Sunday at the Cross Bones

‘Oh,’ she said, seeing me first. ‘What are you doing here?’ I rose and glanced to Emily for guidance – to find her seated on a wooden chair, attaching the top of a silver stocking to the rubber flange of some item of corsetry. Her left leg – rather a beautiful sight! – was fully exposed.

‘Am I interrupting?’ In the doorway Nellie glanced from Emily’s leg to me, where I had half risen from the bed. ‘Shall I go?’

‘No, you silly thing,’ said Emily with a girlish laugh, ‘I was changing. Harold’s taking me to a play. You know lovely Harold, don’t you?’

‘We’ve met,’ she said shortly. ‘When was the last time? The Windmill Theatre, or the Carter woman’s cathouse in Drury Lane?’

‘I cannot recall,’ I said. ‘Perhaps the latter. How is life treating you, Miss Churchill?’

She didn’t reply, but crossed the room to her bed and began rooting around underneath it. Miss Churchill does not like me. Her presence casts a pall on every occasion. She seems to regard me with a suspicion I find frankly offensive. Of course, her experience of men is limited almost entirely to clients, clubland swells and prostitutes’ bullies. Show her a man intent only on the welfare of sinners, and she is puzzled, discomfited and keen to infer the worst.

‘I don’t know what you two are up to, but could you finish it and leave me in peace?’ she said. Her long face was blank with hostility. ‘There’s some things I need to do, and I could live without spectators, if that’s all right with you.’

Emily raised to me an enquiring eyebrow. How could I have communicated, in dumbshow, that her friend was looking for her supply of narcotics, her syringe, etc., without which she could not venture to Oxford Circus for an evening of drugged soliciting in alleys and cheap hotels?

‘Of course, Nellie,’ I said lightly. ‘Emily and I are just off to see Mister Cinders. I shall have her back here in bed early, because tomorrow she starts her exciting job at the Café Royal.’

Nellie’s face set in a sneer. ‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘She told me. Washin’ up for toffs. Hands in the sink from morning to night. Very exciting.’

‘It won’t be like that, Nellie, you beast,’ said Emily, in a hurt, schoolgirl voice. ‘I’ll probably be waiting on Ramsay MacDonald himself in the restaurant by Christmas. That’s what Harold says, anyway.’

‘It won’t be long,’ said Nellie, ‘before you’re dying to be back on the street. Or dying of boredom. Or dead on your feet. Go on and do it, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

If I were a young woman, I would sooner share living quarters with Cassandra, or Medea, or Lady Macbeth and all three witches, than Nellie Churchill. It took all my powers of persuasion to convince Emily that her life would soon change for the better.

She loved the play, however, and left the theatre, humming and chattering about the loveliness of the costumes.

Over a Spanish omelette, I assured her about the dignity of service, especially in so elevated a venue as the Café R, and promised to visit her in a couple of weeks. Home in Maddox Street, I instructed her to brush her teeth and say her prayers.

‘I’m so glad you took me, Harold,’ she breathed. ‘All them men who promised to care for me. Only you ever did. I’m ever so grateful.’

She pulled me towards her. I laughingly desisted and told her to get some sleep, for it was already 11.05 p.m.

‘Ain’t you going to tuck me up,’ she said, ‘and give me a little kiss?’

I would have helped her to bed, and bestowed a chaste kiss on her brow. But the image of Nellie seemed to loom from the dark bed in the corner. Before I left, I taught Emily to say, in bed every night, the words:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,

Bless the bed that I lay on,

Ever this night be at my side,

To light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.

‘I had a friend once called Mark,’ she said dreamily, ‘and one called Luke. And lots called John, or so they said. No Matthews, though. They all promised to take care of me, but they were all pretty rude in the end, all of them.’

I hastened away, to let her sleep, and wake in the arms of the Lord. It has been a most happy birthday.

Stiffkey 20 July 1930

Church attendance low this morning, fifty-five in all, but my sermon well received. Inspired by Mr Charles Sheldon’s fascinating book, Our Exemplar (1898), I took the simple proposition, ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ and enjoined the congregation, each and every one, to act on it in their daily lives.

