by Jon Pertwee
The first thing to do before taking up my new appointment was to find somewhere to live, so naturally the first place I looked at was my old flat in St Martins Street. Arriving on the doorstep I rang all the bells, hoping that a helpful tenant would tell me who the present landlord was. The front door was opened by a tall, emaciated woman of unattractive mien, within the shadowy background, the eyes and teeth of several peering females.
‘Good morning, I wonder if by any chance you know whether the first floor is occupied at the moment?’
‘At the moment, no!’ she said. ‘Would you be interested in it?’
‘Yes, very!’
‘Then come upstairs and we will discuss the matter in greater detail. I am the Manageress,’ she went on.
The ‘peerers’ faded back into the gloom as I mounted those familiar stairs for the first time in several years. Flinging open the door to what used to be my sitting room, I saw that the prominent feature was no longer the comfy Chesterfield suite, but an enormous brass bed and little else.
‘There, will that be all right for you, dear?’
‘No, I’m sorry to say, it won’t, I don’t want a bed in this room at all.’
‘No bed?’ She looked at me with grave suspicion.
‘No bed, just bring the sofa back.’ I unlocked and walked through the connecting door to my old bedroom. It too had a gigantic bed in it. ‘If you’ll remove this and put in a comfortable divan instead, I will take it,’ I said with a broad sweeping gesture.
‘You mean you want the two rooms, dear?’
‘Of course I want the two rooms,’ I replied.
‘Well, I suppose I could arrange it, but it’s going to be rather expensive, all that furniture moving you understand.’
‘That’s OK! If I’m going to stay, I shall want everything to be just right,’ I said a trifle grandiosely, knowing full well that the Admiralty would be footing the bill.
‘Will you be bringing a young lady with you, dear, or will you be looking for company? she asked, through a plastic smile of evenly moulded teeth. I was momentarily speechless at the effrontery of her question. What the Hell had it got to do with her, anyway?
‘How much will it be if I stay for six months?’ I asked trying to ignore the impertinence of her question.
‘Well, let me see, dear, if you were just taking the rooms for an hour or so, I would have to charge you five pounds, plus one pound for the maid, that’s with you providing your own company of course. With one of my girls (and I heartily recommend young Doris), the charge would be twenty pounds a night plus the maid and any refreshments, but for six months, well, that is a different matter altogether, for a six month stay I’d be prepared to make you a very special price, throwing in young Doris whenever you are unaccompanied.’ The horrifying truth dawned at last. I had blithely walked into a brothel. So that explained the sniggering in the shadows and the predominance of beds over other furniture. It also explained why the walls were covered in silver paper; for you could see yourself reflected in them. To think that I had lived in that gaudy but delightfully kitsch flat for all that time before the war, and had never once realised why it had been so decorated. Presumably, just prior to my first living there, it had been raided by the Vice Squad and closed, allowing myself and four other lucky young blades to occupy unknowingly the best little ‘out-of-business’ whore-house in London’s WC2.
Suddenly, it seemed that the second thing to do was also to find myself somewhere to live, so mounting a Hercules bicycle that I had rescued from a bombsite, I set off in search of suitable accommodation within easy cycling distance of Westminster. Immediately behind Sloane Square Tube Station, there is, on the corner of Chester Row and Bourne Street, an extraordinary little beamed cottage. To its right in Chester Row was a three-house bombsite and to its left a burnt-out shell. The cottage itself was like a very old lady, badly in need of a face-lift and make-up, but even with its iron-studded front door hanging from its hinges, it still had an inviting air about it. So I went in. The top floor was empty, with its front door blown in and the ceiling on the floor. The middle floor was a deserted mess. The ground floor flat door was padlocked and when I peered through the windows it appeared to be occupied. I went down to the basement. There was a knocker on the door, so I knocked.
‘Come in,’ lilted a Scottish voice, so I did.
‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I was wondering if you knew if there were any flats to let in this house?’
‘Oh aye,’ said the voice from somewhere in the stygian gloom. ‘This one will be, if you’ll give me about fifteen minutes to get out, I’m having a babbie any minute.’ She appeared from the shadows, enormously pregnant and glowing with the joy of it all. ‘I’m just waiting for the ambulance, to take me the hospital,’ she said. ‘I’ll no be comin’ back, so here is the address of the house owner, a Miss Fenner’ handing me a hand-etched card. ‘She’s awa’ in the country at the moment so you must send the rent to her once a month, it’s three pounds ten shillings a week. Ye can keep what’s left of the furniture and kitchen utensils for five pounds, okay? The hot water comes from a geyser, so ye’ll need some shillin’s. Here’s a couple to get on with, ‘and here’s the key to the flat, the front door’s nae too well and won’t close.’ She paused for a moment, cocked an ear and said, ‘Ah, there’s me ambulance, I hope ye’ll be happy here, I was until my babbie’s daddy pissed off.’ And with that, this delightful balloon of a lady grabbed a suitcase and was off up the staircase and gone. I don’t think I had spoken a word to her throughout the entire encounter. Nevertheless, I was now the possessor of a one sitting room, one bedroom, one bathroom flat in Chelsea for three pounds ten shillings a week, and there I lived for the next twenty years. Eventually I bought the house off Miss Fenner and restored it to its original glory. It still stands there today, with its black and white beamed walls, its oak-studded front door, its cobbled front and blue plates let into the walls. I sold it in 1965 for £8,500, but have just heard that it is about to be demolished, and a neo-terraced Georgian House is to be erected in its place, to resemble, I suppose, all the other houses in the street, and costing in excess of a quarter of a million pounds.
