A Traveller's Life (3 page)

This hideous dream I last dreamt, after an interval of fifteen years, while escaping from the Germans in Italy in the autumn of 1943. It derived from an incident that occurred in the spring or early summer of 1923, the same year that we went to Sark. This incident took place in Barnes while I was on an outing with my nurse in what used to be called a mail cart or Victoria carriage. A mail cart was a machine made for the conveyance of children who have outgrown their prams, as I had, but were still unable to cover long distances on foot, bearing the same relation to a push chair as a Hispano-Suiza to an Austin Seven. In it the infant occupant sat upright with his back as it were to the engine, in this case whoever was pushing the thing. With the hood up conversation between pusher and pushed was precluded, unless the pusher stopped pushing and walked round to the front of the vehicle. It was in some ways a beautiful vehicle, the product of the pre-industrial revolution coach-builder's imagination and just as an electric brougham looked like a brougham that had lost its horse, so a mail cart looked like a Regency curricle which had lost its horses and was being pushed back to the stables by human hands.

My pusher was called Lily. She was my first and last real nurse.
I can remember everything about Lily without the aid of photographs; but the photographs confirm that she was what I thought she was, even at that early age, a very good-looking in a soppy kind of way, raven-haired, distinctly friendly girl with dark rings round her black eyes. I have already referred to her in another book,
Love and War in the Apennines
, but she has to be resurrected yet again for the purpose of this narrative.

Lily had been kitted out by my mother in what must have been a moment of social aspiration in full nurse's rig. The winter outfit, navy-blue coat and a sort of pork-pie hat to match which she wore at a jaunty angle, was innocuous enough but the summer one was very different. It consisted of a short-sleeved blue-denim dress with starched white collar and cuffs, black silk stockings, high heels and a headdress made up of swathes of dark-blue veiling. Dressed in this outfit, a model girl's idea of a W1 or SW1 nurse, with the veiling and the black-rimmed eyes, she looked like a mixture of a houri and nurse in a blue film. In London, W1, or SW1, where nurses, in fact, tended to be rather plain, if not hideous or of forbidding demeanour, she would have been very conspicuous and they would probably have driven her from Hyde Park, if she had attempted to enter it, into that desert where nurses whose charges did not appear in Debrett were sent to languish, Kensington Gardens. In Barnes, SW13, the total effect of the uniform, Lily and her soppy, friendly air could have been nothing less than inflammatory. I loved Lily but even then at that tender age I recognized that it was in a different way from anyone else who ever looked after me; and I think Lily loved me, but in a different way from the way in which I loved her. Thus, because of all this, in her company, as a sort of accomplice or accessory after the fact, because I could easily have told my mother what was going on, I found myself being trundled to assignations, only one or two of which I can remember fully, with what I recall as
old men (which meant that they might have been twenty years old) and my mother recalled years later when I was fully grown as ‘dirty old men' (which probably meant that they were over forty).

The venues for these presumed encounters, for I never remember seeing any actual goings-on, were the towing path above Hammersmith Bridge near Chiswick Ferry which was grassy and on which a number of bushes grew, and a creepy and now desecrated and presumably deconsecrated cemetery on Barnes Common. In it Lily kept me quiet while, again presumably she made rings around the tombs, by giving me handfuls of Carrara marble and other more brightly coloured chippings to play with. Some of these tomb chippings found their way into my bath where they were discovered by my mother. Subsequent sleuthing led to Lily being surprised by my mother, whether while being about to ‘do it', or while actually in the act of ‘doing it', or simply being chatted up, whether on the towing path or in the cemetery or at some other trysting place, she never made clear. Whatever or wherever it was, Lily was instantly dismissed, although this was not until some time towards the end of 1924, the year following the events which I am now narrating.

Whether it was in pursuit of whatever she was in pursuit of, or we were simply on a new, adventurous walk, on the afternoon on which the happenings which led up to my nightmare took place, Lily pushed me in the mail cart up the towing path from Hammersmith Bridge as far as Chiswick Ferry. The ferry was for foot passengers only, and when it functioned at all, which was rarely, they were conveyed across the river by a ferryman in a rowing-boat. Having reached the ferry, as she usually did, Lily turned left down a narrow, unmetalled lane between two reservoirs from which it was separated by iron railings. This lane led to Lonsdale Road, the road up which the police used to push the
drunk and disorderly on their handcart to Barnes Police Station. At Lonsdale Road she normally turned left for Hammersmith Bridge and home along the pavements. But on this particular day instead of doing this she crossed Lonsdale Road and continued to follow the alignment of the lane into what was, for me, unknown territory.

