Chapter 6 Confessions
SIX
CONFESSIONS
ART
The village had a theatre.
I use the term loosely. It was really just the back room of The Crown and Anchor, a pub that had seen better days sometime around the reign of Queen Victoria.
But on certain nights, when the blackout curtains were drawn tight and the right people gathered in the right configuration, that back room transformed into something else entirely.
Something dangerous. Something necessary. Something that felt, for a few stolen hours, like home.
I had heard about it from Julian, back before the war, when we had still been young enough to believe that being careful was the same as being safe.
“There are places,” he had said, voice pitched low even though we were alone in his rooms at Cambridge, “if you know where to look. If you know the words.”
The words. Always the words.
I had learned them slowly, the way you learn any language.
A phrase here, a gesture there, the particular way someone's eyes would meet yours across a crowded room.
Polari was not taught in classrooms or written in dictionaries.
It lived in the spaces between, passed from mouth to ear in whispers, a secret inheritance for those of us who needed secrets to survive.
Tonight, I needed to remember what survival felt like when it was not just about ciphers and convoys and the endless weight of other people's deaths.
I slipped out after my shift ended, when the estate had settled into its evening rhythms and no one would notice one more figure moving through the dark.
The walk to the village took twenty minutes at a brisk pace, long enough for my thoughts to spiral into familiar patterns of anxiety and anticipation.
I knew Tom was following me.
Not obviously. He was too well-trained for that.
But I had spent years learning to read the spaces around me, to notice the footstep that fell half a beat behind my own, the shadow that moved when I moved and stopped when I stopped.
He was good, I would give him that. Anyone else would have missed him entirely.
But I was not anyone else. And some part of me, some reckless and desperate part, was glad he was there.
Let him see. Let him understand what I was, what I had always been. Maybe then he would stop looking at me with those winter eyes, stop making me want things I could not have. Maybe the truth would be enough to build a wall between us that I could not seem to construct on my own.
Or maybe I just wanted him to know. Wanted someone to know, after all these years of hiding.
The Crown and Anchor sat at the end of the high street, its windows dark, its door unmarked. You had to know to turn left past the bar, to knock twice on the door with the peeling paint, to say “Vera sent me” to the woman who answered even though there was no Vera and never had been.
The woman tonight was Margaret, though that was not her real name either. She was perhaps fifty, with steel-grey hair pinned severely back and eyes that had seen everything and forgiven most of it.
“Arthur, love.” She smiled, the expression transforming her stern face into something warm and conspiratorial. “Been an age. Thought you had forgotten us.”
“Never.” I pressed her hand, feeling the roughness of her skin, the strength in her grip. “Work has been...”
“I know. I know.” She patted my cheek like a fond aunt. “In you go. Madam Fortuna is just about to start, and there is a fantabulosa crowd tonight. All the bona omis and palones you could wish for.”
The back room was smaller than I remembered, or perhaps just more crowded.
Bodies pressed close in the dim light, a haze of cigarette smoke softening the edges of everything.
Someone had strung paper lanterns from the ceiling, casting pools of coloured light that made the space feel otherworldly, separate from the grey reality outside.
I found a spot near the back wall, close enough to see the makeshift stage but far enough to slip out if I needed to. Old habits. The kind that kept men like me alive.
The crowd was mixed in ways that would have scandalised polite society. Women in trousers, men in carefully applied rouge, couples whose configurations defied easy categorisation. Here, the rules that governed the daylight world held no power. Here, we could simply be.
A man beside me caught my eye and grinned, his lips painted a deep crimson that caught the lantern light. He was young, perhaps twenty-five, with dark curls and the kind of sharp cheekbones that made him look almost elfin.
“Vada the dolly dish who just trolled in,” he said to his companion, a broader man with kind eyes and a waistcoat that strained at its buttons. “Bona eek on that one.”
“Nanti that,” the companion replied, laughing. “He looks like trade, and you know trade is always barney.”
“A girl can dream, cant she?”
I felt myself smile despite everything. The familiar rhythm of Polari washing over me like warm water, the sense of being among my own people even if I did not know their names.
The first man noticed me listening and winked. “You speak the cant, love?”
“A bit.”
