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Hello and welcome back to Behind a Paddle Hello and welcome back to Behind a Paddle Podcast with me, Boss, and Victoria. We are carrying on an English Madam, the life and work of Cynthia Payne. Dear Mistress Judith, I am firstly writing to thank you for a marvellous party. I really did enjoy myself, although you kept me busy and I worked very hard. It was a wonderful feeling having so many lovely girls around me and coming up to me asking for drinks, etc. I hope my work was satisfying and that I didn't let you down. It was very exciting to meet Miss Agatha. Miss Agatha seems to be a most imperious lady, one whom I would instantly obey and respect. I hope she will forgive me for not being able to put ice in her cold drink. I do apologize for running out at that time, although some more was beginning to harden in the refrigerator. I hope you don't mind, but I am using up a day of my holiday to visit my mistress in Matlock this week, so I will be unable to get over. But I will contact you the week after to make some more arrangements to serve you soon. Although your sexy party was very exciting, I think that a kinky party would be even more fun, especially if it was like the one you organized for the bank manager. I do hope you will be able to show me the photographs of him covered in messy things. Would it be possible for me to suffer this degradation on a smaller scale? Perhaps on a plastic sheet in a room upstairs? I would only want one or two people present to mess me up. Yours obediently, Stlave Philip. Keeping in mind the type of slavery on offer in the hills of Derbyshire, it seems odd that Philip should ask for small scale degradation. Not that the bank manager's messing up could really be accounted large scale. When one considers the grisly condition in which some humiliated customers leave their humiliators, his was a minor befoulment. The photograph Cynthia took of him when he was covered from head to toe with the contents of the Hoover bag made me think of the Tolumd man, who was preserved in a peat bog in Denmark for two thousand years until he was brought out of the umber brown earth in 1950. What can be discerned of the bank manager's features bears an eerie resemblance to the face of the hanged man from the Iron Age. It says something from the trust that Cynthia inspired in her clients that the bank manager allowed her to photograph him. A less honourable madam would have contemplated blackmail or at least secured a substantial loan at a reasonable rate of interest. Cynthia pursued neither unscrupulous course. It is indicative of her attitude to her business that in all the years she ran a brothel, she never had any dealings with the criminal fringe. I kept a clean house. None of my girls were on drugs, and I always vetted the men before accepting them as customers. One of her former party goers, a retired chef, superintendent in the Metropolitan Police, told me that if all the brothels in the British Isles were run on the same lines as Cynthia's, he and his fellow officers would welcome a change in the law. But they're not unfortunately. Coffbert said, As far as I am concerned, Cymphia is, or rather was, unique. The majority of brothels do much more than cater for the sexual appetites of their clients. They're often cover-ups for drug pushing, among other things. I know of brothel keepers who are also receivers of stolen goods. It's no secret that there are houses, particularly in the west end of London, that are in business specifically for tourists, wealthy Arabs and the like. The men who visit them are charged way over their odds. Cynthia's setup was innocent by comparison. Cuffbert befriended Cynthia after arresting her on a charge of brothel keeping. She was working in her last West End flat at the time. The arrest itself was a rigosely funny event. At the station, Cynthia insisted on giving each and every officer her diagnosis of his sexual problems or requirements. You come too quickly, that's your trouble, she informed a surprised constable. The men were both amused and impressed by her brazen behavior, particularly Cuffbert, who in all his long career could not remember an occasion quite like it. She had us all in hysterics. She pleaded guilty straight away, but said that she didn't feel in the least guilty about her work. I provide a useful service, she kept on saying. Which was exactly what she did. The atmosphere at her parties was never dirty or sordid. It was just a group of pleasant people having a lot of fun. Cuffbert tried to warn her for years that she was courting trouble with the police, which could end in possible imprisonment. She's a wonderful human being, warm and kind and generous, but she can be headstrong. If she wants to ignore something, she will. She ignored my advice a thousand times, even when she went to prison, though she behaved as if it wasn't the end of the world. She's a real stoic in that respect. She accepts whatever life dishes out to her and simply carries on. Cynthia had a deeper involvement though, certainly not such a lasting one, with another policeman, with whom she fell in love. The liaison was doomed, she