Old Sins (8 page)

Perhaps most happily for Julian, fashion was being reborn. Not just clothes, not foolish frivolity, nor even a burgeoning industry, it was a serious matter, one worthy of sober consideration and artistic merit. The Royal College of Art had opened its school of fashion design in 1948 with Madge Garland, an ex-editor of
Vogue
, as its professor. People talked about fashion and the design of clothes as something seriously important. Moreover, it was big business. The effect of M. Dior’s New Look had been staggering. Not only was it revolutionary in look, but in attitude. In three dizzy hours in the February of 1947 it spelt the end of economy as a virtue and of fashion as a sin; after six years of skimpy skirts and square shoulders, here were clothes that caressed the body, clung to the waist and swirled around the ankles in glorious extravagance. Women didn’t just like it, or even want it, they yearned for it, they demanded it, they had to have it. The rich flocked to Paris; the ready-to-wear houses copied it within days and it sold and sold and sold.

It was considered unpatriotic, which only lent it more glamour; questions were not quite asked in the House, but Sir Stafford Cripps called a meeting of the major British designers to try to persuade them to keep the short skirt popular, and another of fashion editors to tell them to instruct women to ignore the long; and Mrs Bessie Braddock, the stout and aggressively unfashionable Labour MP, took women to task for
caring so passionately about something so frivolous. Princess Margaret promptly negated any impression Mrs Braddock might have made by appearing constantly in the New Look. It all added up to a defiant, almost reckless approach to anything to do with clothes and looks; and made it an excellent time to be involved in cosmetics.

The Morell empire began life as a cough mixture. It was a perfectly ordinary cough mixture (called unimaginatively, if graphically, Morell’s Cough Linctus), in three flavours: lemon, cherry, and blackcurrant, but it had two important selling points. The first was that it tasted extraordinarily good, and children therefore loved it; the second was that it worked. Given to tired children in the night by tireder parents, it had them asleep again in ten minutes, their coughing silenced, their throats soothed. The reason for both factors was in the formulation, for which the parents and the children had to thank an old man working in the back room of a
pharmacie
in a small town near Deauville, but this was long before a Trades Description Act could prevent anybody from saying anything very much, and Julian had an ingenious and laterally thinking mind. Thus the linctus bore the legend ‘specially formulated for night-time coughs’.

There was no question of there being any money for advertising, and the labels stuck on the bottles by the hands of the bored housewives of West Ealing, where Morell Pharmaceuticals had its headquarters in an ex-WRVS canteen, were simply printed in white on red, with no embellishments of any kind except a border of medicine spoons twisted together, which was to become the Morell company logo. Nevertheless, the simple message was successfully and powerfully conveyed.

Julian sold the product into the chemists’ shops himself, driving huge distances in his Wolseley saloon, its big boot and passenger seats crammed with samples. The pharmacists, used to being fobbed off by crass young salesmen, were charmed by the intelligent, courteous man who could discuss formulae with them and who would always meet orders, even if it meant him personally driving hundreds of miles overnight to do so; originally reluctant to stock the medicine, those who did so invariably came back for more, and because of the conversations
they had had with Julian about formulae, would recommend it to distracted mothers and worried grandmothers and anxious nannies with rather more confidence than usual.

The worried mothers, having experienced its considerable effectiveness and coughs being a constantly recurring problem in the pre-antibiotic era, came back for more and still more, recommended it to their friends, and took to keeping a spare bottle permanently in their medicine cupboard, a suggestion added to the original label as a result of one of Julian’s overnight delivery drives, the time he always had his best ideas.

They trod a delicate path, he and Letitia; their capital had all gone and they lived very much from hand to mouth. The pharmacists were slow to pay, and he had difficulty getting credit for his raw materials. They fortunately had paid cash for their factory building, and had First Street on a mortgage; but for two months they were unable to meet the payment on that. ‘It’s too ridiculous,’ said Letitia cheerfully, over breakfast one morning, looking up from a pained letter from the building society, ‘here we are, dining out every night with the very best people in London – just as well or we’d be quite hungry a lot of the time – and we are threatened with having the roof removed from over our heads.’

