Enchanted Evening (30 page)

*   *   *

Meanwhile, in London, I had to get up early in order to reach the studio by nine o'clock sharp: MG did not tolerate lateness. Besides, there were two buses to catch, as well as a preliminary walk (it was more often a run) from the house up a sloping street – the ‘hill' of Notting Hill I suppose – to the bus stop at Notting Hill Gate. I was always afraid of arriving to see the bus I wanted pull away, because I knew that the next one might not be along for as much as ten minutes.

During the few months of that first autumn I used to see every day, as I hurried breathlessly up the crowded pavement, an elderly, grey-haired and very tall man with a nose like an eagle's beak, striding down the hill towards me as I scurried up it. His face was so familiar that I
knew
I knew him, and I decided that he must be a buddy of Tacklow's. But since I was always late and afraid of missing the bus, I was terrified that one day he'd stop me and ask about Tacklow or Mother, and make me late. So instead of cutting the poor man dead, I used to give him a nervous nod and a smile, indicative of a desire to stop and fill him in with the family news, but regret that I couldn't spare the time.

This went on for at least a month, until one day he did actually stop me. Late as usual, I had resigned myself to apologizing for not stopping to talk to him on previous mornings, and explaining why I hadn't, when he said: ‘I'm sorry if I'm making you late for whatever it is you do, but I couldn't resist it any longer. You so obviously think I'm someone you know.
Do
tell me who it is?' Well, of course I couldn't for the life of me remember. And you know what –? He turned out to be George Arliss, an exceedingly famous film star in those days, who was over in England making a film about the Peninsular War, in which he played the Duke of Wellington. I have seldom felt such a chump. However, he couldn't have been nicer, and what really
was
surprising was that he
did
know Tacklow. They had attended the same prep school and were both nuts about cricket. I quite missed him when he went back to Hollywood.

I saw, and occasionally met, a lot of future celebrities through living near Notting Hill Gate. Peggy Ashcroft, looking exactly the same off-stage as she did on, was often to be seen shopping in Boots, though I never spoke to her. But nearly all the young men and women who were bed-sitting in the same house as I was, were, like Curly's daughter, hopeful ballet dancers trying their wings at the Mercury. Sometimes Marie Rambert let me sit in a corner of the practice-room and sketch them. I could never afford a seat for the lovely ballets that were written and danced in that minute theatre, but I used to stand at the back, squashed up against the wall, and watch them, entranced. I still think of them (as I do the Simla Theatre) as though they were danced on a stage the size of Drury Lane:
Cinderella
with the title part danced by beautiful Pearl Argyle,
The Haunted Ballroom, The Lady of Shalott, The Lilac Garden
. They were all magic to me.

So was a little second-hand jeweller's shop that I used to pass on my way up Notting Hill. There was a fabulous diamond ring in the window. A really beautiful thing, priced at eight pounds. When people talk rubbish to me nowadays as to the price of then-and-now being only ‘relative' I remember that ring; and the fact that I knew, on an income of one pound five a week, that if I skimped and saved, it would not have been impossible for me to raise eight pounds. That ring now would be more like eighteen thousand, probably even more. I couldn't possibly afford it now. Any more than I could afford, then, a tin tub full of cut crystal chandelier drops –
hundreds
of them! – that I was offered in the Old Kent Road for one pound! ‘Relative' my foot!

One of the things that continued to irritate me was the fact that in order to claim that £1 5s. a week Indian Army Pension, I had to clock in once a quarter to a certain section of, I think, Lloyds Bank, Pall Mall, to sign a piece of closely printed paper that included, among other things, my word of honour that I was not ‘to my knowledge', married. I ask you! I was always tempted to write against that one, ‘I'm afraid I can't quite remember what I was doing last Friday,' and see what they made of that.

Apart from George Arliss and the Ballet Club, only a few other things stand out in my memory of those days. Mike taking me to see the All Blacks play England. I had never seen rugby football played before, and I thought the whole business was Marx-Brothers-hilarious. I remember nearly crying with laughter, and Mike getting absolutely furious with me. He took his rugger seriously, and for two pins would have slapped me.

