Something Wholesale (20 page)

Although the book really ends in 1956 with the death of my father three years after he had paid the astonishing sum of seventeen thousand nine hundred and forty-seven pounds, sixteen shillings and fourpence to the Inland Revenue (fifteen thousand of which he had withdrawn from the London Safe Deposit in which it had been reposing in a strong-box in neat stacks all done up with pink ribbon) it was not, unfortunately for me, the end of my life in the dress trade, a business for which, although I persisted in returning to it, I must appear to the reader to have been somewhat miscast.

I carried this money up Regent’s Street for him in a Gladstone bag. We walked because it was raining and there were long queues for the buses and we didn’t want to spend money on a taxi. On leaving the Deposit my father had closed the strong-box, paid the custodians what was owing for the hire of it and handed over the key. There was no point in having it any more. He would have been better advised to have gone bankrupt but it would never have occurred to him to have done such a thing; neither, strange as it may seem, did it occur to me to suggest to him that he should do so.

After this epic payment had been made I left the firm and
worked for a couple of years or so at Worth Paquin, the couture house in Grosvenor Street. In my spare time I wrote my first book which I called
The Last Grain Race
. It was published in the Autumn of 1956. The events leading up to my departure from Grosvenor Street and the subsequent adventures which befell me and my companion, Hugh Carless in Nuristan, ‘The Country of Light’, are described in A
Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
.

On my return from Nuristan in the winter of 1956 I found myself with this book to write for which I had already been given an advance and with a family to support and no money to do it with. The advance had all been consumed in making the expedition and keeping my family alive while I was away.

There is a belief, cherished by the readers of books about outlandish parts that the publishers dish out money to the writers who work for them in the same way as they pay the expenses incurred by their own employees in connection with their business. This, of course, is not true. All that a writer can hope for is an advance from the publisher which is set against any royalties which the book may earn when it is written.

In my case the only source of income which I had at that time was the royalties from
The Last Grain Race
and these were insufficient to keep us all alive, or any one of us for that matter. While working on
A Short Walk
I also wrote articles and some short stories for the
Evening Standard
but there is a limit to the number of short stories that one can write – I once produced three in a week. There was also a limit to the number of short stories which the
Evening Standard
wanted, written by an unknown hand.

It was fortunate that at this critical time my then publishers offered me a job and I worked with them until 1959 when I left to go to the John Lewis Partnership with whom I hoped to earn more money. Fortunately for us all, during these years I had been given a lot of work by
Holiday Magazine
in New York who could
pay very large sums to any writer who was prepared to work hard enough for them.

The following year I became Central Buyer for the Partnership of ‘Model Gowns’ – I was officially known as the M.G. Buyer and I bought for about a dozen stores. This was a job which, according to the testimony of some of the previous incumbents to whom I was able to speak before taking it on, was about as safe as working in a factory engaged in making nitroglycerine. I attributed this to the disenchantment of failure but it did seem surprising to me that the Partnership should bring in a buyer from outside it when they had so many of their own staff to choose from. But, apparently, this was a common practice.

As M.G. Buyer I had an Assistant Buyer, an efficient person who had outlasted a number of my predecessors, and a hardworking staff. I bought dresses of every conceivable and inconceivable shape and size, except short-waisted ones for which there was a special buyer. I bought day dresses, dresses with jackets, long and short evening dresses, what used to be called ‘cocktail dresses’, and still are for all I know, bridesmaid’s dresses – the most unbuyable and unwearable garments in the world – and a huge number of wedding dresses. I shall never forget the spectacle of starry-eyed girls in winter coats and plastic macs and sheepskin boots trying on wedding head-dresses on the ground floor while the snow fell outside in Oxford Street and turned to slush. Most time-consuming and boring of all was trying to buy ‘specials’ for wives of members of the top brass.

