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

by Barbara Tate

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get me skates on and earn some money for the holiday. Tony doesn’t want to draw too much out of the bank; he says it might not get put back. He’s sensible like that.’

  She set to work with a will, determined to earn enough in the next two days to cover the entire expense of the holiday. I asked her what was going to happen about the flat, and she told me that Tony was finding a girl for it and that she hoped it would be someone I would like.

  She had never been abroad before – ordinary people didn’t in those days – and during that day and the next, she worked up a terrific enthusiasm about it.

  ‘Lucky you caught me,’ I would hear her say on her way up with a man. ‘Another couple of days and I won’t be here. I’m going abroad.’ The man would ask where she was going; even if he didn’t, she would tell him. Each time it was somewhere different. As always, I was fascinated by her flights of fancy: on the first evening, her trip took her as far west as New York and as far east as Egypt. Impressively, when she eventually returned from her holiday and the same clients turned up again, she remembered exactly what she had told each one and was able to continue the deception with a colourful and fanciful description of her time there.

  The day before she was due to leave, I noted that she didn’t appear to have any clothes ready to take with her, and even if she had, she hadn’t got a case to put them in. Also, her blonde hair had a brunette parting half an inch wide. I asked if she didn’t think she ought to do something about it. She told me she would be bleaching her roots when she got home that night. She wasn’t catching the plane until midnight the following day; there was masses of time and I wasn’t to get in a flap about it. The following day – the day of departure – she was still flaunting her brunette parting. I was aghast.

  ‘Mae. You didn’t do your hair.’

  ‘I know, I know. Don’t worry. I’ve brought the bleach with me.’ She fished around in a carrier bag and pulled out a bag with some white powder in it and a bottle half full of peroxide. ‘I’ll take it with me and I’ll do it when I get there.’

  By eight o’clock that night, despite frequent admonitions from me, there had still been no signs of preparation, and I was going practically frantic on Mae’s behalf.

  ‘Mae, you haven’t even got a case yet.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ she groaned. ‘You do carry on. Tell you what, I’ll go and see if I can borrow one now. Will that please you?’

  She gave me a comforting pat on the head and a reassuring smile before departing on her quest. She was gone for half an hour, and when she came back, she was bearing in triumph a battered relic of goodness knows how many moonlight flits and trips to Margate.

  ‘See. I got one,’ she crowed as she dumped it on the bed.

  Having a suitcase seemed significant to her, and after staring at it for a little while, she declared that she supposed she’d better start putting things in it.

  She began with the items that needed no thinking about – the bleach and peroxide – then she reached into her carrier bag and produced a hair-dryer, which she also dropped into the case. After that, she paused and thought for a bit.

  ‘Make-up,’ she announced briskly and opened the dressing-table drawer she kept it in. She rooted about and threw one or two items into the case, but seemed unable to take any positive line about how much or what type she would need. She ended up by pulling the drawer right out and tipping its entire contents into the case.

  ‘Ah, perfume!’ she said, after some reflection. With that, she swept in half a dozen bottles off the dressing table. Then she looked round at me, smiling brightly. ‘We’re coming on, aren’t we?’ she said. ‘Now, I’ll want some clothes.’

  She fished in her carrier bag again and came out with a handful of dirty briefs.

  ‘Didn’t have time to wash them, so I’ll do them when I get there. Oh, and a bra; must have a bra. There’s one in this drawer somewhere – if I can find it. It’s my favourite one.’

  Like a mole, she burrowed her way into the tightly packed garments, throwing items of clothing all over the floor behind her.

  ‘Ah, here it is,’ she cried jubilantly, pulling out a screwed-up string of lace. ‘And that’s why I haven’t been wearing it lately – the strap’s broken. Be a dear and mend it, will you? No, don’t bother. I’ll do it when I get there.’

  She finished off her packing by ferreting out a few jumpers, a couple of skirts, a grimy blouse and her favourite suit, which badly needed cleaning.

