Climbing the Stairs (8 page)

And the toilets there! They were an absolute revelation. There were three of them and they were lovely ones. The walls stretched right up to the ceiling – not like those where
there’s no top or bottom. There were basins to wash your hands and as many towels as you wanted.

So we really had a wonderful afternoon at the Trocadero.

That evening Gladys suggested we went round to see her aunt – the wife of this uncle. They lived just off Ladbroke Grove.

It was a terrible place. A house with five floors if you included the basement, and there were three families living on every floor. Four rooms on each floor. One family had two rooms and the
other rooms had one family each. The smell when you went in the passage was appalling. It was compounded of stale food, dirt, and the smell of sweaty humanity.

Mind you, Gladys never turned a hair. It could have been the roses of Picardy for all she knew. Maybe coming from Stepney as she did she was used to it.

I’ve seen some slummy places in my own home town but nothing to compare with that. You didn’t dare put your hand on the banister – it was coated in filth. Each particular
family was supposed to take turns doing their bits of the stairs down from one floor to another, but with three families on each floor there were quarrels as to whose turn it was and nothing ever
got done.

Gladys’s aunt lived on the top floor. All they had in the way of water was one small sink on the landing halfway up and that had to do for those two floors. So that there were six families
using one tiny sink and one lavatory.

The contrast between this and the Trocadero!

I said to Gladys, ‘Surely your uncle can afford a better place than this?’ She said that he probably could if he stuck a job but he drank a lot, which accounted for his red nose.
Apparently he was always drinking and losing his job and I suppose that was what they were reduced to. It was a terrible hole! I didn’t know how anyone had the spirit to keep clean there.

Gladys’s aunt had been in domestic service and she bitterly regretted ever leaving it. She’d loved the place where she worked. And she was delighted to have an audience of two who
themselves were in service. She was on about Sir and Madam and Master Gerald and Miss Sarah. I thought it was absolutely stupid. After all those years still calling the people you worked for Sir
and Madam and Master and Miss. It just shows you, doesn’t it – there is a type of person who likes domestic service? They feel there’s a certain prestige attached to serving the
high and mighty.

While I was there she got out some newspaper cuttings about this Miss Sarah who was in the suffragette movement and I was interested in this.

This Miss Sarah wasn’t one of the more militant ones – not like the Pankhurst woman. She didn’t go around setting fire to churches, slashing valuable paintings or putting
lighted paper through people’s letter boxes. But there were a couple of newspaper photos of her. In one of them she’d got a policeman’s helmet stuck on her head and in the other
she was there with a lot of other women debagging a policeman.

I must say I was surprised because I hadn’t realized that these suffragettes came from well-to-do homes. I couldn’t think that people who’d got a comfortable home and
didn’t have to work could really feel there was anything they ought to fight for.

My mother was a very strong-minded woman – what you would call a militant woman – but she never bothered about the rights of women. So long as she’d got the vote in her home
– and, believe me, she had – she couldn’t care less about the political vote.

Some Sunday evenings Gladys and I used to go to Lyons Corner House which was a very lively place. The only snag was that we had to leave by half past nine and really it was only beginning to
warm up then. We used to get there about eight o’clock. We’d choose the cheapest thing on the menu – egg on toast or sometimes beans on toast. And then we’d perhaps have a
glass of shandy or if we were very daring and we weren’t too hard up we’d have a glass of wine.

There used to be two women who went there regularly. We saw them every time we went. They were about thirty – very sophisticated type of women – hair cut very short. They used
mascara, lipstick, and a dead-white powder. I suppose in a way they looked like clowns, but we didn’t think so.

The most daring thing was that they used to smoke cigarettes. All right, Gladys used to have a puff now and then up in the bedroom that we shared. I’d keep cave and we’d open the
window and flap a towel about if we thought anyone was coming. But to smoke in a public room – and not only that, they used long holders too, like Pola Negri on the pictures – we
thought was the height of sophistication.

We used to try to get a seat near the band if we could because it gave a sort of cachet. Everyone tried to get there. It was an eight-piece outfit.

