Kitabı oku: «Sunday at the Cross Bones», sayfa 2
‘Where does she live?’
‘Oh –’ she waved a vague hand – ‘here and there.’
‘You can be a little more precise,’ said the rector.
Dolores, or Dolly, regarded him steadily. ‘I dunno what you’re thinking, right this minute, Harold, but you’re not to start with her.’ She brazenly took out a cigarette case, extracted a Virginia and lit it. ‘All right? Just don’t start in on her, the minute my back’s turned.’
The rector looked around, with a faint whinny of disavowal. ‘My dear girl –’
‘And who’s this geezer, anyhow?’ demanded the young harpy. ‘What the hell does he want?’ She leaned forward, her dark eyes lit up with suspicion.
‘This is a gentleman from the press, who seeks information about my pastoral work.’
‘Oh great,’ said Dolores, rising to her feet. ‘Bloody reporter, that’s all I need. Informer, more like.’
‘There is no reason to fear –’
‘I’m going to see what’s happened to Jezzie,’ she said, and flung herself away from our table, leaving a hefty waft of Woolworths scent and brass’s armpit.
That left us together.
‘I’m afraid I’ve upset your young friends, Padre,’ I said, as airily as I could. ‘All I was after was a few facts about your crusading work. Perhaps I should leave you to it.’
He put his hand on my arm, a gentle and insinuating gesture. ‘Stand your ground, my boy,’ he said, opening his greatcoat and taking out a huge cigar from a pocket within. ‘They will be back. These young girls regard me as their only hope in this vale of sin. They cleave to me instinctively, as though to an oak in a torrent.’
He crinkled the cigar – it was huge, I couldn’t afford a cigar like that – then picked up Dolly’s box of Swan vestas and lit it. Clouds of expensive blue smoke briefly enveloped his head in a foggy halo. He appeared to devour the enormous tube, running it two inches inside his distended lips, then sucked at it with hungry kisses – mpuh! mpuh! mpuh! – until the tip glowed wide like an orange sun, and the smoke poured from his nose and mouth like some kind of sulphurous ectoplasm.
‘Perhaps I should go,’ I said. ‘They obviously don’t like newspaper men.’
He studied the end of his Havanan torpedo. ‘No, no, I have always been convinced of the power of the press to do good rather than mischief. Without the help of journalists, we shall never reveal to the world the troubles of the homeless, the young strays and runaways, the army of fallen women.’
‘Perhaps,’ I ventured, all innocent-like, ‘we should concentrate on the work of one man. Readers don’t like being told depressing tales about kids dying in poverty and girls on the game. But a story about One Man’s Quest to take care of, you know, tarts who don’t want to be …’
He looked at me coldly. ‘Nobody, my young friend, wishes to be a prostitute. Any girl who finds herself in such employment has not sought it volitionally. It is not a matter of choice. They are driven into lives of degeneracy by the circumscription of choice. Young girls in their natural state are the innocent lambs of Creation. Without worldly knowledge, they would have no will to sin.’
‘And how can you help them?’ I asked, puzzled.
He sucked on his cigar again. ‘By showing them a route back to righteousness. By befriending them, and revealing there is a finer life, a life of the mind and of the soul, in which they may find redemption, a career in the arts or the drama.’
At that moment, the girls came back. Such a transformation! Dolores was all smiles. Jezzie carried her hat, with its spotty veil, in her hand, her face now revealed in all its seventeen-year-old wonder: her fat cheeks aglow, her hair blonde and fine as a pedigree Saluki’s, her eyes shining. You’d think they’d just won some money, these lambs of Creation.
‘We made some new friends,’ said Dolores, ‘in the public bar. They was very nice, weren’t they, Jez?’
‘He was lovely,’ breathed the other one. ‘They’re taking us to a party in a while, to meet some people who are going to put on a show at the Palladium.’
‘What an amazing stroke of luck,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me they happen to be looking for two young actresses of no previous experience to appear in the chorus?’
‘Yeah, as a matter of fact –’ Her young face hardened. ‘How’d you know that?’
‘Oh, journalist’s instinct.’
‘Don’t listen to him, Jez,’ said Dolores. ‘He’s taking the mick. They’re all the same, fucking news hounds.’
I wondered if the rector had heard the obscenity, or if he had learned to ignore the startling rudeness of his young charges.
He turned to Jezzie. ‘Where did you say you lived?’
‘Mmm?’ said Jezzie, still dreamy from her recent brush with the arrow of Eros. ‘Oh, Spitalfields. I got this horrible landlady, she cooks greasy breakfasts, and ticks you off for using too much toilet roll. And no pets and no men in your room after 10 p.m., and if you want to have a bath –’
‘But your address?’
