by Victor Gregg
22
Peggy
As we got older we began to see more of the girls and the sexual divide slowly began to close – this was usually because the girls took the lead. In my case it was a simple approach. There was a café around the corner from Kenton Street in Marchmont Street where a bunch of us spent our evenings nattering about the events of the day (that’s when we weren’t in Soho earning a bob or two). Without any warning this girl – her name was Peggy – who I had known since we were tiny, came across to me, put her arm through mine and without any emotion or bashfulness announced to all and sundry that ‘Vic and I are going for a walk up West’. That was it: by that simple action Peggy had announced that from now on I was her property and at the same time warned off any of her friends who might have designs on my body. I didn’t want any of my mates to think that I was some sort of a pansy, so I fell in with the idea. After all, Peggy was one of the better looking local girls and, not only that, she had just proved herself to be someone not to mess with.
The pair of us were almost the same age, but at fifteen Peggy was an almost fully developed young lady whose hormones were telling her that kissing a boy was only the start of things. As a young man I had none of these urges. I was more interested in whether Spurs were going to pulverise Arsenal next time they met, and how I was going to raise the cash to order one of those flash new suits from Harry Rubinstein’s tailor’s shop up the Cally. So Peggy, for all of her famous fighting spirit, had a job on her hands.
For instance, one time I arranged to meet her to go to the pictures. This was a special date and we were going to the Dominion on the corner of Tottenham Court Road and New Oxford Street. Unfortunately one of my mates from Harrison Street had come up with a bunch of tickets for a punch-up at the Ring, the famous boxing pub in Blackfriars. There was no competition. Peggy slipped my mind completely. Two days later and there was Peggy crying her eyes out; one of her mates came up and told me what a right sod I was. When I took her arm to say how sorry I was (a complete lie) she went into spasms of woe. Then suddenly, without warning, she lost her pathetic ‘little girl lost’ look and became a kind of Boadicea, a warrior type. She was fearsome in her attack on men in general and me in particular. I was lost. I didn’t have a clue what all the shouting was about but we eventually made it up. Peggy lived in Cromer Street and I used to take her for strolls around Holborn and Soho and into the classier cafés, which really impressed her. ‘How do you know all these people, Vic?’ My mum kept on about me bringing her up for a visit. ‘When are we going to meet this nice girl I saw you with the other day?’
Peggy and I were children of King’s Cross; we had everything in common, we had grown up together on the same streets and our families lived in similar circumstance, everyone crammed into two rooms. Peg’s family were, if anything, worse off. There was no way either of us could put on airs and graces. Peggy was well aware of the sort of boys I mixed with, and she also knew that I was what was called ‘a safe pair of hands’, which meant I was one of the boys who could handle themselves.
My main embarrassment was that my sister, little Emmy, who was now nine, kept Mum and Gran fully informed as to what was happening with ‘Vic’s girlfriend’, and of course they were eager to know how things were shaping up. ‘Might make yer more responsible to other people’ was my gran’s line.
Peggy was determined to nail me and to live happily ever after with roses round the door, which was what we reckoned all the girls spent their time planning. Of course they were nice to look at and sometimes walk around with, but we knew we should never let them get the whip hand which was easier said than done.
One evening she decided we were going for a walk up West. I took her round to one of the cafés I knew in Greek Street where I was in good with the Italian couple who ran it. This was because some of the lads from Sidmouth Street had seen off a small bunch of youths who had started to smash the café up. Normally we wouldn’t have got involved, but one of the lads in our gang was Italian. We had been sitting there supping up and nattering among ourselves when this group barged in. When one of them started pushing around the old lady who ran the place, our Italian mate saw red and waded in. We followed him and there was an almighty punch-up which ended with us winning the day. Since then we had always been welcome, which was why I was now sitting there with my Peggy, telling her that she could have anything she fancied on the menu, knowing full well that it would cost me next to nothing, perhaps nothing at all.
