West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and Its Working Girls (33 page)

So it was that, on busy Saturday evenings, when all the other girls were working like robots, Rita and I would be sitting in the Nosh Bar in Great Windmill Street, shovelling down delicious slabs of hot salt beef and latkas, gazing out at the scandalous Windmill Theatre with its constant queue of slightly furtive men.

She was very proud of her home and happy to invite me round to admire it. We often sat in front of her new lighted-coals-effect electric fire, drinking gin, whilst everyone else in the West End was grafting.

Since I had first met her, Rita had been married and divorced again, but she still went under the name of her notorious first husband, who was now doing time – as, indeed, was her second ex-husband. They both happened to land up in the same prison and, having her in common, had become friends.

‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘At least I know where they both are now, and that’s more than I could ever do before they was nicked.’

Rita’s love life was always careless during the periods between husbands, and she invariably chose men younger than herself. She ruled them with a rod of iron and treated them more like sons than lovers. There was something of the deadly siren about her, and all her husbands and lovers gravitated irresistibly towards prison. The clang of the great doors marked the end of each romance, but the current young man, Eddy, appeared to have a charmed life. Consequently, he was outstaying his welcome.

Arriving at Rita’s house in the early hours, while we were still talking and sipping gin after a day’s work, he would dump all his swag on the carpet at Rita’s feet. Then, fastidiously and imperiously, like a dowager at a jumble sale, she would pick everything over, admiring some items and condemning others. Mostly, she condemned:

‘What a load of rubbish! Where’s all the bleeding Georgian teapots and carriage clocks these days?’

Her bark was worse than her bite, and when all the ‘junk’ was stowed away, fabulous things were produced from her new fridge. We munched our way through chicken and smoked salmon while Eddy told us of hair-raising hazards encountered during his nocturnal endeavours, before swaggering off to bed.

‘Silly little bastard,’ she said sourly, almost to his retreating back. ‘Gets on my bleeding wick. He don’t know Ming from Minge. Why can’t he get nicked like all the others did?’

Though I was becoming settled at Rita’s, I still missed Mae. I felt angry with her. I hated Tony and the vicious effect that he, along with the avenging angels of Drugs and Debt, had had on her. At the same time, I was too proud to seek a reconciliation. I knew that if I had gone round and made some of the noises expected of me, Mae and I would instantly have embraced, accompanied by tears, laughter, promises and tea. Yet Tony and I had fought over her, and Tony had won. A friendship carried out under his gloating eyes would have been no friendship at all. So although I missed her, I let her go. My life was moving on.

Thirty-Three

After working with Mae for so long, my life with Rita was delightfully peaceful, with not even the swish of a cane to break the tranquillity. She was terribly strait-laced in some ways. According to her, if a man wanted ‘six of the best’, she would scornfully condemn him as ‘kinked up to the eyebrows’. The props she had bought to make me feel at home remained merely decorative and were unused. I was thankful.

Eyeing the stove one day, Rita remembered that as a child, she’d loved bread pudding, and she suddenly developed a craving for it. Until we both got sick of it, she prepared a bread pudding at home each day, bringing it for me to cook at work. For several weeks, the clients’ nostrils were assailed with the homely smell of hot spice and currants.

For quite some time, the new flat and the bread pudding kept her mind off the irritating boyfriend. But as the novelty faded, her boredom with her love life increased and she started speculating hopefully on Eddy’s lack of fidelity. One evening she got a really hot tip. She had been told in roughly what area he might be found, and after reaching it and instructing the driver to keep circling until she told him to stop, she saw Eddy walking along the street with his arm round the shoulders of a young redhead.

‘That’s it! I got you!’ she said jubilantly. ‘Look hard, Babs. Remember you’ve seen them too, just so we don’t got no fucking arguments from him.’

With that, she called to the driver, ‘Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.’ We hadn’t gone far when Rita decided on a change of tactics. She said she wanted to find out the girl’s address; I demurred.

‘Oh, do leave off!’ she said. ‘I’m not going to bleeding bash the poor little madam. I’m glad she’s taken him off my hands.’

It wasn’t difficult to find out where she lived; Rita had the information in no time at all. Still in the same taxi, we sped back to Rita’s house, where she went rushing round collecting all her newly appointed ex-boyfriend’s belongings and stuffing them into boxes. I helped her to stow them in the waiting taxi, and we then drove to the ‘fancy piece’s’ address, dumped them outside her door and got back in the cab.

‘Right, mate,’ chortled Rita, hugging herself with glee. ‘Let them put that in their pipes and smoke it – and I hope it don’t choke ’em.’ Then she turned and slapped me on the knee. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘we’re going to celebrate.’

From then on, Rita thoroughly enjoyed the freedom of her manless state, but also took great pleasure in choosing her next mate.

Wherever she went, there was much flirting, ogling and innuendo between her and any unattached males present. Rita loved every minute of it, but conveyed the impression that she barely tolerated these vulgar advances. Surprisingly enough, her indifferent responses seemed to have no chastening effects whatsoever. After every snub, the competitors for her favour bobbed up again and again like cheerful cherries in a bowl of water. After all, Rita was a beautiful, wealthy woman. The magic of her first husband’s name still invested her with a kind of glamour in the eyes of lesser crooks, and her little girl was a distinct asset: to be stepfather to the great man’s daughter was tantamount to wearing a lifebelt in these turbulent Soho seas. Remorselessly, destiny was jostling Rita towards husband number three.