Julian looked at her warily. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What I say, darling. The building society are threatening to repossess the house.’

‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘What on earth do we do now?’

‘You don’t do anything,’ said Letitia firmly, ‘just get on with delivering today’s orders and pressing them all for payment. I’m the financial director, I’ll go and see the bank.’

Which she did; Julian never quite knew what she said to the manager, but he saw her leaving the house, a suddenly much smaller and drabber figure in her oldest clothes, her face devoid of make-up, a plentiful supply of lace-trimmed handkerchiefs in her shabbiest handbag, and returned to his duties as sales manager feeling the future of the company and the home of its directors were in very safe hands.

Before going out to dine with the Countess of Lincoln that night, they drank to their modestly generous new overdraft facility in gin and tonic minus the gin, and Letitia assured him they had a breathing space of precisely two months and one
week before their cash-flow situation became critical once more.

‘And now I am going to go and get ready; I’ve bought a most lovely new dress, with a hundred yards of material in it and a pair of those marvellous platform soles exactly like Princess Margaret’s, just wait till you see them.’

‘Mother, how can you possibly afford new clothes when we can’t buy gin or pay the mortgage?’ said Julian, laughing.

‘Oh, darling, I have my account at Harrods and they are dreadfully patient about payment, and we certainly can’t afford to go round looking as if we haven’t got any money.’

‘Mother,’ said Julian, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing working for this company. I’m surprised you’re not chairman, or whatever a woman would be, of the Bank of England.’

‘Oh,’ said Letitia, ‘I very likely will be one day. I’m just doing my apprenticeship. Now, what you have to do, Julian, is take a very hard look at those customers of yours and which ones aren’t paying you quickly enough. We can’t afford charity.’

Julian was certainly not over charitable with his customers, nor was he yet in a position to refuse delivery to slow payers (although he had learnt which of his customers warranted more time and attention than others); but he was learning pragmatism in places other than the bedroom. One of his very first orders came from an old man called Bill Gibson in a small chemist shop in North London; he had taken two cases of the cough linctus and paid Julian on the spot; moreover he had told other friends in the business to see him and take some of his wares as well. Julian owed him a lot and he knew it. Bill had a struggle to keep his shop going, but it was the only living he had, or knew how to manage, and he had no pension to look forward to, it was literally his lifeblood. Besides he loved it, and was proud of it, it gave him a footing of immense respectability and responsibility in the neighbourhood and since the death of his wife it was literally all he had. He lived in permanent dread of his landlord realizing the asset he had and selling his premises over his head.

Six months after launching his company, Julian had still not managed to break into any of the big or even even medium-sized chemist chains; he knew that not only would it make all
the difference to his cash flow as well as his order books, it would give him a stature in the industry that so far he lacked.

One night over dinner he met a man called Paul Learmount, who was building up a nice line of business in outer London, buying run-down shops at cheap prices and converting them into cut-price chemist shops; he was looking for another in Bill Gibson’s area, did Julian know of any? Julian said he did, that he happened to know a place that exactly fitted Paul’s description, and moreover he could put him in touch with the landlord. Four weeks later, Bill Gibson was served notice on his premises, a brash young manager arrived to refurbish the shop, and Julian got a huge order from Learmount’s central buying office.

He took Bill Gibson out to lunch, commiserated with him over his bad luck and insisted on giving him a cheque for fifty pounds to keep him going ‘until you find your feet again. I’ll never forget what I owe you, after all, Bill.’ To his dying day, Bill Gibson spoke glowingly of Mr Morell and the way he never forgot to send him a card at Christmas time.

Within another three months demand was exceeding supply to an almost worrying extent; Julian failed to meet a couple of orders, nearly lost a crucial account, and realized he had to double both his manufacturing staff and his sales force.

