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Hello and welcome back to Behind A Bad Podcast with me, Paul Victoria. We're continuing reading an English Madam, The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne. I do believe we only have two chapters, including this one, left to do. So yeah, let's get on with this. It was a terrible blow. I got very, very desperate. I cajoled. I even threatened. I wanted her, just a part of her. But there was no go. And then I was virtually ordered to leave. I did. On my way back home, I had to pass a railway station. Something drew me to the station platform. I actually stood there waiting for the train to come in. I was prepared to throw myself on the line. And that at the tender age of 22, having survived the Palestinian horror. But fortunately, something came into my mind even as the train rushed towards me, and even though it was going to be such a dramatic theatrical effect, a voice in my head said, She's not worth it. Those were the very words, and I stepped away from the train. It was a split second decision. Gregory worked as an invoice clerk by day and studied at the City Literary Institute five earnings each week, five evenings each week. He was conscious in his twenties of the inadequacies of his education and was determined to correct it in some measure. He received a number of diplomas from the institute, where he took courses in English and foreign literature, history and comparative religion. He read voraciously. He was particularly interested in the writings of Fried, Adler, and Jung. He discovered the Marquis de Sard, whose work he feels has been misunderstood and continually misinterpreted. He got completely dressed for the first time when he was about twenty eight or twenty nine. He can't recall the exact age. His mother was out of the house and was not expected back for a few hours. I managed to procure a rather nice grey flannel women's costume. I was no great shakes as a seamstress, but I managed to make it to my liking so that it fitted. I put on a corset and nylon stockings with suspenders, with the corset and a slip underneath, and a blouse that I borrowed from my mother's wardrobe, and of which I took very great care, and using the right sort of towels, I managed to dress up. My mother had a pier mirror in her bedroom and I stood in front of it and stared at myself. I looked bloody scruffy, but that didn't worry me. I knew then and there that I had someone inside me who was screaming, let me out. The person who confronted him reminded him of his mother in her younger years. The wig, which he had hired from a theatrical costumer, may have had a lot to do with it. It was styled in the fashion most popular during the Edwardian era when she was in her teens. It was with great regret that Gregory took off the clothes that helped reveal to him his essential self. He undressed slowly and reductantly. He feared that the occasion would never occur again, that even if it did, it could never be quite the same. He did not want to return to be Gregory. He endured the unchangeable company of Gregory for a considerable amount of time. Many years passed before he was given the opportunity to rediscover his essential self. Throughout this period he was burdened with feelings of inexplicable guilt. His resulting need to be chastitized caused him to seek out the prostitutes who offered strict discipline and correction. He designed a special punishment chair, which he constructed in the tool shed at the back of the house. He also built a pair of stocks on the instructions of a particular girl, for whom he supplied a set of ankle stocks as well. I wonder if I was going slightly mad. It was a compulsion. It was necessary for me to go and get punished. The girls weren't at all surprised. They didn't laugh at me either. They treated me as if I were perfectly ordinary. You know, that word in Greek Capharosis. That's exactly what it was about. I used to get it over and was very thankful really. I felt it was a clearing of my mind until the next time. Gregory had secured a well paid job in the Paddington area, which meant that he had easy access to a variety of disciplinarians. One of these was Janet, who was also having problems with her personality. He was not to know how seriously disturbed she had become. Like many other prostitutes, she was an assured actress. Cynthia's invitation to Gregory to attend one of her parties just as a woman marked the end of his despair. Cynthia's natural open-mindedness, her freedom from the bogey's restraints that Gregory experienced in his relationship with his aging mother, her manner of conveying the simple message that life is to be lived as happily as possible. These were cherishable qualities to the forty-year-old man who had been forced by circumstances to smother his essential self. Their friendship prospered. Anthea was a respected visitor and party goer, and Gregory a source of fascinating information. Cynthia had never encountered anyone so well read, so knowledgeable in such a wealth of subjects, so eager to share his learning. He wrote her literally hundreds of letters, every one of which she treasures. He described his dual nature in a poem he presented to her, called Doppelganger, strange entity within this flesh contained, grey altar ego of my male hardness, decrees me hers, and demon sovereign like, bids me become her handmaiden regardless, at royal command, art cosmetic I'll use, unquivering lip imprint moist cupid bow, cheeks rogue and eyes mysterious make coal patented neath each penciled brow, a rubbered corset fastened round my waist will render figure smaller far than mine And over the silk knickers direct door distilled in movement sensation divine A jeeting bra will lack of bust correction And rayon slip adorn my new physique bright coloured skirt round nylon legs will flow with each foot cast anew in leather sleek Fresh curled wig, short hair