Tired of modern sermons that offer mere exegeses of Bible texts, or dilate on abstractions (I have seldom heard a sermon on the Mystery of the Holy Trinity that conveyed any sense of their being more than a family vaudeville act – a conjuror impersonating simultaneously the Father, the Son and the Ghostly Dove), the congregation was gratifyingly, audibly, startled by my bold innovation.

Asking them to make a habit of rethinking their daily actions in the light of Christ’s teachings is, if I may immodestly call it so, a masterstroke. It sends them back to the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, searching for clues to correct behaviour. I smile to imagine Mrs Redwood, say, and her charming daughters perusing the Gospel of St John the Beloved in the same spirit that sends my young metropolitan friends, Madge and Agnes, to the advice pages of Peg’s Paper and Women’s Illustrated for counsel about the correct deployment of a hatpin in the fashionable bonnet.

How would it be if every question about modern life could be answered in relation to the teachings of Jesus? If every mystification were clarified by reference to what Jesus said and did, his actions and sermons, his attitude to the woman caught in adultery, the moneylenders in the Temple, the thieves on the Cross … The mind reels at the prospect.

Some of them slunk away from the porch without catching my eye, and headed home as if I had been trying to enlist them in some branch of the armed forces. The majority, Lord be thanked, crowded round me to ask how they might begin this wondrous, emulatory adventure. ‘I have seldom felt more inspired, Rector,’ said Mrs Russ, ‘and I want to start right away. But apart from cooking lunch for Mr Russ and his sister, my day holds little prospect of moral drama. So how exactly …?’

‘My dear Margaret.’ I smiled at her willingness to enter the fray of the Church Militant while roasting parsnips. ‘I do not mean you must seek out occasions of Christlike activity while performing everyday chores. It is only in time that you will discover the moral crossroads which will make demands on your conscience. And only in your own conscience that you will find the answer to the question I have adumbrated today.’

‘But what kind of thing will it be, Rector?’ she asked. ‘I mean, where will the question … turn up?’

Sometimes I feel a Sunday-school teacher in the local mixed-infants class would be of more use than I, when dealing with Mrs Russ.

‘Well – imagine a starving beggar came to your front door, looking for, say, cold cuts of meat, or a drink of buttermilk, or a bed for the night. Will you turn him away, or will you say, “Enter, poor misfortunate traveller, and eat with me, and drink with me, and sleep with me, if that is what your wretched condition requires …”?’

Mrs Russ pursed her mouth into an unbecoming moue.

‘… Or if a young woman, recently abandoned by her family, should meet you in the street and say, “I’m cold and lonely and pregnant, and need to be taken in and found a doctor,” will you ask yourself –’

But Mrs Russ’s look of benign imbecility had changed to one of outrage.

‘Indeed. Good day to you, Rector.’

Fortunately, my other parishioners were more relaxed about applying my radical tenet to their lives. I spent a happy forty-five minutes discussing the practical applications of my plan. I asked them to give me, in a week’s time, tales of how they put into practice what I preached.

The only fly in the ointment, so to speak, was the major. He has sat and brooded in the front pew, these last few weeks, like a wounded old soldier – which of course is what he is, having served his country in the Boer War. He bears the legacy of that elderly conflict in the extraordinary succession of physical jerks and twitches he displays, both at rest on the wooden seat (he rarely kneels to pray) and before the altar. I have allowed him, for a whole year now, the luxury of reading the lesson, in his sonorous militiaman tones. But there is, I fear, evidence these last weeks that he is in the grip of some mental convulsion. Not just in the bizarre spasms of arms and elbows with which he punctuates his readings, but in his odd vocal technique.

In today’s lesson, for example, a beautiful passage from the Book of Proverbs, the major swayed before the lectern like a rating before a force-niner, and intoned the words: ‘There be three things which are too wonderful to me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.’

A simple enough text, yet the major, a man lately too preoccupied with his local ambitions, and too enthralled by the lure of his wine cellar, delivered these lines in a roaring theatrical style. To evoke the eagle, his voice rose to a high falsetto, swooping down to the serpent in a low, basso profundity; then the ship – he drew himself up to a high Admiralty bellow, as if he had spent years of barnacled hardship before the mast, rather than bullying his men out of their trenches and into the firing line; before finally mangling the climactic revelation of ‘the way of a man with a maid’ (what a charming wistfulness lies in that circumlocutory ‘the way of …#x2019;) in a disgusted mutter, completely spoiling the beauty of the image. I love that passage – in which the thought of making love to a woman is ‘too wonderful’ to be borne, like the prospect of flying. Such an eloquent rapture from the beating heart of the celibate! And the words were thrown away by a broken-veined, harrumphing, venal boor of a military charlatan. I stood watching him read, and my heart darkened. I felt a wave of anger. I could have struck him!

