London Blues

by Anthony Frewin

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Bring a camera.’

  ‘A movie camera or a stills camera?’

  ‘A stills camera is just fine.’

  ‘Where do we show up?’

  ‘At my place at eight o’clock.’

  ‘I don’t know where your place is … do I?’

  Stephen pulled out his wallet, took a card from it and gave it to me.

  ‘Eight p.m., then?’

  ‘I’ll see you then, Stephen.’

  ‘Off you go, Timmy. I’m late.’

  I got out of the car and slammed the door. He accelerated forward at a fair old lick and disappeared in the traffic. I glanced up and saw our light was off. Veronica was out again.

  In the hallway I looked at the card Stephen had given me. It was a stiff white card and measured about 3 inches by 2. Printed in a cursive, embossed script typeface was the following:

  Dr. Stephen Ward

  Osteopath

  4, Wimpole Mews,

  Harley Street,

  London, W.1.

  WELbeck 9378

  A doctor, huh? But not a GP.

  I turned up on Stephen’s doorstep at the agreed time with Anton and Nelson, two friends of Sonny’s, as the lad himself was playing trumpet at some benefit in Shepherd’s Bush. Anton and Nelson were big and mean looking and thought it might be a bit of a laugh. They were each 6-foot plus.

  I rang the bell and heard a ringing somewhere upstairs. A light went on and footsteps came down the stairs. Stephen opened the door with a sports jacket over his arm. He smiled at me and then looked at the two fellows.

  ‘My … and what do we have here then? Clasp your eyes on these two! What big boys they are!’

  The two blacks shuffled about and didn’t know how to react. They’d never met anyone like Stephen before and were unsure how to respond to him.

  ‘Milady is certainly going to be in for a good time tonight, isn’t she? In the hands of these two brutes indeed! How lucky!’

  Stephen pulled the door shut and, jangling his car keys about like Carmen Miranda, led us over to his white Jag. Anton and Nelson ducked into the back and I sat in the front with Stephen.

  We got to Portland Place and drove south into Regent Street and then along Piccadilly. It was dark and drizzly and town seemed empty. Stephen was talking non-stop to the spades about all the white women he knows who like black dick, about his experiences with black girls, going to West Indian clubs and smoking charge and so on. On the mention of reefers Anton said that he just happened to have some on him and would Stephen mind if he and Nelson smoked? Not at all, says Stephen, but forgive me if I don’t – I’m driving.

  The car was soon full of the sweet-sour smoke. I opened the window. The spades were now giggling like schoolgirls and talking in this Caribbean patois that whitey can’t understand. We drove round Hyde Park Corner and headed down Grosvenor Place towards Victoria. I was fidgeting with the camera on my lap and feeling edgy for no discernible reason.

  ‘Who am I going to be photographing?’

  ‘A dear friend of mine, Tim. A very dear friend.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that, but who?’

  ‘Anonymity is the best policy I’ve always found. I think she would prefer to keep her identity a secret.’

  ‘What does her husband do?’

  ‘He’s well off … has various interests … the usual.’

  ‘Why am I taking the photographs and not you? And not him?’

  ‘Timmy, we can take snaps but you’re a professional. You can take photographs.’

  Stephen is a real snake when he’s being evasive. He wasn’t going to say anything more. We’ll wait and see what happens.

  The drizzle had turned into rain as we drove past Victoria station and into the warren of backstreets that lead down to the Thames and go under the name of Pimlico. Pimlico. A strange name for a strange area. Nobody knows where it begins and where it ends. I’ve got lost down here. The stuccoed Victorian streets all look the same. People keep to themselves here in a way they don’t in other neighbourhoods. A lot of secrecy about, not like Bayswater where there’s life on the streets. This is an area that people retreat to. Here they know they won’t get disturbed or bothered. There aren’t even many pubs down here and if you do find one you’ll see that it is full of solitary individuals drinking in silence. This is a part of London I don’t think I could ever get to know. Foreign territory. Pimlico. Nobody even knows the origin of the name.