realized, because of the shame Walter suffered at betraying his wife. When he made extra brothel dates with Cynthia, he would consume a great deal of alcohol prior to meeting her. I was head over heels about him. I fancied him like mad. We had a few bloody wonderful nights together, but more often than not they were spoilt because he had brewers droop. Cynthia formed a more passionate attachment to a young Moroccan named Mohammed. She met him while she was on holiday in Tongier with Agatha, who made the vacation doubtably memorable for Cynthia by her seven-minute performance with a tour guide at the airport behind a conveniently placed bush. Apart from the two hectic participants, only Cynthia knew why the leaves were fluttering on that windless day. Mohammed was by far the most accomplished and considerate of her lovers, in the purely physical sense. He took pains to satisfy her, and he did so. He had that legendary staying power that many of her correspondents boasted of possessing. He was not happy to complete their lovemaking until she achieved orgasm. Sex with him was a revelation to her. I thought I knew all there was to bloody know when it came to how's your father. But Mohammed taught me a few things and no mistake. He could make it last till you started to go out your mind. He wasn't like Sam, who needed it six times a night. He did it once to perfection. Cynthia became besotted, Mohammed, to such an extent that Mitchell and Gregory grew alarmed. She was in the grip of total infatuation. They had long been aware that, for all her seeing worldliness, she was a romantic at heart. They feared that she would lose her sense of reality and destroy everything she had carefully built up over several years. Her contact with the real world was stronger than they supposed. On each visit to Morocco, she found herself a little bit more disillusionated with her handsome and still skillful lover. He had taken to drink like most of the men with whom she had been involved. She was happy to spend money on him, but aggrieved to see so young a man ruining himself with an enormous intake of whiskey. On her very last trip, she discovered something about Mohammed that she had half suspected but never properly acknowledged. She saw him one afternoon talking to a famous English actor by the hotel swimming pool and wondered how someone like Mohammed could be on such obviously familiar terms with an internationally known film star. Later that day, she asked her boyfriend how he had made the actor's acquaintance. He replied unblushingly that they had met in the way of business, bedroom business. It did not surprise her to learn that Mohammed was and presumably still is a prostitute. She was not distressed by his confession. Quite the contrary. She assumed that it was his bisexuality that made him so adept and inventive, a lover. What did upset her, what finally caused her to sever the relationship, was Mahmoud's unstoppable addiction to alcohol. Like many drunks, he would change character completely at a certain stage in his drinking. He would suddenly become an explicitly morose, also self-pitying or even violent. Cynthia finds it harder to tolerate drunkenness, although she is sympathetic to the people afflicted by the disease. Mohammed's inability to remain sober forced her out of her bit sottedness. In spite of her unfortunate experience in matters of the heart, Cynthia is unswervingly loyal to the curious notion that the male is the superior of the species. That is not to say that she does not sustain affectionate friendships with women, many of whom once worked for her, because the reverse is true. Neither does she believe that men are inherently stable and sensible, since she has amassed far too much evidence to the contrary. A man who isn't despunking regularly is sure to make a bloody fool of himself. No, it is solely in the business sphere that the regularly despunked male demonstrates his superiority and his trustworthiness. Women are either hard or scatterbrained when I asserted that my solicitor, my accountant, and my agent, all women, were neither, she declared. Well I suppose there must be a few exceptions. Even so, the two men with whom Cynthia has had fruitful and progressive relationships could not be described as upholders of conventional masculine ideals. Mitchell was and Gregory is a transvestite. The late squadron leader Smith discovered the delights of cross-dressing in his old age, a discovery Gregory made in his youth, but then suppressed for many years. Cynthia allowed Mitchell, as she still allows Gregory, the freedom of Cranmore for the expression of his other persona. Photographs revealed that his stockinged legs were the equal of Betty Grable's. These he was always delighted to display, unlike his face, which he considered bloody horrible when in drag. It was usually hidden behind a veil or a yashmach. His refusal to wear false teeth did nothing to make his features more begulling. Robert Mitchell Smith was born in 1906 in the Highbury area of London. His father ran a number of small businesses, but because of his drinking habits was frequently in debt. Mitchell, who had a brother and two sisters, was not very bright