Peggy probably wondered where on earth I had got the money to take her to this posh restaurant in the West End, although really it was an upmarket café. I let her think on. ‘You know what, Peg, when you’re with all your friends, what do they think of you running after me like you do?’ ‘Oh, they’re like little kids, all they want to know is have we “done it yet”.’ ‘Well, what do you tell ’em?’ ‘I just say that you’re not like the other boys. I’m going to be a virgin when we get married.’ So then I said, ‘Let’s get one thing straight, Peg, I’m not getting married till I’ve made my fortune. I ain’t gonna take no wife into the sort of life that we’ve been brought up in.’
So there we were, a couple of fifteen-year-olds chatting away about the road to married bliss and all that went with it. I’m certain that dear Peggy knew exactly what she was talking about, but to me it was cissy talk – women, girls, marriage, babies. I thought that girls and their ambitions were dangerous to have around. But how do you get rid of them, and if you do discover the magic formula that undoes the chains, what do you replace them with? But I enjoyed sitting in that café, listening to a nice looker prattling on. Being in her company certainly made me feel good and I was well aware that there was hardly a boy in the neighbourhood who wouldn’t have liked to get his hands in her knickers. In spite of all this, and my physical attraction towards her, I managed to control myself, much to Peggy’s disappointment. I couldn’t forget the misery that my mum had suffered over my dad, and in some strange way a bit of me blamed the institution of marriage. Not that I spent all that much time thinking about these things. I had more important things on my mind, like how to make a fortune.
23
Jobs and Sods
My next job was as a pastry cook’s assistant, in a small bread shop in Tavistock Place, next door to home. Gran had noticed the advert for a ‘smart youth’ in the shop window and had promptly marched in and told them that the ‘smart youth’ would be on the doorstep the next day. It’s true she knew that I was once again ‘on the stones’, as we called being out of work, but she was still taking a chance saying I would be there. Gran never did things by halves; when I arrived home that evening I was greeted by the words: ‘Got a job yet, Victor?’ ‘Not yet, Gran.’ ‘Start tomorrow morning at the Tavistock Bakery, one pound a week and all the bread you can bring home. And before you leave this house in the morning I want to see you clean and tidy, not your usual scruffy self !’
The bakery was staffed by a pastry cook, a chef, an under-chef and a chap of about eighteen who was working as an apprentice. Then, last of all, me, the dogsbody, as usual.
I had to do all the jobs that the other three considered below their status, like cleaning the floors. Once a week I had to get on my hands and knees and scrape away at the concrete to remove all the dried flour and paste which got brushed off the work tables. By the end of the week all the debris had been so stamped and trodden in that it had become an inch-thick coating on top of the concrete, forming a sort of carpet. The Tavistock Bakery was reckoned to be the finest bakehouse in all Bloomsbury, so what the worst one must have been like boggles the mind. Nothing was thrown away. The sugar, for instance, was measured from a huge sack that stood in the corner. On a shelf next to the mixing board there was a large, square biscuit tin. It was the custom to empty any excess sugar, wherever it came from, and that included the floor, into ‘the biscuit tin’. It was this second-hand sugar that they used to coat the doughnuts and other cakes.
The under-chef was a Scot,
a short, stocky individual who looked like he had served his apprenticeship in the boxing ring at Blackfriars. His chosen sport was cross-country running and he eventually succeeded in persuading me to join him on his training runs, three times round the Outer Circle in Regent’s Park, which he did three evenings a week. His name was Robert but because he was Scottish we knew him as ‘Bruce’. It was Bruce who introduced me to the Marlborough Athletics Club in Drury Lane and for the first time since leaving school I began to enjoy going to work, not because of the job itself, which I hated, but the spirit that prevailed between the four of us and especially being invited to take part in the training schedules, which really lifted me.
It was in this job that I first got a real inkling about sex. The chef used to bang away at the shop manageress most afternoons, while his mate was to be found in a cupboard servicing one of the shop girls. It was all quite open.
