Sunday at the Cross Bones

CHAPTER 2

Journals of Harold Davidson

London 7 July 1930

As I was passing the Lyons Corner House tea room in the Strand today I saw, through the window, a remarkable sight. A young girl, evidently a waitress, wearing a thin raincoat and no hat, was sitting on a chair the wrong way round. Her knees were spread wide around the chair’s backrest, her arms folded along the top. In this posture, she was talking to the lady by the till, who seemed to find nothing unusual in her friend’s wanton arrangement of limbs.

I walked in. My usual table to the rear of the tea room was occupied, and I was forced to sit by the window. I dug into my Stationery and Publications Pockets, and set to work making notes on the findings of the Bishops’ Conference in Liverpool, until I saw the young girl on the chair cease her conversation, and I felt able to intervene.

‘Good evening, my dear,’ I said, giving a grave bow. ‘Am in the presence of Miss Marlene Dietrich?’

‘You what?’ said the girl, blankly. ‘Who’s that? Who’re you?’

‘I see I am mistaken,’ (I smote my brow theatrically), ‘but surely you must be aware of Miss Dietrich, the German actress. Why, you resemble her so closely, I could have sworn it was she sitting on this chair.’

‘You mean I look like her?’

‘It is not just the look, my dear. It is the pose. You must have seen Miss Dietrich’s new film, The Blue Angel, in which she plays a nightclub entertainer, who sits, upon the stage, in precisely the same attitude in which you are sitting now?’

‘No I haven’t. I can’t afford to go to the flicks.’

‘Dear girl, are you destitute? Have you no work to bring you a living wage?’

‘I work here,’ she said, coolly. ‘Only, I’ve just come off duty and now I’m going home.’

‘How fortunate. And do you find the work in this tea room congenial?’

‘What you mean, congealing?’

‘Congenial, my dear, do you find the work pleasant?’

‘Yeah, it’s all right. It’s nice when everyone’s friendly. But we get some right tough characters. The other day, this bloke, he comes in throwing his weight around, he looks at me and goes, “Oi, you! Get me some hot chocolate!” like he’s ordering some squaddie around.’

‘And did you retaliate?’

‘We’re not supposed to say nothing, in case they turn nasty. So I just got his drink and brought it over. Yvonne, my friend, she reckoned I should have upended it into his lap.’ She beamed wickedly at the prospect.

‘I hope you are not abused by gentlemen on a regular basis?’

‘What? No chance. Miss Tewkesbury here, she doesn’t take no cheek from people who’re rude.’

She was a sweet-faced young thing, not a beauty but a healthy, clean-skinned innocent girl, nervous of men. Yet, given a moment’s rest from her labours, she falls into the wayward, legs-apart posture of Lola in The Blue Angel, like the most shameless poule de luxe! Something must be working upon her; some malign influence has her in its grip. I have an antenna for when a girl is going to the bad – or, if not yet going, then disposed in time to slide towards corruption.

Her parents were in Evershot, she said, a village near Yeovil, in Dorset. They had (thoughtlessly, I feel) allowed her to leave school and travel to London with her older sister, to seek employment. The girls live in Camberwell, off the Dog Kennel Hill, and the sister, Delia, has a ‘young man’ who takes her cycling at weekends. She herself (Sandra) has no young man, she says, though she is all of seventeen. Some of the gentlemen who came in for tea made rough jokes about taking her ‘up the town’ one night, but they never (she says) mean it and she wouldn’t wish to. I asked how she spent her evenings. At the Camberwell room, it seems, reading and listening to the radio, although sometimes she and Delia go to the nearby park and drink cider with her gentleman friend and his associates. ‘It reminds us,’ she said, ‘of home.’ My godfathers. I know a girl in imminent trouble when I hear one. But one small light gleamed out from her blank revelation of a blank life. Every so often she goes to the Quakers Hall on Camberwell Church Road, to watch girls from the local school rehearsing their end-of-term drama.

The dear child. So bleakly comforted by so little! Impetuously, I leaned forward.

‘Would you do me the honour of accompanying me to the theatre?’ I asked. ‘I am fortunate to have two tickets to The Young Idea by Mr Coward at the Hippodrome this Friday, and I would like you to come.’

‘Well, I dunno,’ she said, untwining her legs from the back-to-front chair, ‘I don’t know you. You might be a murderer for all I know, mightn’t you?’

