– St Augustine? ‘Salus extra ecclesiam non est’.
London 12 July 1930
Delightful evening with Sandra Hunt, the young waitress I befriended in the Strand on Monday. I popped in on Tuesday to renew my invitation to the theatre and found she had all but forgotten about it! How thoughtless are the young about things that should most demand their attention. Said she thought I had been ‘throwing her a line’ in inviting her to the West End. Reassured her I desired only her company in Hippodrome stalls, mentioning that I was a widower who enjoyed the thrill of live drama. She finally accepted. Angry glances from the dragon-lady in charge of tea room, who kept telling the put-upon girl to return to work.
She was waiting for me on Wellington Street, wearing the same blue raincoat as when we met, silky blonde hair quite straight, except for one charming kink where it falls over her right ear. Caught my breath as I realised how much her face reminded me of –
Enough. She had never been to theatre before! Not just in the West End – she had never been in any theatre, not even a school play, nor even mummers calling in her Hardyesque home village. She loved the stalls, the proscenium arch, the programme, the ladies in their finery nodding at us (doubtless counting us as father and daughter), the velvet curtain. ‘Is there a big screen behind the drapes?’ she asked, in her artless way. She loved the play, its clipped and brittle rallies corresponding to many young girls’ notions of sophistication. She even essayed twirly little dance on the cobbles of Covent Garden Market. Delightful. Bought her sausages and chips at the Brigham Café, and learned more of her family. She has not, after all, been abandoned. Parents sent her and her sister on rail journey to the metropolis with cash subvention, and are coming to London next month to check their progress. So Sandra has no immediate need of guardian and protector against baser instincts. Excellent.
Sandra asked me about our first conversation in the café. Which film star had I taken her for? I explained about Miss Dietrich and The Blue Angel.
‘She plays a performer,’ I said. ‘A kind of exotic dancer in a club, wearing only underwear and a top hat, and sitting astride a chair.’
‘Is it good?’ said Sandra. ‘I mean, would I like it?’
‘I know nothing of your taste in such things, but it is a remarkable study in moral corruption, one that may hold lessons for a young person, about the power of sensual gratification.’
‘So there’s dancing and singing, and this woman in a hat?’ she said. ‘Isn’t there a story? I like a nice story.’
‘Indeed there is,’ I said, ‘a story about a respectable man, a professor, who falls in love with a femme fatale, gives up everything for her and ends his life as little more than a clown.’
‘Ooh,’ said Sandra, ‘I think I’ll go and see that. It sounds great.’
Even as I described the plot, I felt a tintinnabulation of alarm. It occured to me that, though it served as a conversational topic, The Blue Angel is perhaps not a film impressionable young girls should be encouraged to see.
I got the bill. We caught a cab and I dropped this sweet-faced young girl outside her cramped lodgings in Camberwell Green.
London 15 July 1930
Yesterday my fifty-fifth birthday, a day for sober self-examination, yet I rose in excellent spirits, like one – thank God! – perpetually reborn to the fray. Surveyed my ageing flesh in the silvered bathroom mirror. A touch of rheum about the eyes, a deal of sag about the neck, and the brow-lines now feature a cross-hatched complexity like a Piranesi drawing; but on the whole, no need to send for the mortician yet! In a sudden impulse of vanity, I sought out the nail scissors and snipped at the profusion of hairs extruding from my auricular cavities. The eyebrows too have a new tendency to bolt and straggle, and with them too I dealt severely.
Mrs Parker cooked a celebratory breakfast of kippers and scrambled eggs with too much milk in the beaten eggs (comme d’habitude, alas!), and we clinked teacups in a domestic parody of a banqueting toast. The feast day of St Alice of Ravenna, that sweet young flower of sixteenth-century martyrdom. Too few Renaissance paintings commemorate her uncomplaining death, crushed between millstones by Moorish brigands in the Saharan wastes. She will remain, I fear, a dim footnote in the history of North African missions unless I single-handedly rescue her from obscurity.
There was no time to regret my lack of anniversary cards from the children. M, I fear, is preoccupied with our houseful of lame dogs, and the state of the boiler. I should have telephoned. By 10 a.m., I was patrolling Fleet Street – the sunlight blazing off the noble frontage of the law courts, a divine birthday gift.
In Somerset House, I endeavoured to find Elsie Teenan’s birth certificate, in the hope of locating her errant mama, but only an unmannerly crew of Teahans, Teemans and Teamonts appeared beneath my flicking fingers. Most frustrating.
I will not give up on poor Elsie. I will not have her spend one more night outside Waterloo Station among the taxis, flagging for custom in her grey Tipperary shawl. There is no sight in London more pathetic than a young harlot who has found no clients by 3 a.m. I wish she would cease her doomed attempts to sell her body (or to ‘find some young feller to go home with’ in her cluelessly romantic turn of phrase) and embrace a more virtuous life as, say, a maidservant, until she finds a passing Dublin construction worker who will recognise her potential, embrace her spindle-framed loveliness, sing to her from Moore’s Irish Melodies, stop her complaining mouth with appreciative kisses and bear her away to a fulfilled life of twins and St Patrick’s Day shamrock in the new suburban Eden of Tooting Common. I have seen it work. One can build a Jerusalem, of sorts, in London’s green and burgeoning suburbs.
At noon, I popped into St Paul’s where a funeral was in full swing. Nobody I knew, but I derived a cold comfort from the dignified obsequies, the profusion of flowers, the fume of expensive cathedral incense. I was cheered at this sad event by the sight of the dead man’s family. The widow was a handsome woman in her fifties, ‘piss-elegant Mayfair’ as Rose would have said. The lady’s dignified bearing softened by the swell of her bosom in a well-cut black crape gown, she extended an eloquent arm around the waist of her eldest daughter as the Bishop flapped the fuming censer around an expensive mahogany coffin. The daughter laid her head on her mother’s shoulder in a gesture both needy and sweetly supportive. I gazed at this charming tableau of womanhood, admiring their mutual support. I longed to go up and interpose my body between them, to extend caring arms about their waists and tell them they had nothing to fear, since the Life Eternal had embraced their husband and father – yet something stopped my impetuous impulse. So I remained at the end of the pew, singing the climactic hymn, ‘As We Walk the Paths of Sorrow to the Shores of Galilee’, remarking inwardly how similar is the tune to the chorus of ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, a great favourite of mine.
I popped into the offices of the Church Times in Fleet Street, hoping to interest Mr Humphrey Goodman in the progress of our charitable work at the Runaway Boys’ Retreat in Whitechapel. I brought along a score of the new leaflets (a piteous tableau of a woman clutching her luckless infant, driven from her father’s door into a snowy field populated by expiring robins, above the legend ‘More To Be Pitied Than Scorned!’ – surely an image to melt the sternest heart) hoping to persuade him that one might be reproduced on the front page with a suitably affecting editorial. But Mr G, despite his Bunyanesque name, was ‘engaged’, they told me, ‘in writing up the Bishops’ Conference’ and could not spare ten minutes.
Luncheon at the Jolly Farmers with Vincent Doughty, whose clothing manufactory goes, he tells me, from strength to strength. He has started to take
