A Traveller's Life (15 page)

I had had enough liberation for one day. I had never thought of the camp as being home before. Now I beat it back there, up the autobahn, over the canal, under the exit bridge to Brunswick West, back through the broken woods. I was liberated but I was still not free.

Telegram April 26, 10.30 a.m. Official.

Newby. 3 Castelnau Mansions, Barnes SW13.

Am in corrugated iron hut in wood somewhere in Sussex being given leave and clothing coupons. See you this afternoon, Love Eric.

After this I went home to Three Ther Mansions.

In the winter of 1945 I went back to Italy, borrowed a jeep, drove to Fontanellato through what were now the ruins of Italy and, in what had once been the stables of the ancient moated castle in which the last scion of the Sanvitale family still lived, asked Wanda to marry me. In spite of the fact that both of us were working for a branch of MI9, helping Italians who had helped prisoners-of-war to escape, the Allied authorities made things as difficult as possible for us to marry – on the grounds that my wife-to-be was an enemy alien, although in fact she was a Yugoslav, a Slovene from the Carso, whose father was a noted anti-Fascist.

We finally got married in the spring of 1946 in Florence, in Santa Croce, in the beautiful Bardi Chapel which is decorated by Giotto. Then, back in England, I started work in the family business of Lane and Newby Ltd, Wholesale Costumiers and Mantle Manufacturers.
¹
I spent much of the next seven years acting as a commercial traveller on behalf of the firm, tottering up the backstairs of stores in London and the provinces with armfuls of stock to show to buyers who had gone on holiday,
to coffee, to Paris, or the ladies' powder-room, had just been sacked and not yet been replaced, had gone mad or had something else wrong with them, had over-bought, had not yet started buying or simply didn't want anything of the kind I had to offer. Wherever I went I travelled with enormous wicker baskets containing coats and suits and with trunks containing dresses which I unpacked and re-packed at least twice a day, standing in a sea of tissue paper. Once, at Liverpool, I saw the whole collection come off the hook of the crane that was lifting it on board the Irish boat and fall into the Mersey. Fortunately it was a duplicate collection, adequately insured.

The Journey – the great journey as opposed to what might be described as lightning raids, a day visit to Southampton for example – took place twice a year. If it was made a week too early the buyers had not yet received their buying allowance. If it was a week too late they had probably spent it all. It lasted ten days or a fortnight and was carried out entirely by means of the British Railway system which, although already groggy, had not reached the depths of demoralization it was later to plumb.

There was a precise ritual connected with The Journey, in which future generations of savants who have the inclination to study it may find as much significance as did the author of
The Golden Bough
in the Slaying of the Priests at Nemi. It always began in the north and it was impossible to do good business in both Glasgow and Edinburgh. If the orders were good in Glasgow the buyers in Edinburgh were informed by some sort of bush telegraph and asserted the age-old hostility which exists between the two cities by buying as little as possible, and vice versa.

From the stock-rooms in the railway hotels in Glasgow and Edinburgh in those years before Beeching destroyed the railway system, it was possible to make daylight excursions by train to Dundee, Stirling, Perth, Ayr, Peebles, Berwick-on-Tweed and
Aberdeen, returning to them the same night. Mr Wilkins, our senior traveller, claimed to have reached Inverness in one day, transacted business, and then returned to Glasgow, but no one really believed him! The further from his base the more the traveller's spirit failed him, like his medieval counterpart passing uneasily through country which on his map was marked ‘Here be dragons'.

South of the border The Journey took in Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool and the great industrial heart of England in which one of the most terrifying of all the buyers I ever encountered, Miss Trumpet of Throttle and Fumble in Yorkshire, a woman more than six feet high who dyed her hair bright orange, stood guard over her department wreathed in the smoke and flames of a thousand Bessemer converters like a ravening Fury at the mouth of Hell.
²

This was The Journey. It petered out in the flat clay of the Midlands with a visit to Nottingham and Leicester. Nothing else in Britain was worth the expenditure of so much time, money and effort. Buyers in the Eastern Counties, made gelid by the winds that droned over them from the Urals, took every opportunity of deserting their patrimony and doing their buying in London. Most of the South Coast was so close to London that buyers commuted to it. Travelling into the eye of the setting sun towards the Cassiterides and Atlantis, phantom isles of the West, the softer the air grew, the more woolly-minded were the inhabitants. Decisions that were a matter of a moment in the North, in the West, in Bath or Exeter or Torquay or Plymouth were drawn out intolerably. It was like trying to swim through a sea of cotton-wool. Even Bristol, once famous for its swashbuckling merchants, had succumbed to the deadly softness of the Atlantic air. Beyond
the Tamar, in Cornwall, apart from cream teas, the production of hideous pottery and equally awful objects embellished with poker-work, commerce was non-existent. Wales was another problem, as it always has been throughout history.