  ‘I’ll get it done when I get there. Oh, better take another pair of shoes.’

  She sorted through the jumble of shoes and abandoned chastity cages at the bottom of the wardrobe.

  ‘Do take your nice garden-party dress,’ I said, getting it out and starting to fold it. ‘You can iron it when you get there,’ I added, by now thoroughly brainwashed.

  She turned and looked at me quizzically, then grinned. ‘S’right,’ she said, and gave me an affectionate clump on the side of the head.

  It was now about half past nine, two and a half hours till her flight.

  She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve just got time for a couple of more geezers,’ she said, ‘and then I’ll be off.’

  Luckily, one of the geezers was already sitting patiently in the waiting room.

  ‘Let’s be having you,’ she yelled, but when he told her that he wanted a long session in captivity, she bundled him out.

  Half an hour and three geezers later, the lid of the suitcase was closed for the last time, but not before a few more items had been added.

  She eyed the dogs’ mink lying in the corner. ‘Good thing they’ve been sleeping on that,’ she said. ‘It’s the only fur coat I’ve got left now.’ She picked it up and shook it; out flew two or three of Mimi’s knotted rubbers. ‘Ooh, look! Buried treasure!’ she giggled.

  She hung it over her arm as I picked up the disreputable suitcase and we departed.

  ‘The new girl’s name is Phyllis,’ she said, as we hurried down the stairs. ‘I don’t know what she’s like – Tony got her. I expect she’ll be all right.’

  I was left on the pavement, feeling desolate. I realised what a bulwark against my loneliness Mae had become. Being with her was like swimming through breakers, with time only to splutter to the surface and gasp for breath before the next one hit. Irritating though she sometimes was, she possessed a gaiety and optimism that was gradually changing my own rather sombre nature into something much brighter.

  Oh well, I thought, as I turned to make my way home. She’ll only be away for two weeks. Then I smiled to myself as I pictured her entrance at the airport: Mae could never just walk into a place like other mortals.

  Suddenly I was struck by a thought that made me stop in my tracks and grin insanely. Malta! Why, I was as gullible as the rest! It was just as likely that Mae was now on her way to Blackpool !

  Twenty-Seven

  When Phyllis arrived the following day, my heart sank.

  She was about forty, large, solid and matronly, with a bosom like a bolster – and she was grandiose with it. Her attire would have done credit to the chairwoman of the parochial church council but was considerably less suitable for prostitution. She wore an ugly brown tweed suit of uncompromising cut, with a tailored blouse, thick brown brogues and a brown porkpie hat. She carried a large brown Gladstone bag. Her hair, her eyes and her thick lisle stockings were brown too. Only the blouse offered a slight gesture to whimsy – it was pale fawn.

  She sailed in like a duchess, giving me a curt nod as she passed the kitchen en route to the bedroom. I followed her slowly, trying to recover from the shock of her appearance.

  Lady Phyllis seated herself primly on the dressing table stool and, depositing her handbag carefully beside her, proceeded to survey the room with an expression of sour distaste written plainly on her face. I had arrived extra early, to clear away the debris of Mae’s chaotic packing and to clean the place, but even so, I felt suddenly defensive
and embarrassed by the shabby tawdriness of everything. Robbed of Mae’s presence and under this imposing woman’s sharp scrutiny, the furniture, curtains and even the little table lamps looked drab and cheap.

  Eventually, her gaze, still full of aversion, anchored itself on me and dwelt there joylessly.

  ‘You must be Barbara – the maid,’ she decided at last, without a trace of enthusiasm. Her voice had a slight cockney twang, not quite concealed by her carefully cultivated accent.

  I answered in as friendly a way as I could muster, but she wasn’t having any of it and, still eyeing me with disfavour, told me she was ready for a cup of tea.

  The first time she came back with a man, I waited outside the bedroom door for the money to be passed to me, but in vain. Phyllis had never worked from a hustling flat before and, consequently, had never had a maid. I thought I’d better give her a few tactful hints and tips.

