Sunday at the Cross Bones

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‘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