Jim McMurty:
I was born in Bow, where my parents still live, which make me a true cockney. I happily left school at fifteen, and went to help my dad. He is a tattooist with a little parlour just off the West India Dock Road. Those of you who remember the Young Friends Chinese restaurant, where like many others, I discovered the pleasures of dim sum, will know just where I mean.
Dad's clientele were almost all seamen, and many were the four-masted schooners, naked ladies and British bulldogs that I helped ink into broad, hairy backs and hairier arms. I could draw pretty well freehand so I brought a new skill into the shop. Up to then, Dad had bought in his patterns, but I could make stencils, making designs from scratch, or copying pictures, stripping down the complexities under his critical eye.
By the time I got my call-up papers, I was a dab hand with the needle. I was taking on straightforward jobs on my own -- I can't tell you how many times I had the tedious job of blocking in LOVE on the knuckles of the right hand and HATE on the left -- but if that was what the customer wanted, it is what he got. I worked with men almost exclusively until a creepy-looking guy who must have been going on for seven feet tall brought in a rather pretty girl one Saturday.
"Go on Denise", he said encouragingly, "Tell him what you want him to do."
Denise smiled up at him adoringly and, to my astonishment, said in a bright, matter-of-fact tone:
"I want a dotted line around my throat, and in the middle it has to say Cut here. So Billy never forgets that he has my permission to kill me if he ever wants to get rid of me. I know I would not want to go on living, so it would be an act of kindness."
God! What a nutcase! Does she know what she's getting into? I cautioned her:
"You do know that it will show, whatever you are wearing, and, although it will fade a bit, it is totally permanent, don't you?"
"Yes, yes, I know all that. This is his birthday present" she simpered. "It is entirely my own idea. It's what I want, and nobody has talked me into it, and I am doing it of my own free will."
There was nothing more to say.
"Take off your blouse and bra," instructed her lover, "let's give the young man a thrill". Denise blushed and giggled, but she stripped off and lay back on the table with a smile. I now know that if he had told her to let me fuck her, she would have complied with the same smile.
I put a couple of pillows under the back of her neck to tilt her head back and stretch her neck. She lay there, round, pink-nippled breasts complacently smiling up at me like plump, ripe fruit. I swabbed her throat with rubbing alcohol and followed up with dilute dettol, a mild antiseptic, then marked out the simple design in blue. I had a ceiling-mounted mirror above the table, and I adjusted it so that she could see the result. She approved it with a bright smile.
"I shan't do it all today, I'll do one side and let that heal up, then do the other in about a week. Is that ok with you?" Punctiliously I addressed all the questions to her, disregarding her companion. She looked a little put out.
"But why can't you do it all today? It is such a little thing, just a few dots and two short words."
"Yes, but it will be sore for a few days, so we do one side first and let that heal up, then do the other so you have a side to sleep on that does not irritate."
"No! Do it all today. I want it straight away. Is that all right Billy? I don't care how much it hurts. You are trivialising the whole thing by worrying about a little bit of discomfort."
So I began. I think this was the first time I met someone who seemed to welcome pain as a testimony to commitment. Later I was to find that they constituted a small but distinct sub-species, that I grew deeply involved in. I worked steadily, changing needles from time to time as required, and in forty minutes it was done. I wiped away a couple of small pearls of blood where a capillary was close under the skin, swabbed the slightly reddened skin with a little methylated spirit and followed up with more dettol. Before I dressed her throat with a couple of pieces of boracic lint, I showed her the effect in the mirror. I took the money; it was done. I never saw the pair of them again.
Soon after my seventeenth birthday, I got my call-up papers and railway warrant.The problem was that I had just come off a friend's motorbike and got myself a badly crushed foot. I got a doctor's certificate and was given a deferment. Nine months later, after a medical examination, I reported for basic training.
I went through the usual eight weeks of sleeplessness, strenuous exercise, unremitting pressure and thoroughgoing behaviour modification. I was not very different from the other blokes in my training platoon, except for being a year older. Not among the best, nor among the worst; middling in most things. But I found I loved learning to strip and clean, load and fire my Lee Enfield. Although I never fired a shot in anger, I seemed to have an aptitude for rifle shooting, and I have gone on loving it from then to now, competing at Bisley for eight consecutive years.
I passed out into the Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derbys) and was speedily shipped to Germany. On the off-chance I took along my tattooing kit and a supply of needles and inks, thinking that they might come in handy some time. When we got to the depot at Detmold, a long, long way from the East German border, We started to settle into a dull routine.
One evening in the barrack room, for something to do, I got out my gear and started tattooing my regimental crest onto my left forearm.
It's a rather pretty badge, a Maltese cross surmounted by a crown, with a stag couchant on a blue ground, Sherwood Foresters on ribbons alongside the stag and Notts and Derbys on a ribbon below. Sorry I've forgotten all the heraldic terms, but I hope you get the picture. I had shaved my forearm to make the job easier, and made a stencil of the badge to keep it straight and in proportion.
Every tattooist is his own first customer, and that was certainly true of me. There I was pricking in the outline, when I became aware that I had a crowd of spectators who watched in awed silence. I looked around and grinned, which gave them license to speak.
"How long is it going to take?"
"Does it hurt?"
"How many colours can you do?"
"Where did you learn it?"
The question nobody was asking, was the question on everybody's lips. Will you do one for me?
"It's gonna take a while. I'll ink in the outlines and the lettering, but I can't do the badge until I get some light grey. My Dad will send it asap, but I'm a bit boracic right now, and I shall have to build up the inks bit by bit."
It took a Geordie to request clarification.
"Hoo jer mean brassic, bonny lad?"
Determined to keep my end up. I hammed up the cheeky chappie. "Boracic lint, my old China. You know, skint; sometimes yer wiv money, sometimes yer between money. I'm seriously between money right now."
Corporal Symes summed the whole thing up.
"If you can do that sort of work, I don't see shortage of money being one of your problems. You'll have a waiting list a mile long..."
He was quite right. The National Servicemen, many, like me, scarcely dry behind the ears, could not imagine anything more macho than a regimental crest tattoo. I work neatly and have cultivated a light touch. Soon I had a range of small colourful tats on offer. I wrote the whole lexicon of girls' names from Aileen to Zinnia over their hearts in decorative cartouches, Sergeant Austin, the burly PT instructor, had Tower Bridge pot on his back, open with a string of barges going through, and suddenly seemed to be going around shirtless a lot of the time. But that was not all.
As the months wore on, squaddies started bringing in their girlfriends. ATS girls, nurses and a string of German lassies were offered or offered themselves as subjects. This was a whole different market, one I had not encountered on the Isle of Dogs. The female taste, as mediated by their boyfriends, was for small, discreet, feminine butterflies, hearts, flowers and colourful birds, in locations usually covered by bras and knickers. Who was I to say them nay?
I had not had a very extensive sex-life up to that point -- well, not to put too fine a point on it, I had no experience at all. Not that many of us were budding casanovas. The two or three generational family in the two-up-two-down terraced house was still the norm where most of us came from. Privacy was an alien concept. I had done little more than snatch a few kisses in the back row of the flicks before I was called up. The allied occupation of Germany provided a wealth of opportunities, so much so that the venereal disease rate was high enough to make our masters issue free condoms; much to the scandal of certain Members of the two Houses of Parliament who were maiden ladies, or the next thing to it.
It was classic carrot and stick. Put the rear of God in us with gruesome filmshows about the perils of the pox, make condoms readily available, and, thirdly, make the treatment of VD as painful and humiliating as possible. It was not a whole-hearted success. The army was dealing with a pool of intractable stupidity, and the situation only eased as the standard of living of the German population rose off rock bottom. But this was 1948, and we were in the thick of the Berlin airlift. My fellow squaddies were only too pleased to introduce me to girls we were up for a bit of hanky-panky, and I was raring to go.