‘Oh right, 16 Fournier Street. What, you going to write to me?’
The rector, with an operatic flourish, opened his big coat wide, and ferreted about in the lining. He buried his head under his armpit, like a swan having a kip. He appeared to search in one aperture, then another, a third – Jesus, how many pockets did he have in there?
– and pulled out a red ledger, the kind a fellow might keep a note of his expenses in, and gravely inscribed the name of young Jezzie’s fragrant domicile. Then he pressed a business card into the girl’s hand. ‘And here is my address. I gather you are but recently arrived in the metropolis. I hope you will ring me on this number, Vauxhall 9137, if you are assailed by feelings of loneliness or desperation or feel in need of conversation.’
Jezzie tucked the card away in her blouse. Dolores regarded her cigar-puffing benefactor with a look of warning.
‘Harold,’ she said, evenly, ‘we’ve got to talk.’
The rector snapped the ledger shut, returned it to its home in the gaberdine folds, glanced at Jezzie’s newly enlivened presence – her mountainous blonde hair, her even more mountainous bosom and smiled at his young protégée like a fond uncle at a family reunion.
‘We are among friends, my dear, and can talk freely about your future employment –’
‘It’s not about the bloody job, Harold,’ she hissed. ‘It’s about Max. What you done with him?’
He suddenly looked a little nervous. ‘Max?’ he asked. ‘Was that the man I met you with outside the National Gallery?’
‘You know perfectly well. And you put the law on him,’ said Dolores. ‘How could you? The bloody peelers.’
My ears were out on stalks, if that’s the phrase. I seemed to have stumbled into an interesting little row. The vicar, the tart, the villain, the mystery disappearance, the constabulary … All my antennas were quivering.
They were quivering a little too obviously. The vicar and the girls were suddenly all looking at me, none too friendly. Dolores’s enormous gob had lost its pouty allure and was thin as a Gillette blade. The rector’s cigarry animation had evaporated, leaving him with a look on his face like a man just kneed in the nadgers. In this pub snug, there was suddenly an Arctic chill. Even the birdbrain Jezzie could feel it.
‘I think,’ said the rector, and I was relieved to hear anyone saying anything to break the silence, ‘we must not keep you any longer from your friends. If you wish to interview me about my work, you must make an appointment by telephone. I keep irregular hours. It has been pleasant to make your acquaintance.’ And with that, he turned his whole chair, away from me so I was looking at his back, as he leaned into the girls again.
‘I was just going, Reverend,’ I said, rising sheepishly. ‘Unless you fancy one more drink, on me, I mean, and we could …’
He ignored me. Dolores, the little bitch, turned a look of pure contempt my way. ‘You still ’ere?’ she said. ‘Thought you were goin’. And takin’ your big flappin’ ears with you.’
And that was that. I gathered my dignity, my jacket and briefcase and left. At the door, I looked back. The reverend and the two girls were the best of friends again, laughing and yarning away. It was after eight. The pub was now as smoky as Hades, crushed as a Calcutta omnibus, the young lawyers and Friday-night demoiselles getting noisily hammered, the guy at the piano singing ‘Paper Moon’, and I was sorry to leave. I’d just met the oddest geezer I’ve come across in years. I rather envied him his funny entourage, and I itched to find out more about their set-up. So I’ll ring him tomorrow on Vauxhall 9137 and see if there’s a story in it. His old-fashioned way of talking, it ran through my head on the way home. And his coat with all the special pockets. And the girl with the torn veil who’d said, ‘What, you going to write to me?’ like nobody’d ever written her a letter in her life.
Journals of Harold Davidson
London 1 July 1930
The newspapers are full of Iraq. It seems that Britain has agreed to the recognition of Iraqi independence, and the dismantling of our protectorate, set up during the war by the Sykes – Picot Agreement. I am far from convinced that this is a beneficial move. The presence of Europeans in the Ottoman territories is, of course, seen as an outrage by the Muslim hordes. They may admire our scientific advances and our armaments in war, but they resent our occupation of their land – and they bridle when they see our distaste for their corrupt and primitive ways. Most of them would wish Mr Sykes and M. Picot at the bottom of the Tigris and the Euphrates, picked clean by sharia fish. And yet, is it not imperative that we bring modern European ideas to this benighted territory? Could any Iraqi look at the clockwork precision of London life, the fruits of the Enlightenment in our libraries, the technical advances in our roads and in the air, the literacy of our common folk, and not wish the same for his own community?
