The Savoy—the champagne and orchids trade—charged five shillings and Nellie supposed they served dainty food. Jaeger’s Dance Hall provided a more robust thé—iced cakes, sandwiches, lemonade and something called “Turk’s Blood,” which was bright pink: lemonade, Angostura bitters and some extra cochineal. No liquor licence, of course. At first, they abided by the law, but if they didn’t serve drink someone else would. So they did.
As a help in this move into illegality, Jaeger acquired the services of the law, in the shape of a policeman—a certain Detective Sergeant Arthur Maddox, who worked at Bow Street police station. Maddox was a helpful sort of policeman, who, for a sum of money every week, would turn a blind eye to the licencing laws and tip Jaeger and Nellie off if he heard that a raid was imminent.
Jaeger’s Dance Hall took off like a rocket, people jazzing and foxtrotting to a ragtime band until they dropped. It seemed that people wanted nothing more than to enjoy themselves during the convulsion of war. It was the spring of 1918 and people everywhere were sick of attrition.
It was an eye-opener for Nellie. She couldn’t fail to notice that many of the men went home at the end of the night with a dance hostess who had been a complete stranger to them a handful of hours earlier. “The young ladies get very good tips for that,” Jaeger said phlegmatically. “Can’t blame ’em, can you?”
On Armistice night there had been couples—again strangers to each other—actually fornicating in the shadows in the dance hall. Outside in the streets an orgy was taking place. “Copulation,” Jaeger said, even more phlegmatically. “Makes the world go round, don’t it? And better than killing each other. Fucking’s natural, innit?”
Nellie recoiled from the word, but she had to agree, if reluctantly. So many had been lost in the war, she wondered—attempting to put a veneer of refinement on the base vulgarity of the proceedings—if they weren’t following some instinctive compulsion to restock the human race. Like frogs.
She supposed she should come to terms with the concept of “fun.” She didn’t want any for herself but she was more than happy to provide it for others, for a sum. There was nothing wrong with having a good time as long as she didn’t have to have one herself.
One of the dance hostesses—Maud, an Irish girl—had died that night of an opium overdose. It was Nellie who had found her, slumped behind the bar in the hour before dawn.
Jaeger was nowhere to be seen, so Nellie mobilized a couple of rough Army privates on furlough to carry the girl out, paying them with a bottle of whisky each to get rid of her. “Where?” one of them asked. “I don’t know,” Nellie said. “Use your brain. Try the river.” With any luck, the girl would meander through the Essex marshes and eventually be washed out to sea. Nellie never saw the soldiers again and had no idea if they followed her suggestion. “Out of sight, out of mind” was one of the useful epithets that had guided her life.
Jaeger was merely a stepping-stone to Nellie’s future, an apprenticeship. She was hatching a grander plan. After the Armistice, she sold her share in the dance hall to him for five hundred pounds. Afterwards, he was raided on several occasions, found guilty of “selling intoxicating liquors” and allowing the dance hall to be the “habitual resort of women of ill-repute,” with a three-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound fine on each occasion. After the fourth raid in a row, he admitted defeat and left the nightclub business.
* * *
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With her profits from Jaeger’s Dance Hall, Nellie started a cabaret club （“Cabaret intime,” as she referred to it） called “the Moulin Vert” （or “the Moolinvurt,” as those with no French called it）， inspired by nostalgia for the Paris of her younger years.
Taking the lease on a filthy cellar in Brewer Street, Nellie transformed it into a palace—gilded fittings and a sprung dance floor, little café tables à la Montparnasse around the edge of the room. A vision—“A mise en scène,” she said to the veteran of the Artists Rifles she engaged to paint the place. He obliged with murals in the style of Renoir. You could imagine you were on a Parisian street, Nellie said, and in an out-of-character gesture she gave him an extra five pounds in gratitude.
The Twenties roared in and the Moulin Vert opened with a bang. There was dancing between the cabaret acts—culled from all the West End theatres—and nearly the entire chorus from the Gaiety pitched up after midnight. Nellie hired a Tzigane orchestra—not French, it was true, but foreign enough for the crowd that inhabited the “Moolinvurt.” Liquor flowed freely and so did the money. They were rarely raided; Sergeant Maddox had continued to work for Nellie.