I gave a light laugh. ‘I am a clergyman, my dear, and I assure you that murder is the last thing on my mind. To speak plainly, I feel you may have a considerable future as an actress. Please do not smile. I am perfectly serious. Before I took to the cloth, I was a professional actor in London, in Kent, Surrey and Hampshire, and I know talent when I see it. You have no business waiting at tables where boorish men speak to you roughly. There is a world out there of achievement, of glamour and fame, where a girl like you will not have to fetch and carry for a pittance. Perhaps on Friday you will let me introduce it to you?’

She stood before me in her mackintosh, her mouth open (to reveal charmingly white but crooked teeth) in surprise.

‘Call in tomorrow, and ask me again,’ she said, ‘and I’ll see.’

‘I appreciate your caution,’ I said, delighted. ‘And I’m glad to say that you are about to enter, come Friday, a world of sublime happiness.’

When I left she was smiling. A splendid evening’s work. I must look in at the Hippodrome later, to acquire some free tickets from dear Ivy, whom I rescued from a life of vice only last spring.

London 9 July 1930

THINGS TO DO:

1. Elsie Teenan to Mrs Teasdale, 15 The Close, Bermondsey. Rent 3/9 wk. No dogs. Persuade E to part with Biscuit. Poss work at Vincent’s seamstress factory? Must ask.

2. Check employment roster at Labour Exchange, Stratford Road, Battersea. Maids, cooks, etc. in good houses. Lily Beane, Sally Anstruther, Joanna Dee still unplaced.

3. Boots pharmacy. Fresh supplies of rash salve, shingles ointment, gingivitis balm, surgical spirit, bathroom tissue, etc. Wrights Coal Tar soap for Elsie. Special offer beauty soap/shampoo still avlbl? Box set to Marina Carter – bthday 28 July. Mauve ribbons for Patricia. Soft toy for Pamela.

4. Lunch, Monsignor Coveney, Mount St, Weds. We need cash for Christian Rehabilitation of Immoral Youth fund or will surely go under.

5. Visit Fenella Royston-Smith, Ch X Hotel. NB bring Dream of Gerontius for her. Urge her to join Virtue Reclamation League and enlist Kenya friends.

6. Sandra from Strand T-rooms to The Young Idea, Friday, Hippodrome. Tickets from Ivy Bareham.

7. While at it, tkts to see Journey’s End at Her Majesty’s. Cheap dress-circle seats to 1 Sept.

8. 6 p.m., meeting with Eddie Bones & Howard Shiner, Runaway Boys’ Retreat.

9. New girl, Jezebel (!) friend of Dolores Kt. In danger. 16 Fournier St, Whitechapel.

10. Ring Mimi. There must be emergency boilerman somewhere in Norfolk.

11. Sermon – St Augustine? ‘Salus extra ecclesiam non est’.

London 12 July 1930

Delightful evening with Sandra Hunt, the young waitress I befriended in the Strand on Monday. I popped in on Tuesday to renew my invitation to the theatre and found she had all but forgotten about it! How thoughtless are the young about things that should most demand their attention. Said she thought I had been ‘throwing her a line’ in inviting her to the West End. Reassured her I desired only her company in Hippodrome stalls, mentioning that I was a widower who enjoyed the thrill of live drama. She finally accepted. Angry glances from the dragon-lady in charge of tea room, who kept telling the put-upon girl to return to work.

She was waiting for me on Wellington Street, wearing the same blue raincoat as when we met, silky blonde hair quite straight, except for one charming kink where it falls over her right ear. Caught my breath as I realised how much her face reminded me of –

Enough. She had never been to theatre before! Not just in the West End – she had never been in any theatre, not even a school play, nor even mummers calling in her Hardyesque home village. She loved the stalls, the proscenium arch, the programme, the ladies in their finery nodding at us (doubtless counting us as father and daughter), the velvet curtain. ‘Is there a big screen behind the drapes?’ she asked, in her artless way. She loved the play, its clipped and brittle rallies corresponding to many young girls’ notions of sophistication. She even essayed twirly little dance on the cobbles of Covent Garden Market. Delightful. Bought her sausages and chips at the Brigham Café, and learned more of her family. She has not, after all, been abandoned. Parents sent her and her sister on rail journey to the metropolis with cash subvention, and are coming to London next month to check their progress. So Sandra has no immediate need of guardian and protector against baser instincts. Excellent.