academically, but he still managed to win a scholarship to Westminster City School while attending a really rough school, not far from his birthplace. He was asked to leave, the relatively posh academy, however, and was more fortunate than most working class children of his time in being given immediate employment. His first job was in the garage his father ran near Clapham Common. This was followed by a stint in another family concern in a fo in a furniture warehouse in Battersea. Like the garage, the warehouse was eventually sold off, and Mitchell found himself involved in yet another of his father's ventures, an illegal betting operation. It was with the money that he made from the unlucky bets of the punters that he voyaged to Canada, where he studies where he studied agriculture. At McGill University in Montreal. I realized at an early age, Mitchell said, that in England, which was a terribly snobbish country then, and to my mind still is, you had to have a so-called education. It didn't and doesn't matter if you'd learn sod all so long as you could say you'd studied at such and such a place. I always told people when I was much older that I'd been to Westminster School. I dropped the city bit, you see, and the bloody snobs were really impressed. Westminster and McGill in those days was the biggest university in Canada. Westminster and McGill. My mild Smith wasn't just anybody, was he? He'd had a proper education. Mitchell was awarded a diploma from the Articultural College at McGill and went to work on a farm to gain practical experience. He was a farm laborer for two years. He was twenty one when he decided to try his luck in the United States. For him, America seemed an Eldoradu, the country that contained a magical place called Hollywood. He boarded a bus at Vancouver and booked a ticket to Seattle. This was the time of prohibitation and every frontier was guarded. I had no visa, no passport. I was determined to get in, though I didn't know how. I thought I'd get chucked off the coach at Seattle, but luck was with me. Because all the guards rolling drunk on bootleg liquor. I think they must have had some sort of deal with the drivers. Anyway, I remember this particular guard. He swayed across to the bus, which was absolutely packed, and he said, Alright, Bill, oh yes, you're okay. He just waved his hand and on we went. I was on American soil by sheer chance, by sheer accident. Michael wandered down the west coast and ended up in Hollywood. He found it difficult getting even the most ordinary job. He was an illegal immigrant, and therefore frightened of being handed over to the authorities. He worked as a farmhand. Farmers welcomed cheap labour and didn't ask embarrassing questions. He returned to England confident in the knowledge that he had beaten the English system. He had studied at Westminster and McGill, and had and he had travelled extensively. He was somebody now. Encouraged by a devoted aunt, he enrolled to train as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, which was, of course, still in its infancy. He was accepted and sent to Gramtham in Lincolnshire. It was one hell of a hole. We all escaped at weekends. He and his fellow trainee pilots escaped to Nottingham, which was the nearest city of any size. Mitchell was by this time an accomplished ballroom dancer. Going ballroom dancing was a good way of getting to meet girls. I chased around the dance halls while I was in London. Hammersmith Palassis Mumbledon Palassis You had to be able to dance properly if you wanted to be in the swim. The girls didn't want to know if you were a clodhopper. Mitchell met his future wife at the Nottingham Palaces de dance. Violet was very pretty. She was only seventeen and a half, but she let me make love to her the first night we met. I was staggered. She wasn't a virgin, which was unusual for those days. I'm talking about the early 1930s. I didn't have to do any work at all. It was plain sailing from the start. But what really knocked me sideways was when she said, Don't come inside me. Think of it. An innocent looking girl saying that, Christ, I was staggered. Violet was far more experienced sexually than her staggered suitor. At the age of sixteen, Michael has had visited a hotel in the centre of London, the foyer of which contained a lounge where prostitutes plied their trade. He was sitting in the lounge lingering over afternoon tea when a middle-aged man joined him at his table and broke into conversation with him. The man bought Michael a drink and afterwards invited him to dinner. The boy, who was there for the express purpose of buying the favours of a whore, quickly scanned the lounge for a likely lady before accepting the invitation. There was none present. So Mitchell left with the charming Greek. After the meal, his host suggested to the boy that the two of them should go to his the Greeks' lodgings in Bloomsbury. Michael had no idea that his new found friend was homosexual. Nobody told you anything about normal sex then, let alone homosexuality. I was a complete innocent. I was As randy as hell, but I didn't have a clue what to do about it. That's why I went to the hotel. I thought a prostitute would educate