Something Wholesale (6 page)

‘It’s quite easy really, Mr Eric,’ said Miss Webb, the stock-keeper of the Coat Department when I reported to her after the interview with my father. ‘All you have to do is look at the docket. It gives you the number of the piece and the colour. You either have to get it down from there,’ she pointed to the shelves above our heads on which rolls of material, done up in brown paper, lay one on top of one another like giant chrysalids, ‘Or else it’s on the floor.’ We were standing together in a sea of material and torn paper. ‘If it’s not in the fixtures or on the floor then it may be in the cellar. If it’s not in the cellar then it hasn’t been delivered and it may not even be made.’

I thought of the vanmen who had been making such a business of unloading a few pieces into the cellar when I arrived, and shuddered.

‘All you have to do,’ she went on, ‘is to measure off the quantity that’s written on the docket, and mark it off on the ticket, then cut it. You can either use a yardstick for measuring, or these.’ She showed me three inadequate-looking brass pins stuck in the dining-room table that was used for ‘cutting off’ ‘I’ll look after the trimmings, the buttons and the canvas and the linings, if you do the material.’

The stockroom was very hot. It was mid-September and the Autumn orders were in full production. It was my job to cut off the lengths of material according to the dockets which had been written by the Department Manager and by Mr Wilkins, the Traveller, who was principally interested in the Coat Department. Together with the appropriate trimmings they would be collected by the tailors when they called on Fridays to deliver work that had been given out previously and also to collect their money.

I took up the first docket from a thick sheaf. It was for a single garment – a wool georgette, edge-to-edge coat which Mr Wilkins had christened inappropriately ‘Desire’. It was a special order from a store in Leeds for a customer called Mrs Bangle. Completely untutored as I was it was obvious to me on reading the details of the order that Mrs Bangle was something extra special.

‘Hips 62”. Bust 58”. Waist 55”. Neck to Waist Back 14”. Upper Arm 19”. Leave Good Turnings,’ Mr Wilkins had written.

This seemed to make Mrs Bangle a dwarf, 1½’ thick. Even Mr Wilkins had boggled at estimating the quantity of material necessary to construct a coat for such a phenomenon. ‘Wool Georgette GB. 14XX44/7. Blush Pink.’ These were the only details he had given. Funking the calculations, he had simply inserted a question mark and a couple of plus signs in the section marked quantity. The docket was intended for a tailor called Grunbaum and was marked ‘Urgent – Wedding – Seven Days’.

I asked Miss Webb how much extra material I should allow. ‘She’s a fantastic size,’ I said. ‘How did she get like that in wartime?’

‘Bless you, Mr Eric, that’s nothing,’ said Miss Webb, ‘We have much worse than that. It’s something to do with armaments. You’d better ring up Mr Grunbaum and ask him how much he needs. It’ll be good practice.’

She gave me Mr Grunbaum’s number. I dialled it.

‘’ULLO!’ said an unhelpful voice.

‘I want Mr Grunbaum.’

‘Which Mr Grunbaum?’

Miss Webb had vanished. I asked the voice to hold on and went in search of her. Eventually I ran her to earth in the cellar where I found her wrestling with a new consignment of cloth. She said I wanted Mr Harry.

‘I should have told you,’ she said. ‘There’s Mr Sidney, Mr Joe, Mr Harry and Mr Lance – and Mrs Grunbaum. Mr Harry’s the most helpful. Mr Lance is still in the Army.’

Lucky Mr Lance I thought.

‘Mr Harry! Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’ said the voice, ‘’OLD ON!’

The sounds coming over the line from Grunbaum’s were like something from the Dawn of the Industrial Revolution. There were whirring noises of machinery, a clattering of endless belts and sudden gusts of dance music that presumably were encouraging the workers to even greater efforts. After a considerable interval Mr Harry came to the telephone. I read the docket to him.

‘Listen,’ he said, not altogether ungraciously when I had finished. ‘What do you think I am? That Mrs Whatsername; she don’t need a tailor. What she needs is a operation. Listen, I’m telling you, I’m a busy man. Send her to one of those surgical shops. I can make six coats in the time I make that coat. I haven’t got the labour. What do you think you can pay me to make a coat like that? You haven’t got enough money. I’m telling you there isn’t enough money in the whole of the West End to make it worth my while.’

Happily he enlarged on this theme for some minutes. I was glad when Miss Webb emerged from the cellar. Without a word
she took the receiver from me. Until this moment I had regarded Miss Webb, who was round and comfortable as a kindly, almost feudal figure.