  ‘It would be much safer to let me look after the money, you know,’ I said, as gently as I could.

  She looked at me with cold suspicion. ‘I keep it in my handbag and that has a lock on it. I keep the key round my neck.’

  ‘Well let me take charge of your handbag, then,’ I persisted. ‘It really isn’t wise to keep it with you.’

  ‘I prefer to keep it with me,’ she said firmly. She had decided I was showing far more interest in her cash than an honest person should. Thereafter, the handbag never left her side, even when she went to the toilet.

  She didn’t show any vestige of friendliness during her whole stay. Amazingly, she did quite well. Mae’s regulars weren’t all that keen, but the men Phyllis brought back were obviously intrigued by her buxom respectability. She even got quite a few regulars of her own.

  The catastrophe I had feared happened towards the end of her second week. There was the sound of footsteps crashing past the kitchen door as a client charged out of the bedroom and raced down the stairs. This was accompanied by Phyllis’s screams, intermingled with words that no respectable lady would have known. The handbag had gone.

  On her remaining two days, she took the gamble of giving me her money to look after. When she finally left, she paused on her way out and, as though to the manor born, said, ‘Well, goodbye, Barbara. You have done quite well.’

  Afterwards, I wished I’d risen to the occasion and bobbed a curtsey, saying, ‘Goodbye, ma’am. So pleased to have given satisfaction, I’m sure.’

  Mae returned to work without the slightest trace of a tan, but I had been wrong in assuming she’d been in Blackpool. She said she’d spent most of the time playing cards with Tony’s brother’s girl, Lulu. Otherwise, she said, she would have gone mad with boredom; she wasn’t surprised Tony had left the place.

  ‘Nothing to do, and that heat! It’s enough to drive you potty!’

  Apart from Tony’s brother, Guido, she made no mention of Tony’s relatives. I concluded that he hadn’t seen fit to introduce her to them.

  She gave me a Maltese lace tablecloth and a bottle of duty-free Chanel No. 5 and then threw herself into work.

  ‘I’m really going to get down to some hard graft now. Tony wants me to retire as soon as we’ve got enough money behind us.’

  There were two events that marked Mae’s return, the first of which was that the café owner below – still Toffee-nose to us – got done for receiving stolen goods.

  ‘I always knew there was something funny about him,’ said Mae. ‘What a bloody cheek to act so high and mighty when he’s no better than anyone else.’

  A short while later, the ‘bistro’ was taken over and turned into a sensible, no-nonsense caff by someone with a much more realistic eye to business, and from then on, it did a roaring trade, whilst Toffee-nose did time.

  The second event – perhaps ‘event’ is the wrong word to use for something that began so quietly and insidiously – was that Mae began to get hooked on a mixture of amphetamines and barbiturates: pills known then as Purple Hearts. During Mae’s boring holiday, Guido’s Lulu had claimed that, besides making her feel lively in the same way that Benzedrine or Dexedrine did, Purple Hearts made her feel sexy. Because of them, she said, she could earn a bomb every day.

  On her first day back, Mae was all impatient until Lulu arrived with a small quantity of pills for her to experiment with.

  ‘You’ll only need one at a time,’ she warned her. ‘They’re very strong.’

  ‘They might be for you – but not for me,’ Mae boasted – and she swallowed two. ‘These sort of things don’t have any effect on me unless I take plenty. I swallowed a whole Benzedrine inhaler last Christmas, and even that didn’t do much, did it, Babs?’

  She caught sight of my face and, very sensibly, didn’t wait for an answer.

  She went on, ‘I bet I’ll have to take three or four before I feel any different.’

  And with that, a new era dawned – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the effects of being ponced showed themselves in their true colours for the first time. It was money that bound Tony to Mae; it was drugs that Mae relied on to keep up her earning power. We were in the early stages of the endgame and I think I knew it.

  In the past, I had sometimes wondered whether I could cope with much more of Mae’s hectic business extensions; I now began to look back on those days as comparatively peaceful and tranquil.

