Tales of a Tiller Girl

When I was thirteen we were sent to work at a pantomime at the Theatre Royal in King’s Lynn. Normally you wrote to the theatre where you were performing and they organised your digs, but our train was late into Norwich and by the time we got there that evening to speak to the stage manager it was all closed up.

‘What are we going to do?’ said my friend Ruth, who had been sent to perform in the show with me.

‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘We’ll just find somewhere ourselves.’

So we ended up walking up and down the streets, knocking on doors to see if we could find a bed for the night. But nobody had any room for the two of us, and as it got later and later we were getting more and more desperate. Then we knocked on the door of a terraced house and an old man opened it.

‘We’re dancers working at the local theatre and we’re looking for somewhere to stay,’ I told him. ‘Do you think you might be so kind as to put us up for the night?’

‘Well, I’m sure I could sort summink out for a couple of lovely young ’uns like you,’ he said in his broad Norfolk accent.

He seemed like a nice, kindly man so we followed him into the house and he showed us his bedroom.

‘You ladies can ’ave this room and I’ll have forty winks downstairs,’ he said, giving us a toothless grin.

Ruth and I looked at each other in horror. The place was absolutely filthy and everything was covered in a sheet of dust. His bedroom had a strange musty smell and the sheets looked like they hadn’t been boiled up in the copper for years.

‘What shall we do?’ whispered Ruth when he went back downstairs. ‘This place is revolting.’

‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ I said. ‘It’s getting late, and I don’t fancy wandering up and down for hours in the dark.’

Even though his house was filthy he seemed like a nice old fellow, and he was letting us stay for free. But neither Ruth nor I got much sleep that night. We both slept fully dressed on top of the bedclothes and we even left our coats on. Bed bugs were very common in those days and I spent most of the night scratching. Neither of us could wait to leave in the morning.

‘I feel so grubby,’ said Ruth. ‘Before we go to the theatre shall we go to the baths?’

Most towns and cities in the Forties had what were known as public baths. Sometimes our lodgings didn’t have much hot water to go round or even a proper bath, so they were a godsend when we were working away from home doing a show.

When we walked in there was a woman sitting at a little kiosk.

‘Ninepence for a first-class ticket or sixpence for second,’ she told us.

The only difference was that with the first-class ones you got two towels and a scoop of bath salts, and with the second-class ones you only got one towel.

‘Second will be fine,’ I said.

It was expensive enough for us as it was.

She handed us both a meagre piece of soap that had been cut from a big block. Soap was rationed during the war and you couldn’t get any nice, sweet-smelling ones, just this rock-hard green stuff that didn’t lather up no matter how hard you scrubbed. Shampoo wasn’t available either, so you had to use the same soap if you wanted to give your hair a wash, but I’d stopped doing that after I’d discovered how badly it stung my eyes.

‘I can’t wait to feel clean again,’ said Ruth as we went upstairs and sat on the second-class bench until the numbers on our tickets were called.

‘I know what you mean,’ I replied. ‘I still feel all itchy and I’m sure I heard rats scurrying around last night.’

I didn’t mind waiting in the public baths as it was all steamy and warm in there, and you could hear the sound of people singing echoing around the tiled walls. Finally it was our turn and an attendant showed me to my cubicle. It had a stone floor and a huge iron roll-top bath with copper taps but no plug in it.

‘Give me a shout when you’ve finished, love, and I’ll empty out the water for you,’ the attendant told me.

I suppose it was like that to stop anyone from running endless baths. It felt wonderful sinking into the piping hot water after spending the night in that filthy bed. After I’d got out I washed my clothes and underwear in the bathwater, and then got changed into some clean things. Whenever I went to the public baths I would always bring my dirty washing with me.

‘Thank you,’ I said to the attendant.

She went in and opened the tap to let the water out. It was also her job to collect any leftover pieces of soap. These would be melted down and made into a new block, although the thought of that always made me cringe a bit.

‘Ahh, that’s better,’ sighed Ruth. ‘I feel clean again.’

‘Now we’d better go and report in with the theatre,’ I said.

The stage manager was very apologetic about the mix-up with our lodgings.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ve got you somewhere to stay. You won’t have to go wandering the streets again tonight.’

After morning rehearsals were over we went to get some lunch at the local British Restaurant. These were communal kitchens set up in towns and cities during the war to feed people who’d been bombed out of their houses or had run out of ration coupons, or just people like us who needed a cheap feed. For ninepence you could get a basic meal, such as a bowl of soup or a steaming plate of stew. Afterwards we traipsed round to our new digs, which was a big Victorian terrace house.

