Sunday at the Cross Bones

‘I’m a news reporter on the Standard. I’m doing an article about poverty in London, how much it’s worsened in the last couple of years, who’s doing anything about it, private individuals, I mean. I want to ask about your experiences.’

He seemed hesitant.

‘Sorry about just now,’ I went on. ‘I got a bit of a short fuse where these newspaper kids are concerned. I hope you didn’t –’

‘Have you indeed? In that case, my dear fellow, we shall get on very well.’

Giving a rather curt wave to the grumpy sod from the bookie’s, he indicated I should get out notebook and pen. But just at that moment, the pub door opened and these two young dames strode in.

Very dramatic they were, one tall, one short, both dead swishy in their long rustling skirts, tight bodices and fancy hats. You’d have thought they’d have come straight from the Windmill Theatre, though whether part of the audience or part of the stage ensemble, it was hard to judge. Modern girls, you see, the kind we write about in the ‘Trends’ pages – a little shocking, a little too damn pleased with themselves. They were no strangers to the Coal House.

‘Ah, Dolly,’ said the vicar, ‘I was beginning to worry.’ He seized the hand of the smaller one – the one with the huge brown eyes under the rakishly tilted cloche hat – and kissed her on the cheek.

The eyes of the pub followed him. He was short, as I’ve said, and his hair was snow white and he had terrible rabbity teeth, but here he was talking to a brace of posh young flappers like they were at a cocktail party in Henley.

‘And this is …?’ he says, indicating her friend, a plump piece of work in a French hat with a torn veil covered in spots, possibly to match her complexion.

‘This, Harold, is Jezzie,’ says the bird in the cloche. ‘She started out as Jessie, changed it to Eleanora, then Zuleika, then Maudie for a while, then some horrible swell called her Jezebel in a pub one night, and made her cry, so we told her, Use it, darling, don’t let him put one over on you, and she’s been Jezzie ever since.’ She paused and looked around the snug. ‘Flip me, what’s a girl got to do to get a drink around ’ere?’

The reverend ignored her. He was too busy gazing at Jezebel (well named, what with her crimson petticoat peeping out from under her long crackling skirt) and trying to see the face through the spotty veil.

‘You have the look,’ he said, or rather breathed in her ear, or would’ve done if she hadn’t stood a good six inches taller than him, ‘of Miss Greta Garbo. You must surely have seen Flesh and the Devil?’

Jezzie regarded him with a mild stare, the way girls do when they can’t believe you’re taking liberties exactly ten seconds after meeting them.

‘What, Greta Garbo? Me?’ she said and went off into a spasm of titters.

I took the only initiative I could, and said, ‘Would you ladies care for a drink?’

Why yes, they’d love a drink, though they’d have been better off at night class in needlework than hanging round in the Strand. They both fancied Brandy Alexanders.

I went to the bar for the fourth time that night. Benny tried to stick around and ingratiate himself with the dames, but he didn’t have the lingo to handle two young poules de luxe. They could probably sniff him as an off-limits married man right from the word go.

‘I’m going home,’ he said. ‘You got your hands full here.’

‘See you next week, Ben. Give Clare one for me, all right?’

In the snug, the girls sat together on the cracked-leather divan, leaning together in a sisterly fashion, sometimes swaying a bit to right and left as if in a chorus line. The rector leaned forward a lot, his long face inches away from the girls’ cheeks, turning his shining eyes first to Dolores, then to Jezzie. He did 90 per cent of the talking. For minutes they smiled vacantly, like little girls listening to an elderly grandpa grinding on about the war, hoping that they might get a chocolate biscuit. Reckoning I’d bought myself an introduction, I took the stool beside him, and listened in.

‘… and Mrs Lake will, I’m afraid, no longer countenance your irregular hours and gentlemen callers, Dolores,’ he was saying. ‘I spoke with her on Tuesday. She has developed a singular aversion, I’m afraid, to your Maltese gentlemen friends, whom she describes, with a singular lack of racial accuracy, as Hottentots.’ His face essayed a brief, high-table smile. ‘She does not want, she says, “them swarthy chancers” dropping in and out of her establishment at all hours. So we will have to find you some new haven. I have asked about your secretarial studies at Mrs Moody’s and I fear – no, do not interrupt – you have failed to honour your commitment. I hear your morning session last week saw Mrs Moody cooling her heels for an hour with no sign of your –’

‘I can’t go studying squiggles in the middle of the bloody night,’ said Dolores, grumpily.

