Of the women I have met who earned cash by hiring their bodies to fleeting strangers, Rene was the one who most resembled a stereotyped Edwardian tart. I believe she was second generation, following so to speak in her mother’s footsteps.
Perhaps I am romanticising both the profession and the era when I say that no insult is intended, quite the reverse indeed. Irene was not just beautiful and spectacularly turned out but good‑natured, generous and honest. Of the stereotype’s more negative features − treachery, greed, sexual frigidity, coldness of heart − she showed no visible sign. For those honoured with her friendship, evenings and afternoons in flats, restaurants and nightclubs were made more luminous and enjoyable by her physical magnificence and her generosity with money, whisky and marijuana.
Rene was creamily statuesque, blue‑eyed, baby‑faced, generous in all important features. Being tall she did not always wear high heels. When she did, with full war‑paint, false eyelashes, ash‑blonde beehive and all the trimmings, the lacquered vision measured a little over six feet, but it was not seen every day. In the early 1960s − the real 1960s to old‑time Gate‑dwellers − people tried to dress comfortably if they could afford it, although it was difficult on formal occasions. Usually Rene wore a sort of battledress, with makeup but without heels, some sort of frilly blouse or fluffy sweater and tight black trousers. She was efficient and fast at repairing her face, having quick baths and changing her clothes. It was unusual to see her without makeup and hairdo (or at least curlers); it made her look slightly smaller.
One thing sure was that being with Rene got you noticed. When you were let into her flat just off Talbot Road by the very traditional nicotine‑stained, trap‑jawed, apron-and-slippers-wearing maid‑of‑all‑work, other people were often already present. In the streets nearby, and in and around the Fiesta a couple of blocks away, people would wave and shout to her, or come up and engage you in conversation. If you went anywhere else with her − she always travelled by taxi − everyone would look first at her and then, appraisingly, at you. It was extremely unnerving, but worth it.
From where I stood, it looked as if men in Irene’s life were filed in four categories: wages, friends, lovers and associates. The first category must have outnumbered the others but was seldom evident to members, like me, of the second category. This was not because she felt ashamed of her profession or made any attempt to hide it. She was no hypocrite, although really very ladylike in a fun-loving way. But on visiting her sometimes one might be asked to wait in the lacy suburban-looking sitting room, seldom for more than twenty minutes or so. The maid would be a bit disapproving because one was in the wrong category for the time of day and she could tell at a glance that one did not represent business. She was not openly rude, however. Rene ran a tight ship.
Her own appearance on these occasions would sometimes be preceded by the passage through the hall of some unglamorous character whose palpable wish for invisibility made one look politely away. A minute or two later a rosily bashful Rene would come in, hair brushed and smelling lightly of soap. ‘Sorry, darlin, wages,’ she would say with a very slightly self-deprecating giggle. A moment later the maid would be making tea and Rene would haul whisky and marijuana from a shiny black handbag chosen to match her own imposing physical scale. With these being consumed, plans would be made for the evening. Wages as such, when I knew Rene, were mainly a daytime phenomenon.
Apart from the maid – I’ve often wondered if she was Rene’s mother or aunt – Rene’s women friends, less numerous than her male friends, were I suppose colleagues on the same level as herself, similarly lacquered and formidable: somewhat above the level of streetwalker and below that of Knightsbridge or Mayfair courtesan, relying heavily on the telephone for appointments but not really ‘call girls’ because operating at home. Not one of these women had Rene’s innocent charm or insouciant physical lavishness: they would be too angular or too muscular, or have close-set eyes or a cruel turn of mouth. Most were a year or two older than her − she was hardly older than me, perhaps not even my age, although she seemed to me like an older sister. And these women did not much like Rene’s unkempt, pot-smoking, posh-talking but penniless social companions. It seemed weird to them. I mean proper gents, wife doesn’t understand me, you look an understandin filly, ere’s a gold watch, let me put it on for yer: OK, Jag, nightclub, I mean no harm, good time had by all. But what were these geezers on about half the time, drinkin Irene’s whisky and smokin er tea, not even tryin to get a free one, what did she see in them? Bunch of ponces if you ask me, well not ponces exactly, never bring er any punters, no use if there’s any trouble, no, not poofs either even if they do talk like bleedin poofs, but poncin off er all the same, get my drift?
