A Traveller's Life (4 page)

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.'

And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light,

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

But westward, look, the land is bright.

A. H. Clough,
Say Not the Struggle
                

Naught Availeth
                    

In 1925, when I was five and a half, we embarked on what, so far as I was concerned, was the most ambitious holiday I had ever had. In summer my father took a cottage at Branscombe, at that time a very rural and comparatively unvisited village in South Devon, between Seaton and Sidmouth. It promised to be a particularly exciting time as my father had decided that we should travel there from Barnes by motor. This meant that most of our luggage had to be sent in advance by train from Waterloo to Honiton, a market town on the main line to Exeter; at Honiton it was picked up by a carrier and transported the ten miles or so to Branscombe by horse and cart. Others taking part in this holiday, although they did not travel with us, being already foregathered there, were my Auntie May (the aunt who had accompanied my mother and
me on the memorable visit to Godshill)and her husband, Uncle Reg. Before the war Uncle Reg had worked as a journalist in Dover on the local paper and in this capacity had been present in 1909 when Blériot landed on the cliffs, having flown the Channel. During the war he had been in the navy in some department connected with propaganda. Later he became editor of the
Gaumont British Film News
. He was very urbane and elegant. He was later on good terms with the Prince of Wales for whom he used to arrange film shows at Fort Belvedere, and for the Royal Family at Balmoral. For these services he was presented with cufflinks and cigarette cases from Plantin, the court jeweller, as well as other mementoes. He preferred to be called Reginald rather than Reg, but no one ever did so. They put up in the village pub where we, too, were to take our meals.

The third party was made up of three fashion buyers for London stores, Beryl, Mercia and Mimi Bamford, all of whom were friends of my mother, particularly Mimi, and their mother. All three were unimaginably elegant, often almost identically dressed in long, clinging jerseys and strings of amber beads, and they were surrounded by what seemed to be hordes of extremely grumpy pekinese who did not take kindly to the country. Their mother, who did not take kindly to the country either, was even more formidable. She owned a Boston Bulldog called Bogey, which had had its ears clipped, a practice by then declared illegal. Like her daughters she was immensely tall, and must at one time have been as personable as her daughters, but even I could recognize that she was incredibly tough, if not common.

‘She didn't ought to 'ave 'ad 'im,' was the comment she made about me, by now a boisterous, active little boy, to my Auntie May while we were at Branscombe, ‘she' being my mother; an anecdote that my aunt eventually told me, which she did with an excellent imitation of the old lady's gravelly voice, having put off doing so
until only a few years before her own death in 1974 in order, as she put it, to spare my feelings.

Neither Beryl nor Mercia nor their mother ever went to the beach, or even set eyes on the sea, the whole time they were at Branscombe. For Beryl and Mercia the seaside was Deauville. What Branscombe was to them is difficult to imagine, or they to the inhabitants. Only Mimi relished the simple life.

The morning of our departure from Three Ther Mansions was a fine one. We were seen off by the head porter of the flats – gratuity – and by Ellen, the cook/housekeeper, who had taken Mrs George's place in a resident capacity. At that time Ellen was probably in her late forties. She had smooth black hair parted down the middle with some white strands in it, a pale face and a rather forbidding, if not sinister, appearance – perhaps secretive is more appropriate; in retrospect I think what she most resembled was a female poisoner – and she was stiff, and starchy, or at least her aprons were starchy. In spite of her apparent grimness or strangeness or secretiveness Ellen was always very kind to me, especially when my parents were away, and I think that when they returned she resented their presence.

I found Ellen disturbing in a way which I could not have explained to her or to anyone else, not even to myself. Sometimes I used to ask her to take me in her lap and cuddle me. If she did, and sometimes I would have to ask her several times before she agreed, she would fondle me in a detached, offhand way that made me all the more determined to make her love me, although I did not really love her; but I was never successful.

Whether it was the Napier with the gleaming brass-framed windscreen, or the much more modest Citroën which succeeded it at about this time, whatever we were travelling in was a pretty close fit for the five of us, even with the picnic baskets and our overnight suitcases strapped on the carrier at the back. (I can't
remember which it was and anyone else who would know, or care, is dead.)

There was Mr Lewington, the chauffeur from around the corner in Fanny Road, who was driving us down to Devonshire and then bringing the car back to London – all attempts by my father and mother to learn to drive themselves had been attended by what might quite easily have been fatal results (my father had demolished the façade of a garage; my mother had left the road on Barnes Common and travelled some distance overland before coming to a halt). There was my father who sat next to him, from which position he was better able to keep an eye on the behaviour of other road users, pedestrian or otherwise, and if necessary stand up and rebuke them for some actual or imagined infringement of the rules of the road; and in the back, besides myself, there was my mother and Kathleen, usually known as Kathy, a sweet girl of fifteen or so with long auburn hair down to her waist who had replaced Lily and now ‘helped out' with such chores as taking me to school. Kathy wore ordinary clothes. My mother had given up any high-falutin' ideas about uniforms when Lily left and anyway I was now much too old to have a real nurse. Kathy was as excited about the trip as I was, never having been out of London before. There we sat with a travelling rug over our knees made from what looked like a leopard skin but was really a very costly length of woollen material from Paris, bought by my father with the intention of making from it a model coat, but pinched by my mother who had it made into a rug. In front of us was a second windscreen, a sheet of metal-framed glass, that would be as lethal if shattered in an accident as the front one would be, that could be folded down to form a picnic table when the machine was at rest. There was no such thing as safety glass in common use. In winter it was jolly cold in our open motors, even with the ‘lid' up, and then everyone except the driver and me, because my legs were too
short, was provided with what were known as Glastonbury Muffs, huge boots lined with sheepskin, each holding two feet. If it was really cold these boots had a sort of pocket in them which could be used as a receptacle for a hot water bottle; but I do not believe we ever went motoring with hot water bottles.