me. He was indeed educated that night, but in a different manner from the one he had anticipated. The Greek gave me some pajamas to wear. He even went out of the room while I got undressed and put them on. We went to bed in the dark. I remember, and we said good night. I turned over to sleep, and the next thing was I felt his hard prick against my ass. I was terribly excited. For all that I was surprised. It's not so bloody horrible, whatever people say. I was so desperate. I didn't stop to worry if I was doing something perverted. He was a thoughtful bloke, that Greek. He brought me off when he'd finished me. Which was exactly what I wanted. I wasn't the least bit ashamed in the morning. In fact, I was grateful. I went home in a cheerful mood because I'd had my oats. I never saw that man again. And I never had another go at homosexuality until I was in my seventies. And that was in Greece. Mitchell was frustrated for most of his time in Canada and America, with a bunch of boys from the college who were all as green as hell. He went to the Arse End of Montreal in search of loose women. They roamed the streets for a while and then entered a movie house to kill a couple of hours before things hotted up outside. An ice cream seller gave them the address of a brothel. It was miles away, in an even rougher area of the city. There was a bloody queue winding all along the street and round the corner. We would have had to wait for hours. The group repaired instead to a calf where a couple of girls obliged with the quickest of quickies in a room upstairs. The pair accommodated the dozen or so of students from McGill in what Mitchell remembered as a little over half an hour. He was more successful during the few months he spent in London before going off to Grantham for his training. He had a motor car which made a greater impression on some girls than good looks and winning ways. His skill as a dancer helped him too. He made a number of conquests, but only after a great deal of preliminary chat and the consumption of several cocktails. Violet needed no such preliminaries. Her eagerness for sex startled Mitchell, who was accustomed to coyness, decorousness, horrified or pretended protestation. Violet was absolutely straightforward and refreshingly honest. She couldn't get enough of it, and she said so. She opened my eyes. I didn't so much as look at other women while Violet was around. Violet was around for the eternity of her husband's distinguished career in the Royal Air Force. He took her with him wherever he was stationed because of his skill as a pilot and his ability to communicate his enthusiasm for flying. Mitchell was elected to train young men for the difficult task of nighttime combat. He was tested to the utmost of his ability and was eventually put in charge of his own squadron. At the end of the war, though, he felt that he had had enough excitement, enough danger. He and Violet looked after a pub for a while and then bought a small news agency and tobacconists business in Skegness. It was there that Violet died in her mid-40s. Mitchell was heartbroken. He lived in a state of limbo for years afterwards. He knew that Violet was irreplaceable, and when his sexual urge was no longer dormant, as it was for a considerable time following her death, he suffered appalling guilt at the time of being aroused by anyone other than Violet. He missed her terribly. At her instance there were no children by the marriage, so Mitch was alone with his grief. He was alone for what seemed to him an age. He bought a large house in Perlee, Surrey, which he had converted into free flats. He took the ground floor one for himself and sold the other two. His vast garden was also on free levels. The tenants were allowed access to the lower and middle levels, but the highest was out of bounds. This was Mitchell's nudatorium in the last years of his life. He would sleep in a tiny shed during the summer months in order to be closer to nature. He would potter about all day in the nude, in his cut off domain, where he would welcome a few selected visitors. These included, besides Cynthia, his particular favourites among the girls, Janet, Magda, and Agatha. There was a pole in the garden to which Mitchell liked to be tied. The naked women would dance round it, uttering strange whooping noises and sometimes chanting in unison. We felt such bloody fools, said Cynthia. He called us his squaws. These tribal rites were performed in the unlikely setting of the stockbroker belt. It gave the former squadron leader much amusement to contemplate the possible reactions of his neighbours to the news that primitive customs were taking place only yards away from their neatly trimmed hedges, their regularly mowed lawns. The news never reached them, though. They must have been occasionally curious about the odd shriek that disturbed the Surrey tranquillity. Agatha was especially proficient when a blood curdling yell was required. Before Mitchell answered Cynthia's advertisement in a contact magazine, he was a frequent visitor to massage parlours. He also visited a terrifying cow in Ill's Court, who had a large wheel in her apartment. No fewer than six men could be tied to this