‘And consider as well,’ said the sergeant, his plausible manner not quite making up for the vagueness of his words, ‘what she’s been up to lately. It’s not just the sleeping in the parks, is it? It’s doing the business with strangers behind bushes and against trees, isn’t it? No telling what extra diseases they pick up in the middle of the night, is there?’
‘I am surprised to hear a supposed medical orderly speak such nonsense,’ I said in a voice like iron, ‘but one thing is clear. Despite the evidence of insect bites, exposure, neglect and sexual abandon, she did not die from any of them.’ I paused, in the vain hope that he might take in my words. ‘She died of poverty.’
This was no Disraelian flourish. Being poor, being a woman and being in London did for her as surely as a knife stabbed in her back. I have seen it happen again and again until I am wearied in contemplating the scale of the problem. The last four years have seized the festering sores of poverty and prostitution, and made them infinitely worse, blown them into cancerous lumps on the metropolitan body. Since the General Strike, that brave, doomed public uprising, the working class has lost its energy, its indomitable spirit. Jobs are being shed by the score every week. The roads are filling up with unemployed carters and dockhands, farm labourers and lathe operators, colliers and shipmen. For a woman of the working class, what work is there but domestic service, or drawing beer in a saloon, or seeking a position exhibiting herself to artists or the public in a coarse revue? And when she has learned that the secret of success in each of these workplaces is to find more inventive ways of pleasing men and doing their bidding, why, what is to stop her proceeding down the final half-mile to whoredom and moral decay?
Poor Emily. She is – was – no more than twenty-three. When I met her, just six months ago, outside a pub in Rupert Street, I noticed the passivity of her nature. I took her to a café in Dean Street where I learned little of her recent circumstances but much of her younger days, her brothers and sisters, her pets, her attic bedroom, the trees in the yard in whose branches she used to hide from her indulgent, tree-climbing papa. It was like talking to a child of a mildly emetic sweetness. She seemed a girl stuck firmly in her infant world, who clapped her hands together with delight if you bought her a pastry, who laughed with the angelic tinkle of Christmas chimes if you told her stories of parishioners’ follies, and who probably responded to the brutal business of sexual penetration by cries to the perpetrator to cease tickling her.
It was all a pretence. The childhood was an invention, drawn from a dozen storybooks of nursery, bathtime and barnyard adventures, of a loving mother and father, of exciting discoveries in the secret woodland. It was all make-believe. So was her breathless, ingénue surprise at everything. It was as though she had never been taken out to a beef supper before (‘Is this where lords and ladies dine?’), nor to a cathedral (‘But how could the painters have done them lovely pictures up so high?’); nor even for an innocent walk in Green Park in the moonlight: ‘Why have you brought me here?’ she would say in a breathy mumble, one hand over her mouth. ‘You are not going to – use me, are you?’
She was an actress who seldom left off playing a virgin – a woman in her early twenties playing an urchin child in ragged skirts and off-white pants. It was a pose that, she confided to me, ‘many gentlemen like’. Presumably it appealed to the kind of feeble-minded City clerk who felt himself to be a gentleman because a feathery young strumpet discerns him to be one. I cannot bear to think of the poor girl suffering in her last extremities. Nor suffering the torments of employment at the Café Royal, a position I found her, specifically to rescue her from being nightly brutalised in Soho, as she explained about her pet lamb into the ears of her straining and pounding clients. But must I blame myself? My wish was only to help her, to protect her – very well then, to save her, as one would save a robin with a crushed wing on one’s front doorstep.
I am assailed with doubts. Should I have left her alone, with her babyish fantasies? Did I make her life worse or better by taking her from gutter to decency, from Soho to Regent Street? Now she lies before me on this slab, her beauty fled, her childish patter dead as carbon.
She seems to accuse me. I cannot stand to hear her say it again, for her body to breathe the words at me, through her breasts and her ringlets and her pale skin:
‘Why have you brought me here? Harold? Why have you brought me here?’
Journals of Harold Davidson
London 1 September 1930
Rather an exhausting day. The 8.05 from Wells ran thirty-five minutes late, and I suffered the ennui of sharing a carriage with Mr Hagerty, the Blakeney surveyor, all the way to Piccadilly. A dull man in a dull employment to which he is admirably suited, presiding over the placement of new traffic lights and pedestrian walkways, he seldom leaves the vicinity of Norfolk, and I had to suffer his foolish blatherings for the best part of two hours about the great Adventure of visiting the metropolis. He has been there on two occasions in the last eight years, and every detail is imprinted on his bovine, provincial memory. I learned more than I could endure of his sister’s delightful home in Peckham Rye, the wonders of its indoor plumbing and drawing-room gramophone, her husband’s fulfilling hobby of visiting racetracks – not horses, mind, but Bugatti automobiles – and returning home with printed catalogues of motor cars over which he pores for hours of acquisitive greed. I learned of Hagerty’s forays into music halls and cinemas, which he finds racily modern, his encounters with London policemen with whom he likes to converse regarding their experiences of riots and affray in the General Strike, his plodding notations of London fashions – ‘I saw a man wearing shoe-spats in Regent Street, and it were only lunchtime,’ he said wonderingly – and his prurient fascination with urban vice. Like English tourists returning from Paris forty years ago, he dilates upon the ‘sinfulness’ of London with that mix of condemnation and shivery excitement that marks the furtive voyeur. If only he knew the grubby truth about the poor girls whose lives I seek to better! Perhaps he feels on safe ground employing the word ‘sin’ with me, anent the moral shortcomings of city behaviour. He expects some answering repertoire of clucking disapproval about the frightful times we live in, and hopes for salty anecdotes about my colourful female charges. If so, he was disappointed. I avoided any yellow-paper revelations of sordid liaisons, and recommended he visit the lovely side chapels of Southwark Cathedral for inspiration. We were both, I think, glad to see the back of each other when we parted at Piccadilly Station and he shambled off carrying his theoloditic paraphernalia, like one of Hardy’s overambitious sons of toil stumbling into the heady glare of Christminster.
I was met with a show of hostility from Mrs Parker at the lodging house. Dolores and Jezzie had both called to see me on Sunday night, at midnight, then again at 1 a.m., to seek moral guidance and, discovering I was from home, voiced their disapproval to my landlady, as she stood (I can imagine the ghastly sight all too clearly) in her mildewed shift and berated them for calling at an hour when, she said, ‘good Christian folk should be slumbering’. She has a charmingly Victorian turn of phrase. I tried to make her see that the impulse towards confession, the redemptive nature of simple talk, knows no time or formal appointment. But Mrs P was adamant. ‘I would not admit a gentleman caller at such an hour,’ she stated flatly, ‘and nor would I let the likes of them wake up the household with their big voices and their brassy boots when everyone’s in bed. I’ve told you six times before, Rector,’ she bleated, ‘I don’t know what ministry they’re expecting at such an hour, but it’s got to stop.’
No matter. Monday is my day for Holborn. I cut some sandwiches (hard-boiled egg and tomato, ham and lettuce), packed them into my pilgrim’s scrip with two apples, distributed supplies of salve, ointment, surgical spirit, tissues, soap, shampoo, etc., in my Pharmacy Pockets, included Bible pamphlets 103, 112 and 149, Dream of Gerontius plus theatre tickets in my Literature Pockets, updated files on Elsie, Marina, Bridie, Lily, Sandra, Esther and Matilda in the Needy Cases Pocket, and set off.
Unusual crowds around the