Forgive me, Jesus, for what I have said. I have given way to thoughts of violence on thy Sabbath. But he infuriates me so. I shall not allow him to desecrate future services in St John’s. I shall confront the major, no matter what the cost.

CHAPTER 3

Letter from Miss Joan Tewkesbury, Proprietor, Lyons Corner House, The Strand, to Mrs Elvira Samuel, Head of Personnel, Lyons Ltd

30 July 1930

Dear Mrs Samuel,

I have had ocasion to write to you before on the matter of the underseribales who to offen frekwent the premisses of our Corner Houses. You have always been kind enoght to advise me as to the correck proceedor and I want your help regarding one spechial case.

He is not your ushal rodwy. He is not a drunk nor a tramp, in fact he come on like a perfeck gent, he does not try and nick anything, he is not one to start a sing song in his cupps, fact is he dont drink annything but tea, he is not one of the yellers or screemers after the pubs shut. And that is the truble. Nothing he dose is ever bad enoufh to mean we got to call the constabbulary. But I feer he is a bad influence on the young wimmin we employ.

He comes by every other night, 9pm reglar as clockwork, he comes sidling in wearing the same gastly long coat, he orders tea and a bun. He sits in the same place, table 5, hes always there fiddling in his pokets and scriblign things down in his horible purpel writing, looking arond him, talkign to peeple on the tables rite and left, chat chat, natter natter, how are you wot splendid wether were having, like evryones his pal. And then it happens. A yong Nippy – take Sandra, only come on the staff last month he clocks she’s a new girl and calls her over. As you knoe, we try and teach new girls, be frendly to the customers, you taut me that yourself when I started Mrs Samuel, but inside five seckons, he starts on em. ‘O hello, my, youre beoutiful, my word youre the dead spit of Binnie Hale, she’s lovely like you, you should be on stage sumwhere. What lovly hair etcetera. Do you like Noel Coward, O shurely youve seen his work, a classy girl like you. Ive met him menny times, only the other nigth I was out with him and CB Cockrain, surely you must know the great impressario. You must be a singer, far too good to be working in a clapped out teashop like this, the bloody nerve of it, clapped out indeed, anyway he says, would you care to ackompany me to a play in the West End on Teusday, it will be my pleshure.

I tell the Nippiess, first rule of waitressing, be friendly but dont get involved with male customers. Theyre lonly men, or they wodnt be in here at 9 o clock of a Saturday night loking for sympathy. If they was respectable, theyd be at home with there wives and sproggs. But some of these girls, they gets taken in so cruel like they think, O blimey, a real show, the Qwality go and see them, maybe if I go then I’ll be qwality too, poor delooded saps. And next thing you know, theyve had the big nigth out and theyre all diffrent in the morning, tired and droopy and wistful, you cant make them do any washing up for starters and theyre offhand with the customers, they drop plates and canot reckoin bills and go off for a weep in the Toilets. Then the bliter comes in two days later and treets them like old mates, hell stand with an arm round em, talking and talking and skweezing their waste, need, need like its a wodge of doe, and theyre eyes ull shine all angelic like they seen a vishion but before you know it theyll be in the Ladies agen having another big weepin seshon. I know that within a week theyll be gone and I dont know where but it aint to anywhere thats good for them.

Ive said to him, now look here, Ive lost six or seven good girls, nice girls who was happy at there work before you started in on them, so Id be obliged if you take your custom elsewhere. Well thats no good because he just starts puffin on his big old cigar and qwoting the Bibel at me and giving out about the fall of man and such like until Im reddy to screem and brane him with a spatuler.

So what am I to do Mrs Samuel? I cant call in the law becoss he aint done nothing wrong. Can I tell him to buger off and bar him like from a pub when he comes back? Pleese advise. We cant go on like this. Sandras just come back from the ladies (for the third time) and handed in her notice. She says she wants to be in modern dramer for which she has a Magicall Talent. Her exack words, the birdbrain.

