From the inimitable bestselling author, Kate Atkinson, a mesmerising novel set in Soho in the 1920s, when gangsters and politicians, peers and dancing girls, rubbed shoulders in a dazzling new world.
1926
Holloway
‘Is it a hanging?’ an eager newspaper delivery boy asked no one
in particular. He was short, just thirteen years old, and was
jumping up and down in an effort to obtain a better view of
whatever it was that had created the vaudeville atmosphere. It
wasn’t much past dawn and there was still hardly any light in the
sky, but that had not failed to deter a party crowd of motley
provenance from gathering outside the gates of Holloway prison.
Half of the throng were up early, the other half seemed not to
have been to bed yet.
Many of the congregation were in evening dress – the men in
dinner jackets or white tie and tails, the women shivering in
flimsy backless silk beneath their furs. The boy could smell the
tired miasma of alcohol, perfume and tobacco that drifted
around them. Toffs, he thought. He was surprised that they were
happily rubbing shoulders with lamplighters and milkmen and
early shift-workers, not to mention the usual riff-raff and rubberneckers
who were always attracted by the idea of a show, even if
they had no idea what it might be. The boy did not count himself
amongst the latter number. He was merely a curious
bystander to the follies of the world.
‘Is it? A hanging?’ he persisted, tugging at the sleeve of the
nearest toff – a big, flushed man with an acrid cigar plugged in
his mouth and an open bottle of champagne in his hand. The
boy supposed that the man must have begun the evening in pristine
condition, but now the stiff white front of his waistcoat was
stained with little dots and splashes of food and the shiny patent
of his shoes had a smattering of vomit. A red carnation, wilted
by the night’s excesses, drooped from his buttonhole.
‘Not at all,’ the toff said, swaying affably. ‘It’s a cause for festivities.
Old Ma Coker is being released.’
The boy thought that Old Ma Coker sounded like someone in
a nursery rhyme.
A woman in a drab gaberdine on his other side was carrying a
piece of cardboard that she held in front of her like a shield. The
boy had to crane his neck to read what was written on it. A furious
pencil hand had scored into the cardboard, The labour of the
righteous tendeth to life: the fruit of the wicked to sin. Proverbs 10:16.
The boy mouthed the words silently as he read them, but he made
no attempt to decipher the meaning. He had been press-ganged
into Sunday School attendance every week for ten years and had
managed to pay only cursory attention to the subject of sin.
‘Your very good health, madam,’ the toff said, cheerfully
Raising the champagne bottle towards the drab woman and taking
a swig. She glowered at him and muttered something about
Sodom and Gomorrah.
The boy wormed his way forward to the front of the crowd,
where he had a good view of the imposing gates – wooden with
iron studs, more suited to a medieval fortress than a women’s
prison. If there had been three of the boy, each standing on the
shoulders of the one below, like the Chinese acrobats he had
seen at the Hippodrome, then the one at the peak might have
just reached the arched apex of the doors. Holloway had an air
of romance for the boy. He imagined beautiful, helpless girls
trapped inside its thick stone walls, waiting to be saved, primarily
by himself.
On hand to document the excitement was a photographer
from the Empire News, identified by a card stuck jauntily in his
hatband. The boy felt a kinship – they were both in the news
business, after all. The photographer was taking a group portrait
of a bevy of ‘beauties’. The boy knew about such young women
because he was not above leafing through the Tatlers and Bystanders
that he pushed through letterboxes once a week.
The beauties – unlikely in this neighbourhood – were posing
in front of the prison gates. Three looked to be in their twenties
and sported plush fur against the early-morning cold, the fourth
– too young to be a beauty – was in a worsted school coat.
All four were striking elegant poses as if for a fashion plate.
None of them seemed a stranger to the admiring lens. The boy
was smitten. He was easily smitten by the female form.
The photographer transcribed the beauties’ names into a
notebook he excavated from a pocket somewhere so that they
could be identified faithfully in the paper the next day. Nellie
Coker had a hold on the pictures editor. An indiscretion of
some kind on his part, the photographer presumed.
‘Ho there!’ he shouted to someone unseen. ‘Ramsay, come
on! Join your sisters!’
A young man appeared and was brought into the huddle. He
seemed reluctant but gave a rictus grin on cue for the camera flash.
Then, with no fanfare, a small door set into the great gates of
the prison was opened and a short, owlish woman emerged,
blinking at the oncoming light of freedom. The crowd cheered,
mainly the toffs, shouting things like, ‘Well done, old girl!’ and
‘Welcome back, Nellie!’ although the boy also heard the cry
‘Jezebel!’ go up from somewhere in the middle of the crowd. He
suspected the drab gaberdine.
Nellie Coker seemed lacklustre and the boy could see no likeness
to what he had heard of Jezebels. She was almost dwarfed
by the enormous bouquet of white lilies and pink roses that was
thrust into her arms. One of the beauties was carrying a large fur
coat which she threw around the released prisoner as if she were
trying to smother a fire. The boy’s mother had done much the
same thing when his baby sister had fallen in the grate, her loose
smock catching the flames. They had both survived, with only a
little scarring as a reminder.
“There was one scene in the show where the chorus and Binnie came on the stage in bathing costumes. It was thrillingly scandalous and the boy’s eyes nearly popped out of his head every time he witnessed it.”
