Kinky Bee
by Jilliana
Ranicar-Breese
When I worked
for the Italian Board of Trade (ICE) at the
Blackpool Fancy Goods Fair, today the enormous
trade fair at Birmingham's NEC, I worked for
Senior Mancioli who owned an oven to tablewear
ceramics factory in Montelupo, close to Florence.
I got my first taste of selling and found I could
do so easily. Jewish instincts I guess. I
wandered around the fair in my spare time and
fell In love with a yellowish funny looking lion
on the Kinky Bee stand, I called him Leo which
seemed to fit him. Oddity enough my mother's
maiden name had been Lyons, coming from Loeb, a
Polish name from way back when her great grand
parents emigrated to the UK ending up in Swansea.
I must have bought it and chatted to the owner Mr
Kinky Bee - Paul Nathanson with an office in
prestigious Bond Street. I don't recall if I
worked for him at another Blackpool fair but,
when I went to live in London in the late 60s, I
recall being invited to his home in London where
he lived with his actress wife, half his age.
At some point I went to his pokey office down at
the bottom of Bond Street up on a second floor in
a gloomy office building. Once inside it was
chaos with a big black safe under the window.
Samples of his characters, mainly animals,
lingered on his shelves and Austrian carved wood
faces as bottle stoppers so popular in the 50s
and 60s; possibly he was the exclusive U.K.
distributor. A one man band no less with no
staff. No room to swing a cat let alone the lion.
For some reason he wanted to show me the contents
of his safe! Money? No, porno!!! There lay on the
shelves hundreds of black and white photos of men
and woman 'doing it'. Had he taken the photos? I
didn't dare ask. Today I would have. But why show
me? Why were they locked away in a safe? Was it
illegal to have porno photos in late 1967?
This was the second time I had been shown porno
photos. These ones were boring British black and
white ones, the ones in Parioli, Rome were more
interesting being Chinese or Thai shown to me by
an Italian pilot when I lived in Rome in early
1967. Another time, another tale!
Written
in Casa de los Bates, Motril, Spain 7/2/17.
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