What a tragedy that uniformity is so often the only acceptable normality!
Once delivered to my flat, the Bugatti sat proudly outside 66 Chester Row where love was lavished upon it by a horde of small boys from Bourne Street. For a nominal sum they washed it, polished it and sat in it until I thought they would be through to the aluminium. But nowhere could I find another coil. I advertised, went to scrapyards, even tried having it rewound, but all to no avail. It had turned out to be nothing but a blue ornament, so stifling my sobs, I sold it to an enthusiast for £150, a veritable fortune in those days. If only I had had more patience, it would still be in my possession and not the subject of a legal dispute in the Schlump Museum, Switzerland.
*
For the life of me, I could not see the sense of my new appointment, for Intelligence Divisions of any service always smacked of codes and mathematics, two subjects at which I did not excel. So it was with great trepidation that I entered the office of my CO, an RNR Officer of great magnetism, who quickly allayed my fears that mathematics were an essential part of my job. What he wanted from me was my mouth he said, to utilise my abilities as an actor. A spy! My God! He wants me to become a spy!
‘Come in and meet your brother Officers,’ he said, leading me into another office where I was introduced to the most heterogeneous collection of men I had ever met. There was Lieutenant Bob Little RNVR, a prematurely balding, very camp dress designer. Lieutenant John Paddy Carstairs RNVR, the well-known film Director. Lieutenant R. S. Smith RNVR, a brilliant University Don of twenty-four who died two years later with the hardened arties of a man of ninety. Lieutenant Harold Warrender RNVR, the eminent stage and film actor, and a tall, good-looking, round-faced Able Seaman, later to become the Prime Minister of England, James Callaghan.
We were all connected in di
fferent ways with the better security of the Kingdom. My particular brief was to travel this country and others, to lecture and browbeat those members of the men’s and women’s branches of the service most closely connected with secrets of national importance, into watching their wagging tongues. I was, for example, to visit establishments of WRN Signallers and Coders and after showing a most harrowing documentary film, involving great loss of life due to careless talk, I was to give them a psychologically designed lecture that punched home between laughter and tears the tremendous importance they must attach to Security. It was an acting job, pure and simple, and the reason for my appointment was now clear.
Another day would be spent instructing Commandos prior to a raid in the use of escapology equipment, e.g. hidden compasses in brass buttons on right-hand threads (a simple twist that confused the methodical mind of the enemy for many years); magnetised fly-buttons, the biggest hole of which, when one was balanced on the upturned other, pointed to north; magnetised sewing-needles, which when suspended on a piece of cotton, swung northwards; white cotton handkerchiefs, which when soaked in urine turned into full colour maps; wire files sewn down the creases of trousers which when clipped to two signet rings could cut through steel bars like butter; a pipe that you could smoke but was also capable, by a twist of the bowl, of firing one .22 bullet in a case of extreme emergency.
But most important of all was the teaching to a few chosen members of a raid the special intricate code which enabled Intelligence to receive vital information from prisoners of war via seemingly innocuous letters to lovers and loved ones. Intelligence Divisions were also able to reply, by having the writers inculcate seemingly innocent additions to their letters. The job necessitated continuous travel by train, plane and internal combustion engine, and was made all the more exacting and fraught by having to carry, as well as my personal luggage, a large padlocked canvas sack of secret films and books. As this additional encumbrance had to be carried quite unaided, I was soon as fit and strong as a yak.
The one good thing about carrying secret documents was being locked into railway compartments by myself, which, for the first time since the outbreak of war gave me plenty of room to stretch out and sleep. The bad thing was that on several occasions the guard failed to release me on arrival at my destination, resulting in my having to alight at some God-forsaken spot with a suitcase and a sack, and not a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting to my port-of-call in time.
If a train was too crowded to allow me a private compartment, then I resorted to being locked in the cage of the guard’s van, where I would crash out on an old pre-war lilo airbed that I carried with an inner tube repair outfit for such emergencies. I once had to travel all the way from London to Lincoln sitting in a first class lavatory, sleep being made impossible by a continual hammering on the door and accompanying cries of ‘Good God, have you died in there?’
