Good as her Word: Selected Journalism. Lorna Sage

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       Client relationships

      An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne PAUL BAILEY

      ‘MADAME CYN’, SHOUTED THE headlines: ‘luncheon vouchers’, ‘Streatham’. It was somehow obvious from the start that Cynthia Payne’s ‘disorderly house’ was not the usual kind: that it was, on the contrary, bizarrely orderly. As details of Cynthia’s domestic economy emerged the curious subculture of ‘Cranmore’ looked, in fact, so exactly an inversion of the banalities of middle-class existence that legal outrage seemed absurd. It wasn’t just a matter of the 10p and 15p vouchers clutched by the queue of middle-aged-to-elderly clients on the stairs (though these puzzled the police); nor of the clients’ own professions – church, civil service, politics, the bar. As Cynthia’s trial and appeal (plus her recent confessions in the News of the World) have revealed, her Streatham brothel was not a house but a Home, a place where the repressions of everyday life were reflected in a fun-house mirror. And she herself was that most English of institutions, a ‘character’. Hence Paul Bailey’s splendid study, An English Madam, which removes Cynthia (with her willing cooperation) out of the commercial underworld, and installs her in a niche in the Dickensian tradition of social fantasy.

      There is after all, Mr Bailey insinuates, a certain similarity between Cynthia’s role and that of, say, Mrs Todgers in Martin Chuzzlewit. She is the landlady as comic genius loci, the ‘hostess’ restored to matronly dignity. Consider the management skills involved: the house, for instance, was cleaned by ‘Philip’, who paid Cynthia a modest sum to stand over him with a switch and complain when he (always accidentally) missed a tiny corner. Roughly the same arrangement, with ‘Rodney’, took care of the large garden. Drinks were served by the ex-Squadron leader, disguised as the butler or (judging from his photograph) Theda Bara as the mood took him. Sometimes a noted political commentator helped out as ‘Tweeny’, and was spanked by Theda Bara for answering back. ‘Gregory’ provided an advice-sheet on the apparatus of domination (‘WIG: as most dominants are blonde, a platinum wig or hairpiece worn to show below the helmet, as stated’). Once, the bank manager, a difficult customer who could never be humiliated enough, was brought to the verge of ecstasy when pelted with the contents of the hoover, which Philip had been warned to fill to bursting. More conventional clients watched blue movies, and ‘went upstairs’ when they felt like it. The party atmosphere was maintained by a system of paying (£25) on entry (hence the famous vouchers), with discounts for pensioners and the impotent. It all sounds like an inspired experiment in energy saving, with Cynthia (‘Lady Domina’ as she was known to the help, though the Squadron Leader, an old friend, called her ‘Madam Baloney’) orchestrating the follies like a benevolent deity.

      The carnival spirit however, depended – as carnival spirit tends to – on the conviction, shared by Cynthia and her party-goers, that the world outside Cranmore was an alien, bleak, unaccommodating place. If Mr Bailey’s instincts as a writer led him back to the nineteenth century it must have been partly because Cranmore was a kind of time-machine, a refuge from the present where, for example, second childhoods were catered for (again very Dickensian), and where it was taken for granted that your little ways and wants might be entirely out of sync with the greyish person who’d ‘settled down’ or ‘grown old’. It’s not exactly that the set-up resembles a Victorian comedy of humours: a lot of the time it is one, and the intensity of the illusion is a measure of the futuristic bleakness, to Cranmorians, of the supposedly permissive society. What they wanted was the delirious unfreedom – queueing in their socks, with tickets, poached eggs on toast afterwards – of living in the past, not necessarily their own pasts, though some of the fantasies are very specific, but a collective daydream of early life.

      Cynthia understood all this so well, apparently, because her own early life (in fact, her first thirty-odd years) had been fairly unrelievedly awful. As the book’s hilarious account of the historic police raid modulates into the story of her experiences before she found her vocation and acquired her house, the party atmosphere is rapidly dissipated. In many ways we still seem to be in the nineteenth century, but now the ambience is less English, more Maupassant. Cynthia’s mother died young, in 1943, and her father, whom she and her sister hardly knew (he’d been a hairdresser on the cruise liners) wasn’t well-equipped to cope alone, though he had to, since potential second wives found his girls too difficult, and his own conscious respectability cut him off from the sort of surrounding support his working-class background might have provided. Each sister reacted in her own way – Cynthia ‘ran wild’, used bad language, and displayed a generous curiosity about sex, Melanie became sensible and ‘posh’ (and married a police inspector). As ‘Cinders’ drifted away from home on the south-east coast and into London (failed hairdresser, waitress, unmarried mother) she seems, by her own account, to have lost control of her life with frightening speed. She semi-starved for a season in a slum basement with a derelict who ‘looked like Christie’, though all he did was, harmlessly, to collect other social casualties into a family of sorts. Her men seem to have been either father-substitutes (though penniless and inept – she only managed one ‘sugar daddy’) or sexy spivs like ‘Sam’, who worked in the amusement arcade, and got her pregnant with nightmarish regularity.

      This is a twilight world of female drudgery (waitressing, pregnancies), СКАЧАТЬ