‘Hallo, Harry,’ she said. ‘Yes, very well, thank you.’ Without bothering to ask how he was. ‘Your man brought in twenty-two Floras this morning. You know what you’ve done. You’ve shone the linings. I’m sending the whole lot back.’

Having put the ball, as it were, in Mr Grunbaum’s court, she simply stood there without listening while the instrument emitted a series of squawking noises.

‘How much more material do you need for that special?’ she said finally when he had exhausted himself.

‘A yard and a quarter. That seems a hell of a lot. All right, send for it this afternoon.’

Miss Webb thumped down the receiver triumphantly. ‘He can do what he likes with the others but this is Lane and Newby.’

For me it was an exhausting day. Most of the rolls of cloth I needed were in the cellar together with the
Morning Posts
, the
Observers
and the last six dozen of my father’s port, wines with resounding names such as Fonseca and Tuke Holdsworth, prudently locked away behind an iron grille. I made many journeys up and down narrow staircases, like a sherpa on the North Col. By the time five-thirty came I had run my shears through many dozens of pieces. Except when writing I was still left-handed. The shears were right-handed. The results of trying to use them upside down were deplorable; the cut edges resembled the temperature chart of a sufferer from undulant fever.

‘I’m putting you on buttons tomorrow and you can do the carrying,’ said Miss Webb. ‘I don’t know what Mr Newby would say if he saw what you’ve done to all that stuff. He’d have a fit.’

There were three separate departments at Lane and Newby: The ‘Mantle’ Department, the ‘Gown’ Department and the ‘Costume’ Department. (The firm’s letter-heading still proclaimed to a slightly incredulous world that we were ‘Mantle Manufacturers and Wholesale Costumiers’.) More than anything else they resembled tribal areas in which the aboriginal inhabitants lived cheek by jowl but insulated one from the other by their own magic circles. They were also prevented from impinging on one another by a fierce independence and by a fourth circle of more powerful magicians of which my father and mother were the necromancers and Miss Gatling and her Counting House staff the active familiars. Of the three, the Mantle Department, which was responsible for more than half the entire turnover, was the most potent.

In a world in which every square foot of space was becoming yearly more expensive, to maintain these vast areas was the despair of our accountants. Any reasonable organisation would have used one showroom for the short periods in each year when the clothes had to be ‘shown’ and let off the others, but this was unthinkable in a firm such as ours.

These great rooms were surrounded by workrooms in which the original prototypes were constructed and by a labyrinth of
small cubicles, vest-pocket stockrooms containing buttons and trimmings, in which single-minded enthusiasts pursued undisturbed, except at times of stock-taking, the same way of life that they had always done since the coming of the internal combustion engine.

In my travels about the building in those early days I used to come upon them by chance. Occasionally a door would open for a moment, disclosing a grey-haired occupant happily engaged in counting sequins or hooks-and-eyes. Then the door would begin to close as an arrangement of pulleys and counter-balance weights filled with lead shot started to operate and all would be quiet as the grave except perhaps for a single, discreet cough. At such moments it seemed to me that I would never get to know all the secret places of this extraordinary establishment, let alone their inhabitants. I felt like an heir to the Castle of Glamis who had not been told the secret of the Beast which dwells somewhere within its walls.

But for the moment it was enough that I was the most junior member of the Mantle Department.

This was the home of Mr Wilkins.

Mr Wilkins was elderly, as impassive as a mandarin, almost bald and a complete mystery. In 1914 he had gone to the Kaiser’s war as a member of a Territorial regiment; the following year he had been severely wounded in the leg by a sniper’s bullet. As a result he walked with a pronounced limp and most of the time suffered hell with great fortitude. He had the capacity of making anything that anyone said sound like a brilliant idea without believing it himself. He even managed to give the impression that he thought my arrival was an excellent thing for the business, whereas I knew that he couldn’t think anything of the sort.

Mr Wilkins had two desks: one in the showroom at which he sat at the receipt of custom when the buyers were on the move;
and another behind the scenes in the stockroom itself to which he retreated to do his paper work, brood over his expenses and think where he would go next.

He was extremely methodical and it was at this stockroom desk which discreetly faced a blank wall that he sat, covering page after page in his neat, minute handwriting, warning the customers who had not yet paid us a visit that he was about to arrive on their doorsteps. The formula he employed was invariable.

‘… I shall be visiting Edinburgh on Monday, June 28th with the New Season’s Collection of Coats, Costumes, Two-Pieces and Gowns and hope to have the pleasure of welcoming your goodself at the North British Hotel at some convenient time …’

He then went on to suggest a time that was more likely to be convenient to Mr Wilkins than to the Buyer.