‘Nine o’clock in the morning is hardly the small hours. I told Mrs Moody of your circumstances, and she agreed to take you on at a very reasonable rate. It hardly repays me, or her, for our considerate impulses if you choose to spend every morning lying in bed reading rubbishy magazines and drinking chocolate.’

‘I didn’t come here for a lecture,’ said Dolores, an astonishingly self-confident young thing for her age. ‘I thought you was going to introduce me to Ivor Novello, so I could tell him about my singing.’

Jezzie giggled (again). ‘Ivor Novello?’ she said, sneeringly. ‘Ivor pain in my rear end, more like.’

The rector looked hurt. ‘You underestimate my contacts in the world of what the Americans call show business. Though I have never met the delightful Mr Novello, I have friends who’ve had the pleasure of meeting him backstage. They say he is charming to strangers, polite to ladies and friendly to young persons starting out on the musical scene.’

Jezzie unfurled herself from the banquette and took herself off to the Ladies. We all watched her go. Her sizeable young rump, tightly encased in the crackling shiny material, had a distinct wiggle.

‘Charming,’ said the rector with the fond appreciation of an uncle, ‘though unfortunate to bear such a name, whatever the eccentricity of its genesis. Have you known her long?’

‘Couple of weeks,’ said Dolores. ‘We met at the Hippodrome, hanging round the stage door for Jack Buchanan. Bloody freezing it was, and when he came out he just whisked past us and got in a cab. Not as big as you’d have expected neither.’

‘Where does she live?’

‘Oh –’ she waved a vague hand – ‘here and there.’

‘You can be a little more precise,’ said the rector.

Dolores, or Dolly, regarded him steadily. ‘I dunno what you’re thinking, right this minute, Harold, but you’re not to start with her.’ She brazenly took out a cigarette case, extracted a Virginia and lit it. ‘All right? Just don’t start in on her, the minute my back’s turned.’

The rector looked around, with a faint whinny of disavowal. ‘My dear girl –’

‘And who’s this geezer, anyhow?’ demanded the young harpy. ‘What the hell does he want?’ She leaned forward, her dark eyes lit up with suspicion.

‘This is a gentleman from the press, who seeks information about my pastoral work.’

‘Oh great,’ said Dolores, rising to her feet. ‘Bloody reporter, that’s all I need. Informer, more like.’

‘There is no reason to fear –’

‘I’m going to see what’s happened to Jezzie,’ she said, and flung herself away from our table, leaving a hefty waft of Woolworths scent and brass’s armpit.

That left us together.

‘I’m afraid I’ve upset your young friends, Padre,’ I said, as airily as I could. ‘All I was after was a few facts about your crusading work. Perhaps I should leave you to it.’

He put his hand on my arm, a gentle and insinuating gesture. ‘Stand your ground, my boy,’ he said, opening his greatcoat and taking out a huge cigar from a pocket within. ‘They will be back. These young girls regard me as their only hope in this vale of sin. They cleave to me instinctively, as though to an oak in a torrent.’

He crinkled the cigar – it was huge, I couldn’t afford a cigar like that – then picked up Dolly’s box of Swan vestas and lit it. Clouds of expensive blue smoke briefly enveloped his head in a foggy halo. He appeared to devour the enormous tube, running it two inches inside his distended lips, then sucked at it with hungry kisses – mpuh! mpuh! mpuh! – until the tip glowed wide like an orange sun, and the smoke poured from his nose and mouth like some kind of sulphurous ectoplasm.

‘Perhaps I should go,’ I said. ‘They obviously don’t like newspaper men.’

He studied the end of his Havanan torpedo. ‘No, no, I have always been convinced of the power of the press to do good rather than mischief. Without the help of journalists, we shall never reveal to the world the troubles of the homeless, the young strays and runaways, the army of fallen women.’

‘Perhaps,’ I ventured, all innocent-like, ‘we should concentrate on the work of one man. Readers don’t like being told depressing tales about kids dying in poverty and girls on the game. But a story about One Man’s Quest to take care of, you know, tarts who don’t want to be …’

He looked at me coldly. ‘Nobody, my young friend, wishes to be a prostitute. Any girl who finds herself in such employment has not sought it volitionally. It is not a matter of choice. They are driven into lives of degeneracy by the circumscription of choice. Young girls in their natural state are the innocent lambs of Creation. Without worldly knowledge, they would have no will to sin.’

