London Belongs to Me

by Norman Collins

  ‘Oh, very well,’ he said rather sulkily, ‘if you insist, I accept,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure there are others here who could do it better.’

  Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs! It appalled him. It was enough to appal anyone. And at such a moment, too. Admittedly Munich had saved the peace. But there was still a pretty nasty undercurrent of talk about the State of Europe. It said in the morning’s papers that President Hacha had been summoned to Berlin. And when Hitler invited someone to come and stay with him, it didn’t usually end there. Before Mr Josser knew where he was he might find himself… No: it was no use imagining. He must keep his head, read through the reports of his Ambassadors and trust to Providence.

  Mr Josser and Mr Chamberlain were in the same boat now.

  Up in the Gallery, a fattish rather bald young man was writing rapidly. He had a black leather folder of squared paper, and he was diligently making notes of the proceedings. The folder was full of his clear angular handwriting. The young man was Dr Otto Hapfel6 of the University of Heidelberg. He was at present engaged in a postgraduate course at London, and he was writing a thesis on English political institutions. It was his Professor who had suggested that he might care to add a section on the local parliaments. Dr Hapfel, who liked being told by his superiors exactly what he should do, was delighted. He was also delighted by the South London Parliament itself. It provided an excellent footnote to a chapter already entitled The Leader‐Principle in Amateur Democracy: England as an Example.

  Chapter V

  1

  Connie was being raided7…

  It was at the Moonrakers,8 of course. You got to the place through a narrow front door that led straight out of Dover Street. It was a respectable looking sort of door, in between a military tailors and a bespoke shoe‐makers. And judged by the concentration of expensive personal trades in Dover St the door might merely have led to a firm of select and exclusive hatters. But you would have noticed the difference the moment you got inside. No reputable hatter would have had an entrance hall with daffodil‐coloured walls covered with drawings of Apaches and Hawaiian dancing girls and bull fighters in scarlet cloaks.

  The entrance hall was confined. And, once the front door was closed, it was completely unventilated. A slightly suffocating odour of face powder and stale scent filled the place, as though actresses had been caged here. In the wall facing the entrance hall were the double mahogany doors of a small passenger lift. The doors had been smart and highly polished when new. And the upper portions, except for the finger marks, still were highly polished. It was only in the lower portions that the smartness had worn off a bit. The bottom panels were heavily scarred all over, and it was evident that patrons growing weary of waiting had used their feet in an effort to attract attention.

  In a strange way, the same mixture of smartness and shabbiness was repeated in the upstairs rooms. There was the same daffodil coloured paint everywhere, and more of the same sort of drawings. But round about waist height the yellow paintwork was smeared and dejected‐looking as though generations of customers in rather greasy clothing had rubbed against it. Some of the drawings had been almost effaced, in fact.

  It could not exactly be said that upstairs the atmosphere was the same as downstairs. Because here it was so much stronger. It was the original form of the smell, in fact. What you smelt as you came in was simply what had leaked down the lift shaft. And mingled with it up here in its primitive form were the characteristic odours of several dozen different forms of alcohol, cooking, the close foxy stuffiness of two cloakrooms that were often so full that some of the hats and coats had to be arranged along the occasional tables in the passage, and whatever fresh perfumes the ladies had happened to introduce into the room that night.

  The plan of the club was very simple. It was merely the top floor of two identical houses. This meant that there were two large rooms on each side, as well as a couple of smaller ones. One of the large rooms was the restaurant. This was entirely Spanish, with massive metal grilles over the windows and little balconies built out from the wall and stuffed birds in wicker cages and a bogus well‐head with a piece of mirror at the bottom, right in the centre. The tables were of chromium and scarlet wood. Out of this led the salon de danse with its radiogram, painted scarlet like the tables, and kicked about the base like the lift doors.

  On the other side of the hall were the card rooms. One of these was an innocent‐looking, conventional sort of place with wicker chairs and green baize tables. Only a large velvet spider suspended from the middle of the ceiling added the authentic night club note. The other room was a very different affair. It had a big gold chandelier and was hung with a lot of rather dubious tapestries. The rest of the room was taken up with a long polished table with large glass ash‐trays on it. Except for a roulette wheel in the centre and the flimsy little gilt chairs, it might have been the board table of a city company. It was in this room that the serious business of the Moonrakers went on. Eating and dancing and bridge, even poker, were only pastimes to keep the patrons cheerfully occupied until their turn came. In the name of Charity and the Voluntary Hospital movement as much as six thousand pounds had changed hands in the Tapestry room in the course of a single night.

  And this evening everything was warming up nicely. The dining‐room was full of prosperous‐looking men, and sleek‐haired women all wearing that season’s fashionable haggard expression. The women were mostly rather younger than the men and the most of them looked as though a course of good nourishing food might still be able to put them on their feet again. The men on the other hand all looked as though if they went on as they were going they would soon be off theirs for ever.

  Even though it was still quite early – not yet midnight in fact – the salon de danse was packed full with lumbering couples dutifully grasping each other. In the Tapestry room a nearly bankrupt Peer and a well‐to‐do stockbroker were leading about a dozen other players in a friendly game of Faro.