will swiftly hide, and gleaming necklace dangle at my throat gay befrilled blouse replacing sober shirt and silvered earrings strike romantic note Call me not mad, crazed puppet, fortune's fool, nor felon though her damned of mortal sins, since innocent of gill alone I stand, unknowing where I cease or siren she begins. Cynthia welcomed the siren into her entourage. Gregory at last had the freedom to transform himself into Anphia. No one sniggered when she entered the room, and guests were respectful to her when in uniform of an nippy she waited on them. Gregory's sole sadness, a sadness with which he has become familiar with, came with the change back to the self he regarded as the lesser of the two. Divesting himself of the personality of Amphia still causes him indescribable anguish. Gregory left home forever when he was forty-two. He had long since found his mother's company oppressive, and only filial loyalty had made him stay with her. There were scenes when he informed her of his decision. He was inspired to leave because of the disinterested love he felt and feels for Cynthia. He became her lodger in Eden Court Road, and he had an upstairs room at Cranmore. He now lives alone. Gregory joined the Baumont Society, which tries to further the course of transvestism. As its publications continually stress the majority of transvestites are heterosexual and married. A few like Gregory are asexual, and even fewer are homosexual. These last are forbidden membership because the founders of the society believe that passive homosexuality is what the ignorant masses assume to be the reason why men put on clothes of the opposite sex. Most transvestites want to make love to women and to enjoy the full play dressed as women themselves. Not surprisingly, it is a tiny majority who sustain physically contended relationships with their wives. Since he was released by Cymphia, Gregory has attended various conferences transvestites. He described how he prepares Amphiya for such an occasion. The previous day you denude yourself of body hair on the chest, on the legs, the arms and armpits. Hair is part of the masculine ephos. On the morning of the conference, you get up early and bathe very carefully. You manage to bunk yourself underneath so that your male organ is in no way discernible. Then you put on your underclothes and some sort of foundation. I usually use bra fillers in those places. You put on a corset and the stockings and you do it in a kind of trance, as it were. You have to learn to do these things naturally. You master the art of putting on a stocking purely by the rough expedient of having ruined a pair, masculine nails, having ripped holes in them, or by being too eager to pull them up. You learn the hard way. Once you've got your stockings on straight, Mitch's seams were all over the bloody shop. You fasten them up to the suspenders, and it's then that you're looking at someone in the mirror who is beginning to become feminine. The body is starting to look rounded. It's now that feelings start for me. I can't vouch for others. When the under slip is in place and the lingerie pinned so that the straps don't fall off your shoulders, you put a pair of slippers on your stockinged feet. You sit down with your dressing table, you've previously shaven very very close. You massage a little foundation cream into the beard, and all the time you're concentrating on that face, which is gradually inch by inch changing. Now whether it's actually changing or whether it's merely changing in your imagination, I'm not prepared to say. I don't think any transvestite would say it really changes. We'd like to say it really changes. But how could it? Inside the mind it does that's what's important. Slowly as the face alters, a feeling comes over you. You've never known a feeling like it. The odd hair comes down, the line of the eyebrow, the curl of the eyelashes. You know the song. I enjoy being a girl. That's how I felt. When I'm Amphia, a certain coquettishness manifests itself. I'm all of a sudden impish. It's not that I want to shock people. It's just that I want to say this is me. I'm not Gregory. I'm not the soberly dressed man who travels on the bus to work every day. I am me. It's at that stage that I begin to feel confident with myself. Nevertheless, Gregory, who regards himself as a tender transvestite, has not gained the confidence to travel in public as Amphea on a few occasions. She has strolled down the street and bought a newspaper at a local shop. She attends drag balls as well as conferences, but is always transported to them by car. Two years ago, Amphea spent a very pleasant afternoon wandering round the National History Museum. No one, it seems, read Gregory. He wasn't asked to leave by the keeper, and none of the dozens of people who were there that day paid any attention whatsoever to the middle aged lady with the Marcel waves who was wearing a tasteful two-piece. This was a rare outing, however. The fear of being read and consequently mocked means that Amphea is confined to Cranmore, where mockers have never been welcomed. One of Cynthia's favourite party goers is a man she refers to affectionately as Old Humphrey. This former night watchman discovered the delights of sex when he was sixty two. Until then he had never even masturbated. Humphrey cannot recall ever having a wet dream. I've heard about them, of course. I've met blokes who have had them, but I can't say how I remember waking up with my pajamas in a sticky state. Old Humphrey looked after his elderly parents until their deaths some fourteen years ago. He now cares for his younger sister, who is mentally retarded. Much as he loved his mother and father, he experienced a sense of relief when they were gone. Having no one except his sister to wait on, Humphrey found his thoughts dwelling on the subject they should have dwelt on half a century earlier. On the verge of retirement, Humphrey