Sunday at the Cross Bones

CHAPTER 6

Journals of Harold Davidson

London 8 September 1930

To the Windmill Theatre with Joanna Dee, my aspirant ballerina, saved since June from patrolling the streets of Fulham. A charming show, with new costumes and burlesque songs that I always enjoy at this venue, although a new crudeness has, I feel, crept into the stage tableaux. Naked girls in neoclassical posings, impersonating ‘Hylas and the Nymphs’, offer an affecting sight to those who follow the charming tales from Homer, and who can, like I, look upon the pink areolae of the water babies without immoral yearnings. But I felt their sinuous writhings around the loins of a rather well-built Hylas went beyond the boundaries of strict classical authenticity. Delightful, nonetheless. Miss Ariadne Love (not, I suspect, her name at the baptismal font) was a dream in a lurid skirt of dangling bananas and cigars, singing ‘Take Me Back to Old Havana, Where the Jasmine’s Still in Bloom’ most affectingly. Dear Joanna thrilled by it all and clapped her hands together spontaneously in glee. I hope her enthusiasm will direct her steps at the Kennington Dance Academy towards more, shall we say, decorous roles in the classical repertoire than those on show tonight.

I spotted Sir Tristram Pope in the crush, and saluted him with a cry of friendship, hoping to introduce him to my young companion, who enjoys meeting titled men who may help fund her balletic studies. To my surprise he hurried away, like the Fleeing Man in a German melodrama, but not before I spied his lady companion – none other than Eleanora Gilpin, late of the Pig & Whistle in Bow. Well, well, how pleasant that she has found so eminent and moneyed a patron. And how splendid she appeared in her expensive broad-brimmed hat, though its elaborate finery, clamped to her shingled blonde mane with hair clips, is hardly the thing for an evening at the theatre. I must call on her, in her Bethnal Green apartment, to check on her progress, assuming she has not found herself in a more glamorous address!

London 10 September 1930

Paid a visit last night to my dear Rose Ellis in Camden. She is back with her parents for two years now, settled and comfortable, if a little frayed at the edges. Her father, retired at sixty from too many years’ exposure to building-work dust, greeted me with his habitual Irish decency and pressed upon me the bottle of potato poteen he keeps in a kitchen cupboard. It is a reflex action to him, to offer this moonshine concoction to every caller to his house. He should know my teetotal habit, he should remember the hundred times I have waved away his poisonous generosity when visiting Rose, yet still he persists. Poor man! His household is a dimly lit haven for Rose, after her many difficult years of confronting both the demon Alcohol and the sadness that periodically descends upon her beautiful violet eyes and pitches her beyond every stratagem of Christian reassurance.

Mr Ellis and I conversed desultorily for several minutes while waiting for Rose to appear. His talk is full of irritating Catholic asides: ‘I’ve a few good years left in me, Father, DV,’ he’ll say, meaning Deo volente, ‘God willing’, an admirable ejaculation maybe, but not one that is found on the lips of any responsible Protestant believer, smacking as it does of a Muslim Arab punctuating his pronouncements with ‘Insh’ Allah’ at every turn. And I am not ‘Father’ to him or anybody else except for my children. That tiny papist homage, that pregnant ‘F’ word, hangs between us with a small dusting of sarcasm, as if he regards me as a fake pastor, a second-best clergyman.

‘Rose, well, she has her ups and downs,’ he said, ‘but on her bad days, there’s no reasoning with her. A sponge of misery she is now, Father, soaking up every small hardship like the parched earth soaks up rain. I pray to the Blessed Virgin to intercede with the man upstairs to put the light back in her eyes, but, sure, what can you do when she spends all her time broodin’ and snifflin’ and …’

After fifteen minutes I could stand his maudlin defeatism no more (or his dreadful Mariolatrous heresy, or his insulting demotic about the redeeming God as a kind of first-floor lodger) and asked, with an abruptness bordering on incivility, if Rose was at home. He left the room, and I cooled my heels and examined their dingy wallpaper and endured the smell of greens and bacon, until the door reopened to admit my dear Rose, steered into the room by her rebarbative parents who stood alongside her like sheepish gaolers.

