London Blues Page 6

  Desmond is always saying that if I hear anything I should tell him, as he pays well for a good story. I told him about the Duke of Edinburgh regularly visiting these two black prostitutes in Dolphin Square, and how I overheard one of the coloured girls talking about it to her friend, in hushed tones, in the Snax Bar. But that’s not all. The Duke was being blackmailed by an international syndicate of guys in expensive suits with Italian names who had secretly taken photographs. A great story. A really great story. I know it was because I made it all up.

  The first thing Desmond does with a good story is phone his pals up at the Yard. He’s shopped more petty criminals than the rest of London. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he also collected an informer’s fee. ‘Money is what it’s all about, son,’ he says, and I guess it is. That is certainly what motivates the bent coppers who take weekly ‘contributions’ from all of the bigger villains in London. It’s known as ‘licence money’.

  One Saturday morning Desmond staggered into the Snax Bar and said he had a problem and that I had to help him. He led me to a corner table, sat me down, looked hither and thither as though we were in a den of spies (or, worse, other journalists), pulled his chair up, sat down himself with a sly glance to the door, leant forward, looked around once more, and said in a barely audible whisper, ‘The … blue … film … racket.’ Nothing more. That was it. The statement hung there in the air. I didn’t know what to say. The blue film racket what? He didn’t say anything further, he was looking about again. What was I supposed to say, Yes, please!? The blue film racket? I began to think I was being thick. There was something I should say in response but I didn’t know what it was. He’s just staring at me. Is my name going to be put in the frame as a Mr Big to protect someone else or what? I was waiting for him to start talking like one of his detective friends: ‘It’s all right, son. We’ve got you bang to rights. You can tell me everything. Be helpful to me and I’ll play fair with you.’ All detectives talk like this because that’s how they talk in Desmond’s books, and I’ve read two of them, Robbery on My Patch and Villainy on My Doorstep. But hold on, Desmond is about to say something.

  ‘It’s worth a fiver.’

  ‘A fiver? What’s worth a fiver?’

  ‘The story. The whole story. The whole inside story … the fearless truth.’

  Fearless truth!!?? This guy thinks like he writes, no less.

  ‘Desmond, I haven’t got any fearless truth. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  A long silence. The face of the Crown Prince of Crime Reporting drops like a schoolboy who’s just had a bar of chocolate confiscated.

  ‘You don’t know about the blue film rackets then?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about them.’

  ‘I just thought you might. Nobody else about today. I’ve got a problem.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A very quiet week. We need a feature for page two. The editor says we have to do a major exposé of the blue film racket about every six months and tomorrow is as good a Sunday as ever, and it’s been a lean week … and I’m a bit burnt out, old boy, to tell you the truth.’

  Desmond’s problems are also his listener’s problems. It is a childlike egocentric world he inhabits. He’s irritating me no end now.

  ‘You’ve written these stories before, you know what to write.’

  ‘I need something fresh. I’m stymied.’

  ‘OK then. How’s this? For the first time ever blue films are being organised, promoted, in a big way in this country. It’s a slick operation. They are all professionals. And, what’s more, they are regularly making films over here now and not relying on old foreign films made in the 1920s.’

  ‘Yes. A slick operation!’

  ‘High profits. A wave sweeping the country.’

  ‘A wave sweeping the country!’

  ‘The police know who the Mr Big is but he’s surrounded himself with expensive lawyers. The police are patiently waiting for him to make a slip.’

  ‘Patient crime-busters. A slip. I want lots more plausible detail, Tim.’

  Well, I gave it to him and the following appeared, featured over two pages under his byline, the next day. A fitting counterpoint to the greasy bacon and burnt toast on the nation’s breakfast tables.

  I GET THE PASSWORD TO

  THE SECRET WORLD OF BLUE FILM FILTH

  From the murky back alleys of Soho to a more fashionable and smart area of central London I have followed the trail of the ‘blue’ film traffic. There are no shady advertisements, no ex-directory telephone numbers. The only ‘passport’ is a personal introduction.