I had to visit on quite a few occasions, the top secret midget submarine base in north-west Scotland and, being situated in the outlandish place it was, to go out for a drink, a meal, or pay a visit to the cinema necessitated quite a long trip in a Naval picket-boat. On my previous visit I had been introduced to a delightfully decorous young Wren of style and extreme naughtiness. Her name was Kitty and she always managed to look in her Naval Issue like a front cover of La Vie Parisienne. After due acquaintance I found that beneath the blue serge, she continued the ‘Oh La La!!’ impression with lingerie that would have put Janet Reger’s eyes out.
On the liberty-boat one evening, returning from a run-ashore, to get out of the cold and spray, Kitty and I crawled right up into the bow under a six foot covering of deck where, as we had an hour to while away, we made merry as if in a haystack.
On arriving back at the ship, composed and now under perfect control, we alighted, and walked down the jetty towards our various quarters. At that moment the full moon came out from under the clouds bathing us in its light. The sound of raucous laughter came from immediately behind us.
‘What are they laughing at?’ asked a perplexed Kitty.
‘I have no idea,’ I replied vainly looking around in search of a clue.
The laughter got louder and louder and from the accompanying whispered sniggerings, it was plain that we were the butt of their unseemly mirth. The reason why, I could not fathom.
‘Goodnight, thanks for a lovely evening,’ I said, as Kitty turned sheepishly into the Wrens’ quarters. It was only then that everything became clear. Some seaman had done a stirling job of freshly painting the ribs of the picket-boat white. Kitty, striated like a zebra, had white horizontal stripes all down the back of her jacket and skirt. A most compromising collection of marks – but no more than those to be seen on me when I myself turned hurriedly towards the Officers’ Mess. In the still bright light of the moon, Lieutenant J. D. R. Pertwee RNVR NID, stood before the snickering, smirking sailors, with two pure white kneecaps, and two forearms of similar colouration.
As you can imagine, my lecture on ‘Security’ the next day went down a storm, and during one momentary hiatus, a straight-faced, three-badge Stoker complained that there was a distinct smell of wet paint emanating from the platform, and that I should be well advised to avoid getting any on my nice new uniform.
*
After some months I found that giving the same lecture over and over again stultified the mind and impaired the concentration. So much so, that one day in the middle of such a lecture, I gave myself a very nasty turn. I had just spent a very pretty weekend with a very pretty girl, who must’ve been a High Priestess among sexual innovators, and was halfway through my powerful lecture on Security to a large audience of both sexes, when my concentration slipped and I allowed myself to be transported back to the loving arms of the afore-mentioned sex-goddess. For unknown moments erotic thoughts flooded my mind until suddenly a warning bell rang in my head and I was jerked back to the present, with the audience coming into instant focus and looking thoroughly shaken. My God, what had I been saying? I knew that I had been talking all the time, but what words had been issuing from my mouth? Had I suddenly gone into a running commentary on that heavenly sexual encounter? Had I been giving a blow-by-blow description of fornicating gymnastics? From the open-mouthed expressions on the faces of the audience it certainly looked as if I had. Politely requesting them to excuse me for a moment, I rushed into the wings, where I grabbed at a young Seaman-Electrician and asked him what I had been saying. His face suffused into scarlet as he said, ‘I’m very sorry sir, I’m afraid I don’t know. I must’ve dropped off ‘.
The only other person backstage was a behemoth of a Wren Chief Petty Officer. I approached her with caution and again asked if she had heard what I had been saying. ‘Oh yes sir, thank you very much!’ she simpered. ‘Every word, and most edifying it’s been I can assure you.’
With that ambiguous reply she excused herself; leaving me to return to the platform, not knowing until the lecture was over, whether I had been holding my audience in thrall by the power of my oratory or with my highly original approach to sex instruction.
I discovered later over a pink gin that my lecture had in fact continued unabated, with no stories of a similar colour to the drink I was holding, which proves once and for all that it is possible to think of one thing and do another at the same time.
*
About this time I was staying the weekend with Uncle Guy in Caterham when the Germans sent over their first flying bombs. Our house ‘Torcross’ was, you may remember, at the top of a long ridge of hills and therefore very vulnerable. I was helping myself to some breakfast bangers, when with an almighty earth-shattering roar a black monoplane with stubby wings and spouting tire shot over the house. So low was the plane and so intense the vibration of its engine that seconds after its disappearance, the roof tiles began to fall to the ground like rain. Uncle Guy and I rushed out to the cross-roads, from where we could see in both directions. Within ten minutes another of the noisome machines was upon us. But this time
before it clipped the top of a big beech tree and careered on its way to London, we were able to get a good look at it. It was small compared to a normal fighter plane, with short square-tipped wings and a long tube mounted high up on its fuselage. From this tube came a noise that was a fluttering cacophony of mind-bending volume, causing anyone within its vicinity to clap his hands over his ears to avoid having his drums shattered.