‘And how can you help them?’ I asked, puzzled.

He sucked on his cigar again. ‘By showing them a route back to righteousness. By befriending them, and revealing there is a finer life, a life of the mind and of the soul, in which they may find redemption, a career in the arts or the drama.’

At that moment, the girls came back. Such a transformation! Dolores was all smiles. Jezzie carried her hat, with its spotty veil, in her hand, her face now revealed in all its seventeen-year-old wonder: her fat cheeks aglow, her hair blonde and fine as a pedigree Saluki’s, her eyes shining. You’d think they’d just won some money, these lambs of Creation.

‘We made some new friends,’ said Dolores, ‘in the public bar. They was very nice, weren’t they, Jez?’

‘He was lovely,’ breathed the other one. ‘They’re taking us to a party in a while, to meet some people who are going to put on a show at the Palladium.’

‘What an amazing stroke of luck,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me they happen to be looking for two young actresses of no previous experience to appear in the chorus?’

‘Yeah, as a matter of fact –’ Her young face hardened. ‘How’d you know that?’

‘Oh, journalist’s instinct.’

‘Don’t listen to him, Jez,’ said Dolores. ‘He’s taking the mick. They’re all the same, fucking news hounds.’

I wondered if the rector had heard the obscenity, or if he had learned to ignore the startling rudeness of his young charges.

He turned to Jezzie. ‘Where did you say you lived?’

‘Mmm?’ said Jezzie, still dreamy from her recent brush with the arrow of Eros. ‘Oh, Spitalfields. I got this horrible landlady, she cooks greasy breakfasts, and ticks you off for using too much toilet roll. And no pets and no men in your room after 10 p.m., and if you want to have a bath –’

‘But your address?’

‘Oh right, 16 Fournier Street. What, you going to write to me?’

The rector, with an operatic flourish, opened his big coat wide, and ferreted about in the lining. He buried his head under his armpit, like a swan having a kip. He appeared to search in one aperture, then another, a third – Jesus, how many pockets did he have in there?

– and pulled out a red ledger, the kind a fellow might keep a note of his expenses in, and gravely inscribed the name of young Jezzie’s fragrant domicile. Then he pressed a business card into the girl’s hand. ‘And here is my address. I gather you are but recently arrived in the metropolis. I hope you will ring me on this number, Vauxhall 9137, if you are assailed by feelings of loneliness or desperation or feel in need of conversation.’

Jezzie tucked the card away in her blouse. Dolores regarded her cigar-puffing benefactor with a look of warning.

‘Harold,’ she said, evenly, ‘we’ve got to talk.’

The rector snapped the ledger shut, returned it to its home in the gaberdine folds, glanced at Jezzie’s newly enlivened presence – her mountainous blonde hair, her even more mountainous bosom and smiled at his young protégée like a fond uncle at a family reunion.

‘We are among friends, my dear, and can talk freely about your future employment –’

‘It’s not about the bloody job, Harold,’ she hissed. ‘It’s about Max. What you done with him?’

He suddenly looked a little nervous. ‘Max?’ he asked. ‘Was that the man I met you with outside the National Gallery?’

‘You know perfectly well. And you put the law on him,’ said Dolores. ‘How could you? The bloody peelers.’

My ears were out on stalks, if that’s the phrase. I seemed to have stumbled into an interesting little row. The vicar, the tart, the villain, the mystery disappearance, the constabulary … All my antennas were quivering.

They were quivering a little too obviously. The vicar and the girls were suddenly all looking at me, none too friendly. Dolores’s enormous gob had lost its pouty allure and was thin as a Gillette blade. The rector’s cigarry animation had evaporated, leaving him with a look on his face like a man just kneed in the nadgers. In this pub snug, there was suddenly an Arctic chill. Even the birdbrain Jezzie could feel it.

‘I think,’ said the rector, and I was relieved to hear anyone saying anything to break the silence, ‘we must not keep you any longer from your friends. If you wish to interview me about my work, you must make an appointment by telephone. I keep irregular hours. It has been pleasant to make your acquaintance.’ And with that, he turned his whole chair, away from me so I was looking at his back, as he leaned into the girls again.

