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Journals of Harold Davidson

London 15 September 1930

Have finally made contact with Miss Harris! It has not been easy. The young lady, despite her iniquitous employment, seems to have a positive aversion to being At Home to callers. I have made the dismal trek to Queen Street, Camden, four times now, not counting the evening when I made the error of tapping on Barbara’s window and finding an intimidating face looking out. From my knowledge of the Profession, I am aware that mornings are slow (the girls invariably sleep in), lunchtime finds some vigorous activity under way, listless afternoons speed up – like cricket matches! – after the tea interval, then die down from what we have learned to call ‘the cocktail hour’ at 6 p.m. until the pubs start to empty around ten, which is the signal for a great unloosening of sin all over the city.

I called three times in the early evening. Each visit was as fruitless at the last. I stood before the door of number 14, pressing the lowest bell, but heard only a distant inner jangling – like the twanging of my nerves as I awaited yet another hostile confrontation like the last. Resolving to give it up after this final attempt, I called yesterday in the mid-morning, pressed the bell, looked sadly at the drawn curtains and rapped my knuckles on the glass pane …

The door flew open. A small girl stood before me, clad in a garment made of towelling material, off-white or cream. Her feet were bare. With her right hand she agitated a hand towel through curly brown locks and looked at me with her head in one side. I did not recognise her.

‘Yes?’

‘Miss Barbara Harris?’

‘Might be. Who’re you? And what, more to the point, is your problem, banging on a girl’s door at this hour of the morning?’

I examined my wristwatch. ‘It is ten thirty, Miss Harris. The world has risen and been about its business for three hours at least. I am Mr Harold Davidson. We met at Marble Arch some weeks ago. We had lunch in a café and I expressed a desire to call upon you to discuss …’ I faltered. What had we agreed to discuss? I blushed to recall our little colloquy.

‘Oh, I remember you,’ she said, ‘the gent sweating to death in your long coat. You bought me lunch and come on all innocent about the pudding.’ She laughed and towelled her curls. ‘Well, hello again. So you thought you’d give it a go, did you? After all your high earnest chat, you’ve spent a few weeks tossing and turning in your bed every morning and thinking, “Oooh, shall I? Shan’t I?” And here you are.’

Her face, suddenly revealed amid all the towelling, was not as I remembered it. In the morning light, she was a quite different proposition from the poised and soignée strumpet climbing aboard an omnibus. Before me stood a child, five feet nothing, in a childish towel gown.

‘May I come in?’

‘You’re a bit eager, aren’t you? I don’t usually entertain gentlemen until after elevenses. Sorry, but I’m not in the mood. Can’t you come back at lunchtime?’

It was not unlike calling upon one’s dentist without an appointment.

‘I have not called on you for – for that,’ I said. ‘I wish only to talk to you.’

‘Talk to me? What about?’ Under her curly brows, she was suspicious. ‘You’re not from some League of Decency?’

‘I come to see you as a friend, nothing more. A friend who brings you only good news. If you’d let me cross your threshold. I have’ – a brainwave struck me – ‘two small gifts for you, and an urgent message that cannot be conveyed on the street. Where, I notice, we are already becoming the object of enquiring glances.’

Two doors away, a vacuum-cleaner truck had halted and its driver was speaking to a rough-skinned matron in a housecoat and fluffy mules at number 10. Both were watching us with interest.

‘Don’t mind that old sow. You better come in. And if all this stuff about presents and news and messages means that I’ll be staring at some purple monstrosity two minutes from now, I swear to God I’ll bash it with a teaspoon, all right?’

Dazed by this onslaught, I entered the house, through a hallway filled with bicycles – one parked, as it were, halfway up the wall, hanging from two rusting bolts – and was suddenly in her living quarters.