I was discovering that it pays to win friends and influence people. My name came up for a forty-eight-hour leave pass, and I wanted to get to London to buy inks, needles and a better tattoo machine. No problem. Even before my leave began I was on my way to Northolt courtesy of RAF Transport Command. All it cost was the promise to put RAF wings on a couple of arms. And Bob's your uncle.
Mum and Dad knew I was coming, and I was home as fast as the London Transport could carry me, with a promise that a lorry would pick me up at Ruislip station. How's that for service?
Dad had contacts everywhere. In one jam-packed day I was fully kitted out and, for a moderate fee, I learned all about piercing nipples, noses, tongues and even more delicate parts, from a well-preserved lady instructor and a couple of very willing volunteer subjects. I was even offered a master-class in how to insert a Prince Albert, but that was, and remains, a step too far for me.
Yes, in Germany I was seeing a side of life scarcely dreamed off in the Isle of Dogs. Pretty frauleins wanting intimate art or jewellery, and very prepared to offer to play rather than to pay. It was a coming of age for me, and I appreciated every aspect of it. Of course I carried on my day-to-day occupation as orderly-room clerk, and, like everyone else, got roped in to load the cargo planes running the Soviet gauntlet into Berlin, but my spare time was spent in work that was play and play that was work.
All good things come to an end, and the following Summer my demob came and I was back in London, richer in experience as well as money. Shortly afterwards I became as you see me now, an accidental but contented slave-holder.
End of part one.
Sylvia Hughes (Twatti)
My parents owned a boarding house in Islington. It was made up of two early Victorian, four storey houses knocked through. Mum's parents had run it for us during the war, whilst Mum supported the war effort by working for the Ministry of Food. When Dad came home from Burma in 1946, they opted for her to stay in her job, which was well paid and pensionable, whilst Dad ran the boarding house. I left school in 1943 and went straight in as a chambermaid, occasional receptionist, waitress and general dogsbody.
I never had a boyfriend, although I had plenty of offers. I just found boys silly. My Dad and his two brothers were my idea of men, strong, enduring, sweet-natured, full of humour, but unwilling to stand any nonsense. One day, I dreamed, I should find a man like that.
I'd been doing the job for about three or four years, and settled into a routine that got best results in the minimum of time. I hardly regarded the ever-changing tide of guests, usually men staying for a night or two, maybe Monday to Friday, seldom longer. Sometimes, not often, they did something to disgust me, but even then I was largely indifferent. Then came Mister Horrabin.. I took his reservation by phone. His dark, chocolate-velvet voice sent a thrill through me. I was prepping vegetables when he arrived so Dad checked him in. That evening, for one reason or another, I never saw him at all. In the morning I served his breakfast and he smiled at me. His skin was smooth and olive-tinted, his eyes a warm brown, his hair black and tightly curled, thinning at the crown, with a touch of grey at the temples. His smile made my stomach lurch. And then he left, presumably for work.
We have a routine. First of all, breakfast, laid overnight, cooked and served. Then Dad mans the desk to deal with the departing guests, whilst I clean the public areas, the lounge (what a fug of smoke, brimming ashtrays, spilt drinks and rugs kicked all over the place) the hallways, the downstairs toilets. Dad cleans and tidies the desk in between speeding the departing guests whilst I change into my overalls and start the daily round of cleaning. I clean the stairs, then the first floor landing, then the top stairs and the second floor landing. Most of the windows are in the guest bedrooms, and I'll come to them later. Then I make a start on the bedrooms that are being vacated. Top down to the ground floor, then back to pick up the couple of rooms that are vacated late. Then it's our dinner. In the afternoon I clean and tidy the rooms with sitting guests, and that's how it was about half past three when I came to Mister Horrabin's room.
His was the last room on my duty list, and it was close to the time I stopped work to rest for an hour or so before the evening jobs took over. Dad would not be looking for me since I usually go to my room to read or knit. In this case, I was, for the first time I could ever remember, curious to see what sort of things he had brought with him. Frankly, I wanted to know more about him.
His room was immaculately tidy, bed made as well as I could make it myself, suitcase closed a buckled up, suit, shirts and ties hanging in the wardrobe. On the bed was a magazine called Swish, and on the cover was a black and white photograph of a rather plump, busty girl stretched over a man's knee, he with hand raised to deliver a hearty slap. Underneath was another magazine with the title Girls under Restraint, which, I noticed, was published in Copenhagen.
I was riveted. I could not take my eyes off them, and moments later I was lying across the bed, poring over the pictures and the linking text. I leave you do imagine why I was reading one-handed.
Swish was poorly printed, and held together with staples, but it was utterly engrossing to me. Article after article described spanking and being spanked, caned, strapped and tanned. Knickers were "taken down", "strokes" were counted and the disciplinarian was punctiliously thanked for each one. It was an ordered universe, steeped in ritual, and something about it called out to something in me. I knew that what I was feeling was pure sexual excitement, and I loved it.
The bondage magazine was professionally produced and beautifully shot. Here too was an ordered universe, in which the girls were submissive and the men dominant. Thinking about it later, when the shock had died down, I guessed that there were other magazines to cater for submissive men and dominant women, but that was when the shock had died down.
I was imagining myself tightly bound, unable to escape, and happy in my imprisonment. Some of the positions would become severely painful after a time, and as I stared at the bondage photoshoot I pretended that I was dependent on my master to free me, and to free me at his will, not at mine. Even the big ball-gags, forcing the mouth wide open would become painful. Finding, to my slight embarrassment that I had removed my knickers at some point without even remembering doing so, I screwed them into a ball and crammed them into my mouth.
Just at that moment, as if he had been watching and waiting, the door opened wide. What a moment for Mister Horrabin to return. I was terrified, and excited beyond description.
He opened the door wide, and looked down at me, smiling. He said not a word. I gazed up into his brown eyes close to panic. He gestured for me to get up, I stood, head down, the picture of submission. He sat on the bed and gestured me to lie across his knee, and I complied. There was no reason for anybody to be in earshot, so our silence was a part of the unspoken compact between us. If I had not been reading the magazines with such avidity, no contract would have been in force between us, but I was, and he closed the trap around me.
My overalls covered a full-length petticoat, and a bra; no stockings and, of course, no knickers. The position I was in hid nothing from him, and I could not see or guess how he was reacting to what he could see. His fingers brushed the wet lips of what I have learned to call my twat. He began to slap, alternating from one buttock to the other, crisply, sharply, deliciously.
Since I have been with my true master, girls have told me that they knew they were submissive, even masochistic, as small children. One friend says she discovered it when she was nine years old, in a game of cowboys and Indians. I must be a slow learner, because I found it out that afternoon, when I drank in those magazines and longed, viscerally, to be the one who was being spanked, caned, bound and chained.
He stopped too soon, He always stopped too soon, before I could climb right into the pain and lose myself. He spoke:
"Now Twat. Get down on your belly and kiss my feet. Acknowledge your master."
Yes, yes, all I wanted to do was to prostrate myself and own myself his to do with as he wills.
After a few minutes he sent me away, telling me to come back at bedtime. I had never dreamed of responding to the invitations of the male guests, but nothing would have kept me away. I slept with him each night he was there, and on Friday afternoon, when he departed, I left a note for Father and left with him. I never went back.
I thought later that the greatest piece of good and bad luck in my life was that he did not see me until the morning, when my hair was freshly brushed and dressed, and I was bathed and dressed in my black waitress dress and starched cap and pinny. Otherwise, he might never have noticed me, let alone desired me.
