Here's a passage from a 1930's British crime novel*:
"I had made no arrangements as to where I was going to stay, so I took a taxi out to Hampstead. Some years ago I had rooms there in Fellows Road and I knew the landlady was an obliging sort--so I knocked her up and got her to take me in."
Obliging indeed!
*Bude, John The Cornish Coast Murder. London: The British Library, 2014 p. 225.( First published in 1935.)