Читать книгу A Traveller’s Life - Eric Newby - Страница 10

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.

It was from this department that there emanated, by way of Accounts, a bill made out to my father for one of these grand pianos, at a cost of something like £125 ($531) but expressed in guineas, which when it was finally sorted out was reduced to one of about £1.25 ($5.31) for a couple of visits by a piano tuner to Three Ther Mansions in order to tune our modest, upright Chappell, the grand piano having been charged to him in error. Until long after the Second World War, really until they installed a computer, Accounts had a dottiness about them that was sometimes, but not always, endearing; and until the computer was installed it was perfectly possible to order a pound or two of smoked salmon to be delivered from the Food Hall and not actually pay for it until three or more months later.

After seeing some or all of all this, for if my mother went to Harrods in the morning she would also spend part of the afternoon there, she would whisk me off to the Ladies’ Retiring Room on the fourth floor where she freshened us both up before taking me to lunch in the Restaurant where, jacked up in a special infant’s chair which elevated my nose and mouth above what would have been, sitting in an ordinary chair, the level of the table, I ate what at that time was my favourite meal, half portions of tomato soup, fried plaice and creamed potatoes. After this we again repaired to the Ladies’ Retiring Room, which I recall as being rather grand and commodious, for a brief period of doing nothing.

It is now many years since I have visited this room. Even when I used to visit it fairly frequently you had to be pretty young to be allowed in if you were a man; but I distinctly remembered on one occasion seeing what even I could recognize to be a very elegant, very emaciated lady who was wearing a bandeau on her head, which was very fashionable then – or could it have been an ice-pack? – and who was reclining on a wicker chaise longue and uttering a series of ‘Oh God’s’ at intervals.

At least I thought I could remember. However, when I reminded my mother of this incident, in the mid-1960s, she said it could not possibly have been at Harrods.

‘No, it wasn’t Harrods,’ she said, ‘it was Dickins & Jones. I remember they were building Liberty’s, the half-timbered part that looks like an old house, in Great Marlborough Street, almost opposite Dickins & Jones. It must have been 1923. The builders were making a terrible noise with drills and things, and that poor girl, the one you remember, she was very smart, had a terrible headache. She’d probably been to a party the night before. There were lots of parties then. Besides, there was never anywhere to lie down at Harrods so far as I can remember, except in the Furniture Department, and that would probably have meant buying a bed or a sofa.’

Although my mother’s recollection of where this event actually took place also made me an honorary member of Dickins & Jones’s Ladies’ Retiring Room as well as Harrods’s, I never really liked the Regent Street store. Partly because in my opinion there was not much worth looking at, although I liked the smells in Scent – no zoo, no Book Department. But my real reason for disliking it was because my mother used to take me up to one of the Fashion Departments and display me to the buyer, whom she knew, and to the salesgirls, just as she used to do at Harvey Nichols, Debenham and Freebody, and Marshall & Snelgrove, a process which to me seemed to take an eternity.

After this mandatory rest in Harrods’s Retiring Room, my mother used to take me to the Picture Gallery, which I loved and still do. Then, as until recently, the strictly representational nature of the pictures on view underlined as nothing else does in the store, except perhaps in Gifts, the basically unchanging taste of Harrods customers.

In it hung paintings, most of them in cheerful colours: of clipper ships sailing up the Channel under stunsails; the pyramids with fork-bearded, armed nomads and their camels silhouetted against the sunset; lovers in gondolas passing beneath the Bridge of Sighs; bewigged eighteenth-century gentlemen dallying with ladies in perfumed, English rose gardens; scantily but always decently clad Circassians languishing under the wild eyes of prospective buyers in Moorish slave markets; snow-covered Alpine and Rocky Mountain peaks, bathed in shrimp-pink evening light; unlubricious nudes; ducks flighting in Norfolk; Highland stags at bay; Indian tigers and herds of African elephants sufficiently hostile-looking to make it pretty certain that the artist had painted them from photographs, or while up a tree; race horses at Newmarket, and all the animals too large to be stocked in Livestock; riots of cardinals surprising clutches of nuns or, surrounded by empty jeroboams, complimenting the chef on an unusually rich dinner in some French palais. Here, a world beyond Harrods’s world opened out before me.