He called me Twat, or sometime Twatti when he was pleased with me. Having spent the past few years as a shapeless, formless lump in overalls, headscarf tied in a turban and worn bedroom slippers (except when I was on the reception desk), my new name gave me something to live up to. I was identified with my most intimate part, the seat of pleasure and the essence of the female.
I was his slave for almost three years. He taught me everything, introduced me to everything. He had to teach me almost everything about sex, and I was a slow learner. Luckily he discovered that the rhythmic application of a strap on my backside gave my memory much-needed stimulation. I found that my mouth and my back passage were of as much value to him as my twat. He could take me to the heights by plying with my nipples, and he had subtle devices that could keep me on the edge of orgasm for an hour at a time. He punished me when necessary, spanked or caned me for his pleasure and mine, and worked with talent and sophistication to give me sexual pleasure, as well as to train me to please him.
Then he gave me away.
"Twatti, I have something to say to you. I have come to care for you very much, but I have to go back to Austria, or we will lose our family home and our family business. I am sorry but, much as I would like to, I cannot take you. My brothers and my wife and son would simply not permit it."
I collapsed and started to howl with shock and grief. He smacked my face, not brutally, but firmly, and I subsided into sniffs and floods of silent tears. Above all, I knew I must not make him ashamed of me.
I knew that he had his wife had been separated for longer than my lifetime, and did not so much as exchange birthday cards. He was not going there to replace me or to be with them, and I could believe that it was only urgent necessity that as tearing him away from me.
Then he dropped the bombshell. "Twatti", he said, "I'm giving you to my friend and ex-partner Yura Ypsilanti. He is a good man and he will take care of you. I am hopeful that one day we can be together again, but if it happens at all it is years, if not decades away.
I thought maybe he is right, perhaps I can't take care of myself. So I made no protest and allowed him to make the arrangements. I suppose, if I had some money of my own, I might have thought otherwise, but apart from cash for the local shop, I never handled money, and he chose and bought my clothes and even bought my sanitary towels for me. Looking back, I can see that I had been systematically infantilised, but at the time I simply felt totally incompetent to care for myself.
So I was handed over, like an unwanted gift. Mister Horrabin helped me pack, I had few possessions and the suitcase I had brought with me when I came to his flat needed only to be supplemented with one cardboard box and a Spar carrier bag. He put me in the taxi, gave the address and paid the driver. I wept bitterly throughout the twenty-minute journey, that brought me to a house I had never visited before, to become the chattel of a man I had met only half a dozen times. I felt that the bottom had dropped out of my life and I was a hapless ant, sliding inexorably into the rapacious jaws of an ant-lion.
Ten years or so later, my true master gave me a book called The Story of O, which had been smuggled into England by a friend who owned an erotic bookshop just down the road. I was much struck by her mixture of fear and elation when her lover gave O to his brother, on the grounds that she had to get used to being the property of someone she did not love and who did not love her.
It made me aware of the gulf between O's depicted drive to self-annihillation and my own perverse desire for fulfilment and love with a kind but strict master. I did not love Mister Ypsilanti (he demanded to be called and referred to as Master, but I thought of him as Mister Ypsilanti a symbol of silent and inward rebellion).
I certainly had no affection for Mister Ypsilanti. He was a dour, humourless man with what I thought, and still think, was a streak of misanthropy going right through him. Mister Horrabin called me Twatti with some affection and, although it seems an odd word to use, respect. Mister Ypsilanti called me Twat as if it were a bitter curse. He cared nothing for my satisfaction, and, I thought, not much for his own.
He raped me, night after night, seeming to prefer to fuck me dry and cause soreness and pain. On the least provocation he would whip me, and by the end of a month, I had to go around bare because the open sores on my back would weep and stick to my clothing. This was pain, pure pain, with no frisson of pleasure left in it.
Mister Horrabin had played water sports with me, and I quite liked it. The taste of piss was not unacceptable, and the feeling of warm rivulets running down my face and body was mildly pleasurable, and naughty in a childish sort of way. One day he made me clean his arse with my tongue after his morning bowel movement. I went through with it and then dashed to the toilet to vomit until my stomach was empty. He never made me do it again. It was an experience I was not eager to repeat, but I knew that I could do it again it if he wanted it enough. Now I was forced.
As I came to hate Mister Ypsilanti, my resentment with Mister Horrabin grew and grew. How could he show so little concern for me as to consign me to this prison? I knew that even if he came back for me, I should refuse to go with him. I started to plan for escape. To escape I needed money. I knew I could use his clothes and shoes, but without money, I was trapped.
I started by saving six pennies, one at a time, from the change from fish and chips and bagels. I turned that into a sixpence and hid it under the bed, where he could not get down to look. Soon I had a shilling, two months later, two shillings, and finally half a crown -- enough money to get the tube into the middle of London and disappear. Soon, soon I would be free. I did not care when happened then. I might live, I might die, but I would rather starve than stay here.
I didn't know he was so ill. I knew he wasn't too well, he looked thin and drawn, in fact the bones of his face coming into prominence made him even more austerely handsome. God, how I hated the final insult of his handsomeness.
He was sleeping badly, and for the past couple of weeks he had been sending me to sleep in the spare bedroom. Then, one Sunday morning, I went out early for his usual Sunday bagels and lachs, and when I went to wake him up he was dead. I suspected it was heart failure. I knew he had to take heart medicine and I suspected that he had stopped taking it when he felt too ill to go out, Unexpectedly soon, I was free.
He was stone cold, so there was no point in taking any action; you can't ameliorate death. I had no intention of hanging around for the authorities; for whom I probably didn't exist anyway. I began to search the house. I found a wallet with three pound notes, a ten-shilling note and a chequebook. The chequebook was no use to me so I left it in plain sight on the bedside table.
I found some nice women's jewellery and a gold wristlet watch. They went straight into my heap of things to take with me. Then I struck lucky. I had never been allowed to open the cupboards, and I started to see what was there. On a high shelf, I found the clothes I brought with me, that I had never been allowed to wear. I also found what must have been things left behind by his wife. A good leather handbag, some very old-fashioned but very good pre-war women's clothes including an Astrakhan coat with a big, snuggly collar and a Russian-style fur hat. A search among the boxes revealed four pairs of women's shoes, a size too small for me, but wearable.
These winter months he had made me go shopping naked under a thin, shabby cloth coat, feet in a pair of worn-out black plimsolls whilst that sybaritic luxury hung in the wardrobe. If he weren't dead, I should have wanted to batter him senseless. Anyway, that's one problem solved. I don't have to pollute my body with his clothes. I can dress up handsomely and hide under the hat the hair that he had cropped with nail scissors so that it looked as if eaten by rats.
I made some tea; no milk or sugar since, as he did not take them, we had none in the house. I ate my fill of the bagels, smoked salmon and cream cheese. In these eighteen months of fetching them from the Jewish delicatessen on Stamford Hill, this was the first time I had tasted them. They were heavenly and, now that I was free, I vowed to add them to my own diet and always make sure I had enough money to buy them. Unaccustomed to such a full stomach, I was soon bloated and it hurt, so I went for a lie down. No need to listen out for his hateful, hate-filled voice. He can never hurt me now. Tomorrow I shall close up the house and depart. Soho here I come.
Jim McMurty.
When you get demobbed, they give you a hideous shit-brown double-breasted chalkstripe suit, They take away the battledress you've been wearing for the past two years, and you feel strangely unsupported, emotionally empty. Your feet are adapted to ammunition boots, and shoes feel light and insubstantial. You get a railway warrant and a cardboard suitcase in place of your kitbag. And they have finished with you without a word of farewell.
Back in London, I spent a few days with the family, and helped Dad out in the tattoo parlour whilst I got my bearings. There was nothing for me in Bow, and I was going to make the break and look for a shop-front premises up west.