My first steps on The Journey were made in company with Mr Wilkins in 1946. After an appalling journey from King's Cross to Edinburgh, in which we sat upright throughout the night in a third-class compartment with five other occupants, two of whom were drunk, we were decanted on to the platform at the Waverley Station from which porters of the North British Hotel hurried us with a great trolley-load of our skips and trunks to a stock-room in the lower parts of the building, a tall narrow room illuminated by a fifty-watt bulb. Besides a number of rails on which our ‘models' were to be hung, the furniture consisted of a number of rather rickety cane chairs and two trestle tables covered with white sheets that had been neatly patched. The effect was of a mortuary or a place where members of the Reformed Church might pray together before proceeding to England by train. The view from the window embraced the roof of the Waverley Station and a single span of the North Bridge. At intervals the entire prospect was blotted out by clouds of smoke emitted by steam locomotives revving up on the rails below. It was half past eight. Our first customer was at nine-thirty. We had not yet shaved, and had had no food since lunchtime the previous day.

Breakfast resembled a slow motion film of a coronation. At intervals rather niffy waitresses brought food, but with none of the supporting ingredients that would have transformed it into a breakfast – porridge came without milk, margarine and marmalade without toast to spread them on, tea without teacups and, presumably in obedience to some not yet defunct wartime regulation, there was only one bowl of sugar to four tables. By the time we had finished breakfast, having half risen in our seats
despairingly half a dozen times in attempts to attract the attention of these ladies, it was ten past nine.

There was no time to wash or shave. We raced to the stockroom. I was in charge of the dresses, Mr Wilkins had the more robust coats and suits. To me it seemed inconceivable what havoc a night in trunks had wrought among my fragile garments, in spite of their having been carefully interleaved with tissue paper.

By the time we had finished hanging the stuff up it was nine twenty-seven. Mr Wilkins handed me a sheet of writing-paper, part of a large supply he had already filched from one of the hotel writing-rooms, on which he had drawn up a timetable:

To me it sounded more like a gathering of clans in some rainswept glen rather than a series of assignations to buy dresses in the sub-basement of a railway hotel.

In the three minutes that remained before the arrival of Mrs McHaggart, Mr Wilkins treated me to a brief, brilliant summing-up of their idiosyncrasies, which my parents had already described to me at some length; but by the time he had finished I was in such a state of apprehension that I could scarcely distinguish a McHaggart from a McTush.

‘Mrs McHaggart is a good buyer but she doesn't like us to serve any of the other stores in Princes Street. Of course we do – it wouldn't be worth coming here if we didn't – and she knows we
do. The buyers here know everything. They all have relatives in one another's shops.

‘What we have to do is to get Mrs McHaggart's order down on paper. If it's good enough we don't show the styles she's ordered to Miss McTush. They're enemies. If we get a poor order from Mrs McHaggart then we show everything to Miss McTush and change the styles. Miss McTush knows we do this so we can't change them very much. Mrs McRobbie is the same as Mrs McHaggart and Miss McTush. She's in Princes Street, too. The most important thing is to keep them from meeting. If they do at least one of them won't give us an order. That's why I've put in Mrs McHavers between Mrs McHaggart and Miss McTush, because she comes from Dundee, but Mrs McHaggart is up to every kind of dodge. She often leaves her umbrella behind after she's put down her order to give her the excuse of coming back and finding out who else we're serving. Miss McTush doesn't really mind what Mrs McHaggart and Mrs McRobbie buy as long as she gets her delivery before they do. In fact we deliver them all at the same time – we wouldn't dare do otherwise – so Miss McTush is just as difficult as the others. Mrs McHaggart only buys Coats and Suits and Two-pieces. She's not supposed to buy Two-pieces but she does. That's why you won't see Miss Cameron, the Dress Buyer. Miss McTush buys everything. Mrs McRobbie buys everything. Miss Reekie can buy anything but usually she buys nothing. She's a most difficult woman. I call her “The Old Stinker” on account of her name being Reekie,' said Mr Wilkins. ‘I usually take Miss McTush and Mrs McHavers out to lunch together because Mrs McHavers comes from Dundee and Miss McTush doesn't mind that. On Tuesday I take Mrs McHaggart. First thing on Tuesday morning I call on the ones who haven't given us an appointment and do some telephoning. With luck we see some of them in the afternoon or on Wednesday morning and I usually
manage to get off to Glasgow on Wednesday afternoon for an appointment after the shops close in the evening. Some time today we have to do some telephoning to Galashiels and Hawick.'