  Even in the basement clubs of Soho the subject is taboo.

  This ‘blue’ film traffic is a subject for concern.

  This is what Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, said about it in the House of Lords during the second reading of the Obscene Publications Bill:

  ‘We must face it that grossly obscene films in houses or the rooms of clubs are one of the evils of life. There have always been places which try to attract people to shows of this kind. I think they ought to be struck at.’

  Lord Denning said films exhibiting obscenity could be smuggled in from another country and bought at a cost of some £50. These would be displayed in private at £2 to £3 per seat.

  I have news for his Lordship. This filth is no longer imported from abroad. It is made here in Britain. There is a ‘blue’ wave sweeping the country.

  I set out on a voyage of discovery.

  Though the ‘blue’ film business is one of the underworld’s most closely guarded secrets, the frontier can be crossed.

  Especially with a well-filled wallet. The wallet is important. Very important.

  So too is perseverance.

  This is how I did it.

  First I browsed for hours in Soho bookshops specialising in pin-ups, books of nudes and nude ‘stills’ at 10 shillings for five.

  In these shops totally obscene photographs were displayed.

  If the bookshop manager thought you looked like a ‘good punter’ he would invite you to see ‘something stronger’ at the back of the shop. Here in a half-light you could buy photographs of the most depraved activities for £1 to 25s. for a set of five. These ‘specials’ showed sexual activities that would make a hardened crime-buster reach for the banister.

  As Detective-Inspector Greenslade of Scotland Yard once said to me, ‘The depths of depravity to which the common pornographer sink know no bounds.’

  It was in one of these Soho bookshops that I was granted my ‘passport’ to the underworld of filth.

  I was approached by the dark-haired, black-eyed, Levantine-complexioned [Levantine – Fleet Street codeword for Jew. Desmond can boast anti-Semitism amongst his many talents.] manager of one of these shops who offered me expensive, coloured photographs. I said I was more interested in films.

  He looked at me quizzically and then hurriedly scribbled a telephone number on a scrap of paper. He said the number was written in reverse so it would remain secret. He said, ‘Mention me and you will have a good time, honourable sir.’

  I rang the number. A well-spoken woman answered and we arranged to meet outside Baker Street underground station.

  I waited five minutes at the underground station. A smartly dressed woman appeared from the shadows of a building.

  I mentioned the name of the bookshop manager. The woman asked me to follow her.

  ‘It’s not far,’ she said. ‘We cannot be too careful. The police are keen and I don’t like toughs. I don’t like trouble either. It’s not good for business.’

  ‘This will cost you ten [£10]. I know that’s a bit steep but there’s no nonsense. Any further services are extra.’

  We walked about 300 yards to a block of luxury flats. I followed the woman up to the first floor and into an expensively decorated flat. We went into a well-furnished sitting room.

  A large radiogram played softly in the corner. On the wall above it was a silver screen measuring 5
ft. 6ins. by 4ft. 9ins.

  In the middle of the room on an elegant coffee table was a projector. It was angled at the screen.

  ‘Sit down and make yourself comfortable,’ said the woman. ‘I’ll be back in a jiff.’

  She left the room.

  There was a divan in the corner of the room, a large settee and two easy chairs. Behind me was a very expensive writing-desk.

  The woman returned with three small reels of films.

  ‘I think you will like these,’ she said. ‘They are all new and made in England. We do not import old films from abroad. We make them ourselves.’

  The first film like the other two was revolting.

  It was called ‘Up Skirts and Down Slacks’ and the cast numbered two, a young man and a young woman. It was filmed in a flat that looked very much like the flat I was now sitting in.

  When it was over I was offered a drink – ‘At no extra charge.’ I declined.

  The first film was very carefully re-wound and then the second one was shown.

  It featured a blonde girl with two coloured girls and was named ‘Two Blacks Make a White’. It was the most disgusting thing I had ever seen in my life.