Perhaps I should preach about this on Sunday. Through conversations at St Ethelreda’s with Henry, an Arabist of many years’ study, I know how passionately some enlightened Muslims wish to replace the religious tyranny of their lands with a liberal constitution, a monarchy of restricted powers and a parliamentary representation of the people’s will. It was Henry who lent me Admonition to the Nation, a striking work of far-sighted intelligence by Sheikh Mohammed Husein Naini, one of the leading intellectuals of Najaf, who draws connections between the tenets of the Qur’an and the secular policies of British governance. He argues that to curb the tyranny of rulers is an act worthy of the Shia, and to establish a government bound by a constitution may be interpreted as the return of the ‘Hidden Imam’ – the twelfth imam in the succession from the Prophet, who disappeared from view (i.e. died, in Western terms) or has been miraculously concealed by God since 934, and who, some believe, will return one day to usher in an era of perfect justice and perfect government.
It is just one of their myriad madcap beliefs – so bizarre, so capricious and fanciful, when set beside our own happy certainty of the Second Coming of Christ and the promise of eternal bliss in His sight.
An admirable subject for high-table debate, though perhaps a little too sensational for a sermon in Stiffkey. We must see if Iraq subsides into the Ottoman murk where she lay stagnant for so long, or if she embraces the modern light of the West.
Humph. How metaphorically unhelpful that the West is where the light declines, while the East is where it increases and is constantly reborn. Most inconvenient.
A pleasant evening in the Old Coal House with Dolores Knight, despite her continued aversion to any kind of hard work, study or kindly counsel. I told her of Mrs Lake’s objections to the gentlemen callers and Mrs Moody’s exasperation over the secretarial course. Dolly laughs them away. Now I have rescued her from the sordid company of St Katherine’s Dock, Wapping, found her accommodation in Whitechapel, brought a doctor who would treat her unfortunate condition (‘Mat’ low’s Clap’ they call it, rather brutally, in dock regions) and paid her regular visits to discuss her future, I ask myself: What more can I do? The great Schweitzer himself, in the jungles of wherever-it-was, could not work harder at the sharp end of salvation than I, without expectation of reward, but in the hope of seeing results. In the case of Miss Knight, my labours have produced only a bored, disaffected girl, unwilling to embrace the opportunities offered by a virtuous life. Instead, she complained last evening – in front of complete strangers – that I had caused her unpleasant gentleman friend Max to be taken into custody. I may have hinted to the constabulary that he appears to own a great quantity of French brandy, which he retails in small barrels from a back room in the George Inn, London Bridge. I did not say he was a smuggler; that was their interpretation. But he was no good for Dolores – I am quite sure he was a former client, returning to his prey – and she is better off without him. She is bitter, though, and will take some placating.
She brought with her a delightful young friend, comically named Jezebel (!), a thickset, giggling, foolish, boy-loving ninny of a girl in a torn veil. She may well be in danger (from the company of Dolores, as much as from any man). I gave her my card and may call on her tomorrow. Around 1 a.m.
Met a journalist, from the Evening Standard, who wishes to know more about my work and publish feature. Excellent. Seemed nice enough chap, but with tendency to linger and eavesdrop. Ah well, that is the nature of the beast. I have little time for scandal sheets and penny dreadfuls. They deal in such foolish, trivial stuff. I represent something deeper and more serious, at the coalface of modern urban life where the battle every day is between the largest armies of all: sin; damnation; virtue; redemption. But I will grant him an interview if he calls.
Feature article, Evening Standard 5 July 1930
AT HOME AMONG THE HOMELESS How an unusual clergyman is working for the betterment of London’s poor
By Charles Norton
Sam Gillespie was six years old when his parents were drowned in a boating accident. Orphaned, bereaved and shocked, he was taken in by an aunt who lived in Wapping, then sent to nearby Tower Hamlets School. Unable to stomach the cruel taunts of fellow pupils about his parentless state, he regularly played truant. His aunt could not feed him from her limited stipend. Finding it hard to gain work because of his extreme youth, he turned to crime, stealing bicycles. Now fifteen, he has been in prison twice. It is hard for him to secure a job with legitimate enterprises. He is in danger of having to look for a livelihood among the criminal fraternity. What is a boy such as Sam to do?
Step forward, the Reverend Harold Davidson, 54, one of the most remarkable clergymen in England, a man who has brought life and hope to hundreds of misfortunate men, women and children. Davidson is the founder of a number of charities for homeless men, destitute boys and women forced into a life of vice. His work takes him to all corners of London, looking for young people in danger of falling into bad company. ‘It is fortunate that I seldom sleep,’ laughs Davidson, ‘for I find myself summoned to my ministry from morning to night. London is bursting with runaways, who have come here in search of jobs and excitement, and found nowhere to live. For 10 years, the public parks have been their only refuge in snow and rain. Every day they risk arrest for vagrancy; the girls risk fines and imprisonment for soliciting, quite unjustly. Their crime is not prostitution but destitution. Something must be done.’
