Something Wholesale (5 page)

Since no news had been received from the Adjutant about my future employment, within a week after my visit to Throttle and Fumble I was forced, with the utmost reluctance, to report for duty at Great Marlborough Street where, in the phrase that my parents were to employ with varying degrees of optimism in the succeeding months, I was to ‘learn the business’.

‘It’s only a temporary measure,’ they said, ‘until you find your feet.’ They had a touching and totally unfounded belief that I was destined for better things. It was a temporary measure that was to last ten years.

As I pushed open the front door which was ornamented with a large knocker in the form of a ram’s head, a little bell made a pinging noise. This I learned later warned the occupants of the Counting House, who also performed the functions of what would now be called ‘The Reception’, that a visitor was on the way in. Before the war the staff had always used the side entrance, a nearly vertical flight of wooden steps which led to the cellars, when entering or leaving the building, but by 1946 such nuances of behaviour had ceased to be observed. As a result the Counting House was perpetually on the qui-vive – more often than not for no good reason at all. The cause of the bell ringing was most
probably a junior from the workroom on the way out to expend one of her meagre supply of sweet coupons on a Mars Bar for the tea break.

I went in and as the door closed behind me the sounds of traffic died away; the blasphemies of two vanmen who were unloading bolts of cloth from a pantechnicon and sliding them down a shiny plank into the bowels of the building faded; and I found myself in another, more tranquil world, almost in another century.

The hall in which I stood had white panelling; the floor ran first downhill, then uphill, creating the impression that one was intoxicated. To the left was a magnificently carved staircase which led by easy stages to the upper floors. The house had been built in the first half of the eighteenth century. It had been occupied by the actress Sarah Siddons and subsequently by that sinister personality Thomas Wainewright who was not only art critic, forger of bonds and wholesale poisoner but one of the foremost exponents of erotic drawing of his day, an art that he practised with such derivative skill that his work is usually attributed to his contemporary, Henry Fuseli, Keeper of the Royal Academy, whose technique was superior and whose imagination was even more perverse. On one of the upper floors there had continued to exist, until fire put paid to it in 1944, a small stage on which the famous actress had entertained her friends. With these two colossal personalities as previous tenants it was not surprising that the house had its own peculiar atmosphere.

My thoughts were brought back rudely to the present by the sounds of a telephone conversation that was taking place inside a minute booth under the staircase, so small that the unfortunate occupant had to choose between having a private conversation and asphyxiating in the process, or leaving the door ajar and delighting the staff of the Counting House as they pored over their ledgers.

Whoever was inside at this comparatively early hour had chosen the way of dishonour rather than death and was already engaged in an exchange of hideous confidences.

‘No, Maureen! … No, dear!’ said the disembodied voice. ‘No, I don’t want to! … No … No … No, I don’t mind
that
. I think he’s ever such a nice colour … sort of bronze … I just don’t like the way he … Well, he said that the last time … No! … No! The other one’s worse than he is … I had to have it cleaned – And my leg it was
all
bruised. Mum was ever so cross!’

As I listened fascinated to this recital a long, silky-looking leg slid sinuously round the door. Nylons were still in their infancy in Britain at that time or, in the jargon of the day, ‘in short supply’. The owner of this leg had obviously overcome these difficulties. Attached to it was a foot wanton enough, as Balzac wrote, to damn an archangel, partially enclosed in a sandal with a four-inch heel. Half-mesmerised, as a snake charmer who has allowed one of his charges to gain control of the situation, I watched the leg in which muscles rippled as sleek and powerful as a boa-constrictor’s. I could see nothing wrong with it. Either this was not the one that was ‘all bruised’ or else the scars of battle had already healed. I began to experience that morbid sensation known to psychoanalyists as The Death Wish. For the moment I could think of nothing more delectable than being crushed to pulp by this and its attendant member.

Now the instep began to arch itself with infinite slowness, just like the head of a cobra when it is about to strike … Tearing myself away from this disturbing sight I went down the hall.