‘Don't you give Mrs McRobbie lunch?'

‘Mrs McRobbie's got an ulcer. She never eats lunch. I like Mrs McRobbie,' said Mr Wilkins.

‘What about the evenings?'

‘If you want to take buyers out in the evening, Mr Eric, that's your affair,' said Mr Wilkins. ‘Personally I drink beer.'

As he said this there was a murmuring sound outside the door and Mrs McHaggart appeared.

Mrs McHaggart was tall and thin. She was invested with an air of preternatural gloom, accentuated by a small drip on the end of her nose. In all the years I was to have dealings with Mrs McHaggart the drop never actually dripped but always remained suspended on the point of doing so. She was dressed in claret-coloured tweed and jacket of a fur that was unknown to me, possibly made from the skins of animals trapped north of the Highland Line and over which hung an aura compounded of moth balls and Parma Violets. She asked after my parents in a kindly way, but her manner of doing so suggested that they were either dying or already dead and no one had informed her of the fact.

We were off.

I wanted to travel to far distant places but the nature of my job made it unlikely that I would do so. Above all, I longed to visit Istanbul.

Sometimes the ideas I have formed about a place that I have never visited but long to visit are produced not by looking at photographs, as I had done when at a tender age I acquired
The Children's Colour Book of Lands and Peoples
, but by studying works of art. Once this has happened, however much the place has ceased to resemble the place which the artist may have imagined it to be when he depicted it, if it ever did resemble it, then this vision of it is indelibly fixed in my mind and I can never obliterate it.

In Istanbul this evocation of a Constantinople that possibly never was – its name was only changed to Istanbul in 1930 – a place I never visited until 1956, was performed for me back in 1947 by two nineteenth-century artists. William Henry Bartlett,
¹
born in 1809 in Kentish Town, and Thomas Allom, born in London in 1804. I bought the books which were illustrated by them from barrows in London street markets. Both these artists were articled to architects, which accounts for their masterly treatment of buildings; both, like Edward Lear, their contemporary, were indefatigable travellers, often in wild and dangerous places.

The city of Constantinople and its environs, as depicted by Bartlett and Allom, were unnatural, in the sense that they were invested with an extraordinary silence and stillness which is foreign to the Orient, except in the hour before the dawn or when the sun is at its zenith, or in the desert. The inhabitants, men, women and children, were all frozen in the moment in which they were observed or imagined.

As in
The Children's Colour Book of Lands and Peoples
it was a world in which all was well. There was no violence. No heads of pashas displayed on dishes stood on the middle pillar, reserved for this purpose in the first court of the Grand Seraglio, beyond the Bab-i-Humayun, the Imperial Gate; no heads or other portions of lesser persons, such as ears and noses, were on display in the niches on its outward walls, as was customary at that time. And in fact here in this first court, apart from an occasional scream when the Executioner, who was also the Head Gardener, carried out a decapitation, there was always silence, none of the hullabaloo that arose in the second courtyard when the Janissaries, the always dissatisfied infantry of the Sultan's Imperial Court, reversed their
great copper cooking bottles and beat on them to announce some fresh grievance.

‘Anybody may enter the first Court of the Seraglio,' wrote Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, the famous botanist who visited Constantinople in about 1700 during a three-year journey through Greece and Asia Minor, in the course of which he made an extensive collection of plants for Louis XIV ‘… but everything is so still, the Motion of a Fly might be heard in a manner; and if anyone should presume to raise his voice ever so little, or shew the least want of Respect to the Mansion-place of their Emperor he would instantly have the Bastinado by the Officers that go the rounds; nay the very Horses seem to know where they are, and no doubt they are taught to tread softer than in the streets.'

In fact, the engravings of Allom and Bartlett's works gave no inkling of the violence and cruelty practised in the Topkapi Serai, until its abandonment between 1850 and 1853, in the reign of the drunken and wildly extravagant Sultan Abdul Mejid, who was so enfeebled by excessive indulgence in the pleasures offered by his Harem that he was unable to enjoy even the incomparable views from his palace across the Bosphorus.