Yours in dessperation,

Joan Tewkesbury (Mrs)

Journals of Harold Davidson

London 6 August 1930

I have met the most extraordinary young girl. In my long experience of dealing with the fallen, she stands out (already) as a case that will require all my ingenuity and moral strength to bring into the Fold.

I met her at lunchtime outside the travel-luggage shop beside Marble Arch. I was standing, becalmed in thought, wondering if a turn in Hyde Park might be productive, when she passed by my side. She was an attractive young thing, by no means yet grown to womanhood but sturdy and strong, with rich ropes of curly brown hair, always an index of health in a young girl, and strong (if shockingly discoloured) teeth, disclosed in a charming smile as she walked past, perhaps amused to see a gentleman (I wore no dog collar that day) standing still in the bustle of Oxford Street, apparently lost in the blinding sunlight.

I caught and held her glance of appraisal – her eyes were enormous dark marbles, full of intelligence – but could not quite read her expression.

Summoning up all my Christian charisma, I gained her side in an instant and said, ‘Can I possibly be the first, my dear, to remark on your extraordinary resemblance to the American actress Mary Bryan?’

She scrutinised me coolly.

‘Well, that’s a new one,’ she said. ‘I get Miriam Hopkins sometimes, I get Esther Ralston from the really blind boys, but never Mary Bryan before.’

‘I assure you, the resemblance is uncanny. You could be sisters.’

‘Go on, you old charmer. You say that to all the girls, don’cha?’

‘Well,’ I conceded, ‘only the exceptionally pretty ones.’

‘How long you been standing there in your big coat,’ she asked. ‘Poor old duck, you look like you’re going to melt.’

‘I am a little warm. Do you happen to know where one can find a water ice? I am enfeebled with dehydration. I fear I may soon expire in this parching heat.’

‘Come with me this instant,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to ’ave your death on my hands.’ She linked my arm in a forthright manner, as impetuous modern girls will, and led me up Edgware Road, as if we were adventuring friends. ‘I’m saving your life,’ she said, looking at me as though I were some sort of domesticated pet. ‘You and me’re going for a little stroll and I’ll find you a cool billet out of the sun’s rays, and you’ll buy us both a lovely ice-cream sundae. OK with you?’ I could hardly refuse this comely girl’s kind offer, couched though it was in the tones of a young gold-digger looking for a victim. But we conversed amiably enough en route to the Alhambra tea rooms.

‘Nice,’ she said, looking around her, unbuttoning her linen jacket. Beneath it she wore a white cotton blouse with charming blue, heart-shaped buttons. It was evidently a garment purchased some time ago. The buttons, when she leaned forward, strained against her newly maturing figure. A heady whiff of scent enfumed the café air.

I summoned the waitress, a bored-looking slattern in an unflattering ochre tunic. ‘Bring me a long glass of iced tea, my dear, as deliciously cold as your facilities will allow. And for my young guest’ – I waved my hand in choose-anything-you-like largesse – ‘perhaps an ice-cream sundae …’

‘Nah,’ she said, suddenly businesslike. ‘You got any lamb chops? I’m starving. Two, no, make it three lamb chops, and spuds and some veg, and plenty of gravy if you don’t mind. Bread and butter on the side. And a glass of milk, no, make that a beer, you need something more thirst-quenching in this blinking heat, don’t you?’

‘That all?’ said the waitress, scribbling with a stub of HB pencil. ‘Don’t fancy a few dumplings an’ lardy cake as well, do you?’ Her tone was indefinably hostile. Perhaps she wasn’t used to receiving such commands from a customer young enough to be her granddaughter.

‘If anything else takes my fancy,’ said my new friend coolly, ‘I’ll be sure to let you know.’

The waitress raised her eyes heavenwards and left.

‘This place,’ said the girl, ‘used to be all right. They’d let you come in an’ have a little sit-down with tea and a penny bun for an hour, when you was tired. Now they fire you out of here if you’re not spending a whole quid.’ She shook her head – such nostalgia from a mere child of –

‘How old are you, exactly, my dear?’

Her upper lip curled. ‘I’m old enough,’ she said. ‘I’m sixteen.’

‘And what is it that brings you strolling in Oxford Street in your best frock at two o’clock in the afternoon?’ I asked, as neutrally as possible.