  Stephen parks the car behind a derelict Dormobile on Lupus Street and says we’ll walk the last bit: ‘Just around the corner.’ The Dormobile is dented and rusty and has no rear wheels, it is jacked up on bricks. This is a drab and decaying neighbourhood. Lupus Street. Where does that name come from? I thought lupus was some sort of disfiguring disease.

  These terrace houses are now divided up into bedsits and small flats. The windows are crammed with plants and junk and threadbare curtains in conflicting colours that let the light in and out and serve as silhouette screens when the occupants walk in front of the naked 60-watt bulbs. The open basements are full of rusting dustbins.

  There’s a chill smell of rain and rotting vegetables, not that Nelson and Anton would notice it as they pass another reefer back and forth. Stephen is leading us along like a schoolteacher who has had one gin and tonic too many – a nervous concern, a sort of forced hilarity and a lot of gesticulation. We must look an odd foursome.

  ‘I hope those reefers aren’t going to get in the way of you boys performing tonight!’

  ‘I only gotta sniff some white cooch, governor, and I’m there,’ says Nelson, and then he laughs and pats Stephen on the back.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ says Anton, coughing as he exhales the charge.

  We turn a corner. A sign on the railings says St George’s Square. Here are two rows of Victorian terraces facing each other across a narrow oblong of grass and trees. This isn’t one of the great squares of London. Down there on the other side is Dolphin Square, that vast development of flats put up in the 1930s, and beyond, the Thames. The same Thames that flows on and laps against the Isle of Grain ….

  Stephen turns abruptly when we are halfway along the square and walks down the stone steps of a basement. He knocks on the door and turns and smiles at me. One of his ‘I know something you don’t know’ smiles. Stephen might be able to keep secrets but what he cannot withhold is the fact that he has a secret. He won’t tell you what it is but he’ll let you know that he has it. Stephen would have been a good actor, I’ve always thought. He has the vanity, the self-centredness of a Shaftesbury Avenue chorus boy.

  I look at the door. Peeling paint illuminated by the street lamp above. The letterbox is missing, just a rectangular hole in the door. A large brass knocker shaped like a boot. On the right of the door someone has recently nailed a square of hardboard as if to hide something. There are marks to one side of it that seem to have been made by someone forcing the door with a crowbar or something.

  We are still waiting. Stephen knocks hard again. Twice in rapid succession. The door opens and there is a guy in his late twenties in an Italian-style suit and striped Cecil Gee shirt sporting a Perry Como haircut. The guy doesn’t say anything. He stares at Stephen and then at me and then at the spades. His face is expressionless. Stephen mumbles something to him. I can’t make out what it is. The guy’s eyes look up and back to me and then back to Stephen. Everything seems to be in order. This bloke has seen too many B-films. Petty hoods behave in real life in the way petty hoods do in cheap films. They need to. They need a reference for their manner. By themselves they wouldn’t know what to do. I stare at the guy’s face. Motionless still. It fascinates me. There’s something borderline about him. Borderline psychotic, that is. There’s a slight movement in his head which Stephen recognises as an indication that we can go in. We follow Stephen, who seems to know where he is going because he walks straight down a long bare corridor, through a door and across an open yard and into the back of
another building that faces on to a parallel street. Another bare corridor.

  I’m wondering where we are going. The two spades are just passing a joint back and forth.

  ‘What’s this all about, then?’ whispers Anton, the ganja fresh on his breath.

  ‘Ask Stephen,’ I whisper. ‘You know what I’ve told you and that’s all I know.’

  But Stephen is a man on a mission. He has a purpose. Ahead, he stops, opens a door and waves us in. This is a decrepit old bedroom that looks like it hasn’t been cleaned since the Armistice. There’s a smell of cheap musky perfume and mustiness and cigarette smoke. The curtains are faded with some Edwardian flower pattern on them. There’s a massive old wardrobe with a door hanging off. A dressing table with a cracked mirror. The remains of a coal fire in the grate.

  The focal point of the room is a double bed with monumental wooden head-and footboards that looks like something out of a cemetery.