‘I was just going, Reverend,’ I said, rising sheepishly. ‘Unless you fancy one more drink, on me, I mean, and we could …’

He ignored me. Dolores, the little bitch, turned a look of pure contempt my way. ‘You still ’ere?’ she said. ‘Thought you were goin’. And takin’ your big flappin’ ears with you.’

And that was that. I gathered my dignity, my jacket and briefcase and left. At the door, I looked back. The reverend and the two girls were the best of friends again, laughing and yarning away. It was after eight. The pub was now as smoky as Hades, crushed as a Calcutta omnibus, the young lawyers and Friday-night demoiselles getting noisily hammered, the guy at the piano singing ‘Paper Moon’, and I was sorry to leave. I’d just met the oddest geezer I’ve come across in years. I rather envied him his funny entourage, and I itched to find out more about their set-up. So I’ll ring him tomorrow on Vauxhall 9137 and see if there’s a story in it. His old-fashioned way of talking, it ran through my head on the way home. And his coat with all the special pockets. And the girl with the torn veil who’d said, ‘What, you going to write to me?’ like nobody’d ever written her a letter in her life.

Journals of Harold Davidson

London 1 July 1930

The newspapers are full of Iraq. It seems that Britain has agreed to the recognition of Iraqi independence, and the dismantling of our protectorate, set up during the war by the Sykes – Picot Agreement. I am far from convinced that this is a beneficial move. The presence of Europeans in the Ottoman territories is, of course, seen as an outrage by the Muslim hordes. They may admire our scientific advances and our armaments in war, but they resent our occupation of their land – and they bridle when they see our distaste for their corrupt and primitive ways. Most of them would wish Mr Sykes and M. Picot at the bottom of the Tigris and the Euphrates, picked clean by sharia fish. And yet, is it not imperative that we bring modern European ideas to this benighted territory? Could any Iraqi look at the clockwork precision of London life, the fruits of the Enlightenment in our libraries, the technical advances in our roads and in the air, the literacy of our common folk, and not wish the same for his own community?

Perhaps I should preach about this on Sunday. Through conversations at St Ethelreda’s with Henry, an Arabist of many years’ study, I know how passionately some enlightened Muslims wish to replace the religious tyranny of their lands with a liberal constitution, a monarchy of restricted powers and a parliamentary representation of the people’s will. It was Henry who lent me Admonition to the Nation, a striking work of far-sighted intelligence by Sheikh Mohammed Husein Naini, one of the leading intellectuals of Najaf, who draws connections between the tenets of the Qur’an and the secular policies of British governance. He argues that to curb the tyranny of rulers is an act worthy of the Shia, and to establish a government bound by a constitution may be interpreted as the return of the ‘Hidden Imam’ – the twelfth imam in the succession from the Prophet, who disappeared from view (i.e. died, in Western terms) or has been miraculously concealed by God since 934, and who, some believe, will return one day to usher in an era of perfect justice and perfect government.

It is just one of their myriad madcap beliefs – so bizarre, so capricious and fanciful, when set beside our own happy certainty of the Second Coming of Christ and the promise of eternal bliss in His sight.

An admirable subject for high-table debate, though perhaps a little too sensational for a sermon in Stiffkey. We must see if Iraq subsides into the Ottoman murk where she lay stagnant for so long, or if she embraces the modern light of the West.

Humph. How metaphorically unhelpful that the West is where the light declines, while the East is where it increases and is constantly reborn. Most inconvenient.

A pleasant evening in the Old Coal House with Dolores Knight, despite her continued aversion to any kind of hard work, study or kindly counsel. I told her of Mrs Lake’s objections to the gentlemen callers and Mrs Moody’s exasperation over the secretarial course. Dolly laughs them away. Now I have rescued her from the sordid company of St Katherine’s Dock, Wapping, found her accommodation in Whitechapel, brought a doctor who would treat her unfortunate condition (‘Mat’ low’s Clap’ they call it, rather brutally, in dock regions) and paid her regular visits to discuss her future, I ask myself: What more can I do? The great Schweitzer himself, in the jungles of wherever-it-was, could not work harder at the sharp end of salvation than I, without expectation of reward, but in the hope of seeing results. In the case of Miss Knight, my labours have produced only a bored, disaffected girl, unwilling to embrace the opportunities offered by a virtuous life. Instead, she complained last evening – in front of complete strangers – that I had caused her unpleasant gentleman friend Max to be taken into custody. I may have hinted to the constabulary that he appears to own a great quantity of French brandy, which he retails in small barrels from a back room in the George Inn, London Bridge. I did not say he was a smuggler; that was their interpretation. But he was no good for Dolores – I am quite sure he was a former client, returning to his prey – and she is better off without him. She is bitter, though, and will take some placating.

