Up West (40 page)

The common wisdom of the times was never to buy from street corner Johnnies, but to do business only with men known to you, or recommended by a friend, who plied their trade in premises tucked well away from plain sight
down dingy alleys, in basements or up flights of stairs behind an anonymous door. My father ran such a shop from rooms above Parmigiani's delicatessen on the corner of Old Compton Street and Frith Street. Father's shop, and others like it, were highly illegal, but there was an arrangement in place that involved stuffing used banknotes in to an envelope and passing it over to one of the policemen who called at regular intervals.

The shops took this duty in turn. If they should fail to hand over the bribes in time, then they were raided and their stock was sold to their competitors. It was all very well organized. One of my earliest memories is of giving a fat envelope to a man who smiled, patted me on the curls and muttered, ‘Ta, love. Tell your dad I'll be round next month.' He shoved the envelope, unopened, in to his coat pocket, and left as quietly as he had arrived.

Although there were a number of these shops, men were still caught by spivs, because material bought from someone like Father inevitably cost more. This was because rent and bribes had to be paid and, of course, the books, pictures, magazines and flickering Super 8 and 16mm films had to be sourced. In those early days of the fifties, comparatively few of them were made in Britain. The majority of pornography came from France, Denmark and, later, Scandinavia and Holland.

Spivs, on the other hand, were highly mobile, and could take to their toes to evade the law. That way, they only had to cough up hard cash if they were caught. What's more, their
material, if it was smutty at all, was likely to be shots of their girlfriends taken with a Box Brownie, which could be developed in a bathroom; if they didn't have one, a walk-in cupboard or a pantry would do. Black and white photographs were incredibly easy to develop. I could do it myself by the time I was tall enough to reach the work surface. All that was needed was a darkroom, a red light, a light box for selecting the right negatives, a few trays of chemicals, photographic paper, a pair of tongs and a washing line, complete with pegs, to hang the photos up to dry. For the spivs' purposes, great art was not needed: any grainy, under- or over-exposed picture would do. Their clientele were in no position to be picky. They drew their customers from casual tourists who had come Up West for a night on the tiles and, of course – in those days of war, conscription and National Service – servicemen on leave. Both types would be here today, gone tomorrow, and would likely be philosophical about being ‘had' once they'd sobered up enough to focus clearly on their purchase. Unless they had a mate in the know, these men wouldn't know where to find the ‘specialist shops' like Father's, which catered for a more experienced clientele.

One of Father's regulars was the operatic tenor, Gigli. He was a friend of Aldo, Father's business partner. I can remember sitting on Gigli's lap and being sung to while he waited for his friend, or for a preview of the new material recently brought across the Channel. Gigli habitually wore dove-grey, from the crown of his beautiful hat to his spats.

The stock for the shop was smuggled in to England in a
light aircraft, usually a Tiger Moth, piloted by my father. I often accompanied him on these trips. As a tiny girl with a blonde, curly mop and big blue eyes, I made an excellent smuggler's moll: it looked as if Father was simply taking his little girl for a spin. In those days there was an embargo on taking currency out of the country. I think we were allowed £20 or £25 only, nowhere near enough to pay our suppliers in Le Touquet. It was my job to take the currency out. No matter what the weather, I had to wear a liberty bodice so that the huge, white fivers could be stuffed between it and my body. They prickled and tickled, and the liberty bodice made me sweaty and cranky in hot weather, but at least then the fivers went limp and didn't tickle as much, or rustle as loudly, as they did on brisk autumn or winter days. I felt like a walking crisp packet when the money was new and crackly. My teddy, the hollow bodies of my dolls and my toy handbag were also called into service and stuffed with money – pornography was never cheap, even at wholesale prices.

