Golden days, Mabel calls that wonderfully repressive era when you couldn’t get a drink legally for fourteen and a half hours out of the twenty-four. Her membership register was like a starstruck fan’s autograph book — Charlie Chaplin, Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart, Laurence Olivier. And then there were even those who came off the street and signed themselves in under their own names, for some strange reason. Genuine addresses too, in some cases. You’d think they wanted to be arrested.
Mabel had opened the New Kismet when the old Kismet in Great Newport Street had closed, and she had never looked back until just lately. Afternoons only the New Kismet was these days, three till seven, that was enough for Mabel at her age, then they could bugger off back to the French or the Coach or wherever they wanted. It is getting so it is all the same to Mabel whether they come down or not. Time to be putting her feet up. Little place in Brighton. Soho by the Sea.
“Are you a member, sir? Go on, then, fuck off, this is a private club,” she calls mechanically as young James Flood tentatively rounds the bend in the shabby staircase. Mabel models herself on the legendary Muriel Belcher, of the Colony Room Club, for whom she did the odd stint as a barmaid back in the old black and white days. The cattier members say she has borrowed Muriel’s pugnaciousness but none of her personality.
Too late James Flood recalls that he really is a member — one of a tiny select band who have actually paid over their twenty-five pounds dues and received a grubby pasteboard oblong in return. Too late Mabel remembers it also — he has bolted.
Poor James is too young and too nervous to be working in Fleet Street — certainly too young and too green to be on the Soho beat. The Soho beat is a new venture for the daily London Examiner. Its editor Jane Rich, herself newish, was dining in the Groucho Club one evening when the celebrated television personality Brendan Barton was escorted out for urinating into a plantpot. It occurred to her that there must be a thousand news stories in Soho. There are indeed, but none of them has as yet been divulged to young James, who has been assigned to the task of finding them. Soho knows how to keep its secrets.
Certainly there would have been nothing for him in the New Kismet where the only other customer, at this hour, getting on for seven, is Jenny Wise, actress, nursing her last triple brandy, no ice, no soda. If young Flood watched more old films on the box he might just have recognised her. He would half know the name, anyway. In her day Jenny Wise was going to be another Julie Christie, but then she didn’t quite become it. She did get some star billing back in the mid-sixties, though. Big mates with Diana Dors, Bonar Colleano, that crowd, she was. Invites to all the openings at the Odeon, Leicester Square. No stranger to the White Elephant, where Rex Harrison once blew her a kiss.
Jenny, now, is a bit of a link between the Soho of Old Jakie and the Soho of Bell Famous Productions Ltd. Old Jakie, from his flyman days, remembers her playing the juve lead in some play or other at the Apollo — always very nice to him, she was, gave him many a fag. Ellis Hugo Bell, for all that he is definitely not thinking Jenny Wise — he is thinking Kate Winslet, he is thinking some of these new models, that’s if they can act — knows her from Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion and the Sky Movie channels. That Tell Me Tomorrow was her big break, playing opposite James Mason. Then a couple of others, more downmarket, more B-feature, you were then thinking Eric Portman, you were thinking that fellow who finished up doing voiceovers. And then nothing. The usual route. Arms like a dartboard by the time she’d finished, silly bitch — not that Hugo hadn’t tried shooting up, but he didn’t have to be at Shepperton at six the next morning, did he? — and then when she’d got herself weaned off that, the booze. The hard stuff. Still not yet sixty, still keeping her looks although she’s getting fleshy with it, she has her regular stool at the end of the bar in the New Kismet, the one always occupied in Soho clubs by ladies of a certain age who seem to celebrate a lot of birthdays.
Worked on, there could be a story after all in Jenny Wise for the Soho correspondent of the Examiner, if only she wasn’t speechless. By this time of the evening, Jenny can only slur.
“Come on, Jen, let’s have you pissed off up them stairs to Bedfordshire,” says Mabel, not unkindly. As always, she asks: “Now are you going to be all right?”
Yes, Jenny will be all right as she pushes her brandy aside for tomorrow, gathers up her bits and pieces and gropes her way up the stairs, with Mabel behind her to put the chain on the door and catch her if she falls. She’s only to get across to her little flat in Charing Cross Road where she will crash down until three in the morning, breakfast time.
As Jenny’s day ends, so Soho’s begins. Ronnie Scott’s will be tuning up by now, and the Raymond Revuebar throwing open its doors. Give the drag haunt Madame Jo-Jo’s, a favourite with Christine a.k.a. Christopher, a couple of hours yet, but most of the club bars and pubs have already filled up. Soon the greeters will be taking up their posts in the smart new brasseries, and the waiters will hover anxiously in the doorways of the dingy old restaurants as if fearing they will never see a customer again. There is not a table to be had in the pavement cafés, the human flotsam and jetsam are crowding the streets now, the traffic is crawling, the discreet illuminated doorbells glow as dusk closes in.
It is another day beginning in Soho, one day like any other day — that is to say, different from every other one.
1
Butterfield’s Rhubarb Farms Ltd, of South Higginshaw, just outside Leeds, had a firm policy guideline for its truckers: no hitch-hikers.
This was because one of its lorries, in the old pre-refrigeration days, had been hijacked at air-pistol point and made to drive across the Pennines to Rochdale, where the gunman’s auntie, from whom he had expectations, was terminally poorly. By the time thirty tons of rhubarb finally made it down south it had gone limp and the wholesaler was not best pleased.
But Dave Boothroyd, driving an articulated eighteen-wheeler down to New Covent Garden, liked a bit of company, what with the terrible reception he was getting on Radio 5 Live, the only station he ever listened to. Even in this high-tech age the tachograph didn’t show if you stopped to give some poor bugger a lift, and another thing: there was an old Spanish custom that the hitcher stood you a fry-up at the Happy Eater south of Doncaster.
“Don’t see you in the Miners much these days, kidder,” said Dave over two rashers, egg, sausage, beans, black pudding and fried slice. The Miners Arms, South Higginshaw. Changed its name to the Cross-eyed Beagle after a makeover, but was still, to its regulars, the Miners.
“No, I been spending moster my time in Leeds,” said Alex Singer. Alexander to his mum, Alex to his muckers, Al to close friends, Ali to the girl-friend. “Did do, before she pissed off.”
“You’re at the uni, aren’t you, Alex?”
“Metro, yeh.” Leeds Metropolitan University, third year, media studies.
“I might be wrong, kidder, but didn’t you have a bit of a beard, last time I saw you? Little goatee?”
“Chin beard, yeh yeh yeh.”
“Excuse me, Alex, but I was under the distinct impression that the biggest majority of beards grew on chins. As I say, I could be wrong.”