‘This looks a bit better,’ said Ruth.

We knocked on the door and a middle-aged woman and a girl in her twenties who I assumed was her daughter answered it. They were both wearing pink satin dressing-gowns, which I thought was a bit odd as it was the middle of the afternoon.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘The theatre sent us. They said you could put us up while we’re doing the panto.’

‘Oh, er, yes, dear,’ she said. ‘You’re the theatricals, are you? Come on in.’

An American army officer in uniform was standing in the hallway.

‘Hi, gals,’ he grinned. ‘Are you the new recruits?’

‘Oi, you, keep yer mouth shut,’ the woman said in a hushed voice, ushering him away. ‘They’re two nice young ladies from the theatre. You keep yer ’ands off.’

She took us up to our room on the first floor. It was a six-bedroom house but, looking through the doors as we walked past, we noticed that all of the bedrooms seemed to have been split into two.

‘Why do two women need a twelve-bedroom house?’ I asked Ruth.

We soon found out. Every fifteen minutes or so the front doorbell would ring and we’d hear the sound of people traipsing up and down the stairs. They were up and down all afternoon and into the evening.

‘Who are all these callers and what are they doing?’ I said, puzzled.

Ruth and I peeped through the keyhole, and every once in a while an American soldier would walk past arm in arm with a pretty woman wearing nothing but a lacy dressing-gown.

‘Oh, my giddy aunt,’ said Ruth. ‘I think I know what this place is, Irene. It’s a knocking shop.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘It’s a brothel,’ she replied. ‘For the Yanks.’

I was very shocked when she explained what that meant. I might have been streetwise, but I was still very green in some respects. I’d heard that these places existed but I was completely terrified.

‘Give me that chair, Ruth, and I’ll barricade the door,’ I said. ‘I don’t want any of those GIs losing their way and wandering into our bedroom by mistake.’

‘Perish the thought,’ she said.

We were both absolutely petrified. Ruth and I slept in the same bed, and we spent all night clinging on to each other. We couldn’t get out of there quickly enough the next morning.

‘You sent us to a brothel,’ Ruth told the stage manager when we got to the theatre. ‘We can’t stay there.’

Once again he was full of apologies.

‘I’m dreadfully sorry, there’s obviously been another mix-up,’ he said. ‘We didn’t realise what type of place it was.’

Thankfully at last we were sent to a proper boarding house, where we stayed for the month that the panto was on, but I vowed never to go to Norfolk again!

I was so naïve in those days, and as for boys, I didn’t have a clue. I wasn’t as glamorous as some of the other girls at Italia Conti. I didn’t wear any make-up, and I was a funny little thing with skinny legs and two long plaits.

But I did have a bit of a crush on one of the dancers in the King’s Lynn panto, who was tall and blond.

‘Isn’t Malcolm lovely?’ I sighed to Ruth. ‘He’s like a Greek god.’

‘Oh, don’t waste your time admiring him,’ she said. ‘He’s a queen.’

‘What do you mean,’ I gasped. ‘Is he royal?’

She just rolled her eyes at me and laughed.

‘For God’s sake, Irene, where have you come from?’

‘I really don’t know what you mean,’ I said.

For someone so streetwise and independent, I really was quite ignorant when it came to matters of the opposite sex.

After I’d been at Italia Conti for a couple of years the school moved out of Tavistock Square. Miss Conti had found a permanent home for it in Archer Street, just off Shaftesbury Avenue. The only drawback about this new location was that it was slap-bang in the middle of London’s red-light district. It was directly behind the Windmill Theatre, famous for its nude shows and ‘we never close’ slogan. As I walked down Archer Street on my way to class in the morning, a lot of the doorways would be open and I’d see men disappearing up the carpeted stairways with their bare light bulbs.

No one had ever sat down and told me about the birds and the bees, but I learned what I could from playground gossip and talking to friends. One day at Italia Conti I could see a big group of pupils gathered round in a corner of the corridor looking at something.

‘Come and have a gander at this, Rene,’ shouted Tony Newley.

Out of curiosity I went to see what they were all so interested in. Much to my horror it was some black-and-white photos of men and women with their clothes off doing all sorts of odd things.

‘Eurgh!’ I shrieked. ‘How disgusting.’

Then I ran away and all the boys laughed.

A lot of the older girls had boyfriends, but I just wasn’t interested. Daphne, who was a year older than me and was 15 by now, was very beautiful and she was always getting asked out by American soldiers.

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