In June 1937 Crowley wrote what might have been “If able, live in Hampstead” in his diary. The original diary is no longer extant, surviving only in slightly unreliable Chinese-whisper transcriptions, and the transcription is unequivocally “If able, love in Hampstead”. If he really did write that, then it is certainly more aphoristic.
Crowley's comings and goings in Hampstead – leafy, prosperous, supposedly intellectual, historically quite Jewish, famously pleasant – and north London generally, are slightly mysterious. He had chess business up there, and book business,1 and he had a few friends and acquaintances such as Noel Fitzgerald (Boundary Road), Louis Fox (Belsize Park Gardens) and “Campbell and Rhona”, a boxer and his girlfriend who lived at 100c Abbey Road. This was Selvin Campbell, born in Belize, who became Jamaican welterweight champion and moved to Britain in 1936; he fought as Lefty ‘Satan’ Flynn, “His Satanic Majesty”. Crowley also notes an Adele Brand, who lived on Priory Road, and he had an “A1” sexual encounter with a woman called Julia at 37 Broadhurst Gardens.
Hampstead grows less expensive going west, shading across West Hampstead into the historically more down-at-heel Kilburn. In the spring of 1938 Crowley was ecstatic to meet a woman in her early thirties called Sally Pace, who was staying at number 55 Iverson Road, Kilburn, just by the railway bridge on the line to Kilburn station.
This was Sarah “Sally” Pace, aged 32, from Shrewsbury in Shropshire (where she was married to a considerably older publican who ran a pub called the Craven Arms; she may have run it with him). Crowley only had sex with her twice, in March and April, but he was very taken with her and she inspired some of his most enthused poetry since the days of ‘Leah Sublime’:
Sally is a darlin’ little bitch
Slim and tall and wonderful, a witch.
To satisfy her everlasting itch.
But I swear to God I'll put the matter right
If I have to lick the bloody thing all night
After that he lowers the tone, and the second half is less suitable for quotation in a family book.
Sally probably didn't have a telephone, because Crowley also went up there (travelling by bus on a straight line up what is now the A5, along Edgware Road and Maida Vale) and didn't find her in. On the bus back he struck up an acquaintance with another woman, a Stella Hilling, who was in her late twenties and gave her address as 43 the Broadway, Cricklewood (a grocers, which she was either living above or working in). She later came to visit at Manor Place, but she was no Sally Pace. He asked his I Ching to divine the relative characters of Stella and Sally and, as he interpreted it, it came up with “idiot” and “hot stuff” respectively.