They did not show, for example, odalisques being drowned in weighted sacks off Seraglio Point. The mad Ibrahim, the last Sultan with the blood of the Caliph Osman in his veins, who consumed amber dissolved in coffee and drenched his beard with ambergris, had two hundred and eighty of his women disposed of in this way with as little compunction as a motorist ordering an oil change. Nor did they show, and a good thing too, the newly-sheared African eunuchs being bastinadoed with drumsticks by their seniors – presumably like prefects dishing out punishment at an English public school to new boys – in the creepy, three-storeyed quarters of the Black Eunuchs, which are more like a deep ditch with a roof on it than a human habitation. Perhaps it
was the only way they could warm themselves in what, for five months of the year, is a perishingly cold place.
²

Nor did they show the hideous Seraglio deaf-mutes with their slit tongues and punctured ear-drums, whose principal
raison d'être
was to act as stranglers using the bow-string or, if they were strangling a Crown Prince in the Kafes, a silken one.

The Kafes, the Cage, was the suite of rooms in which the Crown Prince was kept captive during the life of the reigning Sultan. Ibrahim was in the Kafes from the age of two until he became Sultan at twenty-four. No wonder he was as mad as a hatter. Eventually he returned to it to be strangled. Osman III spent fifty years in the Kafes.

In fact Bartlett and Allom recorded none of the scenes on which a present day photographer would turn his cameras with relish. There was not even a single burning building to be seen in their pictures, which is strange because the history of Constantinople from the point of view of underwriters and firemen has been one of unending employment. These conflagrations were all due to the Turkish predilection for smoking in bed, forgetting to snuff candles, carrying hot coals with wooden pincers from one room to another in their wooden houses, drying linen over braziers, engaging in mass fry-ups with oil during what is known as the Egg-Plant Summer (the equivalent of our Indian Summer) and simple arson.

With Bartlett and Allom one was in the springtime of the world, or else in a golden autumn. Whichever season, they were
days of calm. In the Golden Horn there were ships at anchor with cock-billed yards, and from the shore little rowing-boats with prows as fine as needles moved out towards them without leaving a ripple on water which was as smooth as glass, while out in the centre of the stream one of the Sultan's thirty-two oared galleys was being rowed across to Galata from the Summer Harem down by Seraglio Point. Behind it, high in the background, rose the incomparable domes and minarets of the city, while along the banks of the Bosphorus on the European and Asiatic shores semi-comatose figures reclined on the balconies of the
Yalis
, the wooden houses built out on piles over the water. They were in the state of euphoria peculiar to Muslim gentlemen and described minutely by the traveller and explorer, Richard Burton, known as
Kif
.

Across the water from under the Imperial Gate of the Seraglio, a troop of horsemen wearing tall tapered hats of pale felt, were riding out past a fountain ornamented with gilded arabesques and crowned with domes, while nearby a servant was bringing, on his head, a coffee table laden with cups to a group of men smoking water pipes under a tree. In the cemeteries of Eyüp and Scutari, the one in Europe the other, Karaca Ahmet, the greatest necropolis in all Asia, women enveloped in the
feridge
and the
yashmak
crouched by the tall, slender headstones which mark the tombs, while in the distance a funeral procession wound away among the dark stands of cypress. These headstones were surmounted with carved stone headdresses, veils or hats for the women, turbans for the men and by the way in which these turbans were made up it was possible for those who had studied the matter to know whether the wearer was a pasha, a dervish, a eunuch or an ordinary, unremarkable man. Seeing them in their pallid, serried ranks under the funereal trees it was as if the dead had been resurrected, only to be turned to stone. Here, too, under a
baldacchino
or canopy among the cypresses, the favourite horse of Sultan Mahmud I was buried.

At Eyüp the new Sultan had come on horseback from the Seraglio to the Mosque there, the holiest in Constantinople, for the ceremony of girding the sword, the equivalent to his coronation, riding out from the Gate of the Shawl and the Curtain Gate. There, in the narrow street which ran out among the tombs to the great marble
türbe
, mausoleum, of Eba Eyüp (which housed the remains of a companion of the Prophet who is supposed to have died in the first Arab siege of Constantinople between 674 and 678), his subjects abased themselves.

At the Sweet Waters of Europe, on the banks of the Barbyses, at the head of the Golden Horn, unveiled Greek girls were dancing the
romaika
on the bank. It was St George's Day. In a harem a pale Circassian slave, from the shores of the Black Sea and attended by a black eunuch who was wild with jealousy, plucked languidly at a sort of lute while another, equally languid and sensual, sat at the feet of her master, who was smoking a
narghile
.