  After a month, she was eating Purple Hearts like sweets. Long before that, though, working conditions had become unbearable: Mae had permanently flushed cheeks, her speech was frenetic and she was subject to sudden impulses and the craziest of whims.

  Several times I tried pleading with her to stop taking the things, and she would say, ‘All right, love – to please you’ or, ‘But I’ve only had one all day’. Once, she handed me the bottle and told me that she would take no more. All that came of this gesture was that, for a while, she took them secretly from another bottle.

  Naturally, business hotted up and there was a larger-than-ever quota of men – sometimes two rows deep – using the spyhole in the kitchen or trussed up in the waiting room. The landing and the staircase above us were pressed into service as a waiting place. The dogs, too – either or both – were appearing more often and adding to the general pandemonium.

  But it was the change in Mae herself that I found most difficult to adjust to. She altered terribly, taking to changing at least one item of her clothing between each client; scuffing through drawers and cupboards and throwing things around in her search for some particular article. When it was found, I was faced with the job of putting everything away again before she returned with the next man. This she did so rapidly that merely trying to keep the place tidy was a killing job.

  All and sundry took advantage of her drugged state: the other girls came to borrow clothes and money from her, knowing that in her unnatural exuberance she would forget who had had what. There was nothing whatever I could do to stop it and no conceivable way of reasoning with her.

  She had odd dietary fancies, too. ‘Do you know,’ she would say, ‘I don’t half fancy a good old-fashioned stew. Let’s have one tomorrow.’ When tomorrow came and, amongst all the daily turmoil, I had managed to produce one, she didn’t feel like eating. Then she would say, ‘Don’t bring anything tomorrow; we’ll eat out for a change.’ The next day she would feel too busy to go out for a meal but would claim to be ravenous.

  Eventually, as she became more loquacious and erratic, the Purple Hearts had an adverse effect on her earning capacity. Clients would be treated to her reminiscences and would find it difficult to get away from her. She wasted valuable time by trying to talk men into doing it twice for double fees, which was as wearing as three fresh men would be.

  As her takings diminished, her borrowing from moneylenders increased. Betty Kelly became a far too regular visitor in our little flat, interest payments mounted, and the vicious circle spun faster. Mae’s Persian-lamb coat languished in the pawnshop, soon to be joined by a beautiful sapphire and diamond ring that Tony had given her.r />
  ‘I’ll do better with that out of the way,’ she said. ‘Diamonds are unlucky for me.’

  She searched for ways to raise money. Faithful Fred, the judo expert, came in for a particular trouncing. She took full advantage of his affection and wheedled extra money out of him every time he visited. To start with it was only ten pounds, but her demands grew to twenty, fifty and eventually a hundred pounds. She described these as ‘loans’, although she knew – and he did too – that she had no intention of paying them back.

  Soon after his savings were gone, we received a phone call from his brother to say that Fred was in hospital. He had been teaching an enthusiastic novice a particular judo hold and the novice, in a fit of exhilaration, had broken Fred’s back. The brother told Mae which hospital he was in and how anxious Fred was that she should visit him. Mae made sympathetic-sounding promises, but although Fred lay for months encased in plaster and occasionally sent her pathetic little letters containing oblique requests for a visit, she never did go.

  This callousness clouded my feelings towards her. Although I tried to excuse it by the fact that she was in a permanently drugged condition, I knew in my heart that she would have been exactly the same without drugs. I had the cynical feeling that, had Fred not lent her money – which conceivably he might now need back – she would have been willing to visit him.

  Nevertheless, I still loved the girl, and although things grew steadily worse, I stuck it out because I felt she needed me. It had always horrified me that apart from Fred and me, everyone else saw her as a glorious, super-deluxe money-making machine. She was such a master of charm that when I felt I couldn’t go on a minute longer, she would slip an arm round me and, rubbing her chin in my hair, say, ‘Poor old Babs. I don’t half give you a time, but you know I love you, don’t you?’ And of course, I was soft putty once more.