contraption, which was turned slowly. Since Mitchell was not prepared to pay more than a few pounds to the forbidding hortends, he was granted that honour of cleaning up the mess that resulted from the circulative torture. This duty he soon discovered affording her, afforded him no delight whatsoever. It was in Madame's balcony's company he finally found contentment. Throwing rubbish at the bank manager fitted in with his view of the essential absurdity of life. He was a skillful marksman. Had Violet gone on living, he would never have developed into a kinky bondage fellow, and certainly not a transvestite. Alone at night in his flat in Pirelli, he would often put on a flowing evening gown or a skirt, twin set and pearls depending on his mood. In a funny way, it was like having a woman about the place again. I enjoyed dressing up as a kind of substitute. Sometimes at Cranmore he rigged himself out as the butler, with Gregory as Anfia. The most conscientious of maidservants, Mitchell would wait on his demanding Madame Baloney. They were occasionally joined at these kinky parties by Randolph, a political commentator, who assumed the role of Tilly, a rowdy tweeny who was forever causing havoc below stairs. The butler, exasperated by her unruly behavior, would take the Slattern across his knees and give Tilly the spanking she deserved. It was a contrite maid, who staggered back to the kitchen. There can be no doubt that Cynthia was largely responsible for the happiness Mitchell experienced in his old age. The house in Elden Court Road and Ample Side Avenue were always open to him. Indeed, he was given the keys to both. He would often have furious rows with his beloved Madame Bolognay, but they were seldom of any importance. Both being her strong, it was inevitable that they would get on each other's nerves. Mitchell was a naturalist and a vegetarian. This man who enjoyed a thorough whipping when the mood was on him could not tolerate cruelty to animals. He would shout abuse to anyone who killed a fly or a wasp. He always drank the water that vegetables had been cooked in. It was his elixir, he said. His garden was overgrown with weeds. They have a right to live as well. If Mitchell had his way, the garden at Cranmore would have been in a similar condition. The otherwise gentle slave Rodney made it plain to the old man that he was the gardener there and would not tolerate such disorder. Cynthia fondly recalls that Mitchell once teased by a boastful party goer about the comparative smallness of his penis. Mitchell was not annoyed or upset by the taunt. He told the man to look closely at the sculpture of the ancient world and to examine that of Michelangelo as well. You will notice no difference between their cocks and mine, he said. In fact, you'll see how much like David's mine is. I have a classical cock, my good fellow. Mitchell died of a massive heart attack in July 1981. He was alone in his flat in Pearley. His corpse was discovered some ten days later by Cynthia and Roger, who had grown worried because they had not heard from him. The squadron leader's funeral was appropriately uncommon. Guy de Morpazant would have relished it. The sky was overcast and there were intermittent showers. The mourners who followed the hearse from Streatham to the cemetery in Croydon included Janet and Magda, Gregory and an assortment of old Cranmorians. The political commentator looked so sober and serious that it was hard to imagine him as the slatinly tilly. Mitchell's erstwhile companions in debauchery were all strictly disciplined in their behavior. At its outset, it was like any other funeral. In the cemetery chapel, the disreputable mourners looked across at the respectable ones from Purley and its environments. A cursory service was held before the coffin was hurried consigned to earth. The rain beat down on whippers and whoopers and on those who will never whip or whoop under any circumstances. Four of Purley's more adventurous residents accepted Madame Bologna's invitation to the reception at Cranmore. They were, as it transpired, rightly apprehensive. The reception developed quite normally into a party. Happy memories of Mitchell's various encentricities were exchanged, giving rise to much laughter as the old Cranmorians of both sexes grew friendlier. Cynthia decided that the afternoon should take a different course. She suddenly called for silence. Everyone present when then asked to toast the dear departed. That's the respectable part of the funeral over, Cynthia announced. We've seen the old boy to his last resting place. Now let's remember him in the way he would like to be remembered. The upstairs rooms are open. Let fucking commence. And commence it did, to the astonishment of one lady from Puri, who kept repeating with increasing hysteria. I've never been in a house like this in my life. Clerics, businessmen, and barristers mounted the staircase they knew so well, but for once they had no need for luncheon vouchers. Their joy was unconfined, which meant that it was free. By order of Madame Bologna, the sound of creaking bedsprings, she observed, would be more congential to Mitchell's ears than any hymn or any prayer. The gasps of