fashion does it confine those entrancing feminine curv
es in which men take such innocent, boyish delight. It is blessedly free of the clumsy shoulder straps of conventional bodices, which resemble the cumbersome harness used to control a horse. Such bindings frequently reveal themselves, to the detriment of the romantic picture which each one of your enchanting brides strives unceasingly to present to that perfect husband, to whom you have with such refulgent genius united her. It elevates any sad and weary breast which pines to sag. Do you ever experience a saggy bosom, Miss Oliver?’

  This most impertinent of questions jerked Mary out of her trance to glare at Miss Bud. ‘No! Never!’ she snapped indignantly.

  Aware that her sales patter might have missed its mark, Miss Bud hastily buttoned up her jacket and threw onto Mary’s desk a card and a small packet. ‘Try them yourself,’ she said, retreating through the door. ‘Then you will certainly recommend them to your clients. Farewell, farewell, Miss Oliver!’

  The receptionist knocked and entered, apologizing for allowing Miss Bud in, for she had overheard the entire bizarre conversation. She was as nonplussed as Mary, who opened the packet and studied the bits of plaster, wondering if in some mystic way they might really have contributed to the undoubted robustness of Miss Bud’s bosom.

  At home that evening in her Piccadilly flat, curiosity overcame Mary’s scepticism. She pressed the intriguing little circles to her far from saggy breasts. Surveying herself in the mirror, she discerned no visible difference, and tried to peel them off. They would not budge. Worse, in bed, woken from fitful sleep by the cacophony of anti-aircraft guns, bombs and droning Luftwaffe planes, Mary felt a tickle, which burgeoned into an itch, which made her scratch away at the plasters – but to no effect. They were as firmly attached to the most sensitive part of her anatomy as limpets to a rock.