We didn’t know either, not really, why Rene chose to associate with us during her recreation time. She didn’t read or talk politics or go to difficult movies or the theatre. She didn’t even much like Ornette Coleman or Roland Kirk, although she did like music and listened happily to the Rollins and early John Coltrane who were our endless mainstays at 105 Westbourne Terrace. Good sounds pumped through decent speakers were part of the Gate decor, but what she liked best was live R&B. I think of her shining in the gloom in the rows of seats on the right-hand side of the Flamingo down at the bottom end of Wardour Street south of Shaftesbury Avenue, the ones at right angles to the stage where Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames blatted out their fluid ultra-danceable sound, topping your Coca-Cola up with whisky from her bottle and passing over her attache-case-sized handbag with the loudly whispered instruction: ‘Roll me a smoke, darlin.’ She didn’t dance a lot, being lazy, but sat there in the hot darkness with friends and acquaintances all around her, innocently happy.
When it was time to take a cab back to the Gate at the end of one of these evenings, Rene would often give lifts to people from some other circle she frequented, recruiting groups of courteous giants in expensive clothing, chunks of gold gleaming among the fingers and eye teeth, conversing in rumbled Jamaican and American monosyllables. Boxers? Hoods? Innocent grunts and toilers in Saturday night garb? Nobody ever said, but coming back from the Flamingo with Rene could be like sharing a taxi with a herd of prizewinning buffaloes wearing aftershave.
Before these scenes became familiar, before she adopted, for a time, the habit of turning up at Westbourne Terrace in the early evening looking for a companion to escort her to Wardour Street or thereabouts for entertainment, Irene had exercised her prerogative as a leading face, a Gate aristocrat, by taking us up socially. She did this in an endearingly formal, official manner which secured our instant loyalty. The Fiesta One restaurant, on the corner of Ledbury Road and Westbourne Park Road, was responsible for this as for so many other fruitful meetings. Having the best food, the best music and the most intelligent, laid-back management in the entire zone, the Fiesta naturally concentrated on its somewhat limited seating all the most discerning locals (or those who could afford its prices which, although modest for what they bought, were high for the area). Being rich and possessing the healthy appetite needed to sustain her lavish frame, Rene went there often as she worked, and at first lived, only two minutes away.
Being also − as I hope I have made clear − a naturally good and decent person with clear-eyed although far from intellectual feminine discernment, Rene learned immediately to respect, and indeed fell (in her fashion) in love with one of, the Fiesta’s owners. During this process, being also friendly and good-natured, she acquired a nodding acquaintance with those of us from Westbourne Terrace who also went to the Fiesta a lot − in our case as much for the music and the conversation, the friendship, of the owners, as for the food which in truth we could not always afford. These most probably were myself and Alan Beckett, although everyone at the flat, and indeed many of our friends from the Gate and other parts of London, knew and liked the place.
Doubtless Clem or Larry had told her that we smoked exotic herbs and seemed all right; or perhaps she had noticed that we sometimes stayed in the Fiesta after it closed, arguing loudly with the staff and roaring with laughter. Anyway she one day asked where we lived and announced that she would come to visit us, setting a date and time.
It was a late afternoon on a weekday, probably an encroachment on Rene’s working hours. Four or five of us were there, all men, no girls; Hoppy, who had signed the lease of the flat and worked with manic energy as a photographer, was there, unusually for that time of day. Rene arrived on the dot, so magnificently turned out that our cavernous hallway, which we used as a communal living area, fell unusually silent for an unusually long time. She was wearing some kind of fussy suit trimmed with bits of gilded braid, a frilly chiffon blouse, earrings, bracelets and so on, very high heels and some kind of ornate black stockings, hairdo, astonishing, doll-like false eyelashes, a careful but not quite discreet makeup job, and − the final touch that really made our jaws drop − two white miniature poodles on leads. We had never seen these dogs before and never saw them again, so they were probably borrowed. They were very well behaved.
We greeted her in the polite constrained manner, already inflected with the casual no-shit American-prole overfamiliarity that later became the norm for the whole of British society, then usual for educated young men; with the exception of Hoppy who, very advanced in certain ways, gave her a brief welcoming stare and yelled ‘WOW!’ at the top of his voice. We gave her the best chair and she sat in it with knees together and the poodles at her feet, blushing prettily. She was a bit shy and the first few minutes were awkward, we intimidated by her war-paint and she flabbergasted by our flat, the like of which she had never seen before.
This was the thing about the sixties, where we were anyway, right at the beginning, before the mass-market hippy thing, the Wilson-era Mersey beat, Carnaby Street, Vietnam and the sexual revolution, the explosion of gonorrhea and manic politics out of the 1968 Sorbonne, all that shit. This was before all that, in a way its precursor, a sketch of something vastly preferable, soon afterwards overtaken by events. There was this openness: not the perverse, obligatory, side-taking, paranoid new respectability, the first of many, that a few years later had certain silly flower children − a term that still raises the gorge of discerning persons − claiming that Charles Manson had been victimised; and a few years after that dissolved into a sort of generalised far-left morality which in extreme cases made perfectly harmless middle-class intellectuals see themselves as enemies of the State on the run from the security forces.