Sandy Napier, home on leave, took me to see the Grand National and I left the course a rich woman. Because the day was Mother's birthday, and since one of the lesser races had a horse running in it called ‘The Mum', I put five shillings on it (all I had!) and it romped home at something like twenty-to-one against. Sandy also rang up at short notice to ask me to join a star-studded party he was throwing at the Victoria Palace, where the auditorium was filled with candle-lit tables at which the clients dined and wined while a spectacular Folies-Bergère-style of show was performed on the stage, with intervals during which the stage was cleared so that the diners could go up there and dance. But the rules about evening dress were strict, and there was nothing in my scanty wardrobe that I had brought to my bed-sit that I could wear for such an occasion. Anything suitable was in the trunks I had left at the Manor House.

Since I was now rich, thanks to ‘The Mum', I made for a large department store at the lower end of Oxford Street that was, in those days, a paradise for impecunious bed-sitters: Bourne & Hollingsworth of blessed memory. There I acquired, for the princely sum of £1 4s. 11¾d. (that last stood for three-farthings!) the prettiest evening dress – bar one (that too was another B & H!) – I have ever possessed. This one was a two-piece in grey ‘elephant crêpe', and consisted of a cowl-neck, floor-length dress, cut on the cross, with a fingertip-length coat whose wide sleeves ended in a band of exactly matching grey ‘foxalene' – a fake fur that looked exactly like dyed fox-fur. I wore it with a pair of diamanté earrings, bought from Woolworths for sixpence, and a somewhat elderly pair of shoes that I treated with a pot of silver paint, also from Woolworths. That outfit was not only a terrific success on its first appearance, but continued to be one for more than fifteen years. And when the ‘foxalene' became tatty (which it did pretty quickly) I removed it and lined the cuffs with a wide band of silver sequins, also bought in the trimming department of dear B & H.

*   *   *

MG's words of wisdom on the subject of a bed-sit within walking distance of the studio had come home to me fairly soon. It had not taken me long to realize that I couldn't afford my present digs, let alone the bus fares to the King's Road and back. But in those days London teemed with digs of all descriptions, to suit every conceivable purse. There probably were bad or greedy landlords about. But if there were, there were not all that many, and the vast majority of landlords and landladies were a nice lot, renting out a room or two in their terraced houses to eke out their own modest incomes.

I found a large bed-sitting room on the second floor of a house in Limerston Street, a mere two minutes' walk from the studio, and was immediately much better off than before, not only because the rent was far cheaper, but because there were no obligatory bus fares to pay. The solid rows of terraced houses in Limerston Street must have been built some time in the earlier half of Victoria's reign, for, believe it or not, the street was cobbled, and the houses had no bathrooms, and only a single lavatory. The original occupants had presumably stuck to the good old British practice of ‘Friday night is bath-night', taking it in a tin tub in front of the kitchen fire. We twentieth-century bed-sitters either cadged one from a friend who lived in a house or a flat that boasted a bathroom (fortunately for me, I had several within strolling distance), or else we had one at the public baths. I never had to try those, but I believe they cost sixpence or, if one was fussy and prepared to pay a bit more, the same bath, accompanied by a rather flossier cake of soap, bath mat and towel.

My room overlooked the street, which, due to the cobbles, was mercifully free of traffic, with the exception of a milkcart which woke us up daily with its hellish clatter at the crack of dawn. Otherwise, the traffic was almost entirely pedestrian. The cobblestones were a feature which still fascinates me, since they are mentioned so often in Victorian novels. Not to mention ‘pea-soupers' – those days of solid yellow fog in which you could barely see your hand in front of your face: I have to say I found them enthralling for the same reason. But they, and the cobbles, were already on their way out. No loss, I suppose. It was those cobbles, of course, that caused the daily milkcart and its load of bottles to jerk one out of sleep with the din of a clash of cymbals!

I paid nineteen shillings a week for bed-and-breakfast, and by arrangement with my landlady, dear Mrs King, another sixpence because I owned one of those ‘new-fangled' objects, a portable radio that ran off the mains: Mrs King reckoned it probably used sixpence worth of electricity a week. The room was heated by a gas fire that had to be fed with a shilling in a slot. So did the little gas cooker that stood on the landing outside my door, on which I and my fellow bed-sitters could heat up canned soup, make toast and boil milk, and cook simple meals. A book of who had last fed it a shilling was attached by a nail on the wall.