  On the bed is a woman in, I’d guess, her mid-thirties. She’s dressed in an expensively tailored black suit with a white silk blouse. Her long blonde straight hair stretches out on the pillows. She has pearl earrings and a pearl necklace. On her fingers are several rings, diamond I would think, including a wedding one. Her skirt is halfway up her thighs and reveals part of her stocking tops. Stephen points at her and says, ‘Let me introduce you, boys. This is Elizabeth.’

  Nelson and Anton are smiling the biggest smiles of their lives. They’ve only ever seen class white pussy like this on the cinema screen. They can’t believe their luck. This is what they’ve been dreaming about since they were kids.

  ‘Elizabeth’, for that cannot be her real name, continues to stare ahead. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t react. I then realise why. She’s neither conscious nor unconscious. She’s hovering between the two not knowing where she is. She’s been drugged. She tries to say something but the words die in her throat. As I approach the bed I can smell the perfume she is wearing, a more subtle fragrance than the one that pervades the room. She isn’t here out of choice. It’s one thing photographing, say, some randy deb who likes the West Indian brothers; it’s another thing altogether photographing somebody who is coerced into it, who isn’t aware of what’s happening. I don’t want any part of this. I turn to Stephen.

  ‘What’s all this about? She doesn’t know what’s happening to her.’

  ‘Of course she does. She takes a few pills so she can relax. She likes to be used. She’s a masochist.’

  ‘And her husband?’

  ‘He gets his kicks looking at pictures of her getting her kicks.’

  Am I being told the truth? She could be some sort of masochist I suppose, but …. Good old plausible Stephen.

  There’s a young tart in slacks sitting in a worn red armchair on the other side of the bed. I hadn’t noticed her. Mid-twenties. Beehive hairdo. Chewing gum. Slim. Hard lips. She goes to say something to Stephen who smiles at her and lays a forefinger over his lips. Her words freeze in her throat. She remains silent. I want to know who the woman on the bed is. I’m not going to let Stephen off the hook so easily.

  ‘Before we go any further, Stephen, I want to know who this is. Do you understand that?’

  Stephen looks at me and his lips part briefly in a forced smile. He says nothing. I repeat the question.

  ‘I really don’t think you should trouble yourself about that.’

  ‘I’m not troubling myself. I just want to know, OK?’

  ‘If I were just to say that she was a friend of a friend … could we leave it at that?’

  That old disarming plausibility. There’s a strained atmosphere here now, even the tart senses it. The spades don’t. They are still having difficulty believing their luck. They are rarin’ to go.

  ‘My,’ says Stephen, looking at his watch and feigning agitated concern, ‘look at the time. We really must get a move on!’

  Curious phrasing. The statement hangs in the air. Anton and Nelson look at each other – they know what to do but they need someone to say Ready, Steady, Go!

  ‘We must undress her,’ says Stephen to Nelson and Anton. They don’t need telling a second time. They’re on the bed and undoing buttons and belts with a delicate dexterity you would scarcely think possible. ‘But do leave her stockings and suspender belt on.’

  ‘Sure, governor,’ says one of them.

  I watch the spades as they sit the woman up and remove her jacket and blouse. I watch Stephen watching them, his lower lip quivering. This excites him. This is his sexuality. The sexuality of a voyeur. He’s really going to enjoy this evening. I’m not. And if I were to hang around I’d wake up in the morning hating myself. I don’t want any part of this. This is Stephen’s sick scene. He can keep it.

  ‘I’m off, Stephen. This isn’t for me.’

  Stephen stares at me and nods. He understands. He isn’t going to argue. Very well, then.

  ‘Rosie, could you show Mr Purdom out?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Ward,’ says the tart as she languidly pushes herself up from the chair.

  ‘Well then, Tim, I’ll just have to take some amateur snaps with my own little camera … won’t I?’

  ‘Yeah, happy snapping.’

  ‘Don’t be long, Rosie. We’ll need you to lend a hand.’

  I followed Rosie out and down the corridor and across the yard. Standing in the shadows was the guy in the Cecil Gee shirt smoking a cigarette. He said nothing. He just stared at us as we walked across. Who was he? Was he Rosie’s boyfriend? No, Rosie doesn’t have boyfriends. Rosie only has gentlemen friends.