endured the pangs of puberty. Like any furtive schoolboy, Humphrey locked himself in the bathroom and eased his pleasant ache with the aid of photographs of naked women. On his way to work one evening, he picked up a discarded contact magazine on the top deck of a bus and realized that he might have the opportunity to satisfy his longings with something more substantial than an image. He was fortunate that Cynthia was among the advertisers in that well-formed issue. He wrote to her, and his modestly phrased and obviously genuine letter earned him an invitation to Eden Court Road. The unshockable Cynthia could not have believed Humphrey when he assured her that he was a virgin. He was a masturbator, what's more of only a few weeks standing. It was a matter of minutes before Cynthia was convinced that the reluctant old man was speaking the truth. She told him not to worry. She knew just the right person to initiate him. That person was Mavis. A meeting was arranged between old Humphrey and the bloody wonderful French polisher. Humphreys, therefore, was a most sophisticated initiation. Nothing in his recent wild imaginations had prepared him for the marvels brought by Mavis's lips, teeth and tongue. He suddenly comprehended a vast amount of wasted time to make up for, and he asked Mavis if she would help him fulfil his late flowering ambition. She said she would, and she did. Agatha aided him too with her usual exuberance. She took him upstairs during one of Cynthia's sex parties, and the poor old boy was greeted on his descent with poached eggs on toast, which Cynthia had anticipated he would desperately need. She always exercised the blokes to their limits. Old Humphrey was one of several beneficiaries of Cynthia's special discount scheme for pensioners. He is seventy six now. He is adamant that meeting the Strepham Madame ensured him more than a decade of unexpected happiness. Shortly before the police raid on Cranmore, Cynthia had begun to think seriously about including disabled younger men among her clients. It is particularly gowling to Cynthia that the present laws prevent her from offering what she considers a necessary service. The friendly atmosphere she assiduously created at Ambleside Avenue is ideal. She believes for the types of customers who are too. Often treated by prostitutes with indifference, derision, and in many cases total rejection. At least four of Cynthia's girls are willing to accommodate someone, like Desmond, for example, who is denied the use of both legs and his left arm. Desmond, who is in his mid-twenties, expressed his sexual frustration to his father when he was about nineteen. Mr. Brown could think of only one way in which to help his son. Very much against his will, but because there was absolutely no alternative, he took Desmond to a prostitute, who worked in a basement room in Ill's Court. A basement room, not a flat. Mr Brown manoeuvred his son in the wheelchair down the steps and told the prostitute that he would call back for Desmond in an hour. Embarrassed, he left. Desmond, who was in a state of almost manic excitement, was given extremely rampant hand relief for the next fifty minutes. He had to watch while the woman performed with three more clients. There was no possible escape for him, since the only other room was the lavatory, which was in constant use. Desmond felt acute humiliation. Desmond's unhappy experience is not an isolated one. He paid two visits to Cranmore in 1978, and both were memorable. The party guests did not afford him special treatment, which he was quick to appreciate. They talked to him as if he was a regular Cremorian. He did not go upstairs, but was wheeled into the group fessex room on the ground floor, which was left temporarily vacant for him and the girl of his choice. He would like to return to Cranmore in the near future. So would Benny, an alert and witty young man who has been as much the victim of seemingly beneficial science as he has of meline nature. Benny was afflicted with Still's disease, a form of rheumatoid arthritis occurring in children. When he was three years old, he was treated with a wonder drug with appalling results. His growth was impeded so that he is now at the age of 26 under four feet tall. He has lost most of his hair. His face is that of a boy of eleven. He is partially sighted. In September 1981, he underwent a series of orthopaedic operations. It is quite likely that very soon he will be unable to walk without sticks. He may, like Desmond, have to be confined to a wheelchair. Benny, against all the odds, is charming and amusing. He has had an affair with a girl of his own age that lasted for 18 months. He wants to marry someday. In the meantime, he has a considerable sexual drive. When he was eighteen, he went to a sauna in Leeds, where a masseuse gave him hand relief. On the second visit, the same Massus let him have a complete intercourse with her. He talks happily of a nurse in one of the many hospitals he has stayed in, who did to him in the privacy of a capacious cupboard what Beryl did, and does to Casper in the public arena. Benny has been to Cranmore once. He cannot think of any experience he would prefer to repeat. Cynthia is not blind to the discontent amounting to open hostility, her method of running a brothel caused among professional as distinct from casual prostitutes. They considered her prices insultingly low, and they resented the fact that she employed women who performed both for fun and for a little extra money. When Cynthia was last in business, not more than half a dozen full-time prostitutes were working for her. Why do you think I've kept my clients? It's because I can guarantee them girls who will be loving on the bed. Most women on the game don't even kiss the punters, let alone do what my girls do. I don't order them to kiss, but they know I'm grateful if they do. Some prostitutes get hard, and they end up hating men's