As Related by Joan Lamburn [4th wife of Louis Wilkinson]

from

Letters to Alyse Gregory 1941-1943

Joan Lamburn, Chris Wilkinson and Louise deBruin

The Powys Journal

Vol. 26 (2016)

(pages 155-156)

June 23, 1942

My dearest Alyse,

. . . I took your letter with me to London meaning to answer it there but I found no place to sit and no time for writing . . . We went to tea with Ethel Mannin on Saturday, a lovely hot day. Louis [Louis Wilkinson] was very cross with a bus that took us miles out of our way, because when we got on and he asked the pretty young conductress if it went to Calonne Road and "she seemed to acquiesce", which only shows that to Louis the acquiescence of a pretty young woman need be no more than the flicker of an eyelid . . .

Louis had made a tentative arrangement to go alone to see a girl in Chelsea after tea, but we left too late and went straight to the Café Royal for dinner and then Louis said would I like to meet Crowley as he lived quite near, so we went along to this big house in Piccadilly where he had a furnished flat. It's really a brothel. Louis is so innocent he had seen and understood nothing on his previous visit, but the moment we entered the cheaply furnished hall with its dusty palm tree in the middle and its Lloyd Loom chairs and insolent looking porter in gold braid I knew where I was. Louis told the porter to "ask Mr. Crowley if he could see Mr. Wilkinson and a friend". The porter took us upstairs to the first floor, opened a door and walked in, calling out, "Crowley? Are you there, Crowley? Mr. Wilkinson and a friend to see yer!" and then said to Louis "Go on in, Sir." We went into a sort of ante-chamber with a filthy uncurtained window looking on to Piccadilly, a few stuffed chairs and sofa and a table on a bare wood floor. It was growing dusk. Crowley emerged from the bedroom where he had been muttering. He seemed rather taken aback but assured Louis we hadn't disturbed him and that there was no one in the bedroom. He was dressed in flannel pyjamas and Bedouin-like yellow silk robe from which his hands came out looking like hen's claws. He sat by the window and talked in a wheezy high-pitched voice in a tone of complaint. A mouse came out from under his chair, a very large mouse—it advanced a little and looked all round, then retired under the yellow robe again. I drew his attention to it but he made no comment. I felt I'd committed a breach of good manners, yet felt unabashed. In the fading light there was a touching dignity in the dumpy little figure by the window. He has told someone, or he has been told, that he resembles Churchill, but I thought he seemed more like Queen Victoria—an aging, pettish, harassed queen robbed of her happiness. . . . We only stayed about 50 minutes and as we went through the hall again the porter said, "You've been very quick, sir!" A whore of the first water was coming up the steps—aged about 55. Perhaps it was the manageress coming back from a walk in the Park. . . .