West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and Its Working Girls (12 page)

‘What do I think about the initials, do you mean? Well, it might make it less valuable if he ever had to sell it. I don’t suppose anyone would be very happy about a cigarette case with someone else’s initials on it.’

‘In that case, it’s having initials on, ’cos I’ll have his guts if he ever tries to sell anything I give him.’

Later that same day, while she was doing her face for the umpteenth time, Mae came out with further thoughts on Tony’s birthday. With terrific excitement and eyes shining, she suddenly swung round on her dressing table stool.

‘Right. Know what I’m going to get Tony for his birthday, Babs?’

‘A gold cigarette case, you said.’

‘Ah, yes. But I’ve thought of something better. I
will
get him the cigarette case and give that to him first, so he thinks that’s all he’s getting. But his real present is going to be a car.’

‘But he’s got a car.’ (Oh, never was money for a little snake ring better spent.)

‘No, love, that’s not
his
car. It belongs to a friend of his who’s abroad for a few weeks. The other day, we were out driving and Tony was telling me about his ambitions and what he wants to do with his life. And then he said, did I want to see the first thing he’d buy when he got enough money? So I said, “Yes.” Well, he drove to this showroom and he made me get out and look at a car they’d got there. I forget what make it was, but it was a lovely pale blue and he got so excited talking about it, and what with that and his nose pressed to the window, he looked just like a little boy. What you do fink?’ She always said ‘fink’ when she was getting carried away.

‘I think...’ I said slowly, ‘I think it’s an awful lot of money to spend on someone you’ve only just met. I think he’d be thrilled to bits with just the cigarette case.’

‘Pooh to that!’ she exploded. ‘Now that I’ve thought of a car, it’s got to be a car.’

She turned back to the mirror to do some more to her face, sulky because I hadn’t been more enthusiastic.

‘You don’t understand. Tony and me will go on for ever. We might even get married. You wait till you fall for someone!’ She was grinning mischievously at me in the mirror now: good-humoured again. ‘Then you’ll want to give him everything he wants too.’

‘If you say so.’ I smiled back. ‘Mother knows best.’

‘I should bleeding think so,’ she mumbled, pressing her freshly painted lips together and staring at the finished result.

I watched her, thinking how this generosity, which I’d known she had, was a surprising contrast to her bouts of thrift, which I’d also seen. She was cheerfully – in fact, eagerly – lashing out many hundreds of pounds on a car, but had resisted spending a pound or two on the front door, which had needed attention when I arrived and was getting worse by the day. When we left at night, she would hold the handle and I would put my hand in the letterbox before we went through a ‘ready-steady-go!’ routine that had to be repeated several times. We were surrounded by odd-job men, any one of whom would have been glad to fix it, but Mae wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Something’ll turn up soon,’ she would say confidently – by which she meant that some client would do it for nothing.

The ‘something’ that turned up eventually was the meat porter, Syd. He was spruced up in his best clothes and making his first call since I’d been there: probably his first ever. It was a Monday afternoon and quiet – a fact he had probably foreseen.

‘Just thought I’d pop in to see how you two girls was getting on together,’ he said. But his careless tone was hiding nervousness. We offered him a cup of tea. ‘Well, I don’t wanna take up your time,’ he said. Mae insisted and he relaxed a bit. When he was halfway through drinking it, she pretended to allow a bright idea to strike her.

‘Any good with doors?’

‘Doors?’

‘Yeah, doors. You know, those things you open and shut – with handles on them.’

Syd smiled in a chagrined sort of way. Swigging down the rest of his tea, he rose to his feet, his face slightly flushed.

‘What’s the hurry?’ Mae demanded.

He seemed confused by this.

‘I thought you was giving me the hint I’d outstayed my welcome – that I was keeping you from your business, like.’

‘Don’t be such a Charley,’ she said. ‘I wondered if you would fix a wonky door for us, that’s all.’

You could see Syd’s relief. ‘I’ll go and take a look,’ he said.