Suddenly a door opened that was almost invisible in the panelling. ‘’ERE!’ said a great voice that made me jump. ‘Is that Mr Eric? Mr Eric! Where you bin? Your Dad’s been asking for you!’

The owner of the voice was Miss Gatling, Head of the Counting House and Company Secretary. In the official hierarchy at Lane
and Newby’s she filled a similar position to that occupied by a Regimental Sergeant-Major. Ever since the time when I had been taken round from one department to another as a small boy and asked by various imposing ladies whether I liked school I had been terrified of Miss Gatling. And I still was terrified of her.

‘Welcome to Lane and Newby’s,’ she said, baring her teeth with a sudden accession of bonhomie that was most alarming. ‘There’s a lot to learn. You’ve probably left it too late,’ she added, encouragingly. ‘I should get up them stairs and see your Dad … AND LOLA,’ she shouted down the hall, ‘WILL YOU GET OFF THAT TELEPHONE! YOU’VE BEEN ON IT TEN MINUTES.’

‘She’ll come to a sticky end that girl. You’ll see,’ she confided to me, gloomily. ‘Only thinks of men. You watch your step!’

My father’s office was on the first floor. It was at the back of the house overlooking what had been the garden until Mr Lane in an orgy of expansion had had it built over to provide more space for the business. It was a tall, narrow, rather gloomy chamber like a drawing by Phiz in
A Christmas Carol
. Originally it had probably been a dressing-room; leading off it was a powder closet to which one descended by a pair of steps. In the window seat there was a concealed wash basin made of lead, with brass taps that had been polished by so many generations of charwomen that they bore only a vestigial resemblance to taps at all.

In one corner was what my father described as ‘my portable desk’. It was really a mahogany chest with brass-bound corners which could be opened out into a sloping desk. It was portable in the sense that it had probably been made originally to be carried on some African’s noddle on safari. In it he kept old fixture cards which showed the breadth of his sporting interests before he took up rowing: Rugby football, cross-country running, boxing, swimming, wrestling and, of course, weight-lifting.

There were three pictures on the walls. One, a photograph of
Lord Roberts of Kandahar, ‘Bobs’ as my father called him, wearing a funny hat without a brim and looking angry on the rifle ranges at Bisley; the second a coloured reproduction of a rococo interior with a riot of cardinals at table ‘Drinking the Health of the Chef in Moët et Chandon’; and the third, framed instructions for ‘The Prevention of Fire in Private Residences’, with an injunction under the heading GAS, ‘In the event of a leak send for the gas fitter and watch him carefully as he will sometimes seek for an escape with a light – and may find it at the risk of blowing up the building and all it contains!’

There was little room to move in my father’s room, except to the window with its wash basin and to the roll-topped desk at which my father sat, for the whole floor was piled deep with newspapers. He kept every copy of the
Observer
and the
Morning Post
as they were published. In the cellars below they were piled high in the transepts, going back with their prophecies of doom and their sudden fits of optimism that were invariably wrong to a period infinitely remote, before 1914. What hedged him in here in his office were the editions of the last five years or so. ‘I remember reading something about it,’ he used to say when confronted with some topic that interested him and in the succeeding weeks he could be found, bent double, grunting as he untied the careful knot with which he had secured a bundle twenty years before, in search of the quotation in question. To my knowledge he never succeeded in finding what he was looking for, but at any rate he always found something else of interest that tended to deflect him from his original course.

Now he was sitting behind the large, shiny roll-top desk which he had occupied since the triumphant departure of Mr Lane. As always, on top of his desk there was a large jug of barley water.

My father was now seventy-five years old. A serious operation of a sort from which few people ever recover had reduced him to
a shadow of his former self. He had undergone it in an East End Hospital while the bombs were raining down, but he spoke remotely of the dangers to which he had been exposed. His former pugnacity had largely evaporated. Previously he had been a man of impressive physique; he was now extremely thin and fragile, like a piece of very old porcelain. But he was still exceptionally handsome and dressed as I saw him now, in a suit of thick flannel, with a rose in his buttonhole and his fresh complexion, he looked like a small boy who had been given leave from his preparatory school to attend the wedding of an elder brother.