contented elderly men were his requiem. Mitchell could not be described as a serious transvestite. He liked people to laugh with him when he lifted his beekeeper's veil. It was only in private. Perhaps that he took the pretense of being a woman behind caricature. In company he was a slapstick female, um a pantomime dame of a wilder disposition than the customary widow twanky. Gregory, who would never dare to call Cynthia by the disrespectful name of Madame Bellone, is altogether more earnest. For him, dressing up means the attainment of an other personality, one that he is happier with than his own. As Anphea, who besides being a maid, is also a sophisticated middle-aged woman, he fulfills himself as others fulfill themselves by making love. Gregory's alignments of gratified desire are those of Annafer, and as she smiles at his reflection in the mirror. I look down at the clothes I'm wearing and I think, yes, you are a middle to upper class matron, smartly turned out, getting on in years, probably with a son now married, already with children, so you're also probably a grandmother. The lines on your face give the game away, and the way you walk and the way you speak, and the amount of ornamentation you use. You are wearing a very, very light eyeshadow, if indeed any at all, as befits a woman of fifty-five. You are definitely not mutton dressed up to look like lamb. I have to be cautious. A real woman can dress and make up to convince people that she's younger, though she's not always successful. It isn't advisable for a transvestite to do the same. There's the danger of being discovered or read, as we say, and that can be a terrible humiliation. Gregory was conscious as a child that he didn't quite belong in his family. His father, who owned a small grocery business in Battersea, was a self-made man who had dragged himself up by his bootstraps, as he was constantly reminding Gregory and the two younger children. I had a very bad relationship with him, unfortunately. I can think of him with a little more kindness now. I realized that he'd had to surmount obstacles in his early life that would have defeated someone with less guts than he had. His father died when Dad was just a boy, and his mother had to scrub floors to earn enough to bring him up. He took to stealing and might have become a full-time FIFA if it hadn't been for the First World War. He fought in two of the worst battles, Wipras and Paschendale. He only ever said one thing about his military career. Five thousand men in one night. Just that single remark. Gregory remembers his father as a rough and ready individual who drank heavily. He was too busy to find time to talk and listen to his sons and daughter, so the children can find it in their mother instead. Gregory, who was born in 1926, spent his formative years in the company of women, since the majority of his male relatives went off to fight in the Second World War. He was never interested in the things that boys are supposed to be interested in, though he wasn't effeminate in any respect. At the age of seven he was dressed up as a fairy, which he seems to recall that he enjoyed, despite the fact that his appearance must have been laughable. Otherwise, he was aware that when he grew up, he too was expected to go off and serve his country. His maternal grandmother, to whom he was very attached, had lost three brothers in the South African War, and she instilled in him a sense of duty and the importance and nobility of sacrifice. Gregory rose in the non-commissioned ranks in the army and was drafted to Palestine in the mid-1940s. He saw dreadful carnage there and is still haunted by experience. On his return to England, he settled down with his widowed mother, with whom he was to live for another twenty years. His brother and sister had both married. It was assumed within the family that Gregory would remain a bachelor. He courted a couple of girls, but in a non-committal fashion. Then he became enamoured of a woman who had been on the verge of marrying his best friend. He had been asked to intercede on the friend's behalf. His efforts to patch up the relationship resulted in his being seduced by the jilter's charm. It was a seduction of the mind alone. Gregory saw her almost every day for two years, yet his feelings for her were given only the most rudimentary physical expression. Their kissing and cuddling never inspired him to request that they continue on a more advanced scale in the bedroom. The thought, Gregory confesses, never occurred to him. Eventually, the woman did to him what she had done to his best friend. She told him, bluntly, that she had no wish to see him again. Right, that is where we're gonna stop for today. I'm pretty sure we only have what, two more episodes of this book, and that's it, I would say. So yeah. This has been Behind and Bad Podcast with me and Paulson Victoria. After this book, I think I will potentially be going back to how I usually did my podcast episodes, where I would just think of a topic which I want to talk about, and yeah, we'll get to it. Do not forget to leave a review, leave a like, share, you know, what whatever. And yeah, thank you very much.

unknown 48:23

Bye.