It was an eerie place. To the left of the lane, which was also unmetalled, a rather dreary expanse of fields with a farmhouse on the edge of it, what must have been one of the nearest farms to central London, stretched away towards the semi-detached developments that but for the war would have already engulfed them, as they would shortly. In these flat fields, some distance off, a line of what looked like men but I later discovered when I was older were rough-looking women wearing cloth caps and sacks in lieu of aprons, worked away, bent double among the vegetables.

To the right of the road a rusty corrugated-iron fence, its top cut into cruel, jagged spikes and festooned with brambles and old man's beard (an appropriate weed for Lily, perhaps, in the circumstances), separated it from the adjoining property, and along it a line of trees, possibly willows, with thick pollarded trunks grew, or rather rotted, for most of them were in the last stages of decay. The surface of the road was full of potholes with water in them, and in the ditches on either side was some of the detritus of civilization, what the French more expressively call
ordures
– broken lavatory pans, rusty oil drums, bits of bicycles and prams, broken shoes, awful items of discarded clothing, bundles of sodden newspaper, broken glass. It was certainly no place for a nanny and a small child in a mail cart. Some five years later, when I was at Colet Court (a London preparatory school), my favourite museum was the Imperial War Museum in South Kensington and there in the picture gallery I saw dozens of similar roads, only the potholes
in the pictures were shell-holes and the trees had been shattered by gunfire, all painted by war artists on Flanders and other fields. It was therefore not surprising that when the fields were finally built over some years later and the lane became a respectable suburban road, whoever was in charge of naming roads in Barnes gave it the name it bears today, Verdun Road.

Against the largest and most decayed of these ruined trees a fire was burning, eating its way into the heart of it, and sitting close to the fire, although it was late afternoon it was still warm, were three of the hideous hags who, when the tide was right, slept up against the abutments under Hammersmith Bridge. And on the fire was an iron pot. It would have been impossible for anyone to say how old these creatures were. They were so blackened by smoke and smeared with filth that it was difficult to identify them as human beings. One of them was singing in a wild, tuneless mindless way and another was screeching at the third member of this ghastly triumvirate, while picking away like a monkey in her long, lank hair. The third one was tending the pot.

As we came abreast of them, the one who was looking for lice or nits in her companion's hair (for that is what she must have been doing), got to her feet and came towards us with surprising swiftness, with her horrible discoloured stockings dragging around her ankles, mumbling something about ‘the baby' between her broken teeth. It was too much for me and I began to bellow; and it was too much for Lily who kicked up her heels and fled, pushing the mail cart through the water-filled potholes which she had previously carefully skirted, so that it bounced up and down on its springs, soaking herself in the process.

She did not stop until she reached the corner of Madrid Road where we were once again on a real, made-up road and enclosed by comforting suburbia. By this time she had more or less succeeded in calming me down.

‘Horrible old thing,' she said, ‘I thought she wanted to eat you up.'

And this not only set me off again but crystallized the dream so that it would always unfold in the same way: myself alone, forced by some irresistible power to walk along the lane with the sun sinking behind the corrugated-iron fence and the dying trees to the one where three cackling hags sit round a fire burning in the heart of it, preparing to make a cannibal feast of the infant Newby.

It was about this time that the tragic demise took place of Mrs George. Mrs George had been our cook/housekeeper since before I was born and it was to her that my mother used to pass on her copy of the
Daily Mirror
when she had done with it. When I was born she ceased to ‘live in', arriving each morning before eight o'clock from where she lived, over the river in Hammersmith.

When she retired, early in 1923, she went to live in a house, so far as I can make out, in Glentham Road and continued to visit us. Glentham Road led down by what must have been one of the few hills in Barnes from Castelnau by the side of the reservoir from which the spray used to blow across the road. Mrs George was white-haired, fresh-complexioned, large enough to qualify for one of the smaller sort of coat that my father sold to the Dutch, and motherly. Seen from the front, protected by an expanse of spotless, white starched apron she looked like a spinnaker that was drawing nicely. I loved Mrs George. She smelt lovely, of the things she was always baking and she let me help her to stir the Christmas pudding mixture which was delicious in its raw state but emerged from the oven in the form of puddings as heavy and black as cannon balls.