It was a room such as I’d rarely encountered, even among the habitats of the wretched sisterhood. In one corner was a basin surmounted by a tiny mirror hanging from a nail. In the other, a rudimentary cooking hob with two gas burners was all but concealed beneath a junk-yard of blackened saucepans. Nothing, it seemed, had been washed in weeks. Against the wall, a table, stool and triptych mirror was submerged beneath an accumulation of jars, potions and powder receptacles, dead flowers, tickets, theatrical handbills, scent bottles with rubbery squeeze mechanisms. Every square inch of space was tumbled with the debris of decadence. Torn squares of magazine pages, bearing the likeness of Ivor Novello, ragged pieces of muslin veil, random photographs, undergarments in vivid shades of crimson and aquamarine – and across the side wings of the mirror, a long lilac feather boa was draped like tinsel across a Christmas tree from Gamages store.

The word ‘abandon’ hardly did justice to this wasteland of human depravity. Its centrepiece was the bed that lay before the window through which the noonday sunlight weakly shone. It was huge. Most tarts of my acquaintance count themselves fortunate to possess a single bed with a soft mattress and pillow, rather than a hard divan and a bolster. Miss Harris could boast a king-size bed, opulently arrayed with cotton sheets, a satin counterpane, an over-blanket in green chenille, and half a dozen pillows that would not have disgraced a Byzantine seraglio.

‘OK then,’ she said, sitting in the edge of the bed. ‘Where’s these little presents?’

I dug through the inner folds of my coat. From the Gifts Pocket, I located a small bar of Evening in Paris guest soap in a decorative box (special offer, 3/6, Boots pharmacy). In my Perishables Pocket, I found a bar of the new ‘Crunchie’ honeycomb-and-chocolate sweetmeat, and gave both to her with grave formality.

‘I offer you these small tokens of my esteem, Miss Harris, to mark the beginning of what I hope will be a long and fruitful alliance, as together we walk the thorny path towards the light that forever gleams –’

‘That it?’ she said, gazing at her gifts with incredulity. ‘Small is right. I never been given a bar of chocolate by a gentleman before, not since I was ten. As for the soap,’ (she sniffed it suspiciously), ‘you’d be better off cleaning drains with it rather’n giving it to a girl and saying it’s a token of your blooming esteem.’

She looked boldly up at me, her brown curls bouncing on her brow like Medusan snakes. ‘You’re a beginner in this game, int’cha? D’you really think you can bribe people with chocolates and scent?’

I was hurt by her tone. All over London I am known for my generosity. In my missionary work, I have showered the Abigails and Idas, the Jennys and Pennys, with sweet-smelling concoctions and treats, until they welcome my arrival in their lives as children welcome Father Christmas. To call my little votive offering a bribe – it was an outrageous slur on my intentions.

‘Oh, don’t look so sorry for yourself,’ said Barbara. ‘I’ve had worse things given to me by gentlemen. And I do like a bit of chocolate round about now.’ She broke off a piece of the orange-brown snack and popped it in her mouth. ‘And I know you wasn’t offering it to get a screw off me – you just wanna talk, right?’

I nodded.

‘Well, if all you want’s a little chat,’ she concluded, ‘you won’t mind me going back to bed. On me own, I mean.’ Upon which, still clad in her towelling robe, she slipped her legs under the sheets, lay back luxuriantly on the pillows and groaned. I feared that she might have suffered some injury, but it was a moan of sluggardly pleasure, as the chocolate melted on her tongue. Her face on the pillow split into a wide smile, like the Cheshire cat’s. A beam of sunshine chose that moment to intrude through the dirty window and settle on her face in a long rectangle of saturated light, falling from brow to chin, bisecting the line of her mouth to make a perfect Christian crucifix.

She closed her huge brown eyes. ‘Lovely sunny morning,’ she observed. I stood by the bed, gazing in wonder, gripped by an epiphany such as I have seldom encountered. Lines from Keats’s ‘Eve of St Agnes’ settled on my heart – that moment when Porphyro, hidden in his beloved’s chamber, discovers her at her prayers:

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,

As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon;

Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together pressed,

And on her silver cross soft amethyst,

And on her hair a glory, like a saint:

She seemed a splendid angel, newly dressed,

Save wings, for Heaven – Porphyro grew faint;

She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.