He was back a moment later, to announce that the top hinge was loose and ask if we had a screwdriver.

I produced all the tools we had, now collected in a carrier bag. Syd gazed inside with growing amusement. There was a hammer with a broken shaft; a bent screwdriver; an assortment of rusty screws; a pair of pincers with no pinch, and a keyless padlock. Syd took out the screwdriver and tried to hammer it into a better shape on the windowsill, then disappeared downstairs again. He was back to say the screws were too small and had we some matches to plug the holes with? Eventually he managed to get the door functioning properly and earned himself another cup of tea.

From then on, just like so many others, Syd was a marked man in Mae’s book. I had taken notice of this: if a tap needed a new washer, it dripped away until plumber-client paid a visit. If anything went wrong with the cooker, we would eat raw food till an electrician-client came again. I got so fed up with the inconvenience that I eventually bought a few tools and learned to mend things myself.

Naturally Mae had also got the purveyors of merchandise well logged; woe betide the wine merchant who didn’t arrive with a sample of his wares at Christmas, or the traveller in ladies’ underwear who didn’t come across with a few pairs of stockings. One day she discovered that one of her clients worked for the GPO, and in no time at all there was a telephone installed in the flat and another at my place – so she could always get in touch with me if she needed to. This was at a time when the standard waiting period for fitting telephones was several months.

I was beginning to know the faces of a few of the regular clients, especially those who had the same calling day each week. These now automatically made their way to the kitchen for a chat until their turn came round. Some of them were pleasant and friendly; others not so.

Mr Tucker, was ‘something big’ in the Stock Exchange. He was a Friday-night regular. When I first met him, it was after he’d spent about three hours drinking at his club. He was ‘posh’; he was fat; he wore thick horn-rimmed spectacles and his round, elderly face squatted under a bowler hat. He gripped the
Financial Times
, his gloves and a rolled umbrella in one hand and left the other hand free to clutch at the banister rails. Even so, he kept falling over on his way up.

‘Gotter see me l’il girl . . . Gotter see l’il Maezy-wayezy b’fore I g’ome to wifey-pifey.’

We always had to go down the stairs to heave and push him up. Even then, he would frequently collapse on the steps, swearing that Mae moved her flat further up the house every time he was expected.

‘He’s always like this,’ Mae told me. Then, to him, she said, ‘According to you, we work in a bleeding skyscraper.’

He gazed at her through unfocused eyes, hiccuped a giggle and attempted a feeble smack at her bottom – which missed.

He drank two cups of black coffee while Mae went on working, during the course of which I was instructed to make sure he didn’t fall off the chair. This duty would have been easier had he not kept making futile lunges at me, saying, ‘You’re a nice l’il thing too. Why doncher come here, you fuckin’ l’il beauty?’

Eventually Mae shepherded him, still staggering, into the bedroom, where she later told me she’d spent twenty minutes unsuccessfully trying to bring him to the point. On this and subsequent visits he left quite happy, still needing our aid to get him into the street.

Fred, on the other hand, was quiet, polite and really nice. Rather than being a standard regular, in his eyes he was actually courting Mae. Fred was a bachelor who desperately wanted not to be. His hobby was judo, which he took very seriously indeed. In fact, other than when he came to see Mae, I think he spent every night at his judo club – he was some kind of ‘dan’ and had a black belt. I liked him very much indeed and thought what a wonderful thing it would be for Mae if she could have seen her way to accepting his advances. But though he vaguely amused her, she didn’t give him a moment’s serious thought; to her he was a client, like Mr Tucker, and increasingly her heart belonged to her dreadful Tony.

Soon afterwards, I was to meet Tony’s predecessor. Though Mae and I laughed about the evening many times, it is one I still look back on with misgivings at my part in this poor man’s humiliation. It would be the first time I saw for myself Fay’s easy capacity for cruelty and her desire to hurt. The first, but by no means the last.

Eleven

Something was up: Mae had come back to the flat without a man. Her face was full of mischief.