Four weeks of going from estate agent to estate agent, scouring the Evening Standard and Dalton's Weekly and walking my feet to rags on the pavements of central London, and I had settled on a closed-down barber's shop in Bewick street. There had originally been four chairs in a long shop not much wider than a corridor.
It already had the plumbing installed, and it would be easy to partition the back for privacy, whilst people looking in the front could see tattoos being applied on the less private areas of my less sensitive customers' bodies. The single toilet in the far rear, originally for the barbershop staff, could be turned into two cubicles for male and female clients. Yes, I expected to be doing a fair proportion of my work on female customers. This was Soho, not the West India Dock Road.
The place was a tip. It had been empty for years, having sustained war damage, and it needed to be stripped out and thoroughly cleaned and decorated. I have never been afraid of getting my hands dirty, and, even more than my parents, the army had ingrained cleanliness into me.
I took a five year lease, with no rent for the first three months whilst the work was in progress. My first action was to get a signwriter to paint the fascia on the day after the lease was signed.
Nine weeks later I was open, and Dad and Mum and a few of my army mates turned up to wet the new baby's head. I was working Straight away, I was getting a trickle of work, but it took a few month for me to become busy. Strangely enough, my first job was a regimental crest -- the Coldstream Guards.
Bewick Street was a friendly place for the people who worked there. Alfredo's would always send a plated meal in or cut some sandwiches. The ladies of the street, several of whom lived in the bed-sits over my shop, would stick their heads round the door and chat when I wasn't busy, and the Dennis and Bern from the erotic bookshop would always say a good word about me to their customers, which brought me some interesting jobs. They also procured books with photos of tattoos, especially the beautiful Japanese books which were like hen's teeth since the war. It was Bern who pushed me into putting up the notice that said Intimate piercing and tattoos available on request.
It was the winter of 1949-50 and it was bitterly cold. Not record-breaking great-ice-age cold like 1947, but still pretty parky. Tuesday morning and I was just about to open up -- I leave myself a good hour to clean and sterilize everything and give the place a good once over before customers arrive at ten.
I walked down the narrow staircase from my nice little bed-sit over the shop, out into the street and down to Mickey's for a Daily Mirror and my daily ten Capstan. Mickey's wife had been very pulled down with bronchitis and I was asking how she was and if she'd like to try some of the soup I had made from some kidneys I had managed to score. You know, typical neighbours' chat. As I walked up to my doorway I could hear footsteps behind me, and I turned to see the young woman in the furs who had stood behind me at Mickey's. She was tiny, thin as a wraith, white and shivering; she looked scared stiff.
"Come in love," I said reassuringly. What can I do for you? Here, have a seat; get a load off."
She just sat there, seemingly unable to speak. I got up, filled the kettle and put it on the stove for hot water. I didn't want to upset her, but I was hoping this wouldn't take too long. I had a shop to clean. She took off the Russian fur hat and I was shocked to see her hair. It reminded me of those pictures we saw at the end of the war, those nasty bastards of the French resistance scalping the poor tarts who had gone out with German soldiers. French resistance my arse!
"I was wondering if you knew anywhere I could get a room and if there were any jobs going." She looked desperate. "I was in the sweetshop and listened to you. You sounded like a nice man, so I took a chance. It's all right, I'll go in a minute; my feet are beginning to warm up."
It would be like drowning kittens to be unkind to the poor tart.
"Tell you what, ducks, you help me clean the shop and get ready for customers and I'll buy you a hot breakfast as Alfredo's. OK?"
She didn't say a word other than to ask where things were kept. whizzed round the place with a vacuum cleaner, cleaned the ashtrays, tidied the magazine rack, took the post from the postman and put it out the back on the table, gave the front windows a polish and found a dozen other jobs to do in the next hour, as I organised my workspace. I have an autoclave like they use in hospitals to keep my stuff sterile, and it needed unpacking and everything straightened up. With mystery girl's help, everything was tickety-boo by twenty past nine. Time for a good breakfast.
"Come on gell," I said, time for breakfast". She put on her coat, and we walked three doors up to Alfredo's.
"Right gell, what's yer name? Mine's Jim".
"My masters called me Twat, but I prefer twatti."
"Yer masters? Yer pullin' my plonker."
"No, not at all. I've been a slave ever since I left home. The real reason I came to see you today was to ask if I could be your slave. I would be so good. I would do everything you asked me to, and I would soon learn to serve you. Please, even if only for a little while! I don't eat much, and I would not need much, just a place to sleep and a who will take care of me."
Just then Rosemary came over to take our orders. Breakfast here was strictly for the locals, shopkeepers, bookies' runners, tarts (some tarts anyway, not the druggies), even the postman and the local Bobby. Anyone else would be politely but firmly told that this was a private party. Nobody wanted questions asked about where the bacon, eggs and bloaters came from.
Mystery girl asked for scrambled egg, and she was overwhelmed to find it was made from fresh, not dried, eggs. I had my usual fare, porridge and a bacon sarnie, plus a big mug of strong milky tea. She said in a whisper that she had not had milk in her tea since she left home over five years earlier. Her masters took their tea black.
I took her back to my bed-sit and turned on one bar of the electric fire for her.
"I've got to get to work. You stay here, ducks, and have a kip. If you need anything, come down the stairs and knock on the wall near the front door, I'll knock back and you can go back upstairs to wait for me. I'll come as soon as I can, but I can't leave a customer half done. OK?"
"May I use the lavatory?" she asked shyly. I was astonished.
"Of course yer fucking can, Why the fuck not?"
She hung her head and didn't answer.
Around one I had a break and went upstairs. She had taken off her clothes and was sitting close to the fire, naked, darning a stocking. The sight of her back and bum horrified me. All over welts and scars, some healed or healing, some scabbed, some weeping and some, quite clearly infected. She looked like something out of a concentration camp. She was thin to emaciation, her little tits flaccid, her belly swollen. Hearing me cry out in shock she looked up, scared, and immediately cringed, putting up her arms to protect her head.
"Be back in a sec.", I said and went down the stairs.
One thing we have in plenty in a tattoo parlour is antiseptic and sterile dressings. I brought them up and made her lie on the bed whilst I dressed her wounds. The open cuts I dressed with sulphanilamide powder, a powerful anti-infective agent. That would have to do until I can get a doctor to see her, and maybe prescribe some of the new miracle drug penicillin, which was in such short supply. I was trying my best to be gentle and she repaid me very well by falling asleep as I worked.
I had a client at half past two, and from then on I was busy until six. When I got back upstairs the flat was cleaned and tidied throughout and she was peeling potatoes and dropping them into the pressure cooker. She looked up at me, unsure if what she was doing was acceptable. I smiled reassuringly and she smiled back, looking relieved. She was wearing a man's white shirt, but she was otherwise naked. I guess it was a common state for her and caused no embarrassment.
"I'm making a sort of kidney and vegetable soup with the cabbage, turnips, onions and a bit of celery. I found a bottle of cooking sherry and used a bit, I hope that's all right."
"Yes, that's ok. The cooking sherry is left from my last girlfriend, Anita. She moved out not long after I had finished tattooing her back and bottom. I guess I'd served my purpose."
If I sounded a bit cynical, that's all it was. By the time she left I was about brassed off with Anita, and coming back one evening to find her gone was a heartfelt relief.
Mystery girl could not have known that, and she started to weep at the idea of my pain. I started to laugh, and after a hesitation, she laughed back at me. I was really starting to like this girl.
"Look, I can't call you Twat, I really can't. How about we make it Tottie, like the little tottie wagtails?"
She grinned, plainly delighted. "Oh yes, please master. I can wag my tail like anything when I am pleased." She took it as permission to stay, and I couldn't bear to say otherwise.
And this is how I became a slaveholder.