  The third, ‘Gymkhana Sluts’, featured a blonde and a brunette with a man. It was made in a riding school.

  Each film lasted about fifteen minutes and was made in black and white. There was no soundtrack. The films were run to music from the radiogram.

  ‘I’ve had a busy day,’ said the woman. Her name was Stella. ‘I have to pay £10 per film per day to the distributors. There are lots of girls organised like me. We get our films from the man who makes them. He is very rich and successful. But I have to be careful. I have nosy neighbours so I never have more than twenty-five men a day here. Would you like any additional services?’

  I made an excuse and left, after I handed over £10.

  Stella is one of many girls caught up in the new ‘blue’ film web run by the Mr Big of ‘Blue’ Films. A man who has sworn to turn England into the ‘blue’ film capital of the world and to make the racket a million pounds a year business.

  You can rest assured that the crime fighters at Scotland Yard are working on his case and that it is only a matter of time before they have him where he belongs – in prison.

  This was virtually all invention. My invention. I particularly liked the fake film titles! The Lords Kilmuir and Denning quotes I dare say, were dug out by some sub on the paper, yet the lad himself takes the money and the glory for doing fuck all.

  I didn’t know it at the time but my fictional venture into blue films presaged a bizarre invitation some weeks later courtesy of French Joe, another Modern Snax regular who’ll soon be appearing on the horizon.

  I’ve only ever seen one blue film and that was down in the docks at Chatham. I suppose there are blue films in Soho but I haven’t noticed them. What we have mainly are small cinemas showing subtitled French ‘X’ films and such. You won’t see much more than the odd naked tit. That’s about it. The Nudist Story opened a little while back. Just about the biggest thing that ever hit these flea-pits. They’re packed out. Nudist films have become big business now.

  Charlie says these pits are really just full of dirty old men giving themselves one off the wrist or paying a streetwalker to do the same. That’s why, he says, the seats are wet and sticky and why there’s tissue paper all over the floor. Fellows go there to play pocket billiards, to have a hand shandy.

  If I continue conjugating the depravity hereabouts we next come to the striptease joints (with the emphasis on the tease) and then the medical-goods shops and the bookshops.

  The medical shops sell condoms, contraceptive creams, pessaries, and all kinds of preparations (good word that!) that add to the pleasure of the act of sexual union. They also sell pills and trusses and special underpants for the incontinent. You only ever see old men going in and out of them and the window displays are full of faded products covered in dust and look like they haven’t been changed since 1933.

  A typical window announces:

  DAMAROIDS – THE GREAT BRITISH REJUVENATOR

  HYGEOLENE – THE PERFECT CONTRACEPTIVE

  DUREX – THE NAME YOU CAN TRUST

  And how about this from the Charing Cross Road?

  OTHER RUBBER GOODS

  * * *

  Please ask the MANAGEMENT for Further Details of Your REQUISITES if not on Display.

  Also in the windows you will find several types of book. The marriage stuff with titles like:

  IDEAL MARRIAGE

  IMPOTENCY – ITS CAUSES AND CURE

  MODERN SEXUAL RELATIONS

  PRACTICAL EUGENICS [Huh!?]

  WEDDING NIGHT ETIQUETTE

  … and then on the other side the ‘art study’ titles:

  BEAUTY’S DAUGHTERS

  CURVES AND CONTRASTS

  OF THE HUMAN FIGURE

  THE FEMALE FORM IN LIGHT AND SHADE

  … wherein too there are always some titles on nudism, or ‘naturism’ as the devotees thereof call it:

  EXERCISING AS NATURE INTENDED

  BEAUTY FROM GERMANY

  SUN WITHOUT SHAME

  … and so on. German naturist books are always popular and they have titles like Körperkultur und Erziehung (I’m quoting from memory) and are full of buxom heavy blonde Bavarian maidens called Lotte who look like they were enthusiastic breeding units for producing Hitler Youth.