Sandra asked me about our first conversation in the café. Which film star had I taken her for? I explained about Miss Dietrich and The Blue Angel.

‘She plays a performer,’ I said. ‘A kind of exotic dancer in a club, wearing only underwear and a top hat, and sitting astride a chair.’

‘Is it good?’ said Sandra. ‘I mean, would I like it?’

‘I know nothing of your taste in such things, but it is a remarkable study in moral corruption, one that may hold lessons for a young person, about the power of sensual gratification.’

‘So there’s dancing and singing, and this woman in a hat?’ she said. ‘Isn’t there a story? I like a nice story.’

‘Indeed there is,’ I said, ‘a story about a respectable man, a professor, who falls in love with a femme fatale, gives up everything for her and ends his life as little more than a clown.’

‘Ooh,’ said Sandra, ‘I think I’ll go and see that. It sounds great.’

Even as I described the plot, I felt a tintinnabulation of alarm. It occured to me that, though it served as a conversational topic, The Blue Angel is perhaps not a film impressionable young girls should be encouraged to see.

I got the bill. We caught a cab and I dropped this sweet-faced young girl outside her cramped lodgings in Camberwell Green.

London 15 July 1930

Yesterday my fifty-fifth birthday, a day for sober self-examination, yet I rose in excellent spirits, like one – thank God! – perpetually reborn to the fray. Surveyed my ageing flesh in the silvered bathroom mirror. A touch of rheum about the eyes, a deal of sag about the neck, and the brow-lines now feature a cross-hatched complexity like a Piranesi drawing; but on the whole, no need to send for the mortician yet! In a sudden impulse of vanity, I sought out the nail scissors and snipped at the profusion of hairs extruding from my auricular cavities. The eyebrows too have a new tendency to bolt and straggle, and with them too I dealt severely.

Mrs Parker cooked a celebratory breakfast of kippers and scrambled eggs with too much milk in the beaten eggs (comme d’habitude, alas!), and we clinked teacups in a domestic parody of a banqueting toast. The feast day of St Alice of Ravenna, that sweet young flower of sixteenth-century martyrdom. Too few Renaissance paintings commemorate her uncomplaining death, crushed between millstones by Moorish brigands in the Saharan wastes. She will remain, I fear, a dim footnote in the history of North African missions unless I single-handedly rescue her from obscurity.

There was no time to regret my lack of anniversary cards from the children. M, I fear, is preoccupied with our houseful of lame dogs, and the state of the boiler. I should have telephoned. By 10 a.m., I was patrolling Fleet Street – the sunlight blazing off the noble frontage of the law courts, a divine birthday gift.

In Somerset House, I endeavoured to find Elsie Teenan’s birth certificate, in the hope of locating her errant mama, but only an unmannerly crew of Teahans, Teemans and Teamonts appeared beneath my flicking fingers. Most frustrating.

I will not give up on poor Elsie. I will not have her spend one more night outside Waterloo Station among the taxis, flagging for custom in her grey Tipperary shawl. There is no sight in London more pathetic than a young harlot who has found no clients by 3 a.m. I wish she would cease her doomed attempts to sell her body (or to ‘find some young feller to go home with’ in her cluelessly romantic turn of phrase) and embrace a more virtuous life as, say, a maidservant, until she finds a passing Dublin construction worker who will recognise her potential, embrace her spindle-framed loveliness, sing to her from Moore’s Irish Melodies, stop her complaining mouth with appreciative kisses and bear her away to a fulfilled life of twins and St Patrick’s Day shamrock in the new suburban Eden of Tooting Common. I have seen it work. One can build a Jerusalem, of sorts, in London’s green and burgeoning suburbs.

At noon, I popped into St Paul’s where a funeral was in full swing. Nobody I knew, but I derived a cold comfort from the dignified obsequies, the profusion of flowers, the fume of expensive cathedral incense. I was cheered at this sad event by the sight of the dead man’s family. The widow was a handsome woman in her fifties, ‘piss-elegant Mayfair’ as Rose would have said. The lady’s dignified bearing softened by the swell of her bosom in a well-cut black crape gown, she extended an eloquent arm around the waist of her eldest daughter as the Bishop flapped the fuming censer around an expensive mahogany coffin. The daughter laid her head on her mother’s shoulder in a gesture both needy and sweetly supportive. I gazed at this charming tableau of womanhood, admiring their mutual support. I longed to go up and interpose my body between them, to extend caring arms about their waists and tell them they had nothing to fear, since the Life Eternal had embraced their husband and father – yet something stopped my impetuous impulse. So I remained at the end of the pew, singing the climactic hymn, ‘As We Walk the Paths of Sorrow to the Shores of Galilee’, remarking inwardly how similar is the tune to the chorus of ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, a great favourite of mine.