Never was a romantic sentiment less appropriate to its context than Keats’s words to this reeking boudoir, with its debris of flimsy undergarments by my feet, its indescribable cheap vests and grey bloomers half concealed by the huge bed. Yet I gazed at the girl as she lay silently basking on her kohl-stained pillow, illuminated by sunlight that seemed to conspire with the contours of her face and, like Porphyro, I too saw an angel there. No other word would do. Her caramel skin was flawless, her teeth, bared by a sensuous smile, were strong. Her hair, newly washed and dried, lay freed from the cloche-helmeted ropes I had encountered at Marble Arch. It curled in rich profusion around her ears and temples.

‘Are you going to stand there staring at me like I’m an exhibit?’ she asked, her eyes still shut. ‘I’m not a piece of merchandise in a bleedin’ shop, you know.’ She laughed to herself, mirthlessly. ‘Well, I mean, I am if that’s what you’re after. But I’m not here for winder-shopping, all right?’

‘No, Miss Harris.’ I recollected myself. ‘I was merely speculating about how you live. I cannot reconcile the apparent squalor of your address with the richness of your sleeping arrangements.’

‘You what?’

‘This bed, for example. I am older than you, yet I can only dream that some day I might possess a bed of such magnificence.’

‘Nice, isn’t it?’ She pulled herself upright, plumped the damask pillows into a fat double hillock and leaned back, like a plucky invalid – no, like a young duchess entertaining callers to hot chocolate and muffins at a breakfast levée in the days of Pope and Swift. ‘When I got this room a year ago, courtesy of a gentleman friend, he said, “Here’s a hundred quid, furnish it how you like,” so I blued half of it on a proper big bed. I reckon it’s where I ’ave the most fun by day as well as night, so I might as well get the best.’ She yawned. ‘You know they say people sleep for eight hours a night, so that’s like a third of a whole day? That means you spend a third of your life in bed. With me, it’s nearer half my life. So I like to be comfortable.’

‘Marvellous,’ I said, a little dazed. ‘I had not done the mathematical calculation before.’

‘What’s your bed like then?’ she asked. ‘Since we’re chattin’.’

I was nonplussed. ‘My bed? Why it’s, um, a solid cherrywood double divan for my wife and myself, with a large headboard. It cannot match this one for opulence, though it is very comfortable. The mattress is delightfully soft after a hard day’s labour, and –’

‘Hopeless,’ she said, crushingly. ‘Get rid of it.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Soft mattresses. They’re no good.’

‘No good?’

‘No good for screwing on. No good for the old fucky-doodah. You can’t get any friction, or purchase, or whatever the word is. Soft bloody mattresses, they ride along under you, they go boingboing-boing up an’ down, but they’re no use if you’re into deep penetration, are they? I’m sure you knew that once, even if you managed to forget it down the centuries.’

I was unbothered by her rudeness. Few things are more delightful than provocative conversation with a young woman.

‘Sit down here,’ she said. ‘See what I mean?’

I sat down, keeping my coat about me for fear of misunderstanding. The mattress was indeed a splendid combination of suppleness and give, like the sprung dance floor at the Strand Palace Hotel.

‘Pass me the hairbrush,’ she said, pointing to the floor. I found it between an ivory silk camisole and a single balled-up stocking. She tilted her head and began to brush her damp locks.

As she did so, the front of her towelling robe opened a good four inches. I looked away, discreetly. My gaze fell upon a plate of breakfast debris, easily a week old, wherein a curdled mess of scrambled egg had been impaled by a cigarette butt. Revolted, I turned back to my hostess. Her left breast lay revealed from the white robe. As she brushed her hair, stroke after languorous stroke, her head on one side, her eyes shut once more. Her left hand caressed her white bosom.

‘I must go,’ I said. ‘I should not have intruded on your toilette. Forgive my impertinence.’

‘There’s no need to rush away, Henry,’ she said. ‘I still don’t know what you’re doin’ here, but if you’d like to give me a bit of a fondle – well, I shouldn’t mind. You’re nice company in a funny sort of way.’