  Charlie describes these books as strokers’ manuals, wankers’ digests and ‘handbooks for geezers who want the solution in their fists.’ He also says they are for blokes who like dating handkerchiefs and practising five-finger exercises. He’s a fund of sexual slang and colloquialism.

  There’s something fascinating about these farther shores of ‘vice’. It brings out the voyeur in me.

  If the medical shops cater for the needs of the practical man, the man of action, the dirty bookshops, perhaps a dozen in number, cater for the man of imagination. They supply the stuff that gets him soaring in his reveries and showing blue films all night long on the back of his eyelids.

  The windows are always crammed full of American ‘girlie’ magazines. They’re tame enough, glamour stuff like those dreary pin-ups put out by Harrison Marks. You go inside the shop and you’re starting to see nipples now and air-brushed crotches. Hang about here for a while and look serious enough and the manager will ask you if you would like to ‘come out back and see something stronger?’ He lifts one side of the counter and you walk through to the backroom where the real action is. Here rows of photographs are kept wrapped in cellophane in packets of five in long wooden trays. The trays are labelled so you can go straight to your partiality.

  JUVE is old streetwalkers dressed as Girl Guides or in schoolgirl uniforms being rogered by Sir. LES or LEZ is lesbian stuff. FLAGE is flagellation and sado-masochistic material. PERV is girls dressed in rubber and tied up, or a white girl being screwed by a black guy, while STRAIGHT is a white couple doing it missionary style or side by side (but certainly not doggy style). That’s it. Sometimes you may see some BEST[-iality] which demonstrates that a girl and her dog are not to be parted, but you’ll never see any HOMO. You’ll have to go to Paris or Port Said for that. This London stuff is produced by straights for straights.

  The quality of these photographs is awful. The exposure is nearly always right but the lighting is harsh and flatly uniform, rather as if the shots were taken under strip lighting. The poses and composition are as unappealing as the old scrubbers and the fellows who appear in them. They all look as though they were shot in a basement in Paddington in 1945, and, indeed, they could well have been.

  Some of these shops are reputed to have a turnover of £200 or more a week. Of course, the police don’t close them, because most of the police are on the take from them, certainly the Obscene Publications Squad at West End Central who are supposed to deal with them. One of these days this whole story might come out, but I doubt it.

  A few of the shops, l
ike the ‘long shop’ in Old Compton Street, next door to the bomb site, always have a shelf or two of ‘readers’ out in the back. ‘Readers’ are books. As magazines are invariably called ‘books’ by the semi-illiterates who manage and frequent these shops another term had to be conjured up for actual books. Thus ‘readers’, as opposed to the rest of the stock that might be termed ‘lookers’. Readers might be sexological textbooks such as Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Stekel and their modern imitators who have MD or PhD after their (pseudonymous) name and choose to publish their studies of female autoerotic practices (or whatever) through cheap American paperback houses operating out of unlikely addresses, like Cleveland, Ohio. They might be what antiquarian booksellers call curiosa or oeuvres galantes, such as a history of corporal punishment or an anthropological study of female circumcision (with plates, yet) or even some reprinted drollery. They could also be what is known as ‘Soho typescripts’. These are short stories a few thousand words or so in length churned out on Gestetner duplicating machines and printed on blotting paper. They are written by local hacks for £1 a thousand words. The hacks are semi-literate too and the stories are bereft of wit or saving graces. They are even bereft of imagination. One typescript I had was called Nurses Like It Always (there was some confusion in the ‘story’ as to whether it should have been All Ways). Here’s the opening sentence verbatim:

  Pretty Staff Nurse Susan of Saint Hildas’ hadn’t had a good hard cock up her for at least 24hrs so when Syd the decorator walked up to her in the Laundry cupeboard her juices start flowing right away and she says “Get them offand show me your a Man” and he did and she took his big cock and gave it a real sucking while she rubbed herself and brought herself off and then he said lay down there I’m going to stick it right up you and he did and while they were doing this Harry’s mate came in [who’s Harry?] and saw the real horny action for himself and got his big dick out and decided she’d have it at the same time up her arse.