This job lasted until one day when I was talking to Bruce. I don’t remember how it came up but in the heat of the moment I called him a ‘Scotch bastard’. He let fly at me with the big wooden shovel that was used to draw the cakes out of the oven. After both he and the cakes had cooled down, he said he was quite sorry it had happened, but it did teach me never to call anyone a bastard unless I was prepared to go to war. In fact, I have never used the term since, at least not in the same personal way, but that was it. Another job down the drain and yet another question and answer session with our gran who insisted that I had disgraced the family. ‘’Ow am I expected to show my face in that shop again?’ The diatribe was relentless and well justified although I didn’t think so at the time. It did cross my mind that Gran was upset because she realised that there would be no more free bread and cakes.
My next attempt to make my fortune was as an assistant packer at Rose Brothers, a cloth warehouse in New Oxford Street which supplied all the local sweatshops with their fabrics. It was while working here helping the delivery driver that I got an insight into the hard work my mum did in order to put a crust on the table.
All over the area that lay between Tottenham Court Road, Mortimer Street and Great Portland Street there were dozens of small dressmaking and milliners’ shops, all competing with one another for the lucrative West End fashion trade. They were nearly all Jewish-owned. The girls and women were intensely loyal to whoever they were working for. In her time, Mother must have done a stint at every milliner’s workshop in the district. The girls followed the work and they all understood why they might be laid off by Mr Rubenstein one day and taken on the next by his rival, Mr Knosher. Mr Knosher would put in a price for a line of hats, then Mr Rubenstein would put in a lower price and get the work. So Mr Knosher laid a dozen off and Mr Rubenstein took them on. The employers of these highly skilled women knew that, whatever happened, they had to keep them in the district.
I soon got bored stiff with the brothers Rose, so I took a job as a humble delivery boy for a grocer in Marchmont Street. It was there that I had my first brush with the law. I got done for dangerous driving while demonstrating to all the world how easy it was to drive a three-wheeled box tricycle not on three wheels but two. That cost me five bob at Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court.
There were repercussions. More than twenty-five years later I applied for a job with London Transport as a bus driver and had to go to the Carriage Office in Vauxhall to get my PSV licence. One of the questions on the form was about past convictions. Naturally I had long ago forgotten about the tricycle incident, but the police hadn’t and my application was returned as being inaccurate. I was completely at a loss to know why; they told me to think back but for the life of me I couldn’t remember doing anything wrong, so finally they told me. It goes to prove that they’ve got you down from the cradle to the grave.
24
Bloomsbury Society
The job at the grocer’s in Holborn was only ten minutes’ walk from the wretchedness of Sidmouth Street and Harrison Street but it was like being transported to another planet.
The streets in which we had played and grown up were solid working-class areas, where people worked for a pittance, the pubs carried on a roaring trade and it was a struggle just to survive. And, of course, in Holborn it was just as much a struggle as anywhere else, but blending in with it and floating right on the surface, in the middle and round the edges, was a volatile mix that made up the larger than life elements of Bloomsbury society.
Within the area between Russell and Gordon Squares, Gower Street, Museum Street and, of course, Bloomsbury Square itself, you found all sorts: poets, writers, arty-crafties, weirdy-beardies, folksy-wolksies, and every political creed under the sun.
At night the street girls took up their stations under their favourite lamp post or in a shop doorway ready to pounce on any passer-by who entered their territory. Us young kids earned money keeping these girls informed when the rozzers were about. For sixpence a week we kept watch and if we saw a copper we gave a signal and off the girls dashed to the nearest café or fish and chip shop to wait until we signalled that the coast was clear.
If the girls lasted a month without going before the local beak, we might be rewarded with a bonus of a shilling from the ponce who looked after their welfare. Not that there was much welfare in evidence, more likely a beating up if they failed to meet some target. But they were a carefree and happy group who accepted the rough life they led with a shrug, knowing that their position only lasted as long as their looks held out. When those started to go the next step was outside the railway stations of Paddington and King’s Cross.