‘What do you know? I’ve found out where Alphonse is. He’s gone back to his old job: he’s a waiter again, at a snazzy restaurant in Lancaster Gate. You and me are booked for a giggle. We’re going tomorrow – it’s about time we had a night out – so bring a party frock with you.’

I didn’t possess a party frock, but with my new life, I could see there might be some use in acquiring one.

‘Will you help me choose?’ I said. ‘Only I don’t think I’d be much good at that sort of thing.’

‘You haven’t got no party frock? No cocktail dress? I’ll choose it and I’ll even buy it for you. I’d like to think I bought your first nice dress.’

So the following day, we met early and rambled along Oxford Street, looking in windows. Finally Mae saw something that caught her eye and she hustled me into a shop. It was a very pretty dress – well, perhaps ‘glamorous’ is more the word – and I tried it on. It didn’t suit me at all. Mae scrutinised me carefully.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ she said at last. ‘But the underskirt’s too baggy; it’ll have to be taken in.’ The shop assistant was instantly down on her knees with a mouthful of pins. ‘And it’s got to be ready to wear tonight.’

‘Yes, madam, it will be ready,’ she answered, briskly pinning away.

Next I was whisked away in a cab to a shop that specialised in kinky footwear and I was bought my first pair of really high-heeled shoes: black, patent leather, with heels four inches high. There were no half measures with Mae, and she rushed me from shop to shop, treating me:

‘What’s your favourite scent? . . . That handbag doesn’t go with anything; let’s see what they’ve got in here . . . That dress’ll need an accessory . . . Are you going to keep your hair like that?’

While Mae was dressing that evening, I took Mimi and Fifi with me to collect the dress, and hurried back with it full of excitement.

I unzipped it down the length of the back and gingerly stepped inside. The material was a black brocade, woven all over with tiny sprigs of silver roses; it had a high collar that plunged to a low V-neck; there were no sleeves to speak of and the main feature was a sort of overskirt in the same fabric, which was caught up in a bunch of formal pleats on one hip. After Mae zipped me up again, I slipped into my patent-leather stilts and practised walking about the room. Enjoying my pleasure, Mae kept one eye on me while the other concentrated on her make-up. She was wearing a floating blue chiffon affair and looked positively ravishing. She turned to me with one hand on her hip and gave an exaggerated flutter of her false eyelashes. She then bullied and cajoled me in her supervision of my own make-up, although I drew the line at false eyelashes.

‘You don’t look at all bad,’ Mae said, standing back to survey the results.

As I walked down the stairs, I felt like a princess, but it was slightly different when I got into the street, where the combination of high heels and tight skirt necessitated a mincing walk: I felt more like a geisha girl than royalty. I was thankful when we got to the main road and Mae hailed a cab.

‘Get in, then,’ she called impatiently from inside. I made a futile attempt.

‘I can’t. My skirt’s too tight.’

‘Well hoist it up.’

‘I can’t do that either; it’s too tight. All I can do is take it off, and I’m not doing that.’

‘Got a newspaper, mate?’ Mae asked the driver. He handed one through the sliding glass partition and she spread it on the floor of the cab.

‘Now,’ she said. ‘Turn around and sit on it. That’s right. Now shuffle backwards on your bum.’

I wriggled till my feet were in. The grinning cabby came round and slammed the door shut, and I was about to shove an arm on the seat in readiness for hoisting myself up, but Mae stopped me.

‘There’s no point in you getting on the seat, is there? You’ll only have to shuffle out the same way.’

All this had brought on a fine fit of giggles, and we were almost hysterical when we reached our destination. This wasn’t the done way to approach such a snazzy place, and the commissionaire was surprised to open the cab door and find a woman sitting on a newspaper on the floor. We tried to establish some sort of decorum, and very nearly succeeded as Mae walked and I teetered inside.

We crossed the foyer and stood in the curtained archway leading to the restaurant, Mae scanning the room.