There was absolutely no social pressure on us to be more than civil to Rene − we did not get on especially well with her colleagues − and there was none on her to associate with us. Indeed such pressure as there was − admittedly not much in the Gate of those days, but the rest of London and the family-containing provinces were still there − tended in the other direction. She chose us, we chose her, nothing much in common but we liked each other’s mugs, fraternally, no pressure of sex or money, no need to prove anything. I believe Rene was pleased and flattered that we liked her without chasing her tail; just as we were pleased and flattered that she should sometimes choose to relax socially with us.
Nothing much in common but our ages – we were all children in our early twenties – and of course cannabis the great leveller which calmed us down on the occasion of Irene’s first visit to Westbourne Terrace as it did everywhere else and on all occasions. By inducing a pleasant relaxation, it made people back off the unconscious group project of ‘making conversation with Rene’ and revert to normal behaviour: sporadic general and individual conversation interspersed with arguments about what music to have next, followed by ferocious, baroque jeering when a choice was actually made. It made Rene relax too. She wasn’t a very demanding person and was perfectly happy to sit getting stoned and listening most of the time. Her conversation was mostly small talk and gossip, and she loved jokes. ‘What did one coffin say to the other coffin?’ she asked us. Well, what? ‘Is that you coffin’?’ She never raised her voice or sounded shrill or strident.[1] Her manner was one of gentle, rosy, ladylike merriment. Being a teahead she understood irony, but she was a stranger to bitterness and her malice was of the most benevolent sort.
She stayed an hour or two, until after dark, and by the time she left, most probably in a cab, we all nursed tender, platonic feelings of friendship for her. I do not remember ever seeing her so dressed up again. When going out she would of course wear something eye-catching and make her hair gleam, but she dressed for comfort in the early-sixties manner, flat heels and slacks (sometimes with stirrups under the instep, a feature which for some reason I have always disliked), the doll’s eyelashes only when she could be bothered.
After that, for a year or two, Rene became a pal. She could be a useful person to go and see when cannabis was in short supply. ‘Ere, nip out and get me alf a tea, darlin,’ she would say to her long-suffering maid. ‘Anyone else want alf a tea? Get some for im as well. Better get me two.’ Sighing good-humouredly, the maid would collect the ten-shilling notes and shuffle off to change into her outdoor shoes. My memory is that she was seldom absent for more than five minutes, but perhaps I am idealising the past, gilding the era in retrospect as old buffers do.
Alf a tea − half a sheet’s worth of marijuana − was the standard Gate street deal at that time (although in Cable Street, in Whitechapel, slightly smaller deals cost five bob). It came rough − flowers, buds, seeds and stalks − in a rectangular newspaper packet an inch or two long, and was often of good quality. The same amount of grass today, for those whose prejudices make them insist on it despite the greater availability of hashish, comes in a plastic bag, will usually be broken up fine to dissimulate a lamentable paucity of mind-bending resin, and costs ten or twenty pounds in the street.
Then as now, ‘deals’ whose weight was not a declared quantity were of variable size (so, of course, were ounces and even pounds, but that was a different matter). If the dealer was in a good mood, or liked the customer, fat deals of good sticky issue might be forthcoming; but in a difficult week, at the end of the dealer’s supply, or in the event of mutual dislike, things could go the other way. Rene for one reason or another was on the most favoured list of whoever it was the maid used to nip out and see, and the result was that she often got good deals. She and her friends were seldom palmed off with thin packages of dust, seeds and stalks, or the appalling substitutes that some dishonest operators kept handy for one-off transactions with innocent passers-by.
There were a lot of innocent passers-by in the early sixties. Data on long-neglected forms of intoxication were fluttering down like tickertape through the awareness of a reading population avid to escape the musty pre-war vision still unconvincingly projected by politicians, media and the commoner sort of artist. These images came from the Americas in the form of precepts and recommendations from a new wave of poets and writers who had discovered the secrets of the trance states used for refuge and enlightenment by the downtrodden indigenous populations and non-white urban and rural communities of those two continents: not just moonshine but gauge, not just cane spirit but coca, mescalin, ayahuasca, yage. Visions! Another way of seeing!
