Leni Minx was an instant success. The small, husky, bitter little voice, often uneven and unsure, commanded strange attention, and produced a deep nostalgia even in the breasts of those who had never been further East in their lives than Felixstowe. No one ate while Leni sang, and indeed some silently wept and carved small swastikas into the soft wood of the bar. The Mayerling Hütte swung back to popularity, and Adolph Seeger blessed the night that he went into a cheap bar off the Kurfürstendamm for a late bowl of soup and found his ‘star’ singing, literally, for her supper to a noisy and inattentive audience who had heard this kind of thing long before; and done better. But the Kings Road, he reckoned, hadn’t yet become over-familiar with the world of Isherwood and Grosz; she was an amateur, and the English liked amateurs far more than professionals; she was also cheap. Three days later, in the same black dress, she arrived with him in London where he gave her a small advance, which she considered a fortune, and bought her a rabbit-skin jacket at a C & A sale, covered her face with a thick white make-up worn by the No dancers of Japan, and carted her off to Bender’s Studios in Covent Garden for a photographic session, buying every known recording of songs from pre-war Berlin and a record-player which he insisted she listen to day and night.

Bewildered, exhausted, and with only a modest amount of English which she said she had picked up ‘from the American Forces’ Network on the radio’, she gratefully accepted the use of a bed in a small cupboard in the flat of Dieter Muller, the head waiter at the Mayerling Hütte, who charged her no rent on condition that she did a little housework about the place and washed out his white shirts. He required no other service, as he considered her too skinny and far too boyish for his lustier tastes, which, at that time, were being sternly suppressed owing to the fact that his training routine (he was making his third attempt at Mr Body Beautiful of West Paddington) was so severe that he frequently found it an effort to move among the tables at night, let alone smile at a customer.