‘There is a certain ferocity and irreclaimable wildness observable in a Circassian beauty. She gratifies the sensuality, but never secures the esteem, of him to whom she is afterwards consigned,' wrote the clerical author of
Constantinople and the Seven Churches of Asia Minor
. ‘She is an object of desire, but never of regard, and always excites more fear than love … The splendour of the harem is contrasted with their own miserable huts (in Circassia); the rich stuffs in which they are clothed, with their homely, coarse, and squalid garments … they have no ties to attach them to their native land, or dim the bright prospect that awaits them in another. They look upon their sale to a foreign merchant to be the foundation of their future fortune, and their entrance into a foreign ship their first step to a life of pleasure and enjoyment; nor are they disappointed.'

These two Circassians, desirable as they were, were only two
of many who had been rejected by the Imperial Chief Black Eunuch, the Kizlar Agasi, the Keeper of the Girls, as not having the necessary qualities for a Sultan's bedfellow. He, having done so, would have sent them to the Aurut Bazaar, or Female Slave Market, which at that time (in the 1830s) was situated near the Burnt Column which marked the site of Constantine's Forum. As late as the 1900s it still functioned, but at Topkhaneh, beyond Galata, where Circassian merchants still carried on a brisk trade in their own flesh and blood, as well as Nubians and Abyssinians.

But what Allom showed was the original market, by the Burnt Column, a courtyard surrounded by balconies with lattices in which the white slaves of Georgia, Mingrelia (a mountainous area north-east of the Black Sea) and Greece awaited a purchaser. The price for a young white slave was then about 6000 piastres, £100, for a black slave about 200 piastres, £16. Yet, as depicted by Allom and described by the almost lubricious Reverend Walsh, it was not a particularly melancholy scene, for the Negresses appeared as anxious as the Circassians to find a purchaser. Only the Greek girls formed an exception. ‘Refined by education, strongly attached to their families, and abhorrent to slavery, their natural vivacity is overcome by their state, and they appear sad and dejected amid the levity that surrounds them.'

It was the moment when a sale was in progress. A bargain was about to be made; the Franks were privileged to be present for until recently a
firman
of the Sultan had excluded them from the Yessir Bazari, the Slave Markets, because it was thought that they sometimes bought in order to give the slave his or her freedom, something a still-young slave, at this stage of his or her career, particularly a black one, actively disliked. Now they were admitted; but only to satisfy their curiosity, not to traffic. On the left a veiled Turkish lady was examining the black female slaves, rather as if they were fatstock, which indeed they resembled. Certainly they were not the lissom
figures of the popular imagination. On the right, the Circassians – there could have been no Greeks among them, as they were displaying their charms quite openly – were being offered by the slave-merchant (perhaps a Jew for he was bearded in an un-Turkish fashion and wore a fur kalpack on his head) to the master of a household, attended by his eunuch. I would never know the outcome; but this was the fascination of seeing the city in this way, for no transaction, no human action, was ever completed.

With these artists I could enter a
hamman
. ‘It has been truly said of the Turks,' the author of
Constantinople
wrote, quoting another, unnamed authority, ‘that “they hold impurity of the body in greater detestation than impurity of the mind” … They make frequent ablution so essential, that “without it prayer will be of no value in the eyes of God” … The law enumerates
eleven
occurrences after which the person must wash, some of which are exceedingly curious, but not fit for the public eye.'

What I was looking at was a male bath. To see the interior of a female one I would have had to go back in time to 1787 when d'Ohsson's
Tableau Général de L'Empire Othoman
was published, and looked at one of the engravings in that rather rare work. In it the women wore high pattens, sometimes covered in silver, sometimes jewelled, reminiscent of those worn by sixteenth-century Venetian prostitutes.

In the female bath there were almost as many children as women. It was an animated scene, but presumably of the artist's imagination, who could scarcely have been admitted. ‘The mysteries of a female bath it is not permitted to see, no more than those of Eleusis … Their bath is the great coffee-house, where they assemble, and enjoy a freedom they can nowhere else indulge. If a stranger enter this sacred place by mistake, even his mistake is punished with death.'

Miss Pardoe's description of a bath to which she had the entrée
was published some fifty years later. It was as if she was writing an extended caption to Bartlett's drawing of the same scene which he had, somehow, already witnessed.