Something Wholesale (18 page)

I spent the next seven years tottering up the backstairs of stores with armfuls of samples or stock which I was anxious to get rid of. For hours and sometimes days I waited with my feet sinking deeper and deeper into the carpet for Buyers who had just gone on holiday, were just going, were in London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Rome, Zurich or the ladies’ powder room; had a cold, had been dismissed or had not yet been appointed; were having coffee, an affair with the Managing Director, a baby (so rare an excuse that even I was satisfied); had not yet started to buy, had finished buying, had over-bought; didn’t want anything until after the Budget, Christmas, Easter, The Funeral (in the better end of the trade the decease of Royalty was always unseasonable); thought the clothes too expensive, too old-fashioned, too smart for the provinces or just didn’t like them. Hemmed in by subterfuge I almost grew to love the ones who didn’t like them and said so. It is not a business renowned for candour. I called on the Buyer of one London Store for five years without seeing anything but her feet protruding from under a screen.

Wherever I went in England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales I was dogged by the wicker baskets which I inherited from Mr Wilkins when he gave up travelling. At least twice a day, I packed and
unpacked them, standing waist-deep in tissue paper. Although I counted them incessantly, like a warder with a working party, sometimes one would go missing, temporarily, perhaps because by nature I was less careful than Mr Wilkins. On two occasions they vanished completely. Standing on the platform at York, having