‘Harold is my name,’ I said sternly. ‘And, as I have said, I have not sought your address in order to slake some carnal appetite. I am interested in you, Miss Harris, because you are a clever young woman doomed to a life of exploitation, the result of some wrong turning you have taken. I wish only to find out more about you, in order to rescue you from sliding further into moral disarray. I came here today to say that I am at your disposal, to guide, to advise, to befriend, to offer you a map out of the labyrinth of –’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said the girl. ‘I’ve heard it all before. Lot of my older clients say the same thing.’ She adopted a music-hall voice of gruff, masculine gravitas. ‘“Let me take you away from all this, my dear. Let me find you a charming apartment just over a flower shop in Balham, where you won’t be a common tart no more, you’ll just be my personal private tart.” But I never said yes. I prefer to have my own place and entertain whoever I like.’

‘But, Barbara –’

‘Yes, Harold, go on then, explain how, “Oh no, it’s all different with me, I’m not like other men.” I collect excuses from men all over the place.’

The time had come to lay my cards on the table.

‘I am different, Miss Harris, because, you see –’ I drew in my breath and exhaled, with a certain drama – ‘I am a pastor, who wishes only to care for you and bring good things your way.’

‘Pastor? What’s that? Is that what they use to make milk taste better?’

‘A cleric, my dear. A clergyman. A priest. I am the rector of a parish in Norfolk called Stiffkey. But I tend to spend my working days attending to the needs of girls – ladies – in troubled circumstances in London.’

‘Oh, a sky pilot,’ she said. ‘Well, you didn’t act like one when we met. Why didn’t you tell me then? Where’s your dog collar?’

‘I tend not to wear one when going among the lower elements. Some of them find it … intimidating. A priest can be an alarming figure of authority, as well as an unwelcome reminder of the sanctity they have lost.’

‘Right,’ said Miss Harris. ‘So when you meet young girls on the game, you don’t tell them you’re in the Church, and you don’t tell ’em you’re going to save their souls either. So who do they think you are, apart from a stranger who might or might not be a client?’

‘A friend,’ I said, as gently as I could. She had such need of a true friend, for all her brash ways.

‘Oh yeah?’ She sat up in the bed with a rivalrous glint in her eye. ‘And in your friendly way, you take ’em for chops and mash in a café – and then what?’

‘Sometimes I offer them sustenance, it is true,’ I confessed, feeling a little defensive. ‘Sometimes I take them to the theatre. Many of my young charges have a romantic passion for the stage.’

‘Well, very nice of you, I’m sure. Young girl, in London, down on her luck, making a few bob off gentlemen callers, gets asked out to a West End play by charming gent in long coat, no strings attached, after which he’ll buy ’er supper then he’ll walk her ’ome, will he, and expect nothing in return?’

‘Right so far,’ I said shortly. I do not take kindly to being interrogated by children too young to vote.

‘And that’s it? Harry, I mean, who’s kidding who ’ere?’

I smiled at her. St Augustine himself must have encountered just such blank hostility, when conducting his saving ministry.

‘There is no question of “kidding”, Miss Harris,’ I said. ‘My strategy is simply to befriend these unfortunate girls, to become their ally and intimate, to establish close relations with them –’

‘I’ll say you want close relations. Close enough to get into their knickers.’

‘– in order to save them from a life on the streets, to find them work, to reunite them with their parents, to reveal the possibility of a better life. Perhaps a young girl such as you has never entertained the possibility that simple Christian altruism might govern human behaviour.’

‘Al-what?’

‘Altruism. It means doing good to others without thought of recompense.’

‘And you get no reckon pence, do you, for all this work, and theatre dates and dishing out money for lamb chops?’

‘None whatever.’

‘So at the end of the evening, they never give you a little kiss?’

‘I –’ I was not sure where this line of enquiry would take us. ‘I would not discourage any show of affectionate gratitude, within, of course, the bounds of decency.’

‘But would you encourage it, when they say, “Oooh, Harold, you’re so good to me,”’ (she adopted a fey, mincing tone, as of a child who has been bought an ice cream in Hyde Park), ‘“here’s a big kiss for all you’ve done for me, and there’s plenty more where that came from if you was to take me to the Adelphi on Saturday night”?’

I rose from the bed, aware that my hand on the counterpane was in close proximity to her unshielded breast.

‘I am a servant of Christ, Barbara. I am the rector of a flock who depend on me for guidance and enlightenment. It is no part of my morally directed strategy to solicit kisses from young women.’

‘But you do, don’t you?’ Her beautiful brown eyes were suddenly narrowed to unappealing slits.

