Read Online West End Girls: The Real Lives, Loves and Friendships of 1940s Soho and Its Working Girls by Barbara Tate - Free Book Online

the day before, but I no longer regarded them with distaste. It was as though I had finally found my own people. I walked slowly along, relishing this fact. I was amongst fellow outcasts. That day the flat felt homely and lived-in, and it was warm with yesterday’s laughter. Mae, who had arrived only a few minutes before from where she lived in Paddington, had already put the kettle on and greeted me cheerily. Everything felt good.
    ‘You know,’ I reflected, as we were drinking our tea in the bedroom, ‘if I had a key, I could get here before you and do some cleaning. The stairs and this room, for instance: I could never do them while you’re working – at least not the way you work. The place gets like Victoria station!’
    ‘Well, don’t kill yourself; it’s already looking miles better than it did.’ She glanced at her bedside table, which now held only one cup and one ashtray. ‘I’ll get another key cut if it makes you feel any better – had to give Charley the spare one. Let me know what cleaning things you want – I don’t s’pose there’s any there – and I’ll drop a list in at the oil shop.’
    On her first trip out, I reminded her of this, and an hour later, I was presented with a shiny new Yale key (as we were the only people in the building, only the front door was ever locked). I then listed all the things I needed to assist me in my battle for hygiene. It was a long list. Mae had been right: we had nothing. The only cleaning implements consisted of a mop in a bucket of turgid liquid – as I pulled it out, its strands fell off with the weight of the water – and an old broom whose bristles were practically worn down to the wood. She took the order to the shop at the end of the alley, and during the afternoon, an elderly man in a grey overall delivered everything I needed.
    ‘Looks as though someone’s going to do some cleaning,’ he said, as he dumped the large cardboard box on the kitchen floor and divested himself of the new broom and mop. When he straightened up, he spoke the words I was going to hear over and over again during the next few weeks;
    ‘New here, aren’t you?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s only my second day.’
    ‘You’re on to a good thing with that girl; she hustles like nobody’s business. The wife and I watch her sometimes. Cor blimey, must be in and out like a fly!’
    Just then, we heard the ‘fly’ returning. After tactfully letting her and her new acquisition get into the bedroom, and with a wink in my direction, the hardware man left.
    He was right: Mae was in and out like a fly. There was something metronomic in the way she worked. She marched up the stairs behind each man – never in front of him, in case he changed his mind halfway up and ran off. When she had safely landed him in her room, they would stay there on average for five or ten minutes, and then the man would depart on his own. A couple of minutes later, he would be followed by Mae. Only a minute or two would elapse before the process was repeated.
    During those first days, I drew a sort of blackout curtain over my thoughts: at least in regard to what went on in the bedroom. Mae, without knowing it, made it easy for me to do this, or perhaps I had Rabbits to thank, because out of habit, Mae was still working to the rigid rules that her tough former maid had laid down. This state of affairs was to be short-lived, but it did help me over the initial stages of what was to become an extraordinary partnership.
    On this, my second day, some of the initial startling strangeness had worn off, and not receiving any further shocks to the system, I began to sit up and take notice of everything going on around me.
    Now aware that men who consorted with prostitutes were not the outwardly sinister and debauched creatures I had supposed, I no longer tried to keep out of sight. After glimpsing the first customer by accident, I had realised that one of the reasons I was there was to be seen, so that the