Davidson’s crusade is the more remarkable because he is not based in London. He is rector of the Norfolk parish of Stiffkey and Morston where he lives with his Irish wife, Moyra, and their five children, Sheilagh, Nugent, Patricia, Arnold and Pamela. He teaches religious instruction at the local school, recites poetry and presides over amateur dramatic productions. ‘I used to do a bit of acting, in my student days and after,’ he recalls with a smile, ‘and I fear there’s still a bit of the ham about me!’ He is a frequent visitor to the theatres of London’s West End. While barely past his school examinations, Davidson set up an organisation to help child newspaper sellers – always a prey to bullying and exploitation – acquire a basic education. After gaining a degree at Oxford University, he helped to found the Young Lads’ Apprenticeship Fund, looking to provide an artisanal career for otherwise unemployable youths. ‘It is the most worthwhile work imaginable,’ he told me, ‘attaching these lost boys to employers and helping them become future plumbers, bookbinders and carpenters …’
He is also the founder of the Runaway Boys’ Retreat, where street urchins, on the run from difficult domestic circumstances, are fed and tended by older boys and given a basic education. Davidson has also become known to Londoners for his work with streetwalkers, finding them work and decent dwellings, ‘helping them’, as he puts it, ‘emerge from the crepuscular alleys of sins, the dim corridors of corruption and return to the stony but sure pathway to the Light. These women are often scarcely more than children, young girls preyed upon by men no better than the slave owners of yore. It is my gift sometimes to discover them before they have strayed, and to divert the course of their lives from Perdition. To the fallen, I can offer help and succour. I will go on doing so while there is breath in my body, and friends able to assist in this most necessary and demanding work. I owe it to the girls.’
When we parted company, he was on his way to the Kardomah restaurant in Holborn, to meet another prospective employer of the poor unfortunates to whom he represents a kind of earthly Saviour. Motivated by simple Christian good-heartedness, Harold Davidson is too modest of his achievements to accept such an appellation; but it is deserved nonetheless.
CHAPTER 2
Journals of Harold Davidson
London 7 July 1930
As I was passing the Lyons Corner House tea room in the Strand today I saw, through the window, a remarkable sight. A young girl, evidently a waitress, wearing a thin raincoat and no hat, was sitting on a chair the wrong way round. Her knees were spread wide around the chair’s backrest, her arms folded along the top. In this posture, she was talking to the lady by the till, who seemed to find nothing unusual in her friend’s wanton arrangement of limbs.
I walked in. My usual table to the rear of the tea room was occupied, and I was forced to sit by the window. I dug into my Stationery and Publications Pockets, and set to work making notes on the findings of the Bishops’ Conference in Liverpool, until I saw the young girl on the chair cease her conversation, and I felt able to intervene.
‘Good evening, my dear,’ I said, giving a grave bow. ‘Am in the presence of Miss Marlene Dietrich?’
‘You what?’ said the girl, blankly. ‘Who’s that? Who’re you?’
‘I see I am mistaken,’ (I smote my brow theatrically), ‘but surely you must be aware of Miss Dietrich, the German actress. Why, you resemble her so closely, I could have sworn it was she sitting on this chair.’
‘You mean I look like her?’
‘It is not just the look, my dear. It is the pose. You must have seen Miss Dietrich’s new film, The Blue Angel, in which she plays a nightclub entertainer, who sits, upon the stage, in precisely the same attitude in which you are sitting now?’
‘No I haven’t. I can’t afford to go to the flicks.’
‘Dear girl, are you destitute? Have you no work to bring you a living wage?’
‘I work here,’ she said, coolly. ‘Only, I’ve just come off duty and now I’m going home.’
‘How fortunate. And do you find the work in this tea room congenial?’
‘What you mean, congealing?’
‘Congenial, my dear, do you find the work pleasant?’
‘Yeah, it’s all right. It’s nice when everyone’s friendly. But we get some right tough characters. The other day, this bloke, he comes in throwing his weight around, he looks at me and goes, “Oi, you! Get me some hot chocolate!” like he’s ordering some squaddie around.’
‘And did you retaliate?’
‘We’re not supposed to say nothing, in case they turn nasty. So I just got his drink and brought it over. Yvonne, my friend, she reckoned I should have upended it into his lap.’ She beamed wickedly at the prospect.
‘I hope you are not abused by gentlemen on a regular basis?’
‘What? No chance. Miss Tewkesbury here, she doesn’t take no cheek from people who’re rude.’
