Saying goodbye to her father was hard. He was afraid of being left alone, she knew that, but it didn’t stop her. On the train down, she didn’t know whether she was more upset by his grief and fear, or her own ruthlessness: she never once came close to changing her mind. Saying goodbye to Aidan was easy, though. He seemed relieved, and told her that he knew she’d cause trouble for him if she stayed in Blackpool. (He married someone else the following spring, and he caused her trouble for the next fifteen years.)
And London was easy too, as long as you didn’t expect too much. She found a bed and breakfast near Euston Station, paid three days’ lodging out of her savings, went to an employment bureau and got a job in Derry and Toms in Kensington High Street, on the cosmetics counter. All you had to do, it seemed, was ask for an inferior version of the life you’d had before and London would give it to you. London didn’t mind where you came from either, as long as you didn’t mind the tobacconist and the bus conductor laughing and repeating your words back to you every time you opened your mouth. ‘Toopence!’ ‘Piccadelleh!’ ‘Coopa tea!’ Sometimes other customers and other passengers were invited to join in the hilarity.
A girl called Marjorie, who worked in Ladies’ Shoes, offered her a double room in Earl’s Court, much nearer to the store, and she agreed to take it before she’d realized that Marjorie would be in the double room with her.
She felt even more religious now: Lucille Ball had turned her into some kind of martyr to ambition. The kitchen window looked down over the railway line, and when a train went past, soot fell from the window frames on to the floor. In London, nearly all the money she earned went on food, rent and bus fares. Marjorie was every bit as lonely as Barbara, and she never went out anywhere, so the two of them spent too much time together. They lived off tinned soup and toast, and they never had enough sixpences for the gas fire. She couldn’t watch Lucy, because she didn’t have a TV set, so on Sunday afternoons her longing for home was particularly sharp. It didn’t help, reminding herself that if she were back in Blackpool she’d spend the afternoon aching to be in London. It just made her feel that she’d never be happy anywhere. Sometimes she stopped and looked in the windows of employment agencies, but nobody seemed to need a television comedienne. Some nights she lay in bed and wept silently at her own stupidity. What had she thought was going to happen?
Marjorie told her that she should buy The Stage for the advertisements. There were a lot of girls, she said, who’d worked at Derry and Toms and read The Stage during their tea breaks, then disappeared.
‘Would I have heard of any of them?’ Barbara asked.
‘Probably only Margie Nash,’ said Marjorie. ‘You must have heard us talking about her.’
Barbara shook her head, anxious for news of anyone who had found some kind of secret show-business tunnel out of the store.
‘She was the one who was caught messing about with a customer in the gents’ lav on the third floor, and then she owned up to stealing a skirt. She used to buy The Stage every week.’
And, undeterred by the cautionary tale of Margie Nash, so did Barbara, every Thursday, from the newspaper stall by Kensington High Street tube station. But she didn’t understand a lot of it. It was full of notices that seemed to be written in code:
CALLS FOR NEXT WEEK
Shaftesbury – Our Man Crichton. Kenneth More, Millicent Martin, George Benson, David Kernan, Dilys Watling, Anna Barry, Eunice Black, Glyn Worsnip, Patricia Lambert (Delfont/Lewis/Arnold).
Who, precisely, was being called for next week? Not Kenneth More and Millicent Martin and the rest of them, surely? They must all have known that they were about to appear in a West End play. Was Barbara herself being called, or girls like her? And if there was any way that these mysterious calls might involve her, or anyone like her, how was she supposed to know how to respond to them? There was no date or time or job description. Lots of shows seemed to need soubrettes, but she didn’t know what a soubrette was, and she didn’t have a dictionary, and she didn’t know where her nearest library was. If there wasn’t an English word for it, though, then it was probably work best avoided, at least until she was really desperate.
The vacancies in the back of the paper were more straightforward, and she didn’t need to look anything up. The Embassy Club in Old Bond Street wanted smart and attractive hostesses. The Nell Gwynne in Dean Street needed showgirls and/or dancers, but ‘only lovely girls’ were invited to apply. The Whisky A Go Go in Wardour Street required Pussies, minimum height 5ft 6in, but she suspected that height was not the only requirement, and she didn’t want to know what the others might be.