I popped into the offices of the Church Times in Fleet Street, hoping to interest Mr Humphrey Goodman in the progress of our charitable work at the Runaway Boys’ Retreat in Whitechapel. I brought along a score of the new leaflets (a piteous tableau of a woman clutching her luckless infant, driven from her father’s door into a snowy field populated by expiring robins, above the legend ‘More To Be Pitied Than Scorned!’ – surely an image to melt the sternest heart) hoping to persuade him that one might be reproduced on the front page with a suitably affecting editorial. But Mr G, despite his Bunyanesque name, was ‘engaged’, they told me, ‘in writing up the Bishops’ Conference’ and could not spare ten minutes.

Luncheon at the Jolly Farmers with Vincent Doughty, whose clothing manufactory goes, he tells me, from strength to strength. He has started to take snuff! Every fifteen minutes, he punctuates our discussion by flourishing a tin box, extracting from it a ‘pinch’ of the brown powder in his sausagey fingers, and ramming it up his nose. ‘Fancy a go?’ he asked me several times. He is an oaf, a boor and a man of few spiritual leanings, yet he has undoubtedly been of assistance to the girls. They almost always leave his workplace for more elevated positions, sometimes for a dress shop in the provinces, sometimes for a career in catering. I have little opportunity to ask them about this gratifying advancement. Usually, I am brought the news of their departure by a third party. I am convinced that Vincent gives them a little ‘pep talk’ about their future prospects, and directs them towards more congenial employment.

‘That Erica,’ he said, as we smoked cigars after the veal-pie crumbs had been cleared away, ‘the young one from Swansea, she was a lively piece of work. A demon at pressing she were, pressing and folding, pressing and folding, like she was born to it. Lovely young thing. Had a bit of sass to her as well, talked back to the lads on the pressing machines, gave as good as she got. I got to hand it to you, Rector, you can pick ’em. Sad she had to go.’ He took another elaborate pinch of snuff, shedding much of it on his serge trousers. ‘She wasn’t open to all the opportunities on offer.’

‘And where exactly did she go?’ I enquired.

‘Oh, Beckenham way, I believe.’ He seemed suddenly vague. ‘Got an aunt there, runs a flower shop or some such. Lovely girl, though. If you got any more like that, I hope you’ll send ’em over. There’s always room for more of your lively young folk, ’Arold. Always raises the morale in the factory, a bit of new blood.’

Heartened by this endorsement, I told him about Elsie Teenan and her efforts to find work. ‘A naive girl,’ I confided, ‘but strong and healthy, charmingly grateful to all who try to help her.’

‘That so?’ said Vincent. ‘Sounds ideal. Send her over for a little chat with me, soon as you like.’ What a good, solicitous fellow he is!

Evening. It is years since I celebrated my birthday with a dinner party, or any communal meal, unless in Stiffkey on the day itself, consuming mutton chops with Mimi. Settled instead on a visit to Maddox Street, to see Emily Murray and Nellie Churchill in their charming ‘bed-sitting room’. Nobody could accuse me of having favourites, but the presence of Miss Murray is always a delight.

‘Oh, Harold, how lovely,’ she breathed as she opened the door. ‘I’ve been longing for you to come by, so I could show you my new friends.’

She led me by the hand into a room in which the fume of cheap scent battled for the upper hand with the odour of fish and stale nicotine.

‘Close your eyes!’ she cried. ‘I must make them presentable to such a noble guest.’ I complied, and was led across an unappealingly sticky carpet to her bed. ‘You mustn’t look, Harold, or it will be too naughty of you. Dickens and Jones are all tumbled and listless, and I must smarten them up. Sit up, you bad boys. All right, Harold, you may open your eyes.’

I did, and saw upon the coverlet the familiar profusion of soft toys, lolling drunkenly over half its area. There must have been close on forty wool bears and rag dolls. In pride of place were her new acquisitions, a flop-eared rabbit and a cross-eyed giraffe, humorously arrayed so that one of the giraffe’s soft legs encircled the rabbit in fond camaraderie.

