The Men in My Life. By Marthe Watts. (Christopher Johnson,
21s.) 'The sauciest remin- iscences of London's West End since the memoirs of Harriette Wilson,' the advertisements say. M'well, yes—but 'since' is the operative word.
Harriette was a wit and a rattle: if she slept with a duke—and she slept with a number, from Argyll to Wellington—we know his name and his manner of talking. Mrs. Watts boasts of two dukes, both English, and their sons into the bar- gain, but we know of them only that one paid a fiver, and slapped the lady's face 'at the crucial moment,' and that the other sent her butter and eggs during the war. There is nothing of that eye for character and ear for the spoken word that made the top tart of the Regency an artist at the escritoire as well as on the chaise longue. All the same, there is fascination in the matter-of- fact: Mrs. Watts earned her living on her back in Spain, Italy, France and the stews of North Africa; not until she came to London did she have to cater for clients who wanted to be tied up and beaten, and it was here, too, that she set up her record—forty-nine clients on VE Day— and she is a little put out, this Stakhanovite of Stafford Street, that she failed to pick up a fiftieth. This is not a book to turn to for titil- lation, or to enlarge one's stock of handy know- ledge—Mrs. Watts is reticent about the tricks of the trade, and not especially articulate about anything, but the chapter on how she got married to an expatriate British lush for the sake of the passport is quietly amusing. What she cannot even begin to explain is the way that brothel- seasoned women will put up with pimps like the Messinas who beat them, spied on them, humili- ated them, allowed them ten minutes per client (so that unsatisfied clients would sometimes beat them, too) and yet went on being given their money, their loyalty and their professional ser- vices—unpaid, in their scanty leisure, and according to a strictly scheduled shift system.
CHRISTOPHER PYM
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