The beauties crowded around, hugging and kissing the
woman – their mother, the boy surmised. The younger one clung
to her in what in the boy’s opinion was a rather hammy fashion.
He was a connoisseur of the theatrical, his round took him to all
the stage doors of the West End. At the Palace Theatre, the stage
doorman, a cheerful veteran of the Somme, let him slip into the
gods for free during matinée performances. The boy had seen
No, No, Nanette five times and was quite in love with Binnie
Hale, the luminous star of the show. He knew all the words to
‘Tea for Two’ and ‘I Want to Be Happy’ and would happily sing
them, if requested. There was one scene in the show where the
chorus and Binnie (the boy felt that he had seen her enough
times for this familiarity) came on the stage in bathing costumes.
It was thrillingly scandalous and the boy’s eyes nearly popped
out of his head every time he witnessed it.
As a drawback, in order to gain free entry he had to listen to the
long-winded wartime reminiscences of the doorman, as well as
admiring his collection of Blighty wounds. The boy had been one
when the war began and, like sin, it meant nothing to him yet.
Ramsay, Nellie’s second son, was made to relieve his mother of
the burden of the bouquet and was caught by the photographer
holding the flowers like a blushing bride. To the annoyance of his
sisters (and himself too), this would turn out to be the photograph
that graced the newspaper the next morning, beneath the
heading Son of notorious Soho nightclub proprietor Nellie
Coker greets his mother on her release from prison. Ramsay
hoped for fame for himself, not as an adjunct of his mother’s
celebrity. He started to sneeze in response to the flowers, a rapid
volley of atishoo-atishoo-atishoo, and the newspaper delivery boy
heard Nellie say, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ramsay, pull yourself
together,’ which was the kind of thing the boy’s own mother said.
‘Come along, Ma,’ one of the bevy said. ‘Let’s go home.’
‘No,’ Nellie Coker said resolutely. ‘We shall go to the Amethyst.
And celebrate.’ The pilot was taking the helm.
The crowd began to melt and the newspaper boy continued on
his way, his spirits lifted by having been a witness to something
historic. He suddenly remembered an apple, old and wrinkled,
that he had squirrelled away first thing that morning. He retrieved
it from his pocket and chomped on it like a horse. It was wonderfully
sweet.
The toff with the cigar spotted him and said, ‘Good show, eh?’
as if he valued his opinion, and then cuffed him amiably on the
side of his head and rewarded him with a sixpence. The boy
danced happily away.
As he left, he heard someone in the crowd yelling, ‘Thief!’ It
was a term that could have applied to any of them really, except
perhaps the man who had been watching the proceedings from a
discreet distance, in the back of an unmarked car. Detective
Chief Inspector John Frobisher – ‘Frobisher of the Yard’ as John
Bull magazine had styled him, although somewhat inaccurately
as he was currently on loan to Bow Street station in Covent Garden,
where he had been sent to ‘shake things up a bit’. Corruption
was acknowledged to be rife there and he had been tasked with
seeking out the bad apples in the barrel.
John Bull had recently asked Frobisher to write a series of articles
based on his experiences in the force, with a view to making
them into a book. Frobisher was not a narcissist – far from it –
but he had been enlivened by the proposition. He had always
been a books man and a literary challenge was something that
took his fancy. Now, however, he was not so sure. He had suggested
it be called London After Dark, but the magazine said they
preferred the title Night in the Square Mile of Vice. He didn’t
know why he had been surprised by this when every cheap rag
howled with lurid tales of foreign men seducing women into
venality of one kind or another, when in reality they were more
at risk of having their handbags torn from their arms in broad
daylight.
Nothing had yet been published, but every time he submitted
something to John Bull they asked him to make it racier, more
‘sensational’. Racy and sensational were not part of Frobisher’s
character. He was sober-minded, although not without depth or
humour, neither of which was often called on by the Metropolitan
Police.
He was idly following the progress of a couple of women who
were stealthily working their way through the crowd, skilfully
picking pockets. Frobisher recognized them as subalterns in the
female Forty Thieves gang, but they were comparatively small
fry and of no interest to him at the moment.
A pair of cream-and-black Bentleys – one owned, one rented
for effect – drew up and the Coker clan divided themselves
between them and drove away, waving as if they were royalty.
Crime paid, fighting it didn’t. Frobisher felt his law-abiding bile
rising while he had to quash a pang of envy for the Bentleys. He
was in the process of purchasing his own modest motor, an
unshowy Austin Seven, the Everyman of cars.
The delinquent Coker empire was a house of cards that Frobisher
aimed to topple. The filthy, glittering underbelly of
London was concentrated in its nightclubs, and particularly the
Amethyst, the gaudy jewel at the heart of Soho’s nightlife. It was
not the moral delinquency – the dancing, the drinking, not even
the drugs – that dismayed Frobisher. It was the girls. Girls were
disappearing in London. At least five he knew about had vanished
over the last few weeks. Where did they go? He suspected
that they went in through the doors of the Soho clubs and never
came out again.
He turned to the woman sitting next to him on the back seat
of the unmarked car and said, ‘Have you had a good look at
them, Miss Kelling? And do you think that you can do what I’m
asking of you?’
‘Absolutely, Chief Inspector,’ Gwendolen said.
Extracted from Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson.