Her golden hair was matted into slender ringlets, making her long, soulful face even longer – an El Greco saint, or martyr. She was clad in an old-fashioned Victorian white blouse with an amber bijou clamped at the neck, an unbecoming brown skirt in some fusty fabric, the whole ensemble enveloped in a housecoat of patterned wool that reached to the floor.

‘Rose, my dear –’ I clasped both her hands, as I surveyed her over-lagged frame – ‘how good to see you! Forgive the lateness of this visit, but I was attending a homeless benefit in Euston, and my mind was filled with thoughts of you. It has been too long since our last meeting. I left you in June hoping that you might attend one of my Saturday soirées in Vauxhall. But seeing no trace of you, I reasoned that you had more pressing social engagements.’

I stopped. Released from the supporting hands of her parents, her body swayed back and forth like an aspen under the breath of a summer zephyr. Her eyes sought to focus on mine, and a sigh escaped her lips with a fugitive whiff of mint.

‘Harold,’ she said thickly. ‘Harold, I –’ As her thoughts struggled to form themselves into words, I realised she was the worse for drink. The aroma of toothpaste was overpowering.

‘I been dreaming of horses,’ she said, in a dull monotone, ‘great white horses with streaming hair, galloping along the seashore. I thought I was riding one of them, only the horses in front kept charging off to the right, and the others that rode faster than me were galloping off to the left and all I was doing was running towards the sea, with no horse under me at all, and what good was that?’

She was sadly disturbed, my lovely Rose. Her father gazed at the floor neutrally, as if this were an occasion of blame and, wherever the blame could affix itself, it was certainly not to him. Her mother held my gaze as if asking how much of her daughter’s current state was due to our friendship over the last ten years.

‘Rose,’ I said, ‘I am shocked to see you like this. Sit down beside me here and tell me how you are, while your mother –’ I waved an importuning hand, confident that no mother in England would refuse the classic clergyman’s request – ‘will bring us a cup of tea and leave us to discuss your troubles in private.’

Rose sank obediently down on the threadbare ottoman and, gathering her housecoat around her spindly shoulders, gave me her attention. Her parents slunk away. I had not criticised their obvious neglect of my old friend; and their relief was palpable.

‘I’ve been very bad, Harold,’ said Rose when her parents had departed to the dark regions of tea and kitchen smells. ‘Sometimes I don’t get up ’til three, when the light outside’s changing to dusk, and the day is gone. I don’t see no one for days. When there’s visitors to the house, Dad’ll say, “Put on some clothes and a bit of lipstick and come down to join the company for the love o’ God, or they’ll think we’ve murdered you and stuffed you in the attic.” So I do what he says, and I try to talk, but I never know what to say to anyone no more, since I stopped hanging around with Violet and Ruth and the girls. I can’t talk to people any more, that’s the truth. I lost the art, if I ever had it.’

‘Rose,’ I said, ‘you give up hope too easily. I had not thought domesticity would be such a trial. When you abandoned your old life, I thought steady work in the textile warehouse would give you a new community in which to thrive. When that failed, we tried the outdoors employment offered in the tulip beds at Kew Gardens, but you ran away from it –’ I clamped my hand on her arm – ‘you ran away, my dear, like a cat from a garden hose, saying it did not suit you. As if ministering to plants and flowers were not preferable to your ministering to strange men in Smithfield.’

‘I know, Harold,’ she said, shaking her sad ringlets. ‘God knows I’ve tried. But the girls in the warehouse were horrible to me, they’d make out I was low and stupid and in the canteen they’d say to the skivvy, give her more potatoes, them Micks live on potatoes, until I’d cry. And the gardens at Kew were lovely in the summer with red camellias and the foam of apple blossom. But I couldn’t stand the cold once October came, and the ground was hard and they made me poke the soil night and day. It was so hard, it was like poking sheets of iron with a thimble. And the gardening sergeant, he’d be nice one minute, and say, that’s a fine bed there, the drills of seedlings in nice straight rows, marvellous, and before you knew it he was putting his big hands round my hips and saying, “Rhythm rhythm, you’ve got to work with the soil, shoving in the seeds this way and this” – and all the time, Harold, he’d be behind me pushing away while pretending to apprentice me, pushing so rudely until I could feel something that wasn’t a dibber-stick at all.’

