What were the secrets hidden within the seedy little Soho smut shop?
I made my first visit to London in the late 1970's, when I was twenty-eight. I had grown up in the States, in the Midwest to be precise, but I had always hankered to visit Britain, and especially London. Perhaps it was my avid reading of the "Complete Sherlock Holmes" when I was ten, or the British Invasion bands that took over the American radio-waves just as my adolescence arrived; but whatever the cause, from early on, I thought of myself as an Anglophile.
It took a good while -- at least a decade -- but once I got some money in the bank, I bought a round-trip ticket from Chicago to London. With the help of a travel agent -- remember them? -- I booked an off-season flight at the tail end of September and got a reservation at one of the numerous small hotels near Russell Square in Bloomsbury. The exchange rate favored the dollar at the time, so my meagre travel funds could just cover a single room with a loo and showers down the hall, and a nice big breakfast in the morning that helped me skip lunch most days.
My hotel -- St. Margaret's, as I recall -- was perfectly situated for my pursuits. It was just a block or two from the British Museum and Library, and within walking distance of Charing Cross Road, back when it was still packed with second-hand booksellers. Since my idea of a well-spent afternoon was poking around in the dusty shelves of used bookshops seeing what serendipity turned up, I was as happy as a lark. That was especially the case when I discovered that Charing Cross also marked the eastern edge of seedy Soho. Jackpot!
One small bookshop on the Soho side of Charing Cross seemed to be mainly marked-down "remainders", but a narrow staircase at the back of the shop led down to a cramped basement room with racks of British smut devoted mainly to spanking magazines. As something of a perv, I was delighted until I discovered that most everything was sealed up in plastic bags, with few browsable copies, and those that I perused looked pretty tame. However, they whetted my appetite for further kinky fare, and so I ventured into the sleazy side streets of Soho, with shop windows filled with fetish garb, adult toys, and promises of the bizarre.
One nondescript shop seemed devoted to booklets and magazines featuring men and women wearing rubber boots and Mackintoshes. This did not interest me in the least, but I was suitably impressed that there were enough Londoners with that particular kink to support a shop solely serving that clientele.
I banged around some more, though a light drizzle was beginning, when I came upon an unremarkable adult shop of some sort whose very anonymity piqued my interest. It was on the ground floor of an ancient dirty red brick building with another floor or two above, with a faded shop name painted above the wooden front door: Honeypot Bookshop. It sported no Venus & Mars symbols, no pink neon or "adults only" signs, no clues whatsoever as to what it was about.
"Hmm," I said to myself, "let's check this out. You just never know..."
I tried the door handle, both pushing and pulling, but it seemed to be locked. Then I spied a small sooty white plastic doorbell labeled "Bookshop" and pressed it. After a short pause, there was the sound of a sharp click and the door released, allowing me to enter. The heavy door swung shut behind me and I tried to make out the features of the rather ill-lit shop. Off to one side, behind a tall counter was a white-haired old coot giving me the once over. He was dressed in a rumpled white shirt, his grey woolen trousers held up by a pair of ancient black suspenders.
"How can we help you, young man?" he asked with a surprisingly warm but scratchy voice. "Any special interests, eh?"
He gave me a classic wink, as if he were a fellow conspirator who had been hoping that someone like me -- a kinky naif -- would show up and ring the bell. I gave a nervous glance around, trying to figure out what was on offer. It mainly looked to be cheaply printed booklets with pastel colored covers sporting black ink drawings of women with whips towering over cringing men, intermixed with other booklets showing shapely lingerie-clad women bound in all sorts of difficult postures. Neither were quite what I had in mind, but I was getting closer than the spanking bins in the basement of the first shop or the rubber raincoats in the last one.
"Er, can I just browse? I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for, to be honest. Something unusual, perhaps a bit bizarre?"
"Well, you've come to the right place, young man! Feel free to look around, certainly. But I will warn you that our best material is not on display. We only bring it out for serious customers who know what they are looking for."
This struck me as a rather self-defeating store policy guaranteed to drive off new customers like me who weren't sure what they wanted or what was available. As far as I could tell, the self-defeating policy was working quite well, as there were no other customers in the shop, and from the dust on some of the plastic wrapped booklets, I suspected I might be the only walk-in of the day, if not the week.
"You are visiting from the States, I take it?" the old coot ventured, no doubt tipped off by my flat Chicago accent. "I suppose you've never been in a shop like ours before?"
"Er, not exactly. I've been in adult bookstores back home, but they're set-up rather differently. Everything's in color and out on display, and no one speaks with each other."
"Yes, well, I dare say there are even shops like that in Soho, but ours is different. We like to get to know our customers, the better to supply them with sophisticated materials precisely suited to their tastes and, er, fetishes, as it were. Surely, you have favorite fantasies that stiffen the old rod, my boy? No need to be embarrassed! We are very discrete and keep such things strictly confidential."
I was somewhat taken aback by the old coot's direct approach, as I was not at all eager to blithely confess my perverted little fantasies with a complete stranger. But on second thought, why not? When you got right down to it, what did I have to lose?
"Oh what the hell," I thought to myself. "Let me toss a pebble in the pond and see what ripples it creates."
"Well, how about this? Do you have anything about voluptuous mature women in lovely lingerie who seduce shy young men and make them service them orally? Or perhaps invite them to bugger their large arses?"
I could feel my face go red and I felt like a total pervert, but the proprietor gave me an encouraging grin displaying a mouthful of ill-aligned teeth. He looked as pleased as punch.
"There you go now, lad! Now we are getting somewhere. As it so happens, I believe I have just the thing for you! Follow me upstairs and we shall have a nice cuppa. Let's give you something to remember us by, a nice souvenir of London."
* * *
The old coot briskly walked me past a half-open doorway into a darkened back storeroom seemingly full of half-open parcels of booklets and shelves of leatherbound volumes and lurid paperbacks, and on over to a narrow wooden staircase. He flicked on a dusty bare light bulb overhead and eagerly climbed the steps ahead of me, pushing a door open at the top that led into a tidy kitchen with an old gas Wedgewood stove with an ancient-looking kettle on a back burner.
"Mary! We have a young guest!"
A rather short pleasantly plump woman of a certain age, dressed in a light blue flowered dress, came into the kitchen, smiling warmly. She looked to be considerably younger than her husband, in her late forties or early fifties perhaps, her brown hair was streaked with wisps of grey and put up in a loose bun. Though plump, she was by no means fat, but rather shapely with a surprisingly small waist and generous bust and hips. Her lovely brown eyes were emphasized with subtle mascara and light eye shadow.