I was born in Bow, where my parents still live, which make me a true cockney. I happily left school at fifteen, and went to help my dad. He is a tattooist with a little parlour just off the West India Dock Road. Those of you who remember the Young Friends Chinese restaurant, where like many others, I discovered the pleasures of dim sum, will know just where I mean.
Dad's clientele were almost all seamen, and many were the four-masted schooners, naked ladies and British bulldogs that I helped ink into broad, hairy backs and hairier arms. I could draw pretty well freehand so I brought a new skill into the shop. Up to then, Dad had bought in his patterns, but I could make stencils, making designs from scratch, or copying pictures, stripping down the complexities under his critical eye.
By the time I got my call-up papers, I was a dab hand with the needle. I was taking on straightforward jobs on my own -- I can't tell you how many times I had the tedious job of blocking in LOVE on the knuckles of the right hand and HATE on the left -- but if that was what the customer wanted, it is what he got. I worked with men almost exclusively until a creepy-looking guy who must have been going on for seven feet tall brought in a rather pretty girl one Saturday.
"Go on Denise", he said encouragingly, "Tell him what you want him to do."
Denise smiled up at him adoringly and, to my astonishment, said in a bright, matter-of-fact tone:
"I want a dotted line around my throat, and in the middle it has to say Cut here. So Billy never forgets that he has my permission to kill me if he ever wants to get rid of me. I know I would not want to go on living, so it would be an act of kindness."
God! What a nutcase! Does she know what she's getting into? I cautioned her:
"You do know that it will show, whatever you are wearing, and, although it will fade a bit, it is totally permanent, don't you?"
"Yes, yes, I know all that. This is his birthday present" she simpered. "It is entirely my own idea. It's what I want, and nobody has talked me into it, and I am doing it of my own free will."
There was nothing more to say.
"Take off your blouse and bra," instructed her lover, "let's give the young man a thrill". Denise blushed and giggled, but she stripped off and lay back on the table with a smile. I now know that if he had told her to let me fuck her, she would have complied with the same smile.
I put a couple of pillows under the back of her neck to tilt her head back and stretch her neck. She lay there, round, pink-nippled breasts complacently smiling up at me like plump, ripe fruit. I swabbed her throat with rubbing alcohol and followed up with dilute dettol, a mild antiseptic, then marked out the simple design in blue. I had a ceiling-mounted mirror above the table, and I adjusted it so that she could see the result. She approved it with a bright smile.
"I shan't do it all today, I'll do one side and let that heal up, then do the other in about a week. Is that ok with you?" Punctiliously I addressed all the questions to her, disregarding her companion. She looked a little put out.
"But why can't you do it all today? It is such a little thing, just a few dots and two short words."
"Yes, but it will be sore for a few days, so we do one side first and let that heal up, then do the other so you have a side to sleep on that does not irritate."
"No! Do it all today. I want it straight away. Is that all right Billy? I don't care how much it hurts. You are trivialising the whole thing by worrying about a little bit of discomfort."
So I began. I think this was the first time I met someone who seemed to welcome pain as a testimony to commitment. Later I was to find that they constituted a small but distinct sub-species, that I grew deeply involved in. I worked steadily, changing needles from time to time as required, and in forty minutes it was done. I wiped away a couple of small pearls of blood where a capillary was close under the skin, swabbed the slightly reddened skin with a little methylated spirit and followed up with more dettol. Before I dressed her throat with a couple of pieces of boracic lint, I showed her the effect in the mirror. I took the money; it was done. I never saw the pair of them again.
Soon after my seventeenth birthday, I got my call-up papers and railway warrant.The problem was that I had just come off a friend's motorbike and got myself a badly crushed foot. I got a doctor's certificate and was given a deferment. Nine months later, after a medical examination, I reported for basic training.
I went through the usual eight weeks of sleeplessness, strenuous exercise, unremitting pressure and thoroughgoing behaviour modification. I was not very different from the other blokes in my training platoon, except for being a year older. Not among the best, nor among the worst; middling in most things. But I found I loved learning to strip and clean, load and fire my Lee Enfield. Although I never fired a shot in anger, I seemed to have an aptitude for rifle shooting, and I have gone on loving it from then to now, competing at Bisley for eight consecutive years.
I passed out into the Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derbys) and was speedily shipped to Germany. On the off-chance I took along my tattooing kit and a supply of needles and inks, thinking that they might come in handy some time. When we got to the depot at Detmold, a long, long way from the East German border, We started to settle into a dull routine.
One evening in the barrack room, for something to do, I got out my gear and started tattooing my regimental crest onto my left forearm.
It's a rather pretty badge, a Maltese cross surmounted by a crown, with a stag couchant on a blue ground, Sherwood Foresters on ribbons alongside the stag and Notts and Derbys on a ribbon below. Sorry I've forgotten all the heraldic terms, but I hope you get the picture. I had shaved my forearm to make the job easier, and made a stencil of the badge to keep it straight and in proportion.
Every tattooist is his own first customer, and that was certainly true of me. There I was pricking in the outline, when I became aware that I had a crowd of spectators who watched in awed silence. I looked around and grinned, which gave them license to speak.
"How long is it going to take?"
"Does it hurt?"
"How many colours can you do?"
"Where did you learn it?"
The question nobody was asking, was the question on everybody's lips. Will you do one for me?
"It's gonna take a while. I'll ink in the outlines and the lettering, but I can't do the badge until I get some light grey. My Dad will send it asap, but I'm a bit boracic right now, and I shall have to build up the inks bit by bit."
It took a Geordie to request clarification.
"Hoo jer mean brassic, bonny lad?"
Determined to keep my end up. I hammed up the cheeky chappie. "Boracic lint, my old China. You know, skint; sometimes yer wiv money, sometimes yer between money. I'm seriously between money right now."
Corporal Symes summed the whole thing up.
"If you can do that sort of work, I don't see shortage of money being one of your problems. You'll have a waiting list a mile long..."
He was quite right. The National Servicemen, many, like me, scarcely dry behind the ears, could not imagine anything more macho than a regimental crest tattoo. I work neatly and have cultivated a light touch. Soon I had a range of small colourful tats on offer. I wrote the whole lexicon of girls' names from Aileen to Zinnia over their hearts in decorative cartouches, Sergeant Austin, the burly PT instructor, had Tower Bridge pot on his back, open with a string of barges going through, and suddenly seemed to be going around shirtless a lot of the time. But that was not all.
As the months wore on, squaddies started bringing in their girlfriends. ATS girls, nurses and a string of German lassies were offered or offered themselves as subjects. This was a whole different market, one I had not encountered on the Isle of Dogs. The female taste, as mediated by their boyfriends, was for small, discreet, feminine butterflies, hearts, flowers and colourful birds, in locations usually covered by bras and knickers. Who was I to say them nay?
I had not had a very extensive sex-life up to that point -- well, not to put too fine a point on it, I had no experience at all. Not that many of us were budding casanovas. The two or three generational family in the two-up-two-down terraced house was still the norm where most of us came from. Privacy was an alien concept. I had done little more than snatch a few kisses in the back row of the flicks before I was called up. The allied occupation of Germany provided a wealth of opportunities, so much so that the venereal disease rate was high enough to make our masters issue free condoms; much to the scandal of certain Members of the two Houses of Parliament who were maiden ladies, or the next thing to it.
It was classic carrot and stick. Put the rear of God in us with gruesome filmshows about the perils of the pox, make condoms readily available, and, thirdly, make the treatment of VD as painful and humiliating as possible. It was not a whole-hearted success. The army was dealing with a pool of intractable stupidity, and the situation only eased as the standard of living of the German population rose off rock bottom. But this was 1948, and we were in the thick of the Berlin airlift. My fellow squaddies were only too pleased to introduce me to girls we were up for a bit of hanky-panky, and I was raring to go.