‘Rose,’ I said, ‘I am so sorry. There is no reckoning the base appetites of men. But I gather, from your father and from your appearance, that your stay at home does not fulfil you either?’

‘Bored, Harold,’ she said. ‘Bored bored bored. I’m so dull at home I could cry. And I do, every day.’

Her beautiful eyes were shining with liquid salt as she clutched my arm.

‘We had such laughs together, going to the music halls in the old days, meeting them funny people you used to introduce me to. Them days, I felt I could do anything because you cared for me. When we went around together, I felt like a real person. I used to think, so bloody what if the showgirls look at me sideways and ask, “Who’s she?” and “Who invited her backstage, into this bar or this hotel?” I could stand all their fish-eyed looks because I knew, well, at least the rector thinks I’m someone worth knowing. At least he talks to me like I got half a brain. I could endure anything because I knew you loved me.’

This was a little hard to take. Had I really told her such a thing, in those words? Of course I was fond of her and had taken her to shows, as I do so many of my young charges, to invigorate their sense of the wondrous drama that might one day fill their lives. But she has clearly been nursing a private delusion. I could not speak of love to her. I am a married man, the pastor to a village of dependants and a city of lost or about-to-be-lost souls. Love is an irrelevance in all this. Her solitude has invented a love between us.

‘Rose,’ I said, ‘let us strike a deal. You must pull yourself together, read from the Book of Job in the Bible and stop abandoning yourself to misery. In turn I will promise to take you away from here and find some employment, no, some adventure, that will return a spring to your step.’

She looked at me sadly. ‘I’d give anything to get away, Harold. But you won’t send me back to the gardens, will you? I couldn’t stand that.’

‘My dear Rose,’ I said, almost laughing, ‘I will not send you anywhere. I am no evil slave-driver, like Mr Svengali in Du Maurier’s book. Together, we shall find some employment that will fulfil and gratify you, until you are sufficiently invigorated to do something more cheerful with your appearance and dress. In three months, you shall be living in pleasant rented rooms in, I don’t know, Pimlico or Bloomsbury, with fresh flowers in the hall and a white linen cloth on the table –’

‘I’d love the white tablecloths,’ she whispered.

‘– and at the close of day, Rose, we shall meet as friends in the old delightful way, and visit the amusements of Shaftesbury Avenue and go on excursions to Tooting Common and Greenwich Park, and walk in the sunshine and watch the nannies and the bicyclists. You shall make new friends, and show off your finery on picnics. And you shall, perhaps, help me with my work sometimes when your own duties are not too arduous.’

‘I will, Harold, you must count on it,’ she said with new energy (my strategy was working better than I could have hoped). ‘For there is no kinder, sweeter man than you, and I would like to help with the poor misfortunates.’

As I left, I reflected that nothing guaranteed her rehabilitation more than her blindness to her own status as the most dismal girl of my acquaintance. Once a fallen woman starts to feel sympathy for the wretchedness of others, she is on the path to recovery.

I did not seek out her parents. I left with a glow of satisfaction, that I could restore the meanest of God’s creatures to life by a few simple promises.

Outside, I recalled that Barbara’s address – 14 Queen Street, Camden – was only a few roads away, and I made the journey in short order. No traffic came or went (it was well after midnight). It was an ugly street of brick tenements. The moon hung above a shut-up public house, the Greyhound – and a single gas lamp at either end of the street illuminated the dismal flagstones and doorways. I found number 14, a common lodging house on three storeys, with an array of eight doorbells, beside each one a name on a dirty oblong of paper. The lowest one read simply, ‘BARBARA’. Impetuously, I pressed the bell. A muffled jangle sounded inside the ground-floor window. Moments passed, a feeble light flicked on and was as quickly extinguished. Voices could be heard, one girlish and querulous, one male and indignant. I stood, inches from the window, uncertain as to how to proceed. When all had been quiet for minutes, I rapped softly on the window.