‘You’ll have to get here a little earlier than this, you know!’ he said, putting on his glasses and looking at me over the tops of them. ‘You have to set an example. I’ve arranged for you to start in the Coat Department – there’s a lot of cutting off to be done. It’s too much for Miss Webb; she’s not as young as she was. None of us are. We need some new blood. Have some barley water.’

‘Everything’s changing so rapidly nowadays,’ he went on, ‘I was having a yarn with old Brown in the silk trade.’ There followed a long anecdote about what old Brown had told him.

‘But I mustn’t keep you,’ he went on. ‘I’ve got to get down to Hammersmith – I’m having a new set of sculls made for my best boat. Shan’t be able to use them much myself but you may find them useful. I haven’t been at all well you know,’ he said, as if this was something of which I was ignorant.

‘Well you’d better get on,’ he said, rolling down the top of his desk with a gesture of dismissal. ‘Oh, by the way; you know that shaving brush I sent you when you were in that camp in Czechoslovakia. Can I have it back?’

‘I’m afraid it wasn’t very strong, father. It fell to pieces.’

‘You young chaps!’ he said, seriously. ‘You don’t know how to look after things. That was a good brush.’

It was one of my father’s more maddening idiosyncracies that
as soon as news of my capture had been conveyed to him he mentally wrote me off so far as the material necessities of life were concerned. In answer to my request that he send me a pair of corduroy trousers and a thick pullover he wrote back to remind me that such things were ‘in short supply’ and that the civilian population of the island were having to ‘tighten their belts’.

‘I have been in touch with the Red Cross,’ was the sort of reply he used to send me in answer to such demands ‘and I understand that they have taken on the job of looking after your welfare! I visited St James’s Palace – the Headquarters – and there I was told that everything necessary is being done to ensure an equitable distribution of warm clothing and other comforts among you all.’

It was useless to remind him that the clothes I wanted were already in my wardrobe and that there was no need to buy anything. He himself was the possessor of a vast and comprehensive wardrobe. Early privations had left him with an ever-present fear that he might one day find himself penniless and in rags. To counteract this possibility he became a hoarder on a grand scale. He bought leather bootlaces by the score for the heavy boots he got from Lobb. ‘I had these boots made,’ he told me once, ‘in case I ever have to take a job as a navvy,’ displaying a pair that would have been far more at home at a shooting party in some ducal household. Whenever he was in Paris for a week or so he used to order shirts, not as most people are accustomed to order them, in threes and fours, but in dozens. From these, and other forms of expensive haberdashery, ties, fine suits of underwear and silk socks, on his return he used to select one or two examples for present use. The rest were filed away in their original cardboard boxes in which, embalmed in moth-balls, they would over a period of twenty years or so undergo a gradual process of dissolution.

In this matter of sending me supplies my mother was in despair. She used sometimes to send me a parcel clandestinely but more
often than not its existence was detected by my father before she was able to send it off – as a result it never left the country at all. Only in the case of the shaving brush was my mother adamant. ‘The boy must be able to shave,’ she said.

My father grumbled a lot, but in the end rooted among his possessions until he found a shaving brush of the rather primitive sort that professional barbers use, with the handle dipped in pitch and wrapped round with string. He added a suit of silk and wool underwear for good measure that he had bought in Paris in 1904.

I received this parcel in the wilds of Bohemia in the Spring of 1943. The shaving brush was much admired by my companions but unfortunately it disintegrated the first time it was put into water; the underwear even failed to survive the routine check which the Germans carried out in order to satisfy themselves that nothing illicit was being sent us. As the Feldwebel held up the fully-fashioned silk and wool long underpants with the Original label Edouard et Butler, Place Vendôme, still on them they disintegrated before my eyes and fell to nothing in a fine powder.