I was discovering that it pays to win friends and influence people. My name came up for a forty-eight-hour leave pass, and I wanted to get to London to buy inks, needles and a better tattoo machine. No problem. Even before my leave began I was on my way to Northolt courtesy of RAF Transport Command. All it cost was the promise to put RAF wings on a couple of arms. And Bob's your uncle.
Mum and Dad knew I was coming, and I was home as fast as the London Transport could carry me, with a promise that a lorry would pick me up at Ruislip station. How's that for service?
Dad had contacts everywhere. In one jam-packed day I was fully kitted out and, for a moderate fee, I learned all about piercing nipples, noses, tongues and even more delicate parts, from a well-preserved lady instructor and a couple of very willing volunteer subjects. I was even offered a master-class in how to insert a Prince Albert, but that was, and remains, a step too far for me.
Yes, in Germany I was seeing a side of life scarcely dreamed off in the Isle of Dogs. Pretty frauleins wanting intimate art or jewellery, and very prepared to offer to play rather than to pay. It was a coming of age for me, and I appreciated every aspect of it. Of course I carried on my day-to-day occupation as orderly-room clerk, and, like everyone else, got roped in to load the cargo planes running the Soviet gauntlet into Berlin, but my spare time was spent in work that was play and play that was work.
All good things come to an end, and the following Summer my demob came and I was back in London, richer in experience as well as money. Shortly afterwards I became as you see me now, an accidental but contented slave-holder.
End of part one.
Sylvia Hughes (Twatti)
My parents owned a boarding house in Islington. It was made up of two early Victorian, four storey houses knocked through. Mum's parents had run it for us during the war, whilst Mum supported the war effort by working for the Ministry of Food. When Dad came home from Burma in 1946, they opted for her to stay in her job, which was well paid and pensionable, whilst Dad ran the boarding house. I left school in 1943 and went straight in as a chambermaid, occasional receptionist, waitress and general dogsbody.
I never had a boyfriend, although I had plenty of offers. I just found boys silly. My Dad and his two brothers were my idea of men, strong, enduring, sweet-natured, full of humour, but unwilling to stand any nonsense. One day, I dreamed, I should find a man like that.
I'd been doing the job for about three or four years, and settled into a routine that got best results in the minimum of time. I hardly regarded the ever-changing tide of guests, usually men staying for a night or two, maybe Monday to Friday, seldom longer. Sometimes, not often, they did something to disgust me, but even then I was largely indifferent. Then came Mister Horrabin.. I took his reservation by phone. His dark, chocolate-velvet voice sent a thrill through me. I was prepping vegetables when he arrived so Dad checked him in. That evening, for one reason or another, I never saw him at all. In the morning I served his breakfast and he smiled at me. His skin was smooth and olive-tinted, his eyes a warm brown, his hair black and tightly curled, thinning at the crown, with a touch of grey at the temples. His smile made my stomach lurch. And then he left, presumably for work.
We have a routine. First of all, breakfast, laid overnight, cooked and served. Then Dad mans the desk to deal with the departing guests, whilst I clean the public areas, the lounge (what a fug of smoke, brimming ashtrays, spilt drinks and rugs kicked all over the place) the hallways, the downstairs toilets. Dad cleans and tidies the desk in between speeding the departing guests whilst I change into my overalls and start the daily round of cleaning. I clean the stairs, then the first floor landing, then the top stairs and the second floor landing. Most of the windows are in the guest bedrooms, and I'll come to them later. Then I make a start on the bedrooms that are being vacated. Top down to the ground floor, then back to pick up the couple of rooms that are vacated late. Then it's our dinner. In the afternoon I clean and tidy the rooms with sitting guests, and that's how it was about half past three when I came to Mister Horrabin's room.
His was the last room on my duty list, and it was close to the time I stopped work to rest for an hour or so before the evening jobs took over. Dad would not be looking for me since I usually go to my room to read or knit. In this case, I was, for the first time I could ever remember, curious to see what sort of things he had brought with him. Frankly, I wanted to know more about him.
His room was immaculately tidy, bed made as well as I could make it myself, suitcase closed a buckled up, suit, shirts and ties hanging in the wardrobe. On the bed was a magazine called Swish, and on the cover was a black and white photograph of a rather plump, busty girl stretched over a man's knee, he with hand raised to deliver a hearty slap. Underneath was another magazine with the title Girls under Restraint, which, I noticed, was published in Copenhagen.
I was riveted. I could not take my eyes off them, and moments later I was lying across the bed, poring over the pictures and the linking text. I leave you do imagine why I was reading one-handed.
Swish was poorly printed, and held together with staples, but it was utterly engrossing to me. Article after article described spanking and being spanked, caned, strapped and tanned. Knickers were "taken down", "strokes" were counted and the disciplinarian was punctiliously thanked for each one. It was an ordered universe, steeped in ritual, and something about it called out to something in me. I knew that what I was feeling was pure sexual excitement, and I loved it.
The bondage magazine was professionally produced and beautifully shot. Here too was an ordered universe, in which the girls were submissive and the men dominant. Thinking about it later, when the shock had died down, I guessed that there were other magazines to cater for submissive men and dominant women, but that was when the shock had died down.
I was imagining myself tightly bound, unable to escape, and happy in my imprisonment. Some of the positions would become severely painful after a time, and as I stared at the bondage photoshoot I pretended that I was dependent on my master to free me, and to free me at his will, not at mine. Even the big ball-gags, forcing the mouth wide open would become painful. Finding, to my slight embarrassment that I had removed my knickers at some point without even remembering doing so, I screwed them into a ball and crammed them into my mouth.
Just at that moment, as if he had been watching and waiting, the door opened wide. What a moment for Mister Horrabin to return. I was terrified, and excited beyond description.
He opened the door wide, and looked down at me, smiling. He said not a word. I gazed up into his brown eyes close to panic. He gestured for me to get up, I stood, head down, the picture of submission. He sat on the bed and gestured me to lie across his knee, and I complied. There was no reason for anybody to be in earshot, so our silence was a part of the unspoken compact between us. If I had not been reading the magazines with such avidity, no contract would have been in force between us, but I was, and he closed the trap around me.
My overalls covered a full-length petticoat, and a bra; no stockings and, of course, no knickers. The position I was in hid nothing from him, and I could not see or guess how he was reacting to what he could see. His fingers brushed the wet lips of what I have learned to call my twat. He began to slap, alternating from one buttock to the other, crisply, sharply, deliciously.
Since I have been with my true master, girls have told me that they knew they were submissive, even masochistic, as small children. One friend says she discovered it when she was nine years old, in a game of cowboys and Indians. I must be a slow learner, because I found it out that afternoon, when I drank in those magazines and longed, viscerally, to be the one who was being spanked, caned, bound and chained.
He stopped too soon, He always stopped too soon, before I could climb right into the pain and lose myself. He spoke:
"Now Twat. Get down on your belly and kiss my feet. Acknowledge your master."
Yes, yes, all I wanted to do was to prostrate myself and own myself his to do with as he wills.
After a few minutes he sent me away, telling me to come back at bedtime. I had never dreamed of responding to the invitations of the male guests, but nothing would have kept me away. I slept with him each night he was there, and on Friday afternoon, when he departed, I left a note for Father and left with him. I never went back.
I thought later that the greatest piece of good and bad luck in my life was that he did not see me until the morning, when my hair was freshly brushed and dressed, and I was bathed and dressed in my black waitress dress and starched cap and pinny. Otherwise, he might never have noticed me, let alone desired me.