As a buyer I was a better selector than bargainer, although I pulled off some good coups as well as perpetuating some disasters. I was not good at money but I was good at getting things to the branches when they needed them in a hurry. Sometimes I felt more like a Commander-in-Chief or a Quarter-Master-General with twelve armies operating on twelve different fronts (the
branches) each of which had to be supplied with stores and munitions (dresses) at precisely the right time for them to be used in battle against skilful and ruthless adversaries (the customers).

I found that relatively little of a central buyer’s time was taken up in actual buying. Most of it was spent deciding how much of the total budget for the season should be committed to buying before the season began and how much should be kept for later when one would know better what the customers wanted, by which time it was usually too late to buy it. You had to decide how much to spend on various types of dresses and how many to buy at various price levels and what size to buy and in what proportion to buy them. Should one buy very large sizes? Statistically the answer was ‘no’. These were a few of the things a central buyer had to decide before he even set foot on a manufacturer’s doorstep.

Much of my time was spent travelling between Oxford Street and Brixton, Southampton, Sheffield, Liverpool, Sloane Square, Nottingham, Holloway, Reading, Hampstead, Cambridge, Southsea and Windsor, marking down the slow-moving stock and talking to the department managers, sterling women who, having been in the wholesale myself, I felt I had known all my life. This enormous round of visits took so long that by the time it was completed it was necessary to start again.

To stop myself going mad, twice a year I used to go off to France and Italy to see the fashion collections there.

In Florence the couture and boutique collections were shown in the Sala Bianca, the great, white, rather chilly-looking ballroom in which the Kings and Queens of the House of Savoia had once cavorted. In it a seemingly endless procession of sometimes good, sometimes magnificent, sometimes completely dotty clothes passed before my eyes and those of the massed bands of international buyers and fashion journalists who sat around the catwalk
noting and sketching away in their Kalamazoo and Hermès notebooks.

There were always at least fifty American buyers representing, to name a few, I. Magnin of San Francisco, Saks 5th Avenue, Ohrbach’s of West 34th Street, Wanamaker’s of Philadelphia and Neiman-Marcus of Dallas, Texas, besides hordes of manufacturers and designers from 7th Avenue.

Store buyers such as these had the best seats, at the T-junction of the catwalk where the model girls turned in their tracks like London taxis, perhaps discarding a coat or jacket to reveal some additional surprise underneath before making the long haul back to the changing room.

And there were great herds of German buyers in those now far-off days giving a big hand to the mannish, the military and anything that looked as if it had been put together with rivets; and lots of patient, sad-looking manufacturers from Zurich, dreaming up equally sad derivatives of what they saw in double jersey. Apart from myself and my fellow buyers from the Partnership the English were a meagre contingent in 1962: two buyers from Dickins and Jones, some manufacturers from Steinberg and Susan Small and two gloomy-looking little men from Gor-Ray Skirts, our combined presences a tribute to either our loyalty or our good fashion sense, in contrast to that of the majority of English buyers who, having read somewhere that Italy was finished because some Italian fashion houses had moved to Paris, assumed that this was really so and stayed away.

In 1962 for the first time there were Japanese buyers in the Palazzo Pitti, the women in full tea-house regalia, the men in carbon-copy black suits. ‘If they’re going to bring the same expertise to the garment industry that they’ve shown in bringing everyone else’s optical industries to a near standstill, we’d better watch out’, was the observation that emanated from Mrs
Guggenheim Henry of Wanamaker’s, Philadelphia when these orientals showed their appreciation of some neat little number. This was the first year, too, I covered the Italian collections for the
Observer
under the pseudonym Jo Gray and learned how difficult it is to write coherently about fashion.