Mrs George called my mother ‘Ther Missus' and my father ‘Ther Master'. She called the enormous ochreous, to me rather creepy building at the bottom of Riverview Gardens with the
words HARRODS FURNITURE DEPOSITORY written large on the side of it, ‘Ther Suppository'.

Each week on her afternoon off Mrs George used to set off with her friend, another cook from round the corner, for Pontings store in Kensington High Street, always a magnet for domestics on their afternoons off, travelling on the No. 9 or 73 bus. With her, rain or shine, summer and winter, she always carried an umbrella and often, even when it was not raining, she used to be seen in the street with it up. This was her only eccentricity and no one will ever know why Mrs George took it into her head one day when the tide at Hammersmith Bridge was sufficiently low for her to go down some steps to the muddy foreshore and, fully clothed and with her umbrella up, although it was not raining, enter the water and be swept away by the still ebbing tide. It was not for lack of money. She was of a prudent nature. The coroner recorded a verdict of ‘suicide while of unsound mind' which was more or less mandatory at that time.

‘George gone,' I said when the news was eventually broken to me.

As I indicated in an earlier chapter, my mother was a customer of Harrods before I was born. She had worked as a model girl in one of its fashion departments as long ago as 1912 and could probably have found her way around the place blindfolded. At the time she worked there it is unlikely that she was a model girl in the present sense of the word. Poiret, it is claimed, ‘invented' them in 1919. Her job, or part of it, would probably have been to try on new stock when it came into the store so that the buyer, who at that time would have also been the department manager, or one of her deputies if they were inexpensive versions of ‘models', could detect any defects which could give her the excuse, always a temptation if the buyer had over-bought, to send the garments back to the suppliers with a debit note. In the jargon this operation was known as ‘passing'.

For those who have not read
Something Wholesale
, an account of my life with my parents in the garment industry, this would seem to be an appropriate moment to interpolate a little more information about my father.

My father was apprenticed to the drapery trade in 1887 at the age of thirteen, in the Brompton Road, where he slept under the counter of the shop, which was then commonplace. Later he
graduated to the drapery department of Debenham and Freebody, which he left to become a partner in the firm of Lane and Newby, Mantle and Gown Manufacturers and Wholesale Costumiers, which was how the firm's letterheading described the scope of its activities well into the 1950s. He was an all-round sportsman, a pupil of Sandow, the strongest man in the world, who eventually destroyed himself by lifting an enormous motor car out of a ditch unaided. My father used to go down to Whitechapel to be ‘pummelled' by pugilists in order to toughen himself up, and after vigorous outings on the Thames in what are known as tub pairs and tub fours, used to bathe, winter and summer, in the now-polluted waters of the river Wandle where it entered the Thames at Wandsworth, before setting off to work in ‘The Drapery'. He was a rowing man before everything, even before his business. So great was his passion for rowing that he had left his newly married wife (my mother-to-be) at the wedding reception at Pagani's in Great Portland Street on learning that it was just coming on to high water at Hammersmith and had gone down to the river by cab for what he described as ‘a jolly good blow' in his doublesculler with his best man, who eventually became my godfather, returning hours later to his flat to find his bride in tears and having missed the boat train for Paris where the honeymoon was to be spent at the Lotti. His ambition was that I should win the Diamond Sculls at Henley, and in this ambition he was aided and abetted by my godfather, a crusty old Scot if ever there was one, who had himself won the Diamonds and the Stockholm Olympics in 1912.

To help me to victory in this and life's race my father insisted that my bowels should open at precisely the same moment every morning (this was at a time when certain Harley Street surgeons were advocating the removal of whole stretches of their patients' digestive tracts in the belief that whatever was passing through
would emerge at the other end with as little delay as possible and thus avoid ‘poisoning' the owner). In addition, he made me sniff up salt and water so that my nasal passages might remain equally clear, and have a cold bath each morning, winter and summer. When I was older I learned from him that besides keeping one in trim, cold baths were an aid against filthy thoughts, although I never found them to be of any remote use for this purpose (as useless as telling an Eskimo that he won't have filthy thoughts if he sits on an iceberg). In the early mornings I accompanied him on brisk trots along the towing path at Hammersmith, or down deserted suburban streets, punting a football, which I thoroughly enjoyed. At the age of six or so I learned to row our sumptuous,
Three Men in a Boat
-type, double-sculling skiff, which was kept at Richmond and in which we used to go camping ‘up-river', wielding one enormous scull as an oar. In the same way my mother, who had been a model girl in my father's firm, and who was more than twenty years younger than he was and still went with him to Paris long after they were married to buy models from Poiret, Chéruit, Patou and others which were made to her lath-like proportions, had been turned into a very stylish oarswoman.