He had a surprisingly robust sense of humour. The wall above his desk was decorated with coloured postcards of a sort that borough councils in the more squeamish seaside resorts are trying to extirpate. One showed an enormously fat lady in the sea smacking the bald head of a gentleman that was just showing above water level with the caption, ‘Oh, Sir, I am sorry. I thought it was my husband’s behind.’

It was always assumed that these postcards were Mr Wilkins’ property. He never referred to them, but sometimes he used to look up at the wall and utter a distant rumbling sound, ‘Huh, Huh, Huh,’ that might have been laughter.

Most of the customers liked Mr Wilkins, but now that he is dead no one will ever know what Mr Wilkins thought of the customers or anyone else – or what he thought of the postcards. He possessed a degree of inscrutability that is rare in the West.

The head of the Department was Miss Stallybrass. She had been with Lane and Newby since she had started there as a junior salesgirl and in the interval had acquired a considerable presence.
She was still sufficiently youthful for the epithet ‘girl’ to be applied to her without seeming grotesque. She shared Mr Wilkins’ capacity for agreeing with any proposition. Unknown to anyone she used to put down large orders for cloth for delivery at some date far in the future, secrete them under her blotter and suddenly produce them to the consternation of Miss Gatling and my father whose budget had not taken such expenditure into account at all. She was jovial, florid, had a laugh that made the chandeliers tinkle, loved parties and was as sharp as anything. My father liked Miss Stallybrass personally but always referred to her as ‘a chancer’. He regarded Mr Wilkins as much more stolid. My mother loathed Mr Wilkins and regarded Miss Stallybrass as ‘full of go’. Providing that neither of the Directors was incapacitated and unable to attend to business this partisan attitude of my parents was the most effective way of dividing and ruling. Together Mr Wilkins and Miss Stallybrass would have been a formidable coalition; divided they were just manageable.

But in these early days I was ignorant of such intricacies; sorting my buttons and matching my linings, well-hidden behind the scenes I soon found myself prey to more disturbing sensations.

On my second morning, conscious of the disasters I had perpetrated, I was set to work on buttons and linings. Like a miser contemplating his hoard, I plunged my arms into large boxes full of buttons that were copies of ten-drachma coins from Fifth-Century Syracuse, all executed in black and gold glass and most of them different. When not engaged in the soul-destroying work of matching sets of four I matched satin linings with materials, most of which seemed to be in a dreary shade of brown.

‘That’s Donkey,’ said Miss Webb, helpfully. After having shown what I was capable of when left to myself she was seldom far from my elbow. I was immeasurably cheered by her remark. To me all
the browns with which I was contending had the uniform tint of farmyard manure.

At this moment Lola, the owner of the leg, flounced into the Stockroom fresh from yet another encounter with Miss Gatling. ‘Coo!’ she said, ‘I’m going to let my hair down.’ This she did quite literally by pulling out the pins which kept it up at the back in a style that was currently called Pompadour.

‘Glad that’s over!’ she went on, letting it fall over her face and shoulders in a black cascade. Then her mood changed.

‘Boo! You wicked old thing,’ she said peering through it at Mr Wilkins, like a hairy Ainu. ‘And they say they don’t know what happened to Jack the Ripper.’ As always, Mr Wilkins affected to take no notice.

To me she was more genial. ‘Well you’ll be a nice change,’ she said, squeezing my hand encouragingly, disregarding Miss Webb’s monitory glare. She then spent a happy half-hour experimenting with her hair, twisting it into plaits and piling it on top of her head, all the time humming to herself in a mindless way.

In her high-heeled shoes Lola was almost as tall as the guardsmen to whom Mr Lane had been so partial but there was certainly no other resemblance. She was one of those girls who was so remarkably silly that their silliness has a sexual quality that adds to their desirability. It was fascinating to watch Lola in repose as, completely absorbed in what she was doing, she wove her hair into ever more hideous forms. With her mouth half-open in what must have been an habitual expression, with slightly protruding teeth and moist lower lip, she had the almost half-witted look that some prostitutes cultivate in order to stimulate their clients. Across her face, as if the wind was ruffling a shallow pond, there passed expressions of impatience, sadness and a look that I was later to identify as hunger. She reminded me of a borzoi in whom Dr Pavlov had lost interest half-way through an experiment.

