West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and Its Working Girls (26 page)

Pretty early on, Tina upset the domestic scene by stealing from members of her family and playing truant from school. She graduated to petty theft, terrorising her teachers and getting into trouble with boys. The theft resulted in reform school, but when she had finished her time there, she was welcomed back home with open arms.

Just for the heck of it, she took to burgling. During one of her maraudings, she was disturbed by the elderly lady who owned the house. Tina beat her up and left her unconscious. She used what she had stolen to get to London. Once there, she borrowed a bit, thieved a lot, lived with several men, produced four children – all placed in various homes – and gravitated into prostitution.

Tina made her own fantasy world up as she went along. The stories she told her clients about her past and present life were amazing. Her mother’s nationality was never fixed. Sometimes she was Spanish:

‘You can see where I get my looks from, can’t you?’ she would say, swaying and clicking imaginary castanets.

Or again:

‘My mother was Mexican, you know. I take after her.’ Here, she would grasp a plastic flower from a vase and place it between her teeth.

Another time:

‘Would you ever guess my mother was Egyptian? You can see now, can’t you?’ She hurriedly pencilled her eyes into black slants to prove her point.

Though her mother’s history varied, her father’s was more consistent. She was, when I first knew her, the illegitimate daughter of a duke. Though his title varied from day to day, he always remained true blue-blooded English.

By the time I met her, she was in her late thirties and had been on the game for a number of years. In time, she was to tell me she trusted and loved me as she had never trusted or loved anyone. I replied that I would just as soon befriend a viper. Her good opinion of me remained undiminished. Had I allowed it, she would have overwhelmed me with stolen gifts, and my principled refusal puzzled her. When she finally realised it was genuine, she said, ‘Ah well, I suppose I admire you really.’ Others were not so chary about receiving her ‘shopping’, and she was able to walk out of a store concealing anything from coats to cosmetics. She didn’t necessarily limit herself to things she wanted or needed – she had the largest collection of sunglasses I have ever seen.

Once, she gave away a jumper that she’d nicked and made the mistake of telling her friend which shop she’d taken it from. Finding that she could do with a size larger, the ‘daft cow’ – as the friend in question was later described – took it back to change it. Tina’s name was mentioned and the police turned up. Somehow, in a flat crammed with ill-gotten gains and confronted with damning evidence and a witness statement, Tina managed to emerge from the interview without charge. She was unrepentant and took her friend’s betrayal in her stride, though she admitted it was ‘a bloody close thing’.

Tina worked from a house containing two ‘gaffs’, and she had the better one on the second floor. She made the life of the girl above a perpetual misery, and the house was a permanent battleground, with the laurels mostly going to Tina. She was never really happy unless someone was annoying her. She was forever running upstairs to accuse the cowering occupant of some domestic misdemeanour or hurling verbal abuse up at her from below.

Her vocabulary and turn of phrase were quite fantastic – and not something I’d be brave enough to repeat here!

The other girl alleged – probably justifiably – that Tina was intercepting some of her regular clients on their way up and stealing their custom. The accusations continued as private grumbles until, at last, a client said he was willing to state that Tina had tried to ensnare him.

Still in a state of undress from her latest client, Tina clenched her fists and shrieked something to the effect that the man was a ‘fucking liar’ and demanded to know where he was so she could ‘get my fucking hands on him’. She hurled herself up the stairs like a troop of commandos. I managed to get out a few words, but Tina wasn’t taking any notice. Fascinated, I listened to the sounds coming from above. Finally Tina reappeared on the landing, clutching one hand to her bosom.

‘I think I’ve done my fist in!’ she said. ‘I’d just got him propped up nice when the little bastard ducked and I hit the wall instead.’

Her hand was a ghastly sight, swelling like a purple melon. I hated to think what would have happened to the man’s face if he hadn’t ducked. Needless to say, the girl upstairs ceased to press her client-rights after that.

Tina had no real need to steal other people’s clients; she could pick them up herself when she needed to and would work hard if she had to. Her ponce was called Paul, a mild, nice, long-suffering man who was virtually on the retired list.

‘My old man makes me die,’ she told me once. ‘Do you know, yesterday I had forty quickies – forty! By the time I got home I was fit to drop. I told my old man what the take was – ’cos I was ever so pleased with myself – and collapsed into bed. Then bugger me, he got in, all pleased with me too, and by heck, he starts getting randy! I told him to give over and let me get some sleep. Do you know what the stupid bugger said?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘What?’

‘He gets up on one elbow and switches the light on. Then he stares at me and says, “What’s the matter? Have you got another fella, then?” ’

Tina’s uninhibited way of hustling was to go into a café or milk bar, position herself next to a likely man at the counter, touch him up for long enough to hook him and then simply walk away. The men never failed to follow.

It wasn’t always plain-sailing, though. Tina’s second-floor flat was one room converted into two: the bedroom and a kitchen-cum-sitting-room. The bedroom door had a lock for which there was only one key, and Tina was always locking herself out. When she came back one day with a punter called Edward, she realised she was shut out. After a few minutes of effing and blinding about it, she was struck by sudden inspiration. In a gesture worthy of church hall dramatics, she banged her forehead with the heel of her hand and exclaimed,
‘Madonna mia!’

Edward was led to the kitchen window. Tina pointed out a ‘good ledge’ connecting them to the bedroom window. Edward saw a very narrow strip of ornamental corbelling and vehemently refused to have anything to do with it. He began to back off, but Tina took his hand and led him back to the window.

‘Oh, love, not even for me?’ she cooed. Her hand strayed caressingly over his framework. ‘If you do that, you and me could have such a lovely time in there.’

His continued protestations might have been more convincing had he removed himself from the questing hand. He didn’t, and she knew she’d already won. She brought her other hand into play and nibbled his ear, winking at me over his shoulder.

