John Walsh - Sunday at the Cross Bones

I watched her flight (women run so oddly, do they not?), tinged with concern that she may have misinterpreted my little performance as an attempt at seduction. How could she know that for years I acted on stages from Oxford to Bayswater, in student and amateur theatricals? I can, when occasion demands, impersonate a fearsome predator, as easily as I can a saintly family doctor. The stage has always been my second calling. I cannot help it if the suspicious-minded see the performance, rather than the kindly Samaritan behind it.

The afternoon passed agreeably in the Public Records Office, as I sought the documented provenance of Lily Beane. A splendid girl, full of vim and zest but with no discernible ambition, she channels all her energies to whatever is immediately in front of her: laundering (Oh! her rhythmic drubbing of a washboard), selling fruit from a stall at Greenwich Market, buttering rolls in licensed premises on the Strand, talking to men sixteen to the dozen – such undisciplined enthusiasm! How does Browning put it in ‘My Last Duchess’?

‘She had

A heart – how shall I say? – too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.’

I arrived in her life just in time to stay her from sliding into exploitation. I have an instinct for these things. I knew it would be only a matter of weeks before some foul opportunist enlisted her good-natured joie de vivre for venal purposes. I saw the way they looked at her in the Jolly Gardeners in Putney – the leery gang of off-duty lawyers’ clerks and fly-by-night office boys who beguile the female bar staff with lies about their status, and lure them to casual indecency in omnibus shelters. I know how these convivial evenings of conversation and piano-centred hilarity can conclude with invitations to less innocent revels elsewhere. ‘Parties’ – that simple word that covers a multitude of vices, the social obsession of the last decade, along with the multicoloured folly of ‘cocktails’ – have come to represent all the headlong sinfulness of the modern age. I am no wet blanket when it comes to social gatherings. Many are the times I have entertained the Rectory company with recitals – sometimes a little near the edge of propriety! – from the music hall and the dramatic stage. But the parties to which young Lily was invited, Friday after Friday, left me sitting in the snug chewing my fingernails with concern for the fate of the poor girl in the company of such reprobates.

As soon as I could, I engaged her in conversation at the bar, talked with fervour about the danger she faced from plausible youths with too much drink in them, how they would lead her astray with promises of love. She laughed at me. She laughed at me!

‘You don’t know much about the boys round here, mate,’ she said. ‘They’re a long way off talking about love. What century’re you livin’ in?’ She yanked the beer tap until a pronounced blue vein stood out on her cottoned forearm.

‘I assume a young woman of your disposition will not suffer local louts to paw you like a piece of veal when you are so evidently –’

‘I don’t let anyone take advantage of me , matey, thank you very much,’ she remonstrated – her bright brown eyes like button mushrooms agleam in a stew – ‘and I don’t so much as kiss a boy unless he’s told me about his folks. Once they tell you about their folks, you know they’re not wrong ’uns. And even then, it’ll take more than a bit of chat to make me go home with nobody, because I got to be up for work, dead early.’ She paused, handed over two foaming pints to a pink-cheeked, high-collared young City type, no more than eighteen, took his money with the words, ‘Thank you, ’andsome.’ You could almost hear the dereliction of her morals in the immediate future, crashing down in a matter of weeks.

‘You have a friendly disposition, Lily,’ I said. ‘It’s what makes you so popular. You are generous, good-natured, and wish to see the best in people. But do you not realise it is this idealistic nature that renders you a prey to ignorant men who misconstrue your warmth as – as an invitation to come closer?’

‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ she said with a brassy laugh. ‘I’m a good girl. I don’t go anywhere I shouldn’t with boys. Well, not unless they’re goin’ to treat me like a lady, and buy me a nice roast supper at the Stockpot.’

There, in one sentence, is the reason for my presence among these young victims! Poor creature, she could not see that she had already entered the sloping path that leads, with increasing celerity, to the shanty towns of Hades. Part of my mission is to educate foolish youth about the economic underpinning of impurity. Male behaviour which they would not countenance on sober first acquaintance, they will accept as due reward for being bought dinner and port wine at a squalid men’s chophouse in Panton Street. The first impulses towards prostitution, I have often said, arrive with the appearance of the à la carte menu. Sexual abandon that results from misconceived notions of love I can understand, as I have had to understand them in my own family. But sexual abandon that results from gratitude for soup and pork loin with gravy – that is an index of the corruption that threatens to engulf us.

I have worked at the cause of Lily Beane for months, removing her from the public taverns, finding her work as a life-class model in a respectable art establishment in Shaftesbury Avenue, where her sturdy physical architecture and winning smile have proved immensely popular.

I am glad to see Lily safe for the present. But there is no end in sight for my work among the fallen. At times I despair of my chosen occupation. An image comes to me in a dream, some nights, in which I am standing in a great corn meadow through which girls in white shifts are running – so many girls, spread out across such a wide region the eye can hardly take them all in – and I alone know that they are running towards a cliff, an unseen, mighty precipice over which they will surely tumble to their doom. I endeavour, in the dream, to catch them up in my arms, to break their headlong rush, to save them from perdition and put them down in a place of safety, but as they hurtle towards and past me, I see that only a handful can be saved, and a swoon of hopelessness comes over me, and my feet drag as though through treacle, and more and more of the wild children in their fluttering nightshirts appear over the horizon until I am tormented with frustration as to where to run first, trying to save the ones nearest, as they approach, speeding past my outstretched arms …

I ended the day in Drury Lane, with Marina Carter and her company of girls, professionally occupied in sin. We talked about Elsie Teenan, and about Joanna and Lily, and where they have gone to better their employment in this wicked town. Madge and Sara came by and we opened some bottles of sherry wine and elder-flower cordial, and one of the girls procured a modest fruit cake with three candles to represent Mrs Carter’s three decades on earth. There were toasts, and Sara played show tunes on the pianoforte and I was prevailed upon to sing ‘She was Only an Engineer’s Daughter’, a favourite of mine for all its bawdy sentiments, and was rewarded by Blanche, the Jamaican mulatto, sitting on my knee and giving me girlish kisses with her enormous juicy lips. The evening wound down with the arrival of some off-duty constables who were disposed to fuss but were ushered upstairs to ‘inspect the facilities’ as Mrs Carter charmingly put it. She was pleased with my modest gift of beauty preparations, and promises to divert some of her profits towards my Virtue Reclamation League. Another reason to celebrate this long day.