‘You see what friends they are!’ cried Emily. ‘I found them in Bermondsey Market, and adopted them and took them in, and now they have such larks together, I can scarcely bear to leave them to go to beastly work. Don’t you love them too, Harold?’

‘Delightful, Emily,’ I said. ‘Quite the nicest-looking fauna I have encountered outside Chessington Zoo.’

It was the wrong thing to say. ‘Oh, Harold, how can you? I couldn’t bear to think of my darling Dickens and Jones in a horrid zoo. The keepers might be cruel to them, they might be hungry and cold in the night.’ She made a show of pulling the counterpane over the wool creatures, as if to warm them. ‘No harm is going to come to them here, not if I must stay home and starve.’

‘Is Nellie not home this evening?’ I asked, keen to change the subject.

‘No, my dear, Nellie is off with one of her gentlemen friends,’ said Emily with a sweet smile. ‘One of the newer kind, which means she will be home later, rather than staying out all night. I fear she is grumpy with me, Harold. We never have a conversation when she returns home, as we used to.’

How delicately she spoke of her previous life of rampant prostitution. She behaves as a child but is twenty-three. When I met her, just four months ago – in Soho, outside a pub in Rupert Street – I remarked then on the sweet passivity of her nature, her simple acquiescence towards one whom she felt she could trust.

‘Hello, sir – Do you want me?’ were her opening words. They could have been the assistant in a hat shop saying, ‘Can I help you?’

I have learned that you must attend to what Emily says, however foolish, because her utterances come studded with information in code. So I asked, ‘Nellie is grumpy with you? In what way grumpy?’

‘She says she is too tired to speak, or to heed what I am saying, or kiss me goodnight. She sleeps until 3 p.m. on a Sunday, and scratches her arms until they are quite bleeding and welcomes gentlemen who come to the door with little messages contained in tiny envelopes.’

I glanced across the room to the other bed, in the dark corner. It was brutally utilitarian. Beside it, the wall was covered with notes and scraps of paper, addresses, times of appointments. Nothing gave a hint of character, or smacked of comfort or adornment.

‘I hoped you might be free tonight, Emily,’ I said. ‘I have two tickets to see Mister Cinders at the Adelphi. It is light as a soufflé, but full of appealing tunes that will lift your spirits.’

She impetuously kissed my cheek. ‘Harold! You know how I adore the theatre. Give me five minutes to get ready in my going-out frock and I – oh but wait. Perhaps I shouldn’t.’

For a moment, I feared that I might have to reassure her that Dickens and Jones would not object to being left alone. But no.

‘Tomorrow I start work, thanks to you, my dear friend, at the Café Royal. Perhaps it would be better if I had an early night. I should not wish to disappoint my new employers by arriving late.’

It is very satisfying to me that she should respond so willingly to my placing her in a job at the kitchens of the distinguished Regent Street restaurant, away from her life of sin. I was moved to find how seriously she was taking it.

‘Your worries do you credit, Emily, but I was not planning on a late night. Decide what to wear tomorrow and put the clothes upon a chair. Set your alarm clock for 7 a.m. We shall go to the play, eat a light supper at Brown’s, I shall see you home and you will be tucked up in bed with, ah, Marshall and Snelgrove –’

‘Dickens and Jones, Harold. How can you tease me like this?’

‘– with your charming menagerie by eleven o’clock, and will awake refreshed to start your new employment and your new life.’

‘Oh, Harold –’ she clutched my arm – ‘I’ll get changed.’ I made a gesture towards the door. ‘There’s no need to go out into the horrid cold wind. You might look away, though, while a lady is dressing.’

I sat on Nellie’s unyielding bed, talking inconsequentially and listening to the noises behind me of rustle and snap, the tiny ladylike grunt that accompanied the fastening of hooks and eyes, the sigh of a lady’s arm sliding into a silken sleeve, all the sonic paraphernalia of a woman at her toilette. Some men might find the scene erotically promising, but I am inured to such things. Ten years of dealing with the sisterhood of vice have left me overfamiliar with the female boudoir. Odd to think I have been in hundreds of bedrooms over the last decade, but none has been that of a woman of decent moral address. Not one. What a curious state of affairs.

The door opened and Nellie came in. It was, frankly, awkward timing.