One day, after one of our grand ‘blow-outs’ at our favourite Chinese restaurant, she suggested a bottle of Beaujolais. We had finished our meal and the bottle, and had an amusing time getting back to the flat, where we flung ourselves on to the sagging double bed. We must have fallen asleep; the next thing I knew, Rita, obviously still drunk, was leaning up on one elbow, prodding me awake with a bony forefinger.

‘Fine fuckin’ maid you’ve turned out to be, letting me sleep half the night! Come on, I’ve decided I’m gonna get myself a bloke today.’

Still slightly tipsy with wine, we sallied forth to a place called Leo’s – the most favoured thieves’ kitchen of them all. On the ground floor, ordinary mortals sat amidst tropical plants with concealed lighting, but the in-crowd used the basement. It smelt like a damp air-raid shelter, there were no plants and the electric lighting was harsh and crude. It was open all night, and for many who went there, it was the nearest thing they had to a home.

There were thieves and crooks there of every denomination. The girls with them were mostly clip-joint hostesses and mysteries. Prostitutes seldom went there, as they considered themselves to be a cut above this rabble. Rita’s arrival caused something of a stir.

She had been gradually sieving through the candidates for her affections and had ended up with a shortlist of three; it was pot luck which one of them got to her first. There was not long to wait: no sooner had we sat than one of the chosen arrived at our table.

‘Wotcher,’ he said. ‘How’s tricks?’

And with that, the romance commenced.

His name was Tom, and he wasn’t quite so young as Rita’s previous lovers. He was large and cheerful, with that honest, candid gaze that is the successful rogue’s most valuable stock-in-trade. His eyes were a warm brown, and he had neat, well-oiled chestnut hair; his clothes were smart and his tie bore a discreet monogram. His speech was heavily larded with rhyming slang and his gestures were virile, with lots of muscle-flexing. It was clear that he was out to impress.

Rita reacted to this mating display with demure coquetry and fluttering eyelashes. After about a quarter of an hour, I couldn’t stand any more of it and went home to sleep off the residual effects of the Beaujolais. The following day Rita was all smiles; Tom had thawed the snow maiden to a greater degree than I would have thought possible.

At the beginning of May, she married him. Although this was her third stab at matrimony, she made as much of it as if it had been her first. No expense was spared to make it a great and memorable occasion. Rita was opulently lovely in velvet and fur, and with her little girl in a smart dark suit, the couple appeared to be the epitome of hard-working honesty. After the registry office, we moved to a hall adjoining an East End pub, where a band played until the early hours of the morning and the booze flowed non-stop. A good time was had by all, and Rita, flushed with happiness and with sparkling eyes, confided to me that this time she was sure it was for keeps.

Afterwards, she found it difficult to settle down to hustling again and the clients began to suffer once more. She took a lot of time off to be with Tom, so when rent nights came round, there was never enough in the kitty to pay.

‘Your heart isn’t in it any more,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you retire? Then you could have a proper married life with Tom.’

She was scandalised. ‘What? Me chuck the game? I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I’d go spare!’ Then she looked at me with genuine affection and added, ‘Anyway, what would you do if I went straight?’

‘Me?’ I thought for a bit. ‘Well, I suppose I might go straight too.’

‘Cor, strewth! You must be mad !’

She was so outraged by my suggestion that she pulled herself together and, as if to absolutely refute it, made enough for the rent in two hours flat. The vision she’d glimpsed of herself as a happy housewife had shaken her. After that, things returned almost to normal.

My twenty-third birthday came, and Rita and Tom gave me a slap-up supper. They also gave me a lovely coffee-set, whose cups, when held to the light, revealed a Japanese lady’s face hidden in the porcelain at the bottom.

‘Don’t worry, they’re new: they’re not nicked,’ Rita assured me.

Not long after that, after much conjecture, consulting of calendars and, finally, the onset of actual symptoms, Rita came to the conclusion that she was pregnant.

‘I’d have an abortion if it wasn’t Tom’s baby, but I suppose it’s time my kid had a brother or sister. I’ll go on working for another couple of months and then stop until after the nipper’s born. What are you going to do? Myrtle round the corner would have you like a shot – but I’d want you back after, mind.’

‘I don’t really know what I want to do yet,’ I told her. ‘There’s plenty of time to think about I. Anyway, I might take a holiday too.’

Life, in its perplexing and unpredictable way, was sweeping me inexorably forwards, towards new horizons and new choices. If Rita left the game for a few months, would I really start work again for a girl I cared little for? Or take a holiday? In which case, how to use it?

I didn’t think much about the situation, just took things day by day. Sooner or later the decisions would come, and I was content not to hurry them.

Thirty-Four

The following Monday, after only a couple of minutes in the street, Rita came hurrying back looking agitated. She’d seen a policeman laid out by a drunk with a beam of wood and didn’t want it known that she had witnessed it, ‘or there’ll be all the argy-bargy of making statements and attending court’.

It was the following day – as though the spirit of violence was hovering in the air – that we heard that Mae had been stabbed. At first, rumour had it that she was dead; then that she had nearly died but was hanging on by the skin of her teeth. We were shocked and shaken and couldn’t work for thinking about it.

‘Cor. Makes you bleeding think, don’t it?’ said Rita. ‘You going to see her?’