Postscript • • • trotter of an earlier genera' tion
in the travel books o the younger entry—as Peter attention, both well-deserved Fleming, say, might turn bi5 turned last week to Kenneth Allsop's article 0° the strip-tease clubs of Soho. I have perlustrated doggy determination with which Mr. Alls°C those sleazy streets myself, and admire apparently got himself admitted as a mein to one institution after another. My own experi. ela ence was that their watchdogs interpret ,1),.cti. strictly as the election committees of St. Janie°ij and Pall Mall their rules about membershiPt that you could sign the book and pay your gib' I:el scription, but not be admitted for the statutorl 'I'd that I had just come up from Manchester and forty-eight hours, no matter how urgent YL° need and insistent your pleas. The only Sob` club I managed to get into as soon as I had POI my subscription was the one where I pleaded was due back on the early-morning train : Ivos; go back there, melts the heart of even a strir proclaimed a 'guest' of the management ari° walked straight in. To have come from Ms°. chester and, more harrowing still, to have t° : the
bet club chucker-out. What I wish that Mr. Allsop had investigated was why it is that London's strip clubs are di! only ones in Western Europe—the only ones the world, as far as I know—to which wo aren't admitted. (Perhaps there was more in phrase of Mr. Raymond's press agent about Athenwum of the strip clubs' than Mr. Al realised.) My own experience is that in Paris Brussels, Hamburg and Berlin, part of the f for the male customers is to take their girls' watch.—and not only when the males are elder' and the girls, so to speak, under training, are family parties, too. For that matter, women , allinved into the Windmill Theatre to this daY to see the sedater nudes there, and I used t° cloih-capped old biddies at Collins's Music 0 vale for shows such as French Tit-hits and Pe Inferno. So what is it about the Soho clubs that they really are lewder and more obsee
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than those of Hamburg? Or is it just another Manifestation of our English hypocrisy?
Let it not be thought that we are con- slailtlY making sorties into Soho. It is a Privilege for the earnest and the high- Minded to work in this stretch of Gower Street, v‘e on the Spectator are and do. University °liege and the Slade are across the way, RADA °uIY a few yards down the street and, on our (,),wn side, publishers, Sisters of Charity, Student Zonvement House, the East and West Friendship eletY, and the UCH Medical School. So strong tile atmosphere of intellectual endeavour that liven the advertisements in the window of the Ettle tobacconist-newsagent's shop near the s ustnn Road corner are purely educational—in- d nerie: by teachers of dancing seeking gentlemen irauPlls, an ex-schoolmistress ('strict disciplinar- n: most subjects taught'), and a Miss Rodney-Whipley gives private singing lessons to gentlemen Tonic Sol Far different--how churlish and unwelcom- ;mg' Indeed—they are in Belsize Village, where n1 aged and yellowing advertisement for a beaesseuse-chiropodist that a colleague has long no_ja used to seeing in her newsagent's window added to it, she tells me, in angry capital letters, This is a genuine advertisement, and anyone who hopes otherwise will be, at least, disappointed. I cher'.sh the qualification, 'at least.' Mr. A. Leadbetter, who is a learned reader not only of 'Postscript' but of more improving works, sends me this interesting piece of literary research: Raymond Chandler in The Big Sleep (now in Penguins, first published 1939) writes: She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine tawny wave. . . . Her eyes were slate- grey, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. . . . Her face lacked colour and didn't look too healthy.
while James Hadley Chase in More Deadly Than The Male (now in Panther Books, first published 1946) says of his chief female character: She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore a pale blue sweater and dark blue slacks, and she looked well in them. . . . She moved • . • as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine blue- black wave. . . . Her eyes were slate-grey, and had almost no expression when they looked at him. . . . Now that he was close to her he could see that her face lacked colour and didn't look too healthy.
Only a little less interesting than this curious coincidence is that it was spotted in Vicarage Road, Tunbridge Wells.
In spite of the wine-trade cynicism that what the British wine-drinking public wants is some- thing 'dry on the label but sweet in the bottle,' many French growers are trying their hands at drier wines, and shipping them over here. I have already mentioned in these notes Le Fleuron Blanc de Chateau Loubens, Which Berry Brothers sell, French-bottled, at 16s.--a Graves much drier than most because the grapes are gathered earlier, with less sugar than would be usual. Rarer still, but especially interesting because it comes from the vineyards that pro- duce one of the luscious, richly sweet, first- growth Sauternes, is the dry Lafaurie-Payraguey, which I tasted recently at a luncheon given by the firm of Percy Fox, who ship it. It is a surpris- . ing wine altogether—not only dry but lighter than one would expect, yet 'flavoury.' There is little about, but any wine-merchant could get it for an amateur of unusual wines who bothered to ask : it would cost about the same as the Fleuron Blanc.
The other day, in Dolamore's pleasant tasting- room in Baker Street, I was shown another, rather more modest, dry white Bordeaux—an Entre-deux-Mers that they have christened 'Vieux Moulin,' which achieves dryness, the ex- perts tell me, by having its sugar more compre- hensively fermented out than is usual in this region. It costs 8s., which is a very reasonable price for a pleasantly refreshing wine, and Dc1a- more's bottle it in tall, shoulderless Alsatian bottles, which would astonish the Bordelais, most of whom have never seen such things, and 1 am sure must annoy the Alsatians, who will regard it as poaching on their preserves. The French are parochial about their regional wine-bottles, as about much else—but these dry wines from sweet or sweetish vineyards show that they are pre- pared to move with the times, if profit calls.
CYRIL RAY
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