Irene Holland - Tales of a Tiller Girl

‘This looks a bit better,’ said Ruth.

We knocked on the door and a middle-aged woman and a girl in her twenties who I assumed was her daughter answered it. They were both wearing pink satin dressing-gowns, which I thought was a bit odd as it was the middle of the afternoon.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘The theatre sent us. They said you could put us up while we’re doing the panto.’

‘Oh, er, yes, dear,’ she said. ‘You’re the theatricals, are you? Come on in.’

An American army officer in uniform was standing in the hallway.

‘Hi, gals,’ he grinned. ‘Are you the new recruits?’

‘Oi, you, keep yer mouth shut,’ the woman said in a hushed voice, ushering him away. ‘They’re two nice young ladies from the theatre. You keep yer ’ands off.’

She took us up to our room on the first floor. It was a six-bedroom house but, looking through the doors as we walked past, we noticed that all of the bedrooms seemed to have been split into two.

‘Why do two women need a twelve-bedroom house?’ I asked Ruth.

We soon found out. Every fifteen minutes or so the front doorbell would ring and we’d hear the sound of people traipsing up and down the stairs. They were up and down all afternoon and into the evening.

‘Who are all these callers and what are they doing?’ I said, puzzled.

Ruth and I peeped through the keyhole, and every once in a while an American soldier would walk past arm in arm with a pretty woman wearing nothing but a lacy dressing-gown.

‘Oh, my giddy aunt,’ said Ruth. ‘I think I know what this place is, Irene. It’s a knocking shop.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘It’s a brothel,’ she replied. ‘For the Yanks.’

I was very shocked when she explained what that meant. I might have been streetwise, but I was still very green in some respects. I’d heard that these places existed but I was completely terrified.

‘Give me that chair, Ruth, and I’ll barricade the door,’ I said. ‘I don’t want any of those GIs losing their way and wandering into our bedroom by mistake.’

‘Perish the thought,’ she said.

We were both absolutely petrified. Ruth and I slept in the same bed, and we spent all night clinging on to each other. We couldn’t get out of there quickly enough the next morning.

‘You sent us to a brothel,’ Ruth told the stage manager when we got to the theatre. ‘We can’t stay there.’

Once again he was full of apologies.

‘I’m dreadfully sorry, there’s obviously been another mix-up,’ he said. ‘We didn’t realise what type of place it was.’

Thankfully at last we were sent to a proper boarding house, where we stayed for the month that the panto was on, but I vowed never to go to Norfolk again!

I was so naïve in those days, and as for boys, I didn’t have a clue. I wasn’t as glamorous as some of the other girls at Italia Conti. I didn’t wear any make-up, and I was a funny little thing with skinny legs and two long plaits.

But I did have a bit of a crush on one of the dancers in the King’s Lynn panto, who was tall and blond.

‘Isn’t Malcolm lovely?’ I sighed to Ruth. ‘He’s like a Greek god.’

‘Oh, don’t waste your time admiring him,’ she said. ‘He’s a queen.’

‘What do you mean,’ I gasped. ‘Is he royal?’

She just rolled her eyes at me and laughed.

‘For God’s sake, Irene, where have you come from?’

‘I really don’t know what you mean,’ I said.

For someone so streetwise and independent, I really was quite ignorant when it came to matters of the opposite sex.

After I’d been at Italia Conti for a couple of years the school moved out of Tavistock Square. Miss Conti had found a permanent home for it in Archer Street, just off Shaftesbury Avenue. The only drawback about this new location was that it was slap-bang in the middle of London’s red-light district. It was directly behind the Windmill Theatre, famous for its nude shows and ‘we never close’ slogan. As I walked down Archer Street on my way to class in the morning, a lot of the doorways would be open and I’d see men disappearing up the carpeted stairways with their bare light bulbs.

No one had ever sat down and told me about the birds and the bees, but I learned what I could from playground gossip and talking to friends. One day at Italia Conti I could see a big group of pupils gathered round in a corner of the corridor looking at something.

‘Come and have a gander at this, Rene,’ shouted Tony Newley.

Out of curiosity I went to see what they were all so interested in. Much to my horror it was some black-and-white photos of men and women with their clothes off doing all sorts of odd things.

‘Eurgh!’ I shrieked. ‘How disgusting.’

Then I ran away and all the boys laughed.

A lot of the older girls had boyfriends, but I just wasn’t interested. Daphne, who was a year older than me and was 15 by now, was very beautiful and she was always getting asked out by American soldiers.

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