This meant hiring two people: a salesman, to cover the half of the country he couldn’t efficiently reach himself, and a second pharmacist. His original pharmacist, a laconic Scotsman called Jim Macdougall, worked tirelessly, twice round the clock if necessary, performing the extremely repetitive task of filling up to five hundred bottles of linctus a day without complaint on the most primitive equipment imaginable, as well as working in his spare time on Morell Pharmaceuticals’ second product, an indigestion tablet.

The assistant Julian presented him with was a pretty young war widow called Susan Johns.

Corporal Brian Johns had been parachuted into the woods near Lyons late one night while Julian had still been living at the chateau. He had been involved in the pick-up and was responsible for arranging Johns’ transport to a nearby farm, and his liaison with another agent. Johns was only twenty,
nearly two years younger than Julian, married with two little girls, and a brilliant radio operator; he was bringing forged papers from London with him for French agents.

Julian was looking forward to his arrival; he had been feeling particularly lonely and homesick, his work had grown increasingly tedious and futile-seeming, and the thought of some English company was very pleasant.

He waited where Johns was to come down; it was a horribly bright night, but the drop had been postponed three times, and the need for the forged papers was desperate. Fortunately a bombing raid just south of Lyons had distracted the patrolling Germans for most of the night; Corporal Johns reached the ground unobserved by anyone except Julian. That was, however, the last of his good fortune. He landed awkwardly and fell heavily on some rocks; Julian heard him swear, then groan, and then nothing. He had broken both his legs; he was, for a while, mercifully unconscious. He came to in agony to see Julian bending over him.

‘Johns?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry, but I have to do this. Is your aunt still alive?’

‘She is, and has moved down to Nantes,’ said Johns, answering the coded question, and promptly passed out again.

Julian managed to get him to the farm. It was a mile and a half away, half carrying and half dragging him, and it took a nightmare three hours. He had never seen anyone in such pain, never personally felt such fear; the woods were frequently patrolled and he knew if they were caught they would face, at the very best, death. Johns was unbelievably brave, but from time to time a groan escaped him and once, when Julian tripped into a rabbit hole and let him fall to the ground, he screamed. They lay in the undergrowth for what seemed like hours, sweating, listening, shuddering with fear; Julian, glancing at Johns’ face in the moonlight, saw tears of pain on it, and blood on his lip where he had bitten it almost through in an effort to control himself, and for the thousandth time since he had arrived in France marvelled at the power of human courage and will.

He found more of it at the farm, which was already under surveillance; they took Johns in without a moment’s hesitation,
hid him in a barn, poured a bottle of brandy into him, and did what they could with his poor, shattered legs. They dared not get a doctor, but the farmer’s wife had some nursing skills; she made some splints and set them as best she could. Julian, forcing himself to watch as Johns endured this fresh agony, reflected that if his horse had been in such hopeless pain, he would have shot her without hesitation.

For two days Johns lay in the barn; Julian spent a lot of time with him. Plans were being made, an escape route being established, for his safe removal from the farm, and from France, but it meant danger for a lot of people, and Johns knew it. The Gestapo had already searched the farm twice in the past week and every peaceful hour that passed merely led them inexorably towards the next time.

Johns was plagued by guilt as much as by pain. ‘I’m so fucking bloody stupid,’ he kept saying, ‘so fucking, fucking stupid.’

Julian, unable to offer any relief from either the guilt or the pain, except ceaseless administration of the rough French brandy which only succeeded in the end in making Johns violently ill, encouraged him to talk, listening for long hours to rambling stories of Johns’ childhood (not long behind him), of his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Susan, and the birth of their two little girls. In the three years since the beginning of the war, they had spent six weeks together. He gave Julian her address and made him promise to go and find her ‘in case I don’t get back.’

‘Oh, don’t be so bloody stupid,’ said Julian, ‘of course you’ll get back. They’re working on the final details now. Another day or two and you’ll be back in a British hospital with an endless supply of morphine.’

‘Sure,’ said Johns, and Julian knew he didn’t believe him.