She picked up the à la carte menu, a redundant gesture since her sizeable repast had already been ordered. ‘Same as you, I expect. Looking for a bit of company to while the hours away.’

‘Mmmm,’ I said, unsure of my ground. It was inconceivable that this lively, shining-eyed young woman could be a professional sinner. Yet she had clearly outgrown any institutions of learning. The confidence of her bearing suggested employment at some thriving business. Had I learned that she presided over a superior hat shop in Bond Street, I would not have been surprised.

‘What kind of company do you seek out in your lunch hour?’ I asked. ‘Have you a passion for the conversation of strangers?’

She sat back and made a lattice of her fingers. Blue nail polish made lapis lazuli jewels of their extremities. ‘I can talk to anyone,’ she said, with a hint of pride. ‘I’m very … flexible. My old dad used to say it’s the most underrated virtue, flexibility.’

‘Indeed so. I admire your father’s wise counsel. “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, / Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch …”’

‘Come again?’

‘Kipling,’ I said. ‘Surely a well-educated lady like you must know “If”?’

‘Oh yeah. Course. A bloke asked me about him one day in the park. “Do you like Kipling?” he says. “I dunno,” I says right back. “I don’t believe I ever Kippled.”’ She laughed. ‘I didn’t make it up, though. I got it off a seaside postcard down Southend.’

The waitress returned, sulkily, with the food and drink. My cold beverage was a far cry from the Long Island Iced Tea I have enjoyed on occasion at the Savoy. Tea, undoubtedly. Cold, up to a point. An enterprising soul in the kitchen had added two spoonfuls of sugar, as if for a workman, and a slice of lemon floated like a shipwreck victim in its caramel depths.

When I looked up, two of the three lamb chops had been stripped to the bone and the girl was wolfing down mashed potato in sweeping forkfuls.

‘You seem to be enjoying that,’ I said indulgently. ‘God bless your appetite.’ I forbore to confide that I always found a hearty appetite an attractive trait in a young woman. A hunger to devour … strange that it should make the gentle sex more appealing than alarming.

Three minutes of silence passed. I have seen stevedores at Tilbury Docks, onshore after months at sea, demolish their meagre ration of Cornish pasty and greens with more decorum. I watched as a hunk of crusty bread was ushered back and forth through the lees of gravy and the detritus of lamb fibre and popped between her fleshy, pouted lips.

‘I trust it was to your liking,’ I said. ‘Can I interest you in pudding?’

She wiped her greasy mouth with a paper napkin and, still masticating the last of her lunch, delivered herself of this remarkable speech.

‘For afters, I have it in mind that we could get better acquainted. I got a room only a cab ride away in Camden Town. Ten minutes from now, you can come up the stairs behind me, looking at my fleshy arse in my tight skirt, and when we get to my room you can lift it up and look at my black stockings and these really nice white knickers I got on today, with little teeny pink roses on the front, and you can undo these blue heart buttons on my chest that you been staring at for the past half an hour and suck my big tits, only not too hard ’cause they’re real sensitive, and you can lay me down on the divan in my sunny blue room and fuck me hard as you like until you’re done. It’s two quid for an hour, ’cause after that I’ll have to kick you out. And if you’re real sweet beforehand and bung me ten bob extra, I could give you a chew before we get down to business, only I don’t take it down the throat because I’m a nice girl, and anyway you really want to finish up buried to the bollocks in my furry quim, don’t you, that’s what you gentlemen want, isn’t that right?’

Well, well. A harlot, after all. In ten years of dealing with ladies of the night, I have met the gamut – every age, every colour, every disposition, every temperament (even every class!) and I am no longer shocked to discover the base occupation of seemingly decent girls. But in this case I felt a distinct disappointment. My initial suspicion, that she was a lady of uncertain moral direction, was proved correct. But the suspicion had been eclipsed by a growing appreciation of her strength of character, her forthrightness. It is easy to grow close to prostitutes as friends, to feel fond of them as substitute children who have strayed from the Path. One never, however, feels admiration. Knowing the moral dereliction that is their daily choice precludes any possibility of such private approbation. Yet I had begun to admire this young woman, in our brief acquaintance – and to feel that, because I admired her, she could not be one of the sisterhood.

‘What is your name?’ I asked, a little sadly.