Here, in Harrods to this day I can evoke the happiness and more occasionally the miseries of the first twenty-five years or so of my life. It was where I went in Harrods, rather than what I bought or what was bought for me, that I remember, the genus loci of the place: which is no doubt what the now long-forgotten architects Stevens and Hunt (the latter of whom was immortalized as Munt by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner in his great work, The Buildings of England) intended: the lonely staircases, which no one ever used because everyone travelled by lift, led down so quietly that standing on them you could hear the wind whining round the building; the ceilings supported by green marble columns decorated with gilded Egyptian motifs on the ground floor in Gifts, and the elaborate white plaster ceilings on the first floor, rather like the decoration on what they called ‘Our Own Wedding Cakes’ which, like their own Christmas puddings, bread, pastries, sweets, chocolates, veal and ham pies, and goodness knows what else, were made in their own factory over the road. And there were the, to me, beautiful bronze lifts, embellished with what looked like strips of woven metal, one of which still survives. One of these lifts in those years after the First World War was operated by an ex-serviceman with one arm, just conceivably the ‘Ex-Service Man. Loss of right arm, seeks situation as Window Dresser or Shopwalker’, who advertised in The Times on the day I was born but failed to secure one of these positions.

Also on the ground floor, not far from Gifts, was a vast room which housed Jewellery, Silver, Optical and Cutlery. Jewellery was furnished with little, green leather-topped tables, with looking-glasses and red-shaded lamps on them. At these tables what appeared to me, over a period of thirty years or so, to be the same salesmen sat opposite their customers, breathing discreetly at the conclusion of a deal (all that changed was the price and that only latterly), ‘Thank you, sir/madam, an excellent choice, if you will allow me to say so. That will be two thousand, two hundred and twenty-five guineas [£2336.25 or $9929]. May I ask if we have the pleasure of having an account with you at the store? Will you, uhum, be wishing to take the necklace with you?’

My first wristwatch, the first really adult present I ever received, made specially both for schoolboys, and for Harrods, came from this department, in the autumn of 1927. It was to encourage me ‘to be a man’, as my father put it, when I went to my prep school, Colet Court, a prospect which at that time, not yet being eight years old, I found terrifying; but nothing like as awful as the reality. In Cutlery, besides canteens of silver and electro-plate in oak and mahogany cabinets, they carried stocks of fighting and hunting knives, ready for travellers who needed to give the coup de grâce to dying tribesmen or wounded bears in the Balkans. Until long after the Second World War they had show cases filled with regimental swords all ready, apart from being sharpened, for the next great struggle.

Next door to Jewellery, Silver, Optical and Cutlery, in a kind of limbo between it and Gentlemen’s Outfitting (now the Man’s Shop) was the Boys’ Shop. In it they sold all the gear you needed to be ‘privately educated’ in Britain, at preparatory and what are so oddly known as public schools, with the names of more respectable ones emblazoned on the oaken fixtures. In this department over the years I was successively fitted out with flannel shirts, flannel shorts supported by belts striped in the school colours with snake-head buckles, floppy grey flannel sun hats, navy sweaters with collars emblazoned with the school badge, blazers, white trousers, straw hats, black jackets, striped trousers, starched white collars with round bottoms which showed off nicely the brass collar stud, and, almost unbelievably, bowler hats.

To this day passing the site of what was once this department which was linked with the Man’s Shop by flights of symbolic steps and an equally symbolic tunnel, I still experience the feeling of doom that descended on me like a pall during the last ten days or so of the summer holidays, a feeling aggravated by Harrods with their triumphant slogan, constantly reiterated in their catalogues and window displays, ‘Back to School!’ How I hated them. It is not surprising that for years one of the difficulties (which the management admitted) in getting grown-up customers to patronize their ample and sumptuous Man’s Shop was that many of them had never recovered from their traumatic experiences in the Boys’ Shop.

Nevertheless, when I returned to England from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany in the spring of 1945, I spent part of my first traumatic morning of freedom in it trying, successfully it turned out, to buy a pair of corduroy trousers without the obligatory clothing coupons with which I had been issued but which I had already succeeded in temporarily mislaying.

‘Dear, dear, sir,’ said the very elderly salesman when I explained my predicament, eyeing the enormous ‘Battledress anti-gas’ with which I had been issued, presumably in error, in Brussels, after my liberation. ‘We can’t have one of our old customers without a change of trousers, can we? That would never do. Mum’s the word, but here in Harrods we’ve got more gentlemen’s trousers than there are coupons in the whole of the United Kingdom.’