No Customs officer would suspect the father of a sweetiepie like me of smuggling smut with his little girl in tow or indeed, any teddy bear of being stuffed to its ears with illegally exported money to pay for the merchandise. How wrong they were, and how right Father was. To my knowledge, we were never searched when I was present. Of course, it's possible that Her Majesty's Customs were as easy to bribe as the West End's policemen in those bleak days when everyone was so heartily sick of shortages and ‘making do'. Stiff upper lips were definitely becoming very slack by the early fifties, and
even the most upright of citizens was open to the temptation of a few hundred fags and a bottle of brandy.

The drummer, Raye Du-Val, was an equally inventive smuggler. ‘I was in the porn game,' he remembers. ‘What I used to do was to bring in pictures. When I played on tour in France, I used to paste the packets in my drums. Made sure I didn't have transparent drumskin heads, that's how I brought my stuff in.'

For several fairly obvious reasons, including death, embarrassment and the later acquisition of respectability, it was difficult to find anyone at all who was willing to be interviewed about their part in the pornography trade in the fifties, either as models, performers or retailers. Raye Du-Val mentions his role as a smuggler very briefly, and the only consumer of pornography and customer of shops such as Father's who spoke insisted on anonymity for fear of censure, even in these more enlightened times. I suppose that the stigma of consumers being ‘dirty old men' must still cling, even though Tom, as I will call him, was a young man when he first took the train from the genteel town in Surrey where he lived to the West End in search of sleaze. ‘I was lingering outside a porn shop in Cambridge Circus,' he remembers, ‘summoning up the courage, if that's what it was, to go in. The thing that I was immediately aware of when I went in there, was that I was potentially out of my depth: it seemed to be staffed or manned by what I can only describe as gangster types, it was rather a frightening lesson
for a callow youth. They were talking to each other about cars, car engines, but then they stopped the conversation and looked at me. I wondered whether they were going to tell me to bugger off actually, but they didn't, they asked me what I wanted, and as I didn't really know, I was “Er, er” . . . So they said, “Well, have a look at this.” It was American import stuff, and then the price just came and it seemed arbitrary, everyone seemed to be paying a different price from what I could hear, and I thought to myself, “I've got to pay this if I want to leave here”, and it was a very rude shock. I felt very intimidated by the whole thing.

‘But, on the other hand, I felt that I had gone through a kind of rite of passage. Later, when I went back to buy books – and porn – I was kind of asking myself whether I could handle it or not, and I decided that I could. I wasn't so much worried about the law as frightened somebody would say to me, “Listen, man, give us your money and fuck off.” Something like that. But, just as the working girls on the streets seemed to take the business routine in their stride, so the porn guys seemed to take the porn routines in their stride. In fact, they seemed to be thoroughly bored with it, really, because all their conversations were absolutely nothing to do with what they were doing. They were like men on the job, discussing things. You always felt, though, that this could turn a bit nasty.

‘What I do remember is that almost all the punters were quite passive, and orderly. They mostly wanted to come in and out, and I was fascinated by that, just in and out. People
brought bags in, or wore coats with deep pockets: sums changed hands, then they were gone. There was all this X-rated material, and it was just feet away from where the general public was walking. But the main thing though, the prevailing memory, was what big business it seemed to be. Just so busy, so busy.'

When I asked Tom what had brought him Up West in the first place, I got a very clear picture of how – and why – Soho looked so different from the outside than it did from the inside. ‘Soho featured in news broadcasts that I heard,' he remembers. ‘It featured in some of the fiction that I read, and then, when I started reading the music papers, I was aware that so much music was based there. Not exactly Tin Pan Alley, but round that area.

‘So, all those things – and then there was the
News of the World
. We always had the
People
and the
News of the World
. My father wasn't squeamish about that at all, although my mother certainly was [laughs], but I was intrigued. Some of the
News of the World
reporting was quite blatant; strip clubs, whatever, particularly the court cases involving sexual activity. I never really believed the time-honoured phrase that the reporters trotted out, “I made my excuses and left.” [He laughs again.] What red-blooded male would?

