Introduction
During many years as a Fleet Street reporter, covering the day by day Courts, and the many side-issues of stories that never got either into the newspapers or into the Courts, the author encountered many life-stories which were fascinating, wild, and yet not suitable for the tabloid press.
Greater London is a community of some ten million people, ranking it as one of the largest cities in the world. A Londoner can never know the whole city, nor even all of the tube railway stations. He lives in one area, commutes to his work; so the average Londoner knows two areas of the city very well. The rest is a vast, vague brick and concrete maze. The result of these millions of people living within a circle of some twenty mile radius, breeds an insularity, a cool, a complete disinterest in anything not of their immediate concern. And there are ethnic groups which further this. One area is Spanish, another Italian, a further one Jamaican, while Poles live in an area of Edgware Road, and on and on. London, like New York, is a great gathering of many people. As the first city was founded over two thousand years ago, the complex stratas of its societies require almost the skill of an archaeologist as much as a sociologist. One can be in many different worlds, in London, not only of people, but of habits and periods, too.
Diana V., came to our Fleet Street office to sell her life story for publication. It was a wild story, and since Diana was just twenty-six, the girl seemed to have lived enough for several girls her age. The girl had started to write her story in longhand in lined notebooks. She brought with her diaries that revealed the truth and background of it all.
Her true story is fascinating because of the girl's resiliance, and ability to take the hardest knocks of life, and to recover. Diana V. was also lucky, for she seemed always to escape from a possible disaster and be able to look back on it all as just "experience." Her adventurous spirit had led her into many scrapes and tight comers. But Diana still had a great belief in herself, and her eventual success.
All names and places of note have been changed, so as to avoid any embarrassment to any person concerned.
It should be added that Diana V. is a very striking girl of slightly above average height, with dark long hair, light blue eyes, and a very slim figure. She was wearing a very short miniskirt that accentuated the natural taper of her long legs in their black panti-hose. A brisk, smiling, yet serious girl, Diana V. had the intensity of today's modern youth. For all that she had been an orgy girl, Diana still believes in people, and the world changing for the better. Her swift smile, and her bright voice, certainly shows she is always ready for yet another adventure.
James Z. Muntz Beverly Hills, California April 1969.