She brought with her a delightful young friend, comically named Jezebel (!), a thickset, giggling, foolish, boy-loving ninny of a girl in a torn veil. She may well be in danger (from the company of Dolores, as much as from any man). I gave her my card and may call on her tomorrow. Around 1 a.m.

Met a journalist, from the Evening Standard, who wishes to know more about my work and publish feature. Excellent. Seemed nice enough chap, but with tendency to linger and eavesdrop. Ah well, that is the nature of the beast. I have little time for scandal sheets and penny dreadfuls. They deal in such foolish, trivial stuff. I represent something deeper and more serious, at the coalface of modern urban life where the battle every day is between the largest armies of all: sin; damnation; virtue; redemption. But I will grant him an interview if he calls.

Feature article, Evening Standard 5 July 1930

AT HOME AMONG THE HOMELESS How an unusual clergyman is working for the betterment of London’s poor

By Charles Norton

Sam Gillespie was six years old when his parents were drowned in a boating accident. Orphaned, bereaved and shocked, he was taken in by an aunt who lived in Wapping, then sent to nearby Tower Hamlets School. Unable to stomach the cruel taunts of fellow pupils about his parentless state, he regularly played truant. His aunt could not feed him from her limited stipend. Finding it hard to gain work because of his extreme youth, he turned to crime, stealing bicycles. Now fifteen, he has been in prison twice. It is hard for him to secure a job with legitimate enterprises. He is in danger of having to look for a livelihood among the criminal fraternity. What is a boy such as Sam to do?

Step forward, the Reverend Harold Davidson, 54, one of the most remarkable clergymen in England, a man who has brought life and hope to hundreds of misfortunate men, women and children. Davidson is the founder of a number of charities for homeless men, destitute boys and women forced into a life of vice. His work takes him to all corners of London, looking for young people in danger of falling into bad company. ‘It is fortunate that I seldom sleep,’ laughs Davidson, ‘for I find myself summoned to my ministry from morning to night. London is bursting with runaways, who have come here in search of jobs and excitement, and found nowhere to live. For 10 years, the public parks have been their only refuge in snow and rain. Every day they risk arrest for vagrancy; the girls risk fines and imprisonment for soliciting, quite unjustly. Their crime is not prostitution but destitution. Something must be done.’

Davidson’s crusade is the more remarkable because he is not based in London. He is rector of the Norfolk parish of Stiffkey and Morston where he lives with his Irish wife, Moyra, and their five children, Sheilagh, Nugent, Patricia, Arnold and Pamela. He teaches religious instruction at the local school, recites poetry and presides over amateur dramatic productions. ‘I used to do a bit of acting, in my student days and after,’ he recalls with a smile, ‘and I fear there’s still a bit of the ham about me!’ He is a frequent visitor to the theatres of London’s West End. While barely past his school examinations, Davidson set up an organisation to help child newspaper sellers – always a prey to bullying and exploitation – acquire a basic education. After gaining a degree at Oxford University, he helped to found the Young Lads’ Apprenticeship Fund, looking to provide an artisanal career for otherwise unemployable youths. ‘It is the most worthwhile work imaginable,’ he told me, ‘attaching these lost boys to employers and helping them become future plumbers, bookbinders and carpenters …’

He is also the founder of the Runaway Boys’ Retreat, where street urchins, on the run from difficult domestic circumstances, are fed and tended by older boys and given a basic education. Davidson has also become known to Londoners for his work with streetwalkers, finding them work and decent dwellings, ‘helping them’, as he puts it, ‘emerge from the crepuscular alleys of sins, the dim corridors of corruption and return to the stony but sure pathway to the Light. These women are often scarcely more than children, young girls preyed upon by men no better than the slave owners of yore. It is my gift sometimes to discover them before they have strayed, and to divert the course of their lives from Perdition. To the fallen, I can offer help and succour. I will go on doing so while there is breath in my body, and friends able to assist in this most necessary and demanding work. I owe it to the girls.’