‘There seemed to be chests full of Danish material or American material, which was very iconoclastic stuff.' Tom recalls. ‘I remember that one area of the ground floor, there was a wall given over to photography: on others they seemed to have movies, and there was a maze of shelves going around
the shop where there was just material laid out. Another thing I noticed, which was almost something I thought was proverbial about porn sellers, was they all had wads. Wads of cash. Very large sums were involved. There was a man on the till, who sat above everybody else, so he had an overview of the thing, and he had sole charge of the money. One place I went to had this arrangement of mirrors, so from the back of the shop they could see who was coming in the door at any one time, and I suppose manage it from that point. Maybe they'd have five seconds' notice if the police came through the door.'

Personally, I don't think the police would have worried these men at all: they were probably on the payroll. It was thieves after the cash, shoplifters after freebies, or rivals that they had to watch out for. Villains from a rival outfit may have come in looking for trouble, money, or both.

Tom's description of the shops and the men who ran them brought back vivid memories for me, although Father was out of the business years before Tom became a customer. Father always had a wad of notes in his pocket, for example, and so did his fellow shopkeepers. He and I would sometimes visit other shops – a courtesy call, so to speak, for a gossip about the dirty book trade, what was selling, what wasn't, to compare prices and stock or to pass on rumours of a police crackdown. ‘Crackdowns' usually only happened after some particularly damning article in a tabloid newspaper that purported to give the inside story of vice in Soho. The police would then have to make a show of being on the case.

Sometimes we went to sell surplus stock, or to deliver items from our most recent trip to Le Touquet. Although I don't remember Father's shop being as Tom described, I do remember some of the others being just like it. In my time, none had a shop window. If they did, it was whitewashed to give the impression that the shopfitters and decorators were in. The only sign that that was not the case was that the whitewash never seemed to disappear. Later, the windows were blacked out, but that was after the law had been relaxed somewhat.

Obviously, being so young, I was shielded from the exact nature of my father's business. As I grew older, and Father had left the trade behind and turned more or less respectable, I was aware of some erotica on his bookshelves at home, and knew that, in the fifties, even
Lady Chatterley's Lover
,
The Tropic of Cancer
or the works of the Marquis de Sade were considered porn and banned under that archaic 1857 law,
*
but I never really saw the stuff he'd sold.

‘In several cases,' Tom remembers, ‘there was a sort of anteroom that lured you in: then you went to a sort of hatch, and people seemed to say something and a door at the side opened. Well, I went in the door when someone else went in, and when you went in to the back room, there was much
more extreme material – full penetration, group sex, lesbian sex, flage. The Danish material mainly seemed to be books of stills from films, but they told some crude kind of story in their way. The girls were always attractive, but the guys were the strange sort of guys you always see in porn movies. Fat hairy guys with moustaches. No child pornography, but stuff involving animals. That always seemed to be Danish or German. Down on the farm . . . [laughter] You got to look at pigs in a different light.'

Tom tried to explain the appeal of this sleazy life to me. ‘The articles in the newspapers fascinated me when I was a teenager. They described a different world; it was forbidden. It kind of magnetized a lot of people like myself, and I thought the nearest I can get to it is to look at it, be a consumer, get some action that way. It was like having a badge. To the men who ran the shops, I was just some kid who spent his money, then got his arse out of there. But to me, I was negotiating my way through that scene without fumbling, without becoming a victim. I had a real sense of accomplishment. I mean, I left much poorer [laughs] but I had more or less what I wanted.'

He pauses and thinks for a moment. ‘It was the low life I was interested in. I wanted to investigate that. Because I also found myself talking to a lot of down-and-outs, a lot of people who were peripheral people, marginalized people. It was the porn shop that really conferred that on me, confirmed that it was feasible to get in and out of that life. It was like a hunter coming back with the game. That's how I saw it. The other thing that I remember was that I was aching for the
knowledge of it really, and one of the principal reasons for it was that it was exclusively masculine territory. Forbidden territory too. It was a way to be a man.'