At eleven o’clock there was a sound like a traction engine mounting a steep hill and Mrs Smithers, an enormous woman as short as Lola was long, with great brawny forearms, came grunting up the stairs from the cellar bearing a tray loaded with ‘elevenses’ – tea and whatever else she had been able to obtain on the special ration that was allowed to businesses such as ours. The traction engine simile was banished by her actual appearance. Mrs Smithers’ husband had gone down at the battle of Coronel and she herself retained an air that had something naval about it. With her bulges encased in a whalebone corset that was as solid as armour plate she resembled a great sea-going monitor.

‘Morning all,’ she said. ‘Let me have the tray back when you’ve finished, there’s a dear.’ This to Lola who had immediately ‘perked up’ (as Miss Webb said) at the sight of food, as though Pavlov himself had rung a bell in the laboratory for mittagessen.

As Mrs Smithers and her ancient aides mounted the stairs with more and more trays of strong, brown tea and grisly pastries, the sounds of activity, the whirring noises from the workrooms on the upper floors and the sounds of typewriters beating out the monthly statements in the Counting House died away and Lane and Newby’s ground to a standstill.

Although Lola’s real surname was Topper and she lived in Muswell Hill, Mr Wilkins always referred to her as Lola Pagola. Even to me it seemed far more suitable than Topper. In addition he had created an entirely imaginary world for her, as lush as a feather bed which he only allowed to spring to life when we were sitting together round the table which had been cleared for the elevenses or the afternoon tea break. At other times Mr Wilkins ignored her. He was aided in this twice daily by Miss Webb, ‘Webbo’ as he called her. She showed a remarkable aptitude for this creative work which belied her homely appearance.

At such times the atmosphere was heavily charged with
innuendo that it became almost insupportable. But Mr Wilkins was so skilful in handling his inflammatory material that he always contrived to stop it from blowing up until the expiry of the twenty minutes which were allowed to us. The culmination was invariable. Mr Wilkins having brought his fantasy to an outrageous conclusion used to perform what he called ‘the nose trick’ with his tea; Miss Webb, by far the most mysterious occupant of the Stockroom would smile blandly; Lola would go into hysterics with her mouth full of cake and blow crumbs across the table with the despairing cry ‘Oh, Mr Wilkins, you are awful!’; and Miss Stallybrass’s voice would be raised in protest from the outer showroom where she took tea in solitary splendour. ‘Mr Wilkins, will you tell that bloody girl to put a sock in it!’

Lane and Newby employed two sorts of model girl to show their productions. Professional, free-lance girls who were hired for a fortnight or so each season and of whom, thank God Bertha was an exceptional example, and those, of whom Lola was one, who either lacked the energy to make it a full-time occupation or else were the wrong shape. Besides showing the clothes when buyers appeared, these ‘permanents’ put on finished coats and suits and ‘passed them’ before they were sent out to the shops. Sometimes they found themselves being stuck full of pins when new prototypes were brought down from the workroom; for the remainder of the time they acted as showroom assistants with more or less enthusiasm.

There was nothing forthcoming about the professionals. The majority were so completely introvert that it was impossible to have coherent speech with them at all. There were two, Rosie and Julie, who were so narcissistic that they used to sit for hours on end as they waited for some customer to arrive, gazing at themselves in the same mirror, scarcely exchanging a word. Once a day they used to measure one another’s behinds.

‘You’re a bit larger this morning, sweetie,’ Rosie would say spitefully, and they would both renounce their morning tea.

Some of the more juvenile model girls who brought a whiff of artfully contrived innocence to the showing of a white ball dress (Who the hell was having a ball in the Autumn of 1945?) possessed mothers of awe-inspiring appearance who used to wait outside the premises for their daughters in order to chaperone them back to Ilford. Sometimes they used to penetrate into the front hall where they sniffed the air suspiciously, fearing some contamination for their off-spring. One look at Miss Gatling usually satisfied them and they would drone on to her about the wickedness of the world and the unsullied reputation of little Annabel, who by the age of seventeen had a thorough appreciation of the commercial value of lascivious virginity.

Although she was employed to put the coats on and therefore had no need to undress at all, Lola spent an extraordinary amount of time stripped down to her underpants or else half inserted into one of her dresses – a writhing mass of arms and legs, like a female Laocoon. As a result she was always in a state of unreadiness for the simple chores with which Miss Stallybrass entrusted her.

‘Lola!’ Miss Stallybrass used to shout in her fruity voice and Lola used to pout and say ‘Bother!’ and toss her head, the most wilful girl in the whole of Lane and Newby’s.