  ‘Was that your boyfriend?’

  ‘Was who my boyfriend?’

  ‘The bloke in the yard in the suit.’

  ‘What bloke?’

  It was raining again as I walked up St George’s Square and into Lupus Street. I held my camera under my jacket and legged it down to Belgrave Road for a cab. I stood in a doorway of a shop and waited. There were no cabs or buses about. In fact there was hardly any traffic at all. The rain was falling harder now and there was distant thunder.

  I thought back to the bedroom and what was going on there now. Who was the guy in the suit? What did he do when he wasn’t keeping an eye on a photographic session like this? Who was the tart? Why was she there? How did Stephen know her? Who was the woman on the bed? Was the story Stephen told me true? It could have been … knowing the sort of people he knows … then, again, there was an equal possibility that it wasn’t … in which case … in which case what? What could I do? What should I do? Go to the police and tell them that some woman is being photographed with a couple of West Indians against her will? Yes, sir, and how do you know this? I’d be digging my own grave.

  And why had Stephen been so understanding, so very understanding, when I said I was going? Why so obliging? Why couldn’t he take the photos in the first place? He was just too obliging … but perhaps by then he could afford to be. I’d delivered the spades, hadn’t I? I guess that was what it was all about. I don’t know.

  5

  Dizzy Atmosphere

  So why’s everyone suddenly interested in me, huh?

  – Al Capone, attributed (1930)

  Fourth 8mm:

  BLACK BUGGERY

  150 feet (12 minutes), black and white, mute.

  This was shot at the beginning of June 1962 in Sonny’s basement and features him and a couple of girls from around the corner who I think are both on the game part-time. One of them certainly is. I shot it after seeing Jeanne Moreau in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Columbia earlier in the day, which I’d watched just to remind myself what cinema was really all about.

  Ronnie had said he wanted a fuck film: ‘Some black guy giving it up the arse to a couple of white mysteries … would be very popular … particularly with the German tourists. They’re always asking for stuff like that.’

  I wanted to call it Zulu Frolics but that was overruled. Ronnie said nobody would understand what it was all about with a title like that. Anyway, he came u
p with Black Buggery. He thought it a gem, and original.

  One of the girls – her name was Treena Ellis – was doped up on pills and had needle marks all over her arms. Sonny paid her in pills and told me that he would have to give her ten quid for her daddy (whoever he was). I didn’t argue. Treena was attractive but disintegrating fast.

  Mary, the other girl, was from Northern Ireland and worked as a receptionist in some no-luggage hotel in Leinster Square. She said if I ever wanted to shoot in one of the rooms there she could arrange it. I said I’d bear it in mind. While I was setting up the camera she asked me if she had time to do some knitting before we began? Sonny had been passing a joint around and I just found her question so funny, I cracked up. I decided to incorporate this in the action. Black Buggery must be the only blue film showing a girl being buggered while she knits.

  When I was talking to Sonny about Eichmann’s hanging a couple of days before, Mary said it was only because he murdered Jews and that if he had killed anyone else they wouldn’t have bothered. She said that next to Catholics the Jews are the most godless and evil race. They should be wiped off the face of the earth. I guess this is the authentic voice of the Ulster Protestant.

  Veronica thought the film was shot without any thought or feeling. And she was right. Ronnie thought it was my best yet. He said he’s even going to make some stills from the frames. I asked him if this means I would get a few quid more.

  ‘No, but I owe you a drink.’

  How about increasing my rate anyway?

  ‘Not the money about right now, son.’

  Fifth 8mm:

  SCHOOLGIRL FROLICS

  125 feet (10 minutes), black and white, mute.

  This was shot in Frank’s new room over on Harrow Road on a Saturday night in the middle of August.

  I got there early and found Frank cutting out pictures of Marilyn Monroe and sticking them on the wall. He was always a big fan of Marilyn’s and still couldn’t believe she had just committed suicide. Frank always liked them big, busty and glamorous.