He called me Twat, or sometime Twatti when he was pleased with me. Having spent the past few years as a shapeless, formless lump in overalls, headscarf tied in a turban and worn bedroom slippers (except when I was on the reception desk), my new name gave me something to live up to. I was identified with my most intimate part, the seat of pleasure and the essence of the female.
I was his slave for almost three years. He taught me everything, introduced me to everything. He had to teach me almost everything about sex, and I was a slow learner. Luckily he discovered that the rhythmic application of a strap on my backside gave my memory much-needed stimulation. I found that my mouth and my back passage were of as much value to him as my twat. He could take me to the heights by plying with my nipples, and he had subtle devices that could keep me on the edge of orgasm for an hour at a time. He punished me when necessary, spanked or caned me for his pleasure and mine, and worked with talent and sophistication to give me sexual pleasure, as well as to train me to please him.
Then he gave me away.
"Twatti, I have something to say to you. I have come to care for you very much, but I have to go back to Austria, or we will lose our family home and our family business. I am sorry but, much as I would like to, I cannot take you. My brothers and my wife and son would simply not permit it."
I collapsed and started to howl with shock and grief. He smacked my face, not brutally, but firmly, and I subsided into sniffs and floods of silent tears. Above all, I knew I must not make him ashamed of me.
I knew that he had his wife had been separated for longer than my lifetime, and did not so much as exchange birthday cards. He was not going there to replace me or to be with them, and I could believe that it was only urgent necessity that as tearing him away from me.
Then he dropped the bombshell. "Twatti", he said, "I'm giving you to my friend and ex-partner Yura Ypsilanti. He is a good man and he will take care of you. I am hopeful that one day we can be together again, but if it happens at all it is years, if not decades away.
I thought maybe he is right, perhaps I can't take care of myself. So I made no protest and allowed him to make the arrangements. I suppose, if I had some money of my own, I might have thought otherwise, but apart from cash for the local shop, I never handled money, and he chose and bought my clothes and even bought my sanitary towels for me. Looking back, I can see that I had been systematically infantilised, but at the time I simply felt totally incompetent to care for myself.
So I was handed over, like an unwanted gift. Mister Horrabin helped me pack, I had few possessions and the suitcase I had brought with me when I came to his flat needed only to be supplemented with one cardboard box and a Spar carrier bag. He put me in the taxi, gave the address and paid the driver. I wept bitterly throughout the twenty-minute journey, that brought me to a house I had never visited before, to become the chattel of a man I had met only half a dozen times. I felt that the bottom had dropped out of my life and I was a hapless ant, sliding inexorably into the rapacious jaws of an ant-lion.
Ten years or so later, my true master gave me a book called The Story of O, which had been smuggled into England by a friend who owned an erotic bookshop just down the road. I was much struck by her mixture of fear and elation when her lover gave O to his brother, on the grounds that she had to get used to being the property of someone she did not love and who did not love her.
It made me aware of the gulf between O's depicted drive to self-annihillation and my own perverse desire for fulfilment and love with a kind but strict master. I did not love Mister Ypsilanti (he demanded to be called and referred to as Master, but I thought of him as Mister Ypsilanti a symbol of silent and inward rebellion).
I certainly had no affection for Mister Ypsilanti. He was a dour, humourless man with what I thought, and still think, was a streak of misanthropy going right through him. Mister Horrabin called me Twatti with some affection and, although it seems an odd word to use, respect. Mister Ypsilanti called me Twat as if it were a bitter curse. He cared nothing for my satisfaction, and, I thought, not much for his own.
He raped me, night after night, seeming to prefer to fuck me dry and cause soreness and pain. On the least provocation he would whip me, and by the end of a month, I had to go around bare because the open sores on my back would weep and stick to my clothing. This was pain, pure pain, with no frisson of pleasure left in it.
Mister Horrabin had played water sports with me, and I quite liked it. The taste of piss was not unacceptable, and the feeling of warm rivulets running down my face and body was mildly pleasurable, and naughty in a childish sort of way. One day he made me clean his arse with my tongue after his morning bowel movement. I went through with it and then dashed to the toilet to vomit until my stomach was empty. He never made me do it again. It was an experience I was not eager to repeat, but I knew that I could do it again it if he wanted it enough. Now I was forced.
As I came to hate Mister Ypsilanti, my resentment with Mister Horrabin grew and grew. How could he show so little concern for me as to consign me to this prison? I knew that even if he came back for me, I should refuse to go with him. I started to plan for escape. To escape I needed money. I knew I could use his clothes and shoes, but without money, I was trapped.
I started by saving six pennies, one at a time, from the change from fish and chips and bagels. I turned that into a sixpence and hid it under the bed, where he could not get down to look. Soon I had a shilling, two months later, two shillings, and finally half a crown -- enough money to get the tube into the middle of London and disappear. Soon, soon I would be free. I did not care when happened then. I might live, I might die, but I would rather starve than stay here.
I didn't know he was so ill. I knew he wasn't too well, he looked thin and drawn, in fact the bones of his face coming into prominence made him even more austerely handsome. God, how I hated the final insult of his handsomeness.
He was sleeping badly, and for the past couple of weeks he had been sending me to sleep in the spare bedroom. Then, one Sunday morning, I went out early for his usual Sunday bagels and lachs, and when I went to wake him up he was dead. I suspected it was heart failure. I knew he had to take heart medicine and I suspected that he had stopped taking it when he felt too ill to go out, Unexpectedly soon, I was free.
He was stone cold, so there was no point in taking any action; you can't ameliorate death. I had no intention of hanging around for the authorities; for whom I probably didn't exist anyway. I began to search the house. I found a wallet with three pound notes, a ten-shilling note and a chequebook. The chequebook was no use to me so I left it in plain sight on the bedside table.
I found some nice women's jewellery and a gold wristlet watch. They went straight into my heap of things to take with me. Then I struck lucky. I had never been allowed to open the cupboards, and I started to see what was there. On a high shelf, I found the clothes I brought with me, that I had never been allowed to wear. I also found what must have been things left behind by his wife. A good leather handbag, some very old-fashioned but very good pre-war women's clothes including an Astrakhan coat with a big, snuggly collar and a Russian-style fur hat. A search among the boxes revealed four pairs of women's shoes, a size too small for me, but wearable.
These winter months he had made me go shopping naked under a thin, shabby cloth coat, feet in a pair of worn-out black plimsolls whilst that sybaritic luxury hung in the wardrobe. If he weren't dead, I should have wanted to batter him senseless. Anyway, that's one problem solved. I don't have to pollute my body with his clothes. I can dress up handsomely and hide under the hat the hair that he had cropped with nail scissors so that it looked as if eaten by rats.
I made some tea; no milk or sugar since, as he did not take them, we had none in the house. I ate my fill of the bagels, smoked salmon and cream cheese. In these eighteen months of fetching them from the Jewish delicatessen on Stamford Hill, this was the first time I had tasted them. They were heavenly and, now that I was free, I vowed to add them to my own diet and always make sure I had enough money to buy them. Unaccustomed to such a full stomach, I was soon bloated and it hurt, so I went for a lie down. No need to listen out for his hateful, hate-filled voice. He can never hurt me now. Tomorrow I shall close up the house and depart. Soho here I come.
Jim McMurty.
When you get demobbed, they give you a hideous shit-brown double-breasted chalkstripe suit, They take away the battledress you've been wearing for the past two years, and you feel strangely unsupported, emotionally empty. Your feet are adapted to ammunition boots, and shoes feel light and insubstantial. You get a railway warrant and a cardboard suitcase in place of your kitbag. And they have finished with you without a word of farewell.
Back in London, I spent a few days with the family, and helped Dad out in the tattoo parlour whilst I got my bearings. There was nothing for me in Bow, and I was going to make the break and look for a shop-front premises up west.
