By evening, Oakes’s demise was forgotten.
The newspaper delivery boy’s name was Norman. He joined the 4th Armoured Brigade in the next war and was killed during the invasion of Sicily in 1944.
And See You Not That Bonny Road?
Florence came home on a Saturday afternoon that midsummer, walking back into the Ingrams’ house on Tadcaster Road without any fuss, as if she had simply been coming home from school or had been out on a bike ride with Freda. Mr. Ingram was mowing the lawn and Mrs. Ingram was in the kitchen washing their pots from lunch, so it took each of them several minutes to realize that a stranger was in their midst. A stranger who was their daughter.
A flabbergasted Mrs. Ingram clutched her heart in shock at the sight of Florence and had to be helped to the sofa by Mr. Ingram, who could hardly see for the tears of happiness that were pouring from his eyes. “Florrie,” he choked, clutching Mrs. Ingram’s hand. “Florrie’s come home to us, Ruthie.”
Where had she been all these weeks? Mrs. Ingram wailed, but all Florence said was, “I’m starving. Is there anything to eat?”
Once she had recovered from her astonishment, Mrs. Ingram couldn’t stop touching Florence, as if she might not be real flesh and blood but a ghost conjured from her grief. “It’s a miracle,” she said. “God answered our prayers and brought you home.” （How had she got home?） Florence seemed to remember nothing about the past few weeks, or if she did, she wasn’t saying.
Was she the same Florence as before? She was thinner certainly, and a little taller, but she was healthy and showed no visible sign of harm. There would in time come a period when Mrs. Ingram developed the belief that the new Florence was an imposter, a changeling who had taken her real daughter’s place, but Mr. Ingram gradually made her see reason. （“Poor Ruthie.”）
Florence never did tell them where she had been, but, as Freda had predicted, she grew up and married and had two children （and yes, adenoidal and flat-footed）， whom she did indeed take to the pantomime at York Theatre Royal every year, and there may well have been a moment during a production one year of Babes in the Wood when her memory was stirred by the sight of the villagers singing and dancing around a maypole, but the moment soon passed. Florence had no idea what had happened to her friend, in fact she seemed barely able to remember her.
Author’s Note
As anyone familiar with this period of history will recognize, inspiration for this novel comes from the life and times of Kate Meyrick, who for many years was the queen of Soho’s clubland. Her most famous club was the “43” at 43 Gerrard Street, now in the heart of Chinatown. She was imprisoned several times in her career for breaking the licensing laws.
Like Nellie Coker, Kate Meyrick also had a large brood that she was at pains to educate and “elevate.” Two of her daughters did indeed marry into the aristocracy and one son, Gordon, became a published novelist, writing mystery thrillers, including The Body on the Pavement in 1941. （I may have stolen a line from him, in homage.） In a case of life imitating art, he died during the war in somewhat mysterious circumstances after falling from a window of his top-floor flat onto the pavement below.
Kate Meyrick’s autobiography, Secrets of the 43 Club （John Long, 1933）， perhaps not the most truthful account of a life, provided many small details for this novel—like Nellie, Kate knew the price of everything. We Danced All Night, Barbara Cartland’s autobiography, was a cornucopia of little facts now largely lost. She is particularly good on the “Bright Young People,” and I owe my knowledge of “Turk’s Blood” to her, as well as a vivid description of the Baby Party. Nights in London: Where Mayfair Makes Merry by Horace Wyndham （The Bodley Head, 1926） was a rather horrifying insight into the waspish, highly prejudiced mind of a social commentator of the time, and Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground by Marek Kohn （Granta, 1992） was informative. London After Dark by Fabian of the Yard （otherwise ex-superintendent Robert Fabian）， published by Panther in 1958, undoubtedly influenced Frobisher. From him I derived my knowledge of “spielers.”
This is just a fraction of the background reading I did, but you can see that I largely eschewed traditional history books in favour of the gossipy, chattering kind. Shrines of Gaiety is fiction, not history.
And yes, I read The Green Hat by Michael Arlen （Heinemann, 1924）， but it’s difficult from this standpoint in time to see why it caused so much fuss.
As ever, there are real events in this novel and real people, but they are heavily outweighed by the fictional. The then Prince of Wales really did attend a fancy-dress party in the garb of the Ku Klux Klan, but I have no evidence that the Aga Khan went about with liquorice chews in his pocket. And so on. Some small details have been bent to my will—Niven, for example, races a dog at White City, but the track there wasn’t opened until the following year.