guts, and I can't say I blame them. I had a really beautiful prostitute here at a party, and she didn't go upstairs once. Mem preferred Agatha to Miss Frosty Face, who made no bloody effort to be friendly at all. I don't look for beauty in my girls. It's character I'm after. Character and honesty. Cynthia introduced what she calls her luncheon voucher system. When she was working at Elden Court Road, the men preferred to pay me direct. They thought it was less like a commercial transaction that way. Not having to hand over money to the girl they'd just been to bed with made it a bit more romantic for them. Unfortunately, one or two girls who weren't regulars abused the system and purchased vouchers from stationers. I knew they hadn't been upstairs fifteen minutes. They looked far too bloody fresh. Cynthia's childhood friend Pat, who worked for a printer's, solved the problem. She discovered a whole catch of tokens that had been printed for private distribution and which couldn't be forged. She gave them to Cynthia, and the system was never abused again. Cynthia maintains that men like old Humphrey and her other old boys would not be happy visiting Soho and Earl's Court where business is strictly business. One of her long-lasting clients is a man whose wife became paralyzed when she was thirty. He's told her all about my establishment. He used to come here with her full permission. I should think she's worried where he goes these days. She told him to tell me that I have saved their marriage. Where Cynthia wonders does the knickerman go now that Cranmore is close to him? The knickerman is a solicitor in his fifties who used to visit Ambleside Avenue on brothel days. He would sit naked on the bed in the mirror room while a favourite girl, Jeanette, old outrageous Rowanna, who is a professional striptease artist, paraded up and down in front of him, clad only in seven pairs of lace knickers. The knicker man enjoys pretending that he is a regimental sergeant major. Halt, he bellows. And the girl stops marching. First pair of knickers off, he shouts. The girl removes the first pair accordingly. This process continues for roughly twenty minutes, by which time six pairs of knickers have been discarded. Seventh pair off, he shrieks, as his frenzied right hand induces ejaculation. Where too is the sweet old clergyman who when asked by Cynthia what she could do for him, replied I crave an ample angel. Pressed to elucidate, he declared that he would enjoy nothing better in his earthy life than the comfort of the booksome blonde cloth in white samite, and here he hesitated sprouting wings. Cynthia told him he needed a little while to think it over. Angels weren't that easy to come by. Ever attentive to the demands of her clients, Cynthia persuaded a calmly blonde of her acquaintance to be fitted for a long flowing cotton shift, which was run up at short notice by a dressmaker in the neighborhood. The wings were a problem though. They caused her worry for a week or more. Then she had another of her brainwaves. She went along a celebrated theatrical costumer and inquired if they possibly had a pair of wings, golden for preference, that she could hire. They had. The clergyman was contacted and invited to Cranmore the following afternoon. He duly appeared in clerical garb. Cynthia led him into the lounge, where the sight he had been longing for awaited him. Posing majestically before the fireplace was the most generously bosomed of divine messengers, whispering a provocative hello. Cynthia left them there, but not before noticing that the vicar had started to salvate in an alarming manner. The angel, she was later informed, had been most ferociously deprived of her wings, to such an extent indeed, that the angel had been sorely tempted to say something distinctly unangelic. Before she could utter the profanity, however, her shift was lifted and normal service was resumed. The vicar returned to his parish in a cheerful condition, and a slave was commanded by his inventive mistress to straighten the golden wings that the old boy in his adour had inadvertently bent. Okay, I do believe we have one more chapter left of an English Madam, the life and work of Cynthia Payne. So it's okay. I totally understand not making it feel like a business transaction, but at the end of the day, sex workers work, and I think with Cynthia saying prostitutes many, many, many, many times instead of the word sex worker, which was it was the word sex worker was out by then. I feel like that's quite telling. I think business should be business. You get the money, you you get the money at the start. It's a rookie move if you don't get it at the end. And it should be seen as a business and it should be respected as a business. This is where I don't agree with Cynthia.

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It should be a business. People need to respect that. And I think that's definitely what she was missing.

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That sex work is work, and sex work is a business, and it needs to be seen like that. Yes, it's a lot of fun and everything like that, but it's also a business, and we do deserve rights and labor rights, and it sounds really shifty that she didn't pay the workers that much.

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That's kind of messed up. Like, yeah, it's fun and everything, but they still should be getting paid a considerable amount. Hmm. Right.

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I shall leave this here. And I'll see you guys next week for the final chapter. This has been Porcelain Victoria with Behind the Paddle Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode or any of our episodes, please leave a like, follow, and share. And if you want to hear any topics, then please message. It would be really, really great. And yeah, you can follow us on Instagram, mainly Instagram. But yeah, bye.