After the first flush of success, which lasted all of four weeks and then levelled out into a pleasant routine, the ‘Piaf of the Kurfürstendamm’, as she was originally billed, settled down comfortably, enlarging her repertoire and her English vocabulary at the same time, for she was quick to discover that it was not just her voice which attracted many of the customers; and being a willing and industrious girl she seized every opportunity for advancement and very soon found that she spend less and less time washing Dieter’s shirts or listening to his agonized sobs and groans as he raised and lowered his bar-bells, but more and more time extending her range of talents.

Herr Seeger had offered her a number of useful contacts here and there, and she was delighted, if astonished, to discover that underneath the thick layer of white No makeup her appealing innocence and childishness were still apparent to those who wished to discover it; and a lucrative number of gentlemen did. To this end Herr Seeger sent her back to Bender’s Studios, removed the make-up and the black dress, scrubbed her face, gave her a lacrosse stick, a gym-slip and a Shirley Temple wig, in which disguise Mr Bender took a series of poses which he said, himself, were ‘Saucy, but impish. And in the best of bad taste.’ She didn’t know exactly what he meant, but found that she quite enjoyed the work and the extra money which ‘posing’ brought her, for Herr Seeger gave her a very small ‘cut’ on every still sold at the restaurant and they sold well. Briskly in fact. So that in time, the gym-slip alternated with little gingham aprons, poke bonnets, dancing pumps, and modest hand-smocked pinafores, worn with wrinkled white socks. But although she enjoyed the dressing up and make-believe in an appropriately childish way, she was always secretly relieved to pull on the shabby black dress for the Dietrich-Lenya-Leander numbers which she croaked out in the evenings accompanied by an elderly, weary Jew who had once played Schubert and Bach in Prague.

But the ‘Sessions’, as she learned to call them, in the hustle and warmth of Bender’s Studios, delighted her, for the people with whom she worked were above all things kind, and she responded to kindness like a cat to an open fire.

In the motley assortment of people who made up the Staff, Gus Bender was without doubt the Boss. A warm, intelligent man, well into his sixties, he knew all there was to know about his craft, and practised it with care and devotion. He was a calm, down-to-earth creature who brooked no kind of ‘nonsense’.

‘I always call a spade a spade, don’t I, Nig?’ he said one day to the tall, gentle Jamaican who trundled the lamps and cables about the studio. And Nig agreed with a happy smile, rolling himself his eternal ‘ciggie’.