  Outside in her little cubbyhole Connie was all right, thank you. She had come to terms with one of the waiters and he had brought her the better part of a round of chicken sandwiches and a cup of soup that was still quite hot. Connie was doing fine.

  Then in the midst of all this simple amusement, one of the customers – a tall strapping fellow halfway between a moon‐calf and a Guardsman – extricated himself from the scarlet table‐legs and going over to the window opened it, and began blowing a police whistle into the darkness. His two companions got up in the same unhurried way and stood at the entrance to the lift.

  ‘Nobody to leave, please,’ they said mechanically, while they were getting out their notebooks.

  It took Connie next to no time to realise what was happening, even though she was stuck away in a corner and couldn’t see anything. This wasn’t her first raid. And she knew just what to do. It was quite like old days diving for the main switch and flooding the whole place in darkness.

  And after that the fun really started. Even the two detectives at the lift head started blowing their police whistles as well, and their mates down below kicked at the already damaged double mahogany doors in the entrance hall just to let the raiding party upstairs know that support was at hand.

  The customers for the most part took the raid rather as people at a picnic take a sudden thunderstorm. One or two of the men complained that it was a bore, and the various women who were out with other people’s husbands wore a vexed expression. Only one girl broke down. She was a slim pretty thing, and slightly drunk. She was the daughter of Mr Veesey Blaize, K.C. and therefore of news‐value in the popular press. She didn’t want any more paragraphs about herself at the moment while her fiancé was away. So putting her golden head down on the table amid the litter of coffee cups and cigarette‐ends, she wept. She was still weeping when the police located the switch and put the lights on again.

  Meanwhile Mr Vercetti, the manager, had been active and resourceful. Avoiding the beams of the policemen’s torches which were
making darting criss‐cross patterns across the room like the novelty illuminations on a carnival night, he was gently ushering his most important customers to the fire escape at the back. There was one chance in a hundred that way, he explained. But, as it happened, it didn’t quite come off. The police knew at least as much about raids as Connie and Mr Vercetti and they always reckoned to pick up a handful round at the back. Down there in the back yard among the dustbins they gathered together an outside broker, a Peer’s nephew, a South African business man, a member of a South American military mission, a lady of title, an actress and two young women who spent quite a lot of time accounting to the police. It was a good haul and rather fun for the police just waiting there for the flitters to come down one by one into their arms out of the darkness. Mr Vercetti himself was past caring: he had merely tried to do his best by his customers.

  But he was hurt, bitterly hurt. It seemed to him that he might as well give up trying to amuse a race so illogical as the English. In their despondent Anglo‐Saxon fashion they flocked to a night club to enjoy themselves. Then a lot of policemen, as despondent as the revellers, came in and raided them. And neither side really seemed to mind. In Mr Vercetti’s country the police would either, for a consideration, have been ready to leave him alone altogether or, if political personages had been involved, there would have been shootings, gunfire in the street outside, knives, vitriol‐throwing and prison sentences for ten, fifteen, twenty years. As well as one or two suicides.

  Then, quite suddenly, Mr Vercetti’s temper gave way. He went up to the original whistle blower and addressed him.

  ‘This issa da outrage,’ he shouted. ‘I will ruina you. I demanda my lawyer. I demanda you to stop.’

  The tall policeman put down a glass he was sniffing, and turned towards one of his men by the lift.

  ‘Take him downstairs,’ he said. ‘First car.’

  The rest went very quietly after that, with the exception of the pretty girl who was still weeping with her head on her hands. Her two companions had got up with the rather sheepish expressions of people who are told to stand in line like children, and left her. She remained a lonely pathetic figure by the bogus well‐head. One of her shoulder straps had slipped leaving the pale young flesh, with the red weal where the strap had been. There was something appealing and virginal about her. The sub‐inspector, or whatever he was, came over to her.

  ‘Have to come along now, Miss,’ he said.

  The girl did not stir, and the policeman tapped her on the arm.

  The indignity of it, the miserable sordid indignity of being tapped on the arm by a policeman for the second time in fourteen days – it was only a fortnight ago when she had been among those rounded up at the Dishwashers – overcame her. She remembered her father’s good name; the money that she had lost, the inevitable paragraphs in the popular press, her fiancé. When the policeman’s hand descended on her, the second time, she turned sharply round and bit it.

  That was why Cynthia Veesey Blaize – the one customer who had lowered the tone of the place by violence – went down in the small box‐like lift with two policemen all to herself.

  Connie was one of the last to leave. By then, she’d seen the leader of the gang go round putting a seal on the drink cabinet in the bar and, after he’d removed the roulette wheel and the faro board, even putting a seal on the Tapestry room itself. By the time he’d finished sealing up everything, the Moonrakers looked as though a mad solicitor had been let loose in the place.

  The journey to Vine Street was quick and well conducted. The driver of the Black Maria knew the way and they were all quiet in Connie’s car, including Connie. Only two of the passengers, indeed, showed any agitation over the whole affair. One was Mr Vercetti; he was still crying out that it wasa da outrage and that he would smasha da sergeant and ruina him. And the other was the fair girl. The cold night air had gone to her head and she was imploring her gaolers to let her out. She said that she had had enough of it, that she felt sick and that she wanted to go home. Then she was sick.