She was a sweet-faced young thing, not a beauty but a healthy, clean-skinned innocent girl, nervous of men. Yet, given a moment’s rest from her labours, she falls into the wayward, legs-apart posture of Lola in The Blue Angel, like the most shameless poule de luxe! Something must be working upon her; some malign influence has her in its grip. I have an antenna for when a girl is going to the bad – or, if not yet going, then disposed in time to slide towards corruption.
Her parents were in Evershot, she said, a village near Yeovil, in Dorset. They had (thoughtlessly, I feel) allowed her to leave school and travel to London with her older sister, to seek employment. The girls live in Camberwell, off the Dog Kennel Hill, and the sister, Delia, has a ‘young man’ who takes her cycling at weekends. She herself (Sandra) has no young man, she says, though she is all of seventeen. Some of the gentlemen who came in for tea made rough jokes about taking her ‘up the town’ one night, but they never (she says) mean it and she wouldn’t wish to. I asked how she spent her evenings. At the Camberwell room, it seems, reading and listening to the radio, although sometimes she and Delia go to the nearby park and drink cider with her gentleman friend and his associates. ‘It reminds us,’ she said, ‘of home.’ My godfathers. I know a girl in imminent trouble when I hear one. But one small light gleamed out from her blank revelation of a blank life. Every so often she goes to the Quakers Hall on Camberwell Church Road, to watch girls from the local school rehearsing their end-of-term drama.
The dear child. So bleakly comforted by so little! Impetuously, I leaned forward.
‘Would you do me the honour of accompanying me to the theatre?’ I asked. ‘I am fortunate to have two tickets to The Young Idea by Mr Coward at the Hippodrome this Friday, and I would like you to come.’
‘Well, I dunno,’ she said, untwining her legs from the back-to-front chair, ‘I don’t know you. You might be a murderer for all I know, mightn’t you?’
I gave a light laugh. ‘I am a clergyman, my dear, and I assure you that murder is the last thing on my mind. To speak plainly, I feel you may have a considerable future as an actress. Please do not smile. I am perfectly serious. Before I took to the cloth, I was a professional actor in London, in Kent, Surrey and Hampshire, and I know talent when I see it. You have no business waiting at tables where boorish men speak to you roughly. There is a world out there of achievement, of glamour and fame, where a girl like you will not have to fetch and carry for a pittance. Perhaps on Friday you will let me introduce it to you?’
She stood before me in her mackintosh, her mouth open (to reveal charmingly white but crooked teeth) in surprise.
‘Call in tomorrow, and ask me again,’ she said, ‘and I’ll see.’
‘I appreciate your caution,’ I said, delighted. ‘And I’m glad to say that you are about to enter, come Friday, a world of sublime happiness.’
When I left she was smiling. A splendid evening’s work. I must look in at the Hippodrome later, to acquire some free tickets from dear Ivy, whom I rescued from a life of vice only last spring.
London 9 July 1930
THINGS TO DO:
1. Elsie Teenan to Mrs Teasdale, 15 The Close, Bermondsey. Rent 3/9 wk. No dogs. Persuade E to part with Biscuit. Poss work at Vincent’s seamstress factory? Must ask.
2. Check employment roster at Labour Exchange, Stratford Road, Battersea. Maids, cooks, etc. in good houses. Lily Beane, Sally Anstruther, Joanna Dee still unplaced.
3. Boots pharmacy. Fresh supplies of rash salve, shingles ointment, gingivitis balm, surgical spirit, bathroom tissue, etc. Wrights Coal Tar soap for Elsie. Special offer beauty soap/shampoo still avlbl? Box set to Marina Carter – bthday 28 July. Mauve ribbons for Patricia. Soft toy for Pamela.
4. Lunch, Monsignor Coveney, Mount St, Weds. We need cash for Christian Rehabilitation of Immoral Youth fund or will surely go under.
5. Visit Fenella Royston-Smith, Ch X Hotel. NB bring Dream of Gerontius for her. Urge her to join Virtue Reclamation League and enlist Kenya friends.
6. Sandra from Strand T-rooms to The Young Idea, Friday, Hippodrome. Tickets from Ivy Bareham.
7. While at it, tkts to see Journey’s End at Her Majesty’s. Cheap dress-circle seats to 1 Sept.
8. 6 p.m., meeting with Eddie Bones & Howard Shiner, Runaway Boys’ Retreat.
9. New girl, Jezebel (!) friend of Dolores Kt. In danger. 16 Fournier St, Whitechapel.
10. Ring Mimi. There must be emergency boilerman somewhere in Norfolk.
11. Sermon – 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.