Four weeks of going from estate agent to estate agent, scouring the Evening Standard and Dalton's Weekly and walking my feet to rags on the pavements of central London, and I had settled on a closed-down barber's shop in Bewick street. There had originally been four chairs in a long shop not much wider than a corridor.
It already had the plumbing installed, and it would be easy to partition the back for privacy, whilst people looking in the front could see tattoos being applied on the less private areas of my less sensitive customers' bodies. The single toilet in the far rear, originally for the barbershop staff, could be turned into two cubicles for male and female clients. Yes, I expected to be doing a fair proportion of my work on female customers. This was Soho, not the West India Dock Road.
The place was a tip. It had been empty for years, having sustained war damage, and it needed to be stripped out and thoroughly cleaned and decorated. I have never been afraid of getting my hands dirty, and, even more than my parents, the army had ingrained cleanliness into me.
I took a five year lease, with no rent for the first three months whilst the work was in progress. My first action was to get a signwriter to paint the fascia on the day after the lease was signed.
Nine weeks later I was open, and Dad and Mum and a few of my army mates turned up to wet the new baby's head. I was working Straight away, I was getting a trickle of work, but it took a few month for me to become busy. Strangely enough, my first job was a regimental crest -- the Coldstream Guards.
Bewick Street was a friendly place for the people who worked there. Alfredo's would always send a plated meal in or cut some sandwiches. The ladies of the street, several of whom lived in the bed-sits over my shop, would stick their heads round the door and chat when I wasn't busy, and the Dennis and Bern from the erotic bookshop would always say a good word about me to their customers, which brought me some interesting jobs. They also procured books with photos of tattoos, especially the beautiful Japanese books which were like hen's teeth since the war. It was Bern who pushed me into putting up the notice that said Intimate piercing and tattoos available on request.
It was the winter of 1949-50 and it was bitterly cold. Not record-breaking great-ice-age cold like 1947, but still pretty parky. Tuesday morning and I was just about to open up -- I leave myself a good hour to clean and sterilize everything and give the place a good once over before customers arrive at ten.
I walked down the narrow staircase from my nice little bed-sit over the shop, out into the street and down to Mickey's for a Daily Mirror and my daily ten Capstan. Mickey's wife had been very pulled down with bronchitis and I was asking how she was and if she'd like to try some of the soup I had made from some kidneys I had managed to score. You know, typical neighbours' chat. As I walked up to my doorway I could hear footsteps behind me, and I turned to see the young woman in the furs who had stood behind me at Mickey's. She was tiny, thin as a wraith, white and shivering; she looked scared stiff.
"Come in love," I said reassuringly. What can I do for you? Here, have a seat; get a load off."
She just sat there, seemingly unable to speak. I got up, filled the kettle and put it on the stove for hot water. I didn't want to upset her, but I was hoping this wouldn't take too long. I had a shop to clean. She took off the Russian fur hat and I was shocked to see her hair. It reminded me of those pictures we saw at the end of the war, those nasty bastards of the French resistance scalping the poor tarts who had gone out with German soldiers. French resistance my arse!
"I was wondering if you knew anywhere I could get a room and if there were any jobs going." She looked desperate. "I was in the sweetshop and listened to you. You sounded like a nice man, so I took a chance. It's all right, I'll go in a minute; my feet are beginning to warm up."
It would be like drowning kittens to be unkind to the poor tart.
"Tell you what, ducks, you help me clean the shop and get ready for customers and I'll buy you a hot breakfast as Alfredo's. OK?"
She didn't say a word other than to ask where things were kept. whizzed round the place with a vacuum cleaner, cleaned the ashtrays, tidied the magazine rack, took the post from the postman and put it out the back on the table, gave the front windows a polish and found a dozen other jobs to do in the next hour, as I organised my workspace. I have an autoclave like they use in hospitals to keep my stuff sterile, and it needed unpacking and everything straightened up. With mystery girl's help, everything was tickety-boo by twenty past nine. Time for a good breakfast.
"Come on gell," I said, time for breakfast". She put on her coat, and we walked three doors up to Alfredo's.
"Right gell, what's yer name? Mine's Jim".
"My masters called me Twat, but I prefer twatti."
"Yer masters? Yer pullin' my plonker."
"No, not at all. I've been a slave ever since I left home. The real reason I came to see you today was to ask if I could be your slave. I would be so good. I would do everything you asked me to, and I would soon learn to serve you. Please, even if only for a little while! I don't eat much, and I would not need much, just a place to sleep and a who will take care of me."
Just then Rosemary came over to take our orders. Breakfast here was strictly for the locals, shopkeepers, bookies' runners, tarts (some tarts anyway, not the druggies), even the postman and the local Bobby. Anyone else would be politely but firmly told that this was a private party. Nobody wanted questions asked about where the bacon, eggs and bloaters came from.
Mystery girl asked for scrambled egg, and she was overwhelmed to find it was made from fresh, not dried, eggs. I had my usual fare, porridge and a bacon sarnie, plus a big mug of strong milky tea. She said in a whisper that she had not had milk in her tea since she left home over five years earlier. Her masters took their tea black.
I took her back to my bed-sit and turned on one bar of the electric fire for her.
"I've got to get to work. You stay here, ducks, and have a kip. If you need anything, come down the stairs and knock on the wall near the front door, I'll knock back and you can go back upstairs to wait for me. I'll come as soon as I can, but I can't leave a customer half done. OK?"
"May I use the lavatory?" she asked shyly. I was astonished.
"Of course yer fucking can, Why the fuck not?"
She hung her head and didn't answer.
Around one I had a break and went upstairs. She had taken off her clothes and was sitting close to the fire, naked, darning a stocking. The sight of her back and bum horrified me. All over welts and scars, some healed or healing, some scabbed, some weeping and some, quite clearly infected. She looked like something out of a concentration camp. She was thin to emaciation, her little tits flaccid, her belly swollen. Hearing me cry out in shock she looked up, scared, and immediately cringed, putting up her arms to protect her head.
"Be back in a sec.", I said and went down the stairs.
One thing we have in plenty in a tattoo parlour is antiseptic and sterile dressings. I brought them up and made her lie on the bed whilst I dressed her wounds. The open cuts I dressed with sulphanilamide powder, a powerful anti-infective agent. That would have to do until I can get a doctor to see her, and maybe prescribe some of the new miracle drug penicillin, which was in such short supply. I was trying my best to be gentle and she repaid me very well by falling asleep as I worked.
I had a client at half past two, and from then on I was busy until six. When I got back upstairs the flat was cleaned and tidied throughout and she was peeling potatoes and dropping them into the pressure cooker. She looked up at me, unsure if what she was doing was acceptable. I smiled reassuringly and she smiled back, looking relieved. She was wearing a man's white shirt, but she was otherwise naked. I guess it was a common state for her and caused no embarrassment.
"I'm making a sort of kidney and vegetable soup with the cabbage, turnips, onions and a bit of celery. I found a bottle of cooking sherry and used a bit, I hope that's all right."
"Yes, that's ok. The cooking sherry is left from my last girlfriend, Anita. She moved out not long after I had finished tattooing her back and bottom. I guess I'd served my purpose."
If I sounded a bit cynical, that's all it was. By the time she left I was about brassed off with Anita, and coming back one evening to find her gone was a heartfelt relief.
Mystery girl could not have known that, and she started to weep at the idea of my pain. I started to laugh, and after a hesitation, she laughed back at me. I was really starting to like this girl.
"Look, I can't call you Twat, I really can't. How about we make it Tottie, like the little tottie wagtails?"
She grinned, plainly delighted. "Oh yes, please master. I can wag my tail like anything when I am pleased." She took it as permission to stay, and I couldn't bear to say otherwise.
And this is how I became a slaveholder.