Of course sailors and musicians, the kind of people who worked alongside blacks, had been happily smoking, sniffing and swallowing their workmates’ largesse all along, part of the lurid blur of shore-leave or the punishing grind of nightly performance, without realising that they were having visions and seeing things in a new way. Artists had been doing it too, Frenchmen, Indians, Arabs. And of course all along smart, fast, well-travelled people had given the local drugs a try out of curiosity. For a while the more respectable British critics jeered brutally, and with relentless stupidity, at the effusions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, even Burroughs, which they purported to find undisciplined, sentimental and faux naïf. But they could hardly do the same to Aldous Huxley, I mean he was one of the Huxleys for God’s sake, Nancy Cunard or someone had been nasty about him, clever chap too if a bit strange. Surely Evelyn Waugh had … de Quincey of course … and didn’t Baudelaire …
Suddenly the neglected descriptions of visual, aural and emotional splendour, of oblique and magical forms of insight, started to boil through the crust of ideological prohibition, composed of two-dimensional images of drug-induced slavery, misery, poverty, cruelty, perversion and general foreign slackness, with which we had all been raised from the cradle. People began approaching their racier friends to see if some of this famous marijuana might not be available. It was a way of dipping a toe into the murky but strangely inviting waters of alternative consciousness.
My impression, for what it is worth, is that even with her lovers Rene was not much given to transports of passion; that she was essentially maternal and tolerant in her attitude to men, built psychically − and physically for that matter − for comfort rather than speed. Bit knackered are we? Pissed off? There there darlin. Let’s ave a smoke and some whisky. Something along those lines. Her lovers, inevitably fairly numerous over time but honourably dealt with in series rather than simultaneously, overlapped I suppose another shadowy category, that of Rene’s associates. For one has to remember that she had her main existence, her roots, in what the French call the milieu. She was a bit like Garance in Les Enfants du paradis, but without the subterranean heat: she socialised with bohemians, sold her favours to cash customers, had lovers some (but not all) of whom were totally uncriminal individuals. Whether there was a Lacenaire in her movie or not, she seemed very much at home with boxers and hoods, in whose company she was often to be seen.
As Rene was palpably a free agent, able to dispose of her time and come and go as she wished, what might be called the corporate level of her professional life was never apparent to me. Perhaps there wasn’t one, although common sense suggests that people in vulnerable quasi-legal work situations tend to acquire, even when strictly speaking they do not need it, some form of paid protection. The forms this protection takes and the nature and level of payment are obviously variable, open to negotiation. More than once I visited Rene in an ornately appointed, thickly carpeted apartment in genteel white-stucco Gloucester Terrace, a block away from Westbourne Terrace in an area that would call itself Bayswater were it not for the proximity of Paddington Station. It wasn’t her flat but she was often there. The place was kept spotless apart from a litter of quality gauge on the Axminster in front of the garish sub-G-Plan bar in the corner of the sitting room, dropped by drunk, careless or over-excited individuals rolling joints.
There was something a little frightening about this flat, some vibe that passed unidentified if not entirely unnoticed in the welter of youthful experience, but that I now realise tweaked at my much-ignored bourgeois early warning system. It might have been the cleanliness and tidiness, the hotel-like absence of personal objects and domestic litter, or the combination of expensive fittings and bad B-movie taste, or the fact that there was no owner, no host. Or it might have been Rene’s giggling account of sitting demurely on a chair to the underside of which a Luger pistol had been hastily taped − if not at the Gloucester Terrace flat, then certainly somewhere exactly similar − throughout a lengthy visit by the CID.
I don’t have a clear impression of what it is like to be a prostitute, or any woman for that matter, but I believe it is safe to assume that with time work became more of a burden to Rene as it does to most people sooner or later. It is often said, too, that the profession she followed makes women age rapidly, and I have no reason to doubt it. After a while Rene stopped coming to see us, not suddenly but gradually; she moved to some inconvenient place and was seen less often in the Gate. Suddenly we realised that nobody had seen her for a year or more, although she was still around and one could get news of her. Her life had changed in some way: she was working harder, or finding work harder to get, or saving money, or supporting someone. Either she had grown up or the world had got her in a stranglehold, it wasn’t clear which. Later I heard she had retired and was living in Dollis Hill. Later still, some ten years ago, I was told she had died of some rapid cancer. She can’t have been fifty years old.
Much as I liked Rene I can’t pretend to be sorry that I didn’t get in touch again. To see her changed, ill, shrunken, snappish, would have been unbearable without some secure access to the person within, some history of intimacy. For without that history people are quite likely to grow apart with the passage of time. Poor Irene would have felt defenceless without her physical splendour, the beauty that seemed to brighten her surroundings, that was her livelihood, that she never mentioned, that filled her with quiet, inoffensive satisfaction and underpinned her sweetness of character. She wouldn’t have wanted to be seen looking like the dog’s dinner we must all become in the end.
c. 2011 (not written for publication)
[1] She did once actually. Before I realised I had no musical talent apart from being able to sing in tune, I tried to learn to play tenor saxophone, then my favourite instrument. Rene one night dropped my sax on her toe, making a small dent in its bottom curve. It must have hurt a lot. As I peered closely and worriedly at the dent, Rene exclaimed indignantly: ‘What about my toe?’
John Howe: Bricolage: Essays, Journalism and Improvisations 