‘I have a tactile nature. Many of these girls lack a father, or at least a father figure. I see no harm in enfolding them, occasionally, in the tender embrace of the Church, to reassure and soothe their flighty hearts, to offer them a solace that no other man of their rude acquaintance might bring.’

‘Aha! I knew it!’ she said. ‘The old harmless squeeze. We all know where that’s heading, don’t we?’

‘Not at all. My occasional embraces are paternal.’

‘So you don’t sleep with them?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘You just kiss them and hug them and leave it at that?’

A small tintinnabulation in my head told me it was time to move on from this potentially compromising discourse.

‘I told you I had an urgent message to convey to you,’ I said in a bustling tone. ‘It is this. My friend Lady Fenella Royston-Smith, a long-standing benefactor and supporter of the charities I have set up to help fallen women and runaway boys in the metropolis, wishes to meet you. She has agreed to introduce me to a couple of noble philanthropists, but to convince them of the importance of my work they wish to meet an example of the, ah, ladies I seek to help.’

‘Okey-dokey,’ said Barbara. ‘But I still don’t see why she’s invited me. I don’t think I know anyone called Fenella.’ She frowned. ‘Plenty called Smith of course.’

‘Do you not see, my dear Miss Harris?’ I said, my voice dropping to a confiding whisper. ‘This is your chance to move from your unfortunate occupation to a better life. To leave behind the sordid stews of prostitution, and find a position more worthy …’

Her eyes blazed. ‘I think it’s time you got one thing straight, Harold.’ She swept back the counterpane and stood before me, five foot nothing of child-woman self-righteousness. ‘I am not a bloody prostitute. Have you got that? Maybe I sleep with people, maybe I have sex with people I’ve just met, and maybe they might give me a little present now and again, to buy me a hat, but that’s it. I have boyfriends, lots of them, and they can stay here sometimes because they’re good to me and I like them. But I’m not flogging my body down alleys all night long, and I can’t be had just for money. And if your Lady Fifi What’s-’er-name wants to summon me round to some scabby hotel to show me off as a cheap tart, well, she can fuck right off, and so can you.’

Our conversation ended shortly afterwards. I will not inscribe in these pages the language used by Miss Harris to dismiss me from her premises. It was a fruitless encounter. I was unable to launch my usual campaign of prayers and spiritual exercises to cleanse her spirit. I could do nothing but try to defend my modus vivendi against this brazen, argumentative young wanton. I have never met a more obdurate sinner, so iron-clad against every prompting of moral decorum. Hopeless. I shall certainly not waste my time like this ever again.

London 17 September 1930

The papers are full once more of the exploits of Miss Amy Johnson who, after her remarkable circumnavigation of the globe in May, and her extended sojourn in Australia, has appeared back in London, to loud huzzahs. Frankly, I have been sceptical about the number of women who have taken to the skies in the last few years. Lady Heath, Lady Bailey, the elderly but intrepid Duchess of Bedford – their exploits in flying alone to far-flung bits of the empire, from Cape Town to Zanzibar, have become so commonplace, they seem merely a variant of the phenomenon of titled ladies racing sports cars at Brooklands, exchanging their Fortuny evening frocks for the problematic livery of mannish shirts, trousers and hideously unflattering goggles.

I have incorporated into my sermons the modern fascination of flight, and all the competitive, yearning spirit of women piloting their juddering crafts into hostile terrain, into Kalahari wastes and Nepalese foothills. I explained to the Stiffkey congregation on Sunday that all this aerial wanderlust is merely an emblem of mankind reaching for the heavens, trusting to the instruments on the dashboard, the ailerons and rudder, to steer them through the dangerous elements of wind, rain and gravity. Thus we all try to fly heavenwards on our journey of life, trusting to the guidance of Christ and the teaching of his apostles to carry us safely through the buffetings of corruption and sin. The less enlightened pilots may feel only a secular joy in flying above the territory of earth on which they once laboured, carried away by the exhilaration of freedom and amazed to feel they can land in Tartary or Samarkand in a matter of hours. But I know that their true impulse is not one of escape but of transcendence. They wish not to depart