As well as dealing with the girls, the police kept an eye on the cafés that catered for the different political groups. They all had their own sacred venues. The most famous of these was the Red Book Club in Parton Street. The RBC was the home of the local communists and fellow travellers. The anarchists had a den in Red Lion Street, where their national paper was printed, while the Trots met up in a café in Museum Street. In those days the Labour Party had such a bad name that they had very little following except in the universities. As for the Tories, they were non-existent in the area.
As far as I can remember, no one was ever arrested; it was all fairly harmless stuff, and, far from being intimidated by the actions of the police, the harassment made these groups more vocal. These people could talk the hind legs off a donkey, so the altercations with the police often turned out to be very entertaining, though each political sect hated the other’s guts.
Gradually I began to pick up on some of the arguments about the problems of that time: the growing strength of fascism in Europe, communism as the ultimate Garden of Eden, the Trots blasting away at anything that emanated from the soul of Stalin. The poets and the writers trying to find common ground and come up with an antidote, all of them, of course, failing in the end.
There was a lot of talk about Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts. Mosley was the self-appointed head of the British Union of Fascists, an evil anti-Semitic crew. The Blackshirts used to go round the streets causing mayhem, breaking the windows of Jewish shopkeepers and putting the fear of God into anyone who opposed them. The worst thing about all this was the protection they had from the police. I knew that if a person or a group responded with force against these thugs it wasn’t the Blackshirts who ended up in court the next morning.
For light entertainment we had the showgirls and the dancing boys, all living in the boarding houses that filled the streets round Russell Square. I never had a dull or uninteresting time during my life as a young resident of Bloomsbury, and I learnt more than I ever did at school.
One of the customers at the grocer’s shop in Marchmont Street was Charles Laughton, the famous actor. He had a flat in Gordon Square. One day while I was delivering a basket of groceries to him, I came face to face with the great man himself. Would I care to earn some extra money, he asked. ‘Not ’arf?,?’ says I. ‘Be here at seven sharp,’ says he.
It turned out that he was holding a reception for some visitors from America. Part of my
work was to wash the glasses and make myself useful to the cook. I earned myself a fiver that night. Laughton must have put it around to some of his cronies, because I was asked to do similar work quite a few times after that. I could only be contacted through Hales the Grocers so I was in the manager’s good books for bringing in new custom.
At the time I was knocking around with a trio of lads who had left school at the same time as me. We liked hanging around Greek Street and Old Compton Street, in fact anywhere in Soho where we knew the sharp boys could be found. We performed small tasks in return for a ‘floater’, a sort of retainer of a couple of pounds a week, so we always had some extra money in our pockets. As the cliques got to know us we were given more difficult jobs like sussing out how long it took the local copper to do his beat and so on. Much later in life I learnt that this was termed ‘aiding and abetting’. To us boys, however, it was all a bit of a lark and a way of earning a few bob on the side.
25
Running into Eddie Wilson
By now I was nearly sixteen, growing out my clothes like there was no tomorrow and for the umpteenth time I was out of work. I think my grandfather had given up on me. ‘Pity you’re not old enough to enlist, seven years in the army is what you need.’ Mum and Gran were also at it. ‘Victor, you got to settle down, learn a trade. In and out of work ain’t no good for man or boy.’ Pearls of wisdom, no doubt. ‘OK, Mum, I promise to stick the next job I get.’ I didn’t even have my tongue in my cheek. I suppose I must have meant it at the time.
One day, by a stroke of luck, I met up with a character who remembered me from my visits to Brooklands. I was strolling along Great Portland Street, in those days home to specialist sports car manufacturers. Frazer Nash had a dealership along with Salmson and other well-known marques. Eddie Wilson recognised me from the other side of the road and hailed me. Eddie owned a small garage in Chiswick High Road which specialised in converting small-engine-capacity cars into sports models. I explained how I came to be strolling about in the middle of the day when I should have been hard at it earning a crust and he offered me a job.