Although my mother no longer worked for Harrods she had not lost her enthusiasm for the store. She was no mean spender, my mother, and she went through the place like a combine harvester on my behalf. This trait of extravagance was belied by her rather sad, tranquil expression when in repose, just as it belied her vivacity and fondness for company.

Thus a complete set of gear awaited me on 6 December when I turned up, most of it procured from Harrods ‘on account'. It included the pram with its fringed sun awning, an ‘extra' bought in anticipation that I would survive until the summer of 1920, the ‘French bassinet' with its iron stand and an arm which supported the
baldacchino
of fine cotton voile under which I lay tippling gripewater; a
white-enamelled folding-bath, complete with soap dish containing a cake of Harrods's ‘own make' baby soap and a sponge tray with one of their ‘specially selected sponges' in it; a spring balance with a wicker basket, capable of weighing babies up to twenty-five pounds, which was later converted for use in the kitchen by the substitution of a metal pan for the basket; and a nursery screen. Surrounded with this and other equipment (I cannot remember the lot, but this is some of what survived until I was older and could remember), I must have looked like a beleaguered traveller behind a makeshift breastwork awaiting a charge by fuzzy-wuzzies.

If anything ran short which she thought was better ordered from Harrods than bought locally, or she saw something that caught her fancy in their catalogue, my mother used to say, ‘I'll get on the telephone to Harrods,' the telephone being a solid, upright metal instrument with a separate receiver, weighing pounds, which householders were beginning to find useful for laying out the first wave of post-war housebreakers who were now just beginning to come back into circulation, a process that could operate in reverse if the burglar picked it up first. To my mother, the possibility of being able to telephone for a consignment of Harrods's Finest French Sardines in Olive Oil or some bottles of Rubinat Water, which she used as an aperient, and receive them that same afternoon, delivered in a shiny green van with the royal arms on it, was magic.

What was probably my first visit to Harrods, the first I can remember, anyway, took place on the occasion of the rigging out of Lily in Nurses' Uniforms, at that time on the first floor. I remember it not because it was intrinsically interesting but because it took ages and because at one stage all three of us, together with a saleswoman, were crammed into a very small, stifling fitting-room, like the Marx Brothers in the cabin scene on the transatlantic liner in
A Night at the Opera
.

From Nurses' Uniforms I was escorted to Children's Hairdressing, also on the first floor. There, the infant Newby was shaped up again, after having spent some happy minutes snipping away at his noddle with a pair of stealthily acquired nail scissors while seated incommunicado on the pot in front of the gas fire which by this time had replaced the coal fire in my nursery at Three Ther Mansions.

To me Harrods was not a shop. It was, apart from being the place where I had my hair cut, a whole fascinating world, entirely separate from the one that I normally inhabited. It was a world that, although finite in its extent (it covered thirteen acres), I never explored completely, never could, because although at the early age of which I am writing I did not realize this, it was one in which fresh vistas were constantly being revealed, as the management either opened up new, sometimes ephemeral departments or introduced innovations within existing ones.

For instance, in 1929, following Lindbergh's solo crossing of the Atlantic, they opened up an Aviation Department and taught some of their customers to fly. Eventually, when there were not enough potential aviators left untaught among their customers to make it worthwhile keeping it open, it quietly faded away.

‘Hold my hand tight, or you'll get lost,' my mother used to say, as she moved through the store, browsing here and there like some elegant ruminant, a gazelle perhaps, or else walking more purposefully if she was on her way to some specific destination, as she often was. My mother was not the sort of person who only entered Harrods in order to shelter from the rain. Once she was in it, she was there as a potential buyer.

And I did hold tight. Get lost in Harrods and you had every chance, I believed, in ending up in the equivalent of that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns, which when I became a grown-up with an account of my own I located
somewhere between Adjustments and Personal Credit (which comprehended Overdue Accounts) and the Funeral Department, for those whose shopping days were done but whose credit was still good, both of which were on the fourth floor.