After we’d been going there about half a dozen times we got to know some of the players and we thought they were marvellous. They had a kind of uniform of black, very tight-fitting
trousers with a red stripe down the side and red jackets with black facings. And we found them very attractive-looking indeed. And of course we were flattered that they took any notice of us.

Two of them in particular we had our eyes on. Fortunately we didn’t each have our eyes on the same one. Gladys was keen on the one who played the drums, and the one who played the piano I
thought would do all right for me. That is if we ever managed to get out with these two remarkable young men.

One night they began calling out to us asking what tunes we’d like them to play – and that was something that sort of made you feel somebody.

I forget what sort of numbers were popular at that time or how we knew they were. I suppose the errand boys were our disc jockeys then, because whenever a hit tune came out all the errand boys
would be riding about on their bicycles whistling it.

I used to like the soulful sentimental numbers like
You Were Meant For Me
– romantic things – not like these pop things they have now which seem to be full of hidden meanings.
You don’t know whether it’s an exercise in sex or whether it’s a song.

Anyway after we’d chosen a few tunes, a waiter came over with a note from one of them – I don’t know whether it was the drummer or the pianist – asking if we could meet
them one night.

Well, you can imagine Gladys and me; we were in a seventh heaven thinking that these beautiful bandsmen had actually invited us out. We sent back a note by the waiter saying that we’d meet
them at five o’clock on the next Wednesday. We said five because that would give us extra time to do ourselves up and make ourselves look attractive.

And then Gladys said to me, ‘On no account tell them that we’re in domestic service.’

So I said, ‘Well, they’re bound to wonder what we do because we have to get in at half past nine.’

We sat there searching our brains. First of all we were secretaries to someone or other and we were doing night work or then we were looking after an art gallery at night.

I said, ‘They won’t believe anything like that at all, Gladys, so it’s no use coming out with those cock and bull things.’

At last we settled on a story that we were cousins. We didn’t like to say we were sisters because we were so unlike – and her mother was an invalid and we had to be back at half past
nine because the person who looked after her wouldn’t stay any later. It sounded a bit thin but it would do.

But after all this planning and scheming we got a horrible shock. There we stood on the corner where we’d arranged to meet at five o’clock and when they came in sight a couple of
more insignificant-looking creatures you’ve never seen in your life.

In uniform and sitting down they looked marvellous but out of uniform and standing up they were simply ciphers. Both about five foot four. We towered above them. And they were wearing horrible
flashy light-blue pinstripe suits, gingery-coloured shoes and trilby hats. You’ve never seen anything like it in your life.

I was horrified to think of all the work we’d put in night after night to get this couple to take us out.

Gladys whispered to me, ‘Let’s get them in the flicks as quick as we can so that nobody sees them.’

This we did. And while I was sitting there I couldn’t help thinking of all the young men you read about. The favourite novelists at that time were Elinor Glyn, Ethel M. Dell and Charles
Garvice. And I don’t know where they found the type of men that they wrote about: the kind of he-men and yet chivalrous with a kind of power over the women so that they made them do what they
wanted. I’d never then nor since met any men like it.

Mind you, all these wonderful lovers on the films Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro – they were just pasteboard lovers, weren’t they? I could never understand women raving and
going mad about Rudolph Valentino and sending for his photo. In any case who wants a man that you’ve got to share with a load of other women?

I used to wish that you could find an Englishman who was a sheikh. And I used to think that with the shortage of men there was it would be nice if a man could have three wives like sheikhs did.
You could all take it in turns to be number one wife, couldn’t you? I wouldn’t have minded waiting my turn at all. But Englishmen have got neither the inclination nor the stamina.

Later when I was married I used to think it would be fine for women to have two husbands because you really need two husbands. One to go out to work for you, to support you and keep a roof over
your head, and one for pleasure, because the one that does all the work is too tired for pleasure.

Anyway, there I sat in the pictures getting some sort of pleasure by watching sheikhs because I knew that these two we’d got with us were no sheikhs. One and six to go into the pictures
and a fourpenny ice-cream and that was the extent of what they were going to spend on us.