Once Edward was performing his acrobatic feat and was out of earshot, Tina turned to me and said:

‘He must be mad. Don’t forget, if he falls, we’ve never seen him before in our lives.’

She had quite a big S&M clientele and relished her role as a dominatrix. There was, for instance, a headmaster who, ironically, visited during the school holidays to allow enough time for the weals on his hands to fade. There was also a fair sprinkling of judo and wrestling devotees whose punishments caused the floor to shudder with bangs and crashes.

Hidden amongst Tina’s toughness, brutality and general indifference, there were tender spots – if you could find them. She was very upset about a girlfriend of hers who had committed suicide. It was a sad but not unfamiliar story. The girl had married one of her wealthy regulars and then fallen for his cook. The cook – happily married himself – had rejected her, and unable to deal with her feelings, she had taken a massive quantity of sleeping pills.

Tina could also weep buckets over her absent children and over the plight of the poor, old or sick. These were not crocodile tears; she would help where she could. There was one old man who used to visit her who needed a lot of help to reach her room, let alone an orgasm. She never charged him, but as if to lessen his obligation, he always brought his own rubber, carefully enclosed in his wallet.

‘I have to help him on me and I have to help him off me,’ she said. ‘And I’m dead scared all the time he’s going to peg out on the job, but you can’t let him go without it, can you?’

For all her sharp-tongued comments and quick wits, it came as no surprise for me to discover me that Tina was illiterate, though she thought no one would ever suspect.

‘I don’t mind telling
you
,’ she said darkly. ‘Because I know you’ll not take advantage of me. But there’s a lot as would.’

From then on, she took to bringing me documents and letters that had hitherto gone unread, and I was able to sort out a few of her problems. She was, like all the girls, keen to start a bank account, but had not known how to go about it. She didn’t want to look silly at the bank, but neither did she want to ask any of her friends to help her.

‘I don’t want them to know where my hoard is,’ she said. ‘It’d be nice to know I’ve got something behind me for a rainy day, though, and anyway, having a bank account sounds posh.’

So I went with her and helped her open an account with the ten pounds she had to spare at that moment.

‘I wonder how long that’ll stay in there,’ I said to her.

She was adamant:

‘Oh, it’s going to stay there, and I’ll add to it all the time, you’ll see.’

Having joined the ranks of the banking classes, she was as pleased as Punch. She kept flapping her new chequebook around, riffling through its pages from time to time. After that, she often showed me a bank statement to prove she’d kept her word and never drawn the ten pounds out. I also noticed that she’d never put any more in.

‘It’s lovely to have someone I can really trust,’ she told me.

I didn’t pay much heed to this – I knew she would stab me in the back at any given moment if it suited her. However, in my way, I loved her, because I understood her. After all, there are not many people you can know that well and who are so open about their darker nature: nastiness is usually snuggled under a thick eiderdown of culture and politeness. If nothing else, Tina was always herself.

She was – but was I? In the early months of 1949, I was a very different being from the one who had left my grandmother’s house with her curses reddening the air behind me, a very different being from the one who had taken up with Mae on that fateful evening in The Mousehole that third summer after the war. I had a job, I had friends, I had money. But my sense of vocation had dwindled into invisibility and the Soho that had liberated me was now, in some ways, also a prison. I could leave it at any time, of course, but showed no sign of doing so. It was as though I had become a working girl and Soho had become my ponce. I was drifting on a tide, and somewhere deep inside, I wasn’t sure if I liked where it was taking me.

Twenty-Five

It was late spring, 1949. Mae was still working too hard, still borrowing money, still experimenting, off and on, with the Benzedrine. The Rabbits Regime was long gone, and life was the same glorious confusion I had come to expect and require.

Mae’s clothes were generally sexy and figure-hugging; one day, though, she felt like having something different. On impulse, she bought a frilly silk dress with a nipped-in waist and little puffed sleeves. It was the epitome of fresh innocence and she had no idea when she would wear it, though she was desperately anxious to do so. It hung in immaculate glory from the picture rail and we would sit gazing at it during spare moments, wondering where she could give it an airing. Then Mae suddenly remembered the Kursaal at Southend.

‘Smashing place,’ she told me, seeing my mystified expression. ‘It’s a great big funfair. Haven’t you been? I thought everyone had been to the Kursaal. Point is, we must go on a Saturday – Saturdays are really crowded at the Kursaal.’

‘Point is,’ I reminded her, ‘Saturdays are really crowded here as well. Tony will never agree to it.’ (By this time, Tony’s financial interest was no longer a secret and we spoke openly about it – she indulgently, and even with amusement.)

‘Well, it’s jolly well got to be a Saturday,’ she said with a scowl. ‘Southend’s nothing without lots of people.’

I wondered why she always had to make life so difficult for herself. I knew that if she lost her Saturday income, she would have to work like a maniac the following week to make up for it – she’d be very likely to borrow more money as well. She was still taking Benzedrine, together with Dexedrene tablets, and from her actions and manner recently, I suspected that she had been increasing the dose.

‘I’ll manage it,’ she continued. ‘Don’t you worry. I’ll work the next two Sundays. And I’ll tell Tony I’ve already invited you to come with us. He won’t like to say no, then.’

She must have spent the next few days selling the idea to Tony. He finally cracked and the outing was arranged for the following Saturday.

It was a sunny morning when they arrived to pick me up. Mae was sitting bolt upright in the middle of the back seat of the car, with her dress spread out carefully around her. I slid in beside Tony. I could see at a glance that he wasn’t exactly falling about with pleasure at the prospect of our little jaunt to the seaside – but then I’d never seen Tony fall about with pleasure over anything.