This world, which I was forced to regard from what was practically floor level, was made up of the equivalents of jungles, savannas, mountains, arctic wastes and even deserts. All that was lacking were seas and lakes and rivers, although at one time I distinctly remember there being some kind of fountain. The jungles were the lavish displays of silk and chiffon printed with exotic fruits and lush vegetation in which I was swallowed up as soon as I entered Piece Goods, on the ground floor, which made the real Flower Department seem slightly meagre by contrast. The biggest mountains were in the Food Halls, also on the ground floor, where towering ranges and isolated stacks of the stuff rose high above me, composed of farmhouse Cheddars, Stiltons,
foie gras
in earthenware pots, tins of biscuits, something like thirty varieties of tea and at Christmas boxes of crackers with wonderful fillings (musical instruments that really worked, for instance), ten-pound puddings made with ale and rum and done up in white cloths, which retailed at £ 1.07½ ($4.17) the month that I was born. Some of these apparently stable
massifs
were more stable than others and I once saw and heard with indescribable delight a whole display of tins of Scotch shortbread avalanche to the ground, making a most satisfactory noise.

In the great vaulted hall, decorated with medieval scenes of the chase, and with metal racks for hanging the trophies of it, where Harrods's Fishmongers and Purveyors of Game and the assembled Butchers confronted one another across the central aisle, there were other mountainous displays of crabs, scallops, Aberdeen smokies, turbot and halibut, Surrey fowls and game in season on one side; and on the other, hecatombs of Angus Beef, South Down Lamb and Mutton.

The savannas were on the second floor, in Model Gowns, Model Coats and Model Costumes, endless expanses of carpet with here and there a solitary creation on a stand rising above it, like lone trees in a wilderness.

To me unutterably tedious were the unending, snowy-white wastes of the Linen Hall, coloured bed linen, coloured blankets, even coloured bath towels, except for the ends (headings) which were sometimes decorated with blue or red stripes, being – if not unknown – unthinkable at that time (coloured blankets, usually red, were for ambulances and hospitals). In it articles were on sale that not even my mother was tempted to buy: tablecloths eight yards long to fit tables that could seat two dozen guests, sheets and blankets ten feet wide, specially made to fit the big, old four-poster beds still apparently being slept in by some customers, in their moated granges.

Higher still, on the third floor, were what I regarded as the deserts of the Furniture Departments. It took something like ten minutes to get around these vast, and to me as uninteresting as the Linen Hall, expanses, in which the distances between the individual pieces were measured in yards rather than feet.

This ‘Harrods's World' even had its own animal population in what the management called Livestock up on the second floor, what customers of my age group and most grown-ups called the zoo. In it the noise was deafening, what with macaws that could live for sixty years or so, Electus parrots in brilliant greens and reds and purples, according to sex, parrots that could speak – they had to pass a test to ensure that they did not use bad language – and other rare Asian birds, as well as puppies, kittens, guinea-pigs, mice, tortoises, armadillos and Malabar squirrels. I got my first mouse at Harrods.

But the greatest treat of all was a visit to the Book Department. I was not allowed to visit the Toy Department, except for my
birthday, or at Christmas. In fact it was not very interesting except at Christmas time when it expanded for a month or two, then contracted again when the sales began in January, until the following November or December; and it was never as good in those days as Hamleys Toy Shop in Regent Street.

Although my mother refused to supply me with toys on demand on these journeys through Harrods (for that is what they were to me), she would always allow me to choose a book. The first book I can ever remember having, a Dean's Rag Book, printed on untearable linen, came from Harrods, although even then I found it difficult to think of something printed on linen (or whatever it was) as a book. Once I was in the Book Department it was very difficult to dislodge me, and it was only because I was actually being bought a book that I left it without tears, and to this day I find it almost impossible even to walk through this department en route elsewhere, without buying a book I didn't know I wanted.

Beyond the Book Department was the huge, reverberating, rather dimly lit Piano Department, where salesmen who dressed and looked like bank managers used to hover among the instruments, trying to put a brave face on it when I ran my fingers along the keys of their Bechstein Grands as we passed through, probably on our way to Gramophone Records, of which my mother, who loved dance music and dancing, had already amassed a large collection. Sometimes a visitor to the store who was also a pianist would take his seat at one of the grand pianos and this otherwise rather gloomy room would be filled with wonderful sounds.