We were forever running out of shillings, but fortunately, one of us – I think he had the room above me – had returned from a holiday abroad with a handful of small change that was exactly the size and weight of a shilling. This solved a pressing problem. Until the day the gas-man called, which was once a quarter. He was resigned to the problem and would sit on the top step of the stairs, sipping a mug of coffee or cocoa donated by one of us, while we sorted out who owed what and got together enough genuine shillings with which to pay him off.

*   *   *

It was while I was bed-sitting in Limerston Street that I made, inadvertently, one of the most profitable gestures of my life. I had returned to my room unexpectedly one morning, to find Mrs King sitting on the solitary chair in the hall in floods of tears. I thought at first that she must be ill, or that some disaster had overtaken the unseen gentleman always referred to simply as ‘King', or their very pretty little schoolgirl daughter, the apple of their eye. But it was worse than that. I managed to get the story eventually, and this is what had happened.

Someone had rung the front door bell, and Mrs King, answering it, had been confronted by a nicely dressed lady armed with a collecting box. The lady (‘And she
was
a lady,' insisted Mrs King, ‘a
proper
lady') was collecting for some local charity, and she must have been tramping the streets for some time, for she appeared to be very tired. Mrs King urged her to wait while she fetched her purse and the lady sank down thankfully on the hall chair while Mrs King hurried down the stairs to the kitchen, and, returning with her bag, hunted out a modest contribution – sixpence or a shilling, for which the lady was most grateful. Rising to leave, she tottered slightly, and Mrs King, dropping her bag on to the hall table, leapt forward to support her. The lady apologized for being a nuisance, and wondered if Mrs King would add to her kindness by letting her have a drink of water. At which, pressing the visitor to sit down again, Mrs King ran back down the kitchen stairs to fetch and fill a glass, and carrying it up to the hall found that the lady had vanished, taking with her Mrs King's bag. The whole thing had been a well-thought-out and frequently successful confidence trick, that probably netted the thief a comfortable income. But to Mrs King it spelt disaster.

She had only just returned from the bank, or post office savings or whatever, with the cash she needed for the next week's household expenses, and now it had all gone, and what ‘King' would say she dared not think. Her tears began to flow again at the very thought, and I imagined, from the depth of her woe and despair, that the sum she had been robbed of was alarmingly large. She kept on saying that
everything
was in her bag. Every penny! It was only on pressing her that she disclosed the extent of the damage. She had been robbed of five pounds, and as far as she was concerned it was the end of the world. I think it was only then that I realized for the first time how close to the edge of a yawning financial cliff thousands upon thousands of people have learned to live. And that I with my £1 5s. a week, which Tacklow had been paying for out of his scanty income ever since he joined the Army back in the previous century, was one of the lucky ones.

Well, as it happened, I had just sold a painting, a Christmas card design, to a firm called Raphael Tuck who used to do a lot of Christmas-cardery. What's more, I was on my way back from cashing the cheque, and I had the resulting fiver in my pocket. So I pressed it on dear Mrs King and said she was to regard it as an advance (or possibly belated) Christmas and/or birthday present.

Never,
ever
have I spent five pounds to better effect. If you think it was a trivial sum to me, you will be wrong, for we were in the days when the wage of a ‘char', one of London's famous and invaluable scrubbing, cleaning and polishing women, had recently gone up to half-a-crown (i.e. two shillings and sixpence or twelve and a half pence today) an hour, amidst universal complaints about extortion and the threat of inflation. Five pounds was a lot of money, and the picture I had just flogged to Raphael Tuck and Co. represented a week's hard work. But it didn't mean to me what the loss of it had meant to hard-working, thrifty Mrs King and thousands like her. I still had my £1 5s. a week and I could manage on that (just!). Though I admit it was frequently a case of choosing between a cup of tea – after showing work to some clients such as the Medici Society, whose head office was just off Bond Street – or a bus back to King's Road. Because I couldn't afford both.