Branscombe was just over a hundred and fifty miles from Barnes by the direct route. Usually, when travelling with my father, we did not follow the direct route, he being as curious about what lay on either side of the direct route to anywhere as I myself was to be, years later. At Staines, we got down to admire the river and talk to a waterman of my father's acquaintance at one of the boathouses. (He knew every waterman of any consequence between Putney and Henley.) At a place called Virginia Water we visited some exciting ruins brought all the way from Leptis Magna in Tripoli, and an even more exciting waterfall full of enormous rocks.

Then we drove on between miles of rhododendrons and across commons (over which, years later, in 1940, I would crawl on all fours armed to the teeth with ‘token' wooden weapons because all the real ones had been taken away to give to the ‘real' army after Dunkirk), my father with his quarter-inch to the mile Ordnance Survey ‘Touring' Map at the ready to deal with any navigational problems and, as a member of the Royal Automobile Club and the Automobile Association, with both badges on the front of his motor car (the RAC's was grander), returning the salutes of the patrolmen of both organizations (according to whose area we were passing through), men with wind-battered faces, wearing breeches and leather gaiters, who were either mounted on motor-cycle combinations or, in some more rural parts, on pedal cycles. If they failed to salute, members were advised to stop them and ask the reason why.

Among the interesting things we saw on this early June morning
was a nasty accident, with splintered windscreens and lots of blood, which, although Lewington slowed down so that we could have a better view, I was not allowed to see properly, my head being turned the other way by Kathy, much to my disappointment. We also saw traction engines and enormous machines called Foden lorries, fuelled with coal and belching steam and smoke and red hot cinders; and a ‘police trap', set up by a couple of constables armed with stop-watches, one of whom had emerged from a hedgerow in which he had been lurking to flag down a luckless motorist for ‘speeding'. Until November 1931, the speed limit in Britain for all motor vehicles was officially twenty miles an hour. And we saw lots of tramps, most of them, like us, heading west, one of them a diminutive elderly man wearing a bowler hat and a wing collar, who was helping his equally elderly wife to push a very old-fashioned, high-wheeled perambulator with all their possessions in it along the road. And once we saw a team of huge English carthorses pulling a wagon with an enormous tree trunk on it.

At one point we came to a magic place where a road forked away from the one on which we were travelling, a place that I never forgot and was therefore subsequently able to identify, although it was years later. There, sheltered by trees was a grass-grown open space, with a number of low, barn-like buildings disposed about it. Some had slate roofs; some were thatched; some of the more important-looking ones – that might have been part of a farm – were built of cob, a mixture of clay and straw, and had enclosing walls of the same material, which were also thatched or tiled, as they had to be, otherwise they would have melted away in the rain, something I had never seen before.

And it was here, at this moment, as if to set a seal on my memory of it, a memory that would endure for the rest of my life, and embody so many feelings that I could never express, that
my father half stood up in the front of the car and shouted over the top of our windscreen, ‘Hilda! Look at those buildings! How they're built! That means we're in the West.' And he was right. For this was Weyhill, the Werdon Priors of Hardy's
Mayor of Casterbridge
, famous for its ancient six days' fair beginning on old Michaelmas Eve (10 October), one of the most ancient in Britain, to which a line in
The Vision of Piers Ploughman
, c.1360, ‘To Wy and Wynchestre I went to the fayre', perhaps refers. Horses, sheep, cheese and hops were the principal things sold at the fair and as many as 150,000 sheep once changed hands here in a day. The second day of the fair (old Michaelmas Day) was the great hiring-day for farm servants and labourers in this part of Hampshire and the adjoining districts of Wiltshire, the carters appearing with a piece of plaited whipcord fastened in their hats, the shepherds with a lock of wool. For many years now I have watched the at first gradual and later the accelerated decay of these strangely beautiful buildings and, recently, I have witnessed the final destruction of the best of them.

We continued our journey across Salisbury Plain. There were sheep on every horizon now, and from time to time we passed clumps of ugly buildings. (My mother said they were military buildings left over from the war.)

There were more sheep around Stonehenge and I remember hearing the skylarks overhead, so high that I could barely see them, and running my hands over the surfaces of stones so huge that I could scarcely apprehend them. The only other visitor was a vicar in a dog-collar who had driven there with a pony and trap, and I remember thinking how much funnier we looked with our smart clothes and our shiny motor car in such a place than he did with his old suit and his rather yellow dog-collar, and his pony and trap.

A little further on we turned off the main road and followed
a track that led past a number of grassy mounds, and there we had our picnic, not in the motor car using the collapsed windscreen as a picnic table but as we always did, unless it was raining, on rugs on the grass.

It was a memorable picnic, even though picnics arranged by my mother and father were always memorable. It is not just family pride that makes me say so. They really had a flair for picnics. Everyone said so.

There was a big pie, whether it was veal and ham with eggs embedded in it (not extruded through it as they are today) or pork is of no importance. I only know that like every other pie at every other picnic for which my father provided pies it had a design embossed on the crust (acorns and thistles were popular), and was the most delicious sort of juicy pie imaginable. And there was a ham, which my father had bought in case the meals at the pub at Branscombe were not always up to scratch, and an ox tongue and Stilton cheese, and lettuce, tomatoes and spring onions, and loaves of bread like cannon balls and Huntley and Palmer's Oval Water Biscuits, and home-made mayonnaise, and Ventachellum's Sweet Sliced Mango Chutney, and fresh fruit salad, and to drink there was Whiteway's Dry Devonshire Cider for the grown-ups, and for me lemonade, made at home by Ellen. After which everyone except myself had ‘forty winks'.