When we came out we separated. Gladys and I had agreed on this. We had a kind of code whereby if we’d got two young men who might be dangerous if they got us on our own we would never
separate. When we used to go to Hyde Park and walk around with guardsmen there we’d never separate. Nothing would have induced me to be alone with a guardsman. I mean, they’d got no
money to start with so you could be sure they were on the lookout for some pleasure that costs nothing.

But these couple of weeds – they didn’t rate.

When we got outside my pianist steered me down a dark street. Nowadays of course you can’t find a dark street. I don’t wonder people do their courting in broad daylight –
it’s either that or not do it at all.

Well, we walked down this dark street and all of a sudden he stopped and started getting sort of het up – breathing heavily all over me just like a lot of other young men I’d had
– puffing, panting, and pawing was about the extent of their repertoire. And it’s so ridiculous, isn’t it, because if you want someone to start patting and pawing you, you
obviously have got to have some feeling for them? You’ve got to think that you’d like them to do it. But when you’ve met someone for the first time you can’t have much
feeling for them at all, so why should they think you have?

It just shows the colossal egotism of a man, doesn’t it – that he thinks every woman he takes out wants him to drape himself round her neck and be affectionate to her? They
don’t even give you time to get to like them. And the last straw came when he suddenly burst out laughing.

‘What are you laughing at?’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘1 can’t help thinking of the girl I’d arranged to meet tonight. I wonder how long she waited for me?’

Well, I was simply livid. What a thing to say to me. That he’d arranged to meet another girl and then ditched her at the last minute.

Just at this time we’d come to an Underground station so I said, ‘Do you mind excusing me for a minute – I want to go to the lavatory?’

I hated saying it because we never mentioned things like that.

He said, ‘All right then.’

I said, ‘You wait at the top of the steps. Don’t move, will you? I shan’t be long.’

So I went down – bought a ticket home and left him standing there. Just like his other girlfriend waiting. And I kept laughing in the train just as he had. Men!

8

T
HE ONLY TIME
I nearly lost a girlfriend over a boyfriend was when Gladys and I shared one between us. We picked him up one Sunday afternoon in a
Lyons’ teashop; the place was so crowded that the only empty seat was next to us and he came up and said with a rather attractive accent, ‘Could I please sit down at your table? It is
the only place available.’ From the way he spoke we could tell he was a foreigner.

Gladys, who was never at a loss where the opposite sex was concerned, got into conversation with him. We found out that his name was Jan de Beers and that he came from Amsterdam. He assured us
that he was no relation to the diamond people of that name. He needn’t have bothered, because what with his appearance, which was by no means smart, and the fact that all he was having was
one bun and a cup of tea, we knew that already.

We were rather wary of foreigners, particularly Italians and Spanish, because we knew they came from very hot countries and the passion and heat went together. We felt they wouldn’t
respect English girls. I know it sounds trite now, the word Respect, but it was a word that was continually drummed into us so we took notice of it then. If we met foreigners from the more
temperate climates like America, New Zealand, or Australia these were quite all right because obviously they were more affiliated to us. They had the same colour of skin as we had. In those days,
as far as we were concerned, anyone who had got the same colour skin as we had got must be all right. Mind you, we thought Indians were all right because they had lovely coffee-coloured skins and
there was always the chance that they might be sons of rajahs or princes or things.

Opposite the place where we were working the house had been taken over by the Government for Indian students; we never got any further than waving to them at night because of the caste system.
They were educated enough to know that we were only servants and that it wasn’t going to do their prestige any good to be seen out with people like us. Apart from his bun and cup of tea
Gladys and I weren’t surprised to find that this young man was no relation to the diamond people because we never found any young men who had got any money and we never expected to. For us it
was enough that he was good-looking. He said he had been a steward on a ship that had gone backwards and forwards to and from South Africa but that the last time it had docked in Southampton he
decided not to sign on again but to work in England for a while. I was a bit sceptical about this explanation because he seemed young to be a steward. I assumed that by the time you got to be a
steward you would be at least twenty-five to thirty.