1

I WAS THREE days in my first place in London before I had a chance to go out. I arrived there on a Wednesday and as a Wednesday was to be my one afternoon and evening off in the week obviously I didn’t get it that week, so my first time out was on the Sunday. I was allowed from three o’clock till ten o’clock every other Sunday, but that first day it took me so long to do all the washing up that I didn’t get away until four.

I’d had a letter from my mother the day before – the Saturday. Mother must have sat down and written it the minute I left home, saying that I was to be very careful indeed; everybody knew what London was like. Not actually stating anything definite – kind of innuendoes. Anybody would have thought I was some sort of raving beauty and that every man who looked at me was going to make advances. Instead, what I was in those days was fattish, on the plain side with big hands and bigger feet, and with these poor ingredients I didn’t know how to make the best of myself – I don’t think many working girls did. At the end of her letter my mother put ‘and don’t talk to any strangers’. Well, since I didn’t know a soul in London if I didn’t talk to strangers I wouldn’t talk to anyone. So it looked as if I would have to be dumb for the rest of my stay.

Anyway there I was, all ready at four o’clock to go out and I was mad to go and see Hyde Park because it was a place I had read about with its soapbox orators and the guardsmen in their red coats walking around. I asked the cook what number bus to get on because I didn’t want to look like some provincial hick that had just come up to London and didn’t know anything. I was going to ask for Hyde Park, hand over the right money and look as if I knew it all.

I got on the bus that she told me and I went upstairs right to the front so that I could see everything. I sat there for ages looking all round and very soon it struck me that the buildings were much the same kind that you might see anywhere. But of course being as they were in London I thought, oh well, they must be marvellous.

No conductor took my fare. One came up several times but he never reached the front of the bus. I sat on and on looking. I thought it seemed a long way but I had no idea where things were. Then I could see that we were in a very seedy neighbourhood: dirty little shops, a very slummy place – far more slummy than some of the places around my home.

Before I could do anything about it the conductor came up and said, ‘This is the terminus.’ So I said, ‘I haven’t seen Hyde Park yet.’ And he said, ‘No, you bloody well won’t see it on this bus either. You’re going in the wrong direction.’ ‘But this is the right number,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘this is the right number but you’re going the wrong way. You got on on the wrong side of the road.’ ‘Well, why didn’t you come up and get my fare – why didn’t you tell me?’ So he said, ‘You try being a conductor on a ruddy London bus, and see if you’re going to tell people who don’t know where they’re going where they should be going.’

I got off the bus very crestfallen and not knowing what to do at all. So he said to me, ‘Where did you want to go?’ I told him I wanted to go to Hyde Park and also that it was my first time in London. So he said, ‘What are you going to do now, then?’ He thought for a moment. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he says. ‘We’ll be going back in twenty minutes. We’re going over the café to have a cup of tea and that – why don’t you come over with us.’ Well, I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing a thing like that at home. Not only might someone you know see you but, I mean, it just wasn’t done. But after all was said and done I’d gone to London to have an adventurous life so I thought, ‘Well, here goes,’ and walked over to the café with him and the bus driver.

It was obviously a working men’s café full of lorry drivers and bus crews. I was the only member of my sex but nobody seemed to show any surprise at seeing me, so I assumed that they often took women in there.

The bus conductor – I found out that his name was Perce – said, ‘Well, sit down.’ And we did, at a table that was covered in American cloth and innumerable flies, and he went to get cups of tea for us. That tea! It was so black. What they did was to stick soda in the tea urn – it’s a well known trick at these working-class cafés – to get all the colour out of the leaves and make it look strong. And he brought us cakes about the size of tennis balls and the same consistency, too.

Anyway we got talking and this Perce – of course his real name was Percival – told me he lived at a place called the Elephant and Castle. So I said, ‘How did it get that name?’ ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘originally it was called The Castle after the pub there but the landlord’s wife got so fat drinking all the stock that they called it The Elephant and Castle.’ Green though I was I didn’t believe a word of it but I dutifully laughed.

The bus driver, Bert, was a mournful, cadaverous-looking creature and he spoke in such a resigned tone of voice that you felt he’d eaten life’s troubled apple, core and all, and all that was left for him was a gradual descent to the grave. Part of his trouble was that he suffered from gastric ulcers. These he told me were rife among bus drivers because of the shift work and the irregular hours they had to do. This and the fact that they couldn’t stop the bus often enough to empty their bladders. So they got these gastric ulcers. He reckoned they should have been paid danger money. He may have been right but it’s my opinion they got their ulcers from drinking that black tea and eating all those rubbery cakes.

Anyway when I’d got to know him a bit more I found he was a non-stop talker. He showed me photos he’d had taken when he was young and healthy. Apparently he used to go boxing on a Saturday night to earn himself a bit – in the boxing booths, and he told me he’d won twelve fights in a row and used to be called the ‘Wapping Wonder’.

I was absolutely fascinated at the thought that this elderly man – this one-time ‘Wapping Wonder’ – was interested enough in me to tell me his life history. I began to think that there must be more in me than I knew about.

But afterwards the bus conductor, Perce, deflated my ego. When Bert went to that place reserved exclusively to men he said, ‘Don’t take a bit of notice of what he says because he tells everybody that old tale. I’ve heard it hundreds of times. He couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding. All he ever talks about is bladders and boxing.’

Then Perce asked me why I wanted to go to Hyde Park. So I said, ‘I just want to look at it.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘you must have a reason.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘when you live down where I do you read about Hyde Park. Surely it’s one of the sights of London, isn’t it?’ ‘Well, I’ve never bothered to go there,’ he said, ‘and I live here.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s just like the seaside. The residents never bother to go down on the beach and sit on the stones – it’s only the trippers and visitors that do that.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘don’t go into Hyde Park of a night on your own, it’s full of prostitutes.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘is it?’ And far from damping my ardour I thought that was marvellous – I wanted to have a good look at them.

I’d visualized them as very alluring types of women, mysterious-looking – rather like Pola Negri the vamp who was all the rage on the films at that time. So I thought I must go and see them. ‘Yes,’ says Perce. ‘Dressed up in all their finery on the broadwalk there. And woe betide if anyone tries to get on their pitch.’ ‘Well, what do they look like?’ I said. ‘Oh, they dress in muslins and things like that.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘like Greek soldiers that wear those kind of ballet skirts.’ Then Perce said, ‘They might look like that but I wouldn’t want to get in a fight with them. My father was in Greece during the war and he was always telling us tales about the Greek soldiers, how tough and virile they are. “Yes,” he used to say, “it’s more than starch that keeps those ballet skirts up.”’

The implication was lost on me but everybody roared so I laughed too. After all he was providing me with refreshments even if they weren’t light refreshments. Anyway I wanted a free ride back and I got one. I went upstairs again and this Perce kept running up and chatting to me and then he made a date to meet me on my next night off.

So there on my first time out in London after months and months without a boyfriend in my own home town I’d met one and made a date with him.

Mind you, until Perce had told me what a line-shooter Bert the driver was I’d found little to choose between them. In spite of his age and appearance I’d rather fancied myself going out as the girlfriend of the Wapping Wonder. But I never could abide line-shooters. I’d had a belly-full listening to George when I was kitchenmaid at my first place in Brighton.