“Only a bit? With an eek like that, you should be fluent. I am Dilly, and this great lump is my intended, Maurice.”
“Charmed,” Maurice said dryly. “Ignore him. He flirts with everyone. It is a medical condition.”
“It is called having taste, you philistine.” Dilly turned back to me. “First time here?”
“No. But it has been a while.”
“The war makes everything harder.” His voice softened, losing some of its theatrical edge. “Finding time. Finding courage. Finding latties that have not been bombed to rubble.”
“You are from London?”
“Whitechapel. Was, anyway. Nanti left now but memories and dust.” His voice was matter-of-fact, the way all of us had learned to speak about loss.
“Came out here to stay with my sister. She does not know about...” He gestured vaguely at the room, at himself, at everything.
“But she does not ask questions either. Small mercies.”
Small mercies. Yes. That was what we survived on, those of us who lived in the margins. The people who did not ask questions. The rooms where we could breathe. The moments, stolen and fleeting, when we could stop pretending.
The lanterns dimmed. A ripple of anticipation moved through the crowd.
“Oh, here we go,” Dilly whispered, clutching Maurice's arm. “She is fantabulosa tonight, I can feel it.”
And then Madam Fortuna took the stage.
She was magnificent. There was no other word for it.
Tall, broad-shouldered, draped in a gown of deep purple velvet that must have cost someone's entire clothing ration.
A wig of elaborate blonde curls framed a face painted with theatrical precision, lips red as blood, eyes rimmed in kohl that made them seem enormous and knowing.
“Good evening, my darlings.” Her voice was a purr, pitched to carry without shouting, intimate even in a room full of people. “What a bona gathering we have tonight. So many dolly eeks in the crowd, I hardly know where to vada first.”
“Vada me, Fortuna!” someone called from the back. “Vada me!”
“Oh, I vada you, sweetheart. I vada everything about you, including those cod shoes. Did you lose a bet, or are you genuinely colour blind?”
Laughter rippled through the room. The target of the joke, a young man with indeed questionable footwear, bowed theatrically and blew a kiss.
“Now then,” Madam Fortuna continued, arranging herself on a chair that had been draped in fabric to look like a throne, “for any fresh meat in the audience, any omis or palones who have trolled in for the first time and are wondering what language we are speaking... welcome to the parlyaree, darlings. Welcome to the secret tongue of the marginalised and the magnificent.”
She spread her arms wide, the purple velvet catching the light.
“Polari is how we find each other. How we speak truths in plain sight while the straight world walks right past, deaf to our music. When I say an omi has a bona cartes, I mean he has a lovely body. When I say someone is naff, I mean they are dull, dreary, not one of us. When I say the riah on that palone is absolutely stunning, I am admiring her hair.”
“Your riah is absolutely stunning,” Dilly called out, and Fortuna preened, patting her blonde wig.
“This old thing? Please. I found it in a skip behind the Palladium. But thank you, darling, you have excellent taste.” She winked. “Now, shall we have some music? I feel a song coming on. Something tragic and beautiful, like my love life.”
The pianist, a thin woman with fingers like spider legs, launched into an introduction. Madam Fortuna rose, the velvet pooling around her feet, and began to sing.
It was an old music hall number, but she had changed the words. Where the original spoke of a woman pining for her soldier boy, Fortuna's version spoke of an omi pining for his, using Polari to transform a heterosexual lament into something that belonged to us.
“My bona omi went to war, left me crying at the door, with nanti but his picture and his ring. Now I vada other trade, but none of them have got it made, none of them can make my heartstrings sing...”
The room swayed together. Some people sang along, voices joining on the chorus. Others simply listened, faces soft with recognition, with the particular kind of grief that comes from having your experience articulated for the first time.
I found my eyes burning. I blinked hard, refused to let the tears fall, but the tightness in my throat remained.
This was what we had. What we would always have.
Not acceptance, not safety, not the right to exist openly in the world.
But this. These rooms. These people. This language that belonged to us alone, that let us speak truths in plain sight, that bound us together across class and geography and all the other divisions that should have kept us apart.
The song ended. Madam Fortuna took her bows to thunderous applause, then held up a hand for silence.