‘Barbara?’

The reply was instant and unwelcoming. ‘Just piss off, will you? It’s one in the bloody morning.’

It was she. Miss Harris. I recalled her invitation to call ‘any time’, and was, frankly, disappointed. Seeing a crack in the curtains, I put my face to the glass, in the hope of perhaps alerting her to my presence.

Abruptly, the right-hand curtain twitched aside. A large black face looked out. The moonlight bounced off white teeth and the enormous whites of his eyes. Discretion was the better part of valour. I fled away.

London 12 September 1930

Visited Lady Fenella Royston-Smith. Her suite at Charing Cross Hotel is even more sumptuous than the one at the Ritz – which palatial address she has abandoned, pro tempore, after some altercation with the Food and Beverages staff over some detail of diet.

‘Onions, Harold, they would serve onions in every dish that appeared before me. There was no escaping the pungent under-taste in every soup, every ragout and roast, every luncheon omelette and teatime savoury. I told them, time and again, “No onions, not in casserole nor mixed grill,” but they would persist in their sickening, Frenchified obsession. I told Mr Ross, the general manager, onions do not agree with me, that my nervous metabolism cannot digest the damned things, that they bring up the colonic flux and leave me prostrate for hours on the chaise longue. Yet would they heed my simple requirements?’

‘It must be very troublesome, Fenella,’ I concurred.

‘Troublesome! Nobody knows the torments I suffer. The other day, in St Bride’s – a memorial service for Lady Henchard’s late husband – I was so crippled with indigestion, I was forced to forsake the family pew and take a turn around the graveyard to regain my composure.’

Lady R – S is a handsome woman and a steady benefactor of my work, but she can sometimes offer too much insight for comfort into the workings of her intestines. She enjoys the aristocrat’s conviction that every detail of her personal circumstances must be of interest to her confidants. I am glad to be one of this fortunate band, but sometimes the reports of her gastric eructations leave me at a loss, conversationally. (What am I to reply? ‘A huge fart can be a marvellous liberation at such moments, Your Ladyship …’?)

Since her husband, the brigadier, died face down in the mud along with a platoon of doomed infantry somewhere near the Belgian border in 1917, she has devoted herself to good works. A philanthropic soul, she has taken an interest in my Runaway Boys charity for many years. She has a wide social acquaintance with more liquefiable cash than they know what to do with. Without her, and their, monthly disbursements and ad hoc stipends, I could not continue my work among the Fallen. All she wants in return is some elevated literary conversation, and some shared outrage about public immorality.

‘That madwoman Mrs Stopes has established yet another clinic in London where women of any class may procure contraceptive devices, and has now written a book flagrantly recommending the introduction of some form of’ – she seemed to wince at the awful words – ‘rubber tubing into the marriage bed. She encourages the benighted and the shamelessly perverse to take their sordid pleasures with no thought to consequences, to couple together like hares in a field – and I should add, Mr Davidson, she claims divine sanction for her folly.’

‘No,’ I said, heatedly. ‘This is too bad. I have heard a great deal of Dr Stopes in the last few years, because my work leads me, as you know, into the realms of prostitution, where matters of sexual health are routinely discussed. But of her pretensions to religious endorsement, I was unaware.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Her Ladyship, vigorously nodding, ‘I heard it from my maid. The dreadful woman said in court somewhere that her zealotry in this murky business springs from a divine visitation she had one afternoon, under a yew tree in her garden in Leatherhead.’

‘My word,’ I said, stifling a guffaw. ‘A Home Counties Buddha – and a female to boot!’

‘Her disgusting sexual fantasies are bad enough,’ said Lady Fenella, ‘in encouraging loose girls and factory women to fornicate with men, free from concerns of pregnancy, let alone morality. But to claim that Our Lord recommended such a course of action, as it were privately, in the ear of an hysterical Surrey quack is just too much.’