From the first performance of Revudeville (so coy - the word "nude" isn't quite in the title) on February 4, 1932, it was a roaring success. Six times a day, six days a week, from noon until 10.35pm, non-stop revues lit up the Windmill's glass stage. The showgirls and boys danced and sang through themed "numbers", while a girl posed nude, always taking a demure, statue-like pose and often clasping a token feather, scarf or bit of scenery, so that no hint of pubic hair was exposed.  It was the Windmill's boast that "We never closed" right through the war, even though there were actually 12 days' compulsory closure at the start of the Second World War in September 1939, when all West End theatres were forced to shut down. During times of heavy bombing, the Windmill girls would sleep at the theatre.  My mother, a Windmill girl for 11 years, was caught by the bomb that hit the café opposite the theatre and killed a Windmill electrician. She was always a little annoyed that one of the male dancers, Nugent Marshall, was credited with pulling her out of the rubble, when she insisted that they scrambled out together. She spent four months in hospital before returning to can-can her way through the rest of the war.  This was still the era of active censorship, with the censor's blue pencil a reality rather than a metaphor. "If it moves, it's rude," was the Lord Chamberlain's ruling on Revudeville.  But Lord Cromer's office played ball with the Windmill. They used to telephone to say when their senior official - the aptly-named George Titman - was on the way to watch a show, allowing plenty of time for the girls to put on a few more wisps of chiffon. Later, during the war, the theatre had to supply the Lord Chamberlain's office with photographs of planned nude poses ahead of the opening of a new show, as well as the scripts.  The only time a nude moved was when a bomb dropped on the Regent Palace Hotel. The theatre shook and the "statue" ran for her life as a dead rat fell out of the rafters. The nudes were never allowed to sing, because that would involve too much deep breathing and heaving of their fulsome chests.  I grew up with these Windmill stories. My mother, whose stage name was Joan Jay, joined the Windmill in 1936 as a dancer and singer. I was named Vivien, after Van Damm, who she always referred to affectionately as "the old man".  My sister Janet and I loved to turn the pages of old photograph albums full of glamorous pictures of showgirls dressed as squaws, Polynesian dancers, Roman slaves or Louis XIV's courtiers. It took a while for us to notice that the softly-lit "statues" in the background were real people.  My mother was most dismissive of the nudity, and keen to emphasise that she was a soubrette and had never done anything like that. We had no idea what a soubrette was, only that they did it with clothes on. "I grew up with the perception that the Windmill was smart and sophisticated. I was quite shocked when I read about it in the context of sleazy Soho," recalls Janet.  My mother used to say that she didn't look upon the nudes as anything outrageous - they were like classical pictures. Yet how could that naive attitude be maintained in the face of the great passion and excitement they clearly created among the soldiers on leave, and other men who flocked to the tiny 300-seat theatre?  Long queues would form from early morning. As the non-stop performances rolled on, the people in the favoured first six rows - just under the footlights, and well-placed to ogle, and almost touch, the girls - would vacate their seats, and others would vault over the rows to move closer to the front, in what became known as "the Windmill Steeplechase". Every morning, a handyman had to tighten the bolts because the seats suffered such a pounding. Only once did a punter manage to climb up on to the stage - he was swiftly booted out.  Many of the post-war comics, such as Bruce Forsyth, Benny Hill, Jimmy Edwards, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Alfred Marks, endured the trial of trying to amuse an audience only interested in the Windmill girls. Tony Hancock recalled that men would stop him outside the Windmill and say: "My dear chap, I did enjoy your act… could you possibly arrange an introduction to the third girl from the left?"  Stage-door Johnnies were all part of the racy Windmill scene. They would bring presents of chocolates or stockings that were rare treats during the war. My mother kept a small stack of foreign bank notes - French, Spanish, Italian, Belgian, Burmese and Japanese, some with personal notes written on them.  At a time when even married couples might not see each other naked, the mere sight of completely nude girls was outrageous enough. Once war broke out, there were virgin soldiers, old enough to be sent to the battlefields, who deserved to see, if not taste, some of the pleasures of adulthood. The Windmill was, we were told, seen almost as part of the war effort - there are several photographs showing my mother in a showgirl version of air-force uniform.  The Windmill during the war was very insular. The troupe would rarely meet people from outside their own world, and so would not glimpse any hint of censure. In many ways, it resembled a boarding school.  During the Blitz, the company would sleep in their (segregated) dressing rooms. My mother referred to herself as head girl, and once explained: "It means that I had to see that the girls cleaned their teeth, said their prayers and did their homework."  The average age of the Windmill girls was 19. Van Damm, who is played by Bob Hoskins in the film, asked parents for permission for their still under-age girls to go on the stage, and claimed he also sought parental approval for the girls to appear naked.  There were also boys in the theatre, and a more liberal attitude towards homosexuality than in the world beyond theatreland. My mother would coyly refer to a male dancer being "a ginger beer" (rhyming slang: ginger beer, queer).  Together, Van Damm and his boys and girls formed a close-knit family, and when Laura Henderson managed to convince the Lord Chamberlain to allow human classical statues on stage, anyone who balked at the idea of raw sexual nudity could buy into this more ethereal artistic concept and take what seems to us now a rather hypocritical stance - revelling in the excitement and allure of overt sexuality, while denying that this was the centrepiece of the whole show.  David Jaffe, curator of the Rubens exhibition now on at the National Gallery, says that the artist made allusions to classical sculptures in his paintings, and so shares something with the nudes on the Windmill stage. "Both of them are stealing - great artists are great thieves, they steal a seed and go beyond. That's why what they do is different from mimicry. Sadly, the Windmill nudes were not allowed to move and be more creative."  "Josephine Baker doing a fan dance was a work of art - it did not lead to a display of gynaecology," says Phillip Hodson, a fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. "It's a sad commentary on society then that you couldn't look at mobile women and regard their bodies in the same way as men's bodies.  "In those days men were not inhibited about their nudity; for example, men in the army would think nothing of stripping off together and going swimming in the nude.  "The nudes on stage at the Windmill were the first stage of an unbending of the stiff upper lip. I don't weep at its loss. In my many years as an agony uncle I came across so many people who regretted marrying when they had only done it as a way of getting sex, and then didn't know what they were doing."  But if there was nothing sordid or lewd about the Windmill in the 1930s and 1940s - unlike, some might say, the pole-dancing club that the theatre has become - perhaps that was because sexuality was still a taboo, and the British response to embarrassing subjects like bodies and lavatories is so often slapstick humour.  According to Glyn Hudson-Allez, training manager for the British Association for Sexual and Relationship Therapy, wartime Britain still followed Victorian sexual mores, which held that only prostitutes enjoyed sex and men would only have polite procreative sex with their wives.  Some women, she says, may have been persuaded to engage in sex with men going to war who played on their natural sympathy - "and the result was a lot of illegitimate children".  But now, she believes, women have gone overboard with the ladette culture and are competing with men in the sexual stakes. "I hope the pendulum swings back."
Vivien Goldsmith shares her mother's memories of life as one of Mrs Henderson's family of revue girls and boys