I had already learned to be careful about what I bought from these high fashion collections, more careful still about what I bought and actually had copied. The previous Autumn I had bought a beautiful dress made by Roberto Capucci, one of the designers who subsequently migrated to Paris in what came to be known as
Il Volo delle Rondinelle
, The Flight of the Swallows. A very simple, slightly waisted dress, made in a beautiful, knobbly sort of bouclé wool, its principal novelty was that it was sleeveless and could be worn by night or day with equal propriety. Katharine Whitehorn, the then fashion editress of the
Observer
, was also taken with it and offered to photograph it and feature it in the paper on 27 August, providing that I could get stocks into the stores by 28 August, which was less than two weeks after I returned to England with the toile. The biggest problem was the material, which I finally found after a desperate search in an Irish nunnery where the nuns had been making it for years. It came on the market dead on time in a choice of black, cream and a very pretty pink at £16 5s 6d (£16.28p approximately) – and stayed on the hangers, even at Peter Jones, the most modish of the Partnership’s stores. It continued to stick until I had marked it down to something less than £5, at which price it was bought by some of the more daring assistants. This sort of sleeveless dress subsequently became incredibly popular, and almost a uniform among the elegant blue-rinse ladies of America, and eventually it did become a uniform when some of the more chic airlines adapted it for their stewardesses. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it. My mistake had been to buy it a year too early.

Paris that Autumn of 1962 was far more hectic for a buyer than either Rome or Florence. Life in it so far as I was concerned seemed to be made up of either running from one salon to another, most of which were in the 1er or 8ème arrondissements, or else being immobilised between them in a taxi, sometimes, but rarely, with one of the last of the Parisien White Russians at the wheel: from Jacques Heim in Avenue Matignon, to Chanel in Rue Cambon, to Givenchy in Avenue George V (but never to Balenciaga in the same street to whose salon that great genius denied entrance to the hoi-polloi such as myself), to Lanvin and Cardin in the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, to Dior in Avenue Montaigne where its new designer, Marc Bohan, had been an instant success, to Saint Laurent in Rue Spontini, in the 16th arrondissement, whose Left Bank look was big news in 1962, to Nina Ricci in Rue des Capucines, to Balmain and Venet in Rue François (1er). Rushing about in this fashion, one only seemed to eat very late at night.

The French crammed their trade customers into their showrooms as tightly as they had their
poilus
into cattle trucks a few years previously en route for Verdun; so closely shoulder-to-shoulder that on one occasion I found myself annotating my neighbour’s programme. The heat was incredible. At the Balmain opening the temperature outside was 88° Fahrenheit under an overcast sky. Inside, with all the windows shut, conditions were indescribable. French vendeuses were apparently impervious to heat. Remembering a tenuous acquaintanceship with Mademoiselle Spanier, one of Balmain’s top people – she had a talented sister at Peter Jones – we asked her for, and got, some Evian to see us through.

The kick-off took place with one of Bergdorf Goodman of Fifth Avenue’s buyers in the seat of honour, a homely looking soul with a glint of steel in her eye. What followed was a real international
jet-set collection with sable lined coats dropped contemptuously on the catwalk, sometimes exposing suits with very long jackets with side vents, very wide shoulders and inset sleeves with the tops where they go into the shoulders raised in what are known in the tailoring business as rope-heads. It was as if an old-fashioned woman dressmaker had been let loose in a suit workroom run by a man. The skirts of these suits were either straight or very slightly flared and ended one inch below the knee. Unless a woman was tall and willowy or, failing that, elevated on the highest heels, she would look as broad as she was long. That Autumn I bought a
toile
for an evening dress from them, in thanks for the Evian, a short dress from Venet, a comparative newcomer who had been a tailor and cutter with Givenchy, whose clothes were beautifully made and cut and would date less quickly than those of many of his contemporaries, and a funereal but beautiful black chiffon from Chanel that would never date at all, the sort of dress that the Misses McAndrew with whom I had battled in Glasgow in what now seemed a lifetime ago (themselves now sunk into the tomb) had taught me to love. Black was, as Louie or Harry or Charlie, my new-found friends among the manufacturers in West One who I was trying hard to love would have said, ‘very, very big’ in Paris that autumn, and I could almost hear them saying it as they sat in their showrooms in their beautiful dark mohair and wool suits, with their monogrammed shirts, their unscuffed shoes, their freshly manicured nails shining with clear varnish, their freshly capped teeth and their aura of male toiletries.