  As for Connie she was in the first cubicle on the left as you go in. And provided the policeman in the gangway didn’t stand bang in front of the door she kept getting little glimpses of London life through the grille at the back. She found them rather exciting – the flashing signs, the statue of Eros with the lights shining down on him, the crowds. Because, though Connie spent every single one of her nights here in the centre of things, she was too busy to see any of them. And it was a funny thing, now that she recalled it, that she had once made almost this identical journey already. It had been at the end of a stag party in Half Moon Street when some Army chaps had invited a few girls in afterwards, and a brunette had been hit with a champagne bottle. The only difference was that the Black Maria had been horse‐drawn then.

  All the same, the fun seemed somehow to have leaked out of the thing by the time they got to Vine Street. It had been raining – still was raining in fact – and the pavements were cold and messy. They couldn’t all go into the little yard because there were too many of them and some of the cars had simply to draw up outside, like limousines arriving for the Opera. The policemen on duty were brusque and businesslike and, though Connie tried to keep up her spirits by blowing a kiss at the solitary spectator, there was a kind of soullessness hanging over the whole proceeding.

  Once inside, there was the distempered unhomeliness which is peculiar to police stations. Against the setting of the dark green paint, the white waistcoats of the men and the evening frocks of the ladies showed up startingly.

  Immediately in front of Connie in the queue was a tall young man with vague purplish pouches under his eyes and a straggle of honey‐coloured moustache across his upper lip – he was the Peer’s nephew – and his companion, a dark melancholy looking girl with green finger nails.

  ‘Frightful bore this,’ the young man said whenever he caught her eye.

  ‘Can we smoke?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Not a hope,’ the young man answered. ‘Frightful bore, I’m afraid.’

  ‘How long shall we be here?’

  It was her first raid, and she felt tired.

  ‘Oh, hours probably,’ the young man answered. ‘They’ve got to write down all our names and addresses. They’re always fearfully slow. Can’t really write, you know. Frightful bore, waiting.’

  ‘Can we go home then?’

  ‘Oh yes, rather. We’ll be released, on bail.’

  ‘Can you arrange it, or do we have to get Daddy’s solicitor?’

  ‘Oh I’ll fix it. Bit of a bore, but it’s nothing really. Providing we’re both here in the morning, doesn’t really cost anything.’

  ‘But I’m meeting Mummy in the morning. She’s coming up specially.’

  ‘Have to put her off, I’m afraid,’ the young man comforted her. ‘Frightful bore. Don’t know why we had to go there. Too sickening they should have chosen that one. Frightful bore all this, I’m afraid.’

  Connie despised the dark melancholy looking girl because in the ways of the world she seemed no better than half‐witted. But she liked the perfume that she was using, and she kept coming up close to have sniffs at it. When the girl found out what was happening, and looked round to find Connie’s little withered face pressed up against her collar and the old nostrils distended like a horse’s, she gave a little grimace and took half a step forward. But they were packed too close for easy movement and a little shudder, half jolt, half ripple, passed right along the line of arrested revellers, as though a shunting engine had butted into the back of a goods train.

  After this rebuff Connie spent her time discreetly going over the contents of her moire handbag just to be sure that there was nothing in it that she would have preferred the police not to question her about. But it was quite all right: everything in the bag was hers.

  The queue got smaller and smaller, and Connie was finally brought face to face with the Sergeant. He was still scratching away in his book like the Recording Angel. O
ne after another the gentlemen in evening dress had put a price on their own head and on the head of the lady who was with them, and one or two of the ladies who were without companions had opened up their sequin pouchettes and produced a visiting card. Of course there were some who had earlier in the evening made Mr Vercetti a present of most of the ready money they started with, and there had to be a bit of telephoning. Taxi‐cabs kept arriving with surprised friends arranging to go bail. Then Connie’s turn came.

  ‘Name?’ said the Sergeant.

  It was the forty‐seventh name that he had written down, and he had given up saying ‘Please.’

  ‘Victoria Regina Coke,’ Connie told him.

  It was her real name that she was giving: Connie was only a pet name that she had given herself because Victoria Regina had seemed a bit too formal among friends. Also it went so well with Coke.

  ‘Address?’

  ‘10 Dulcimer Street, S.E. 11.’

  ‘Occupation?’

  Connie disliked everything about the Sergeant. He was large, disinterested and foxy‐featured. And she wondered if he would have behaved in that off‐hand manner if she had been the one with the pen in her hand and he had been standing against the rail almost up to his chin.

  ‘Hostess,’ she said firmly.

  The Sergeant wrote it down without raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Anyone to go surety for you?’

  Connie drew herself up and flashed her little yellow teeth at him.

  ‘I can go surety for myself, thank you,’ she said and handed her bag across to him.

  The Sergeant opened it, took one glance at the broken comb, the match box with cigarette ends in it, the chipped mirror, the bus tickets, and began counting out the odd coins.

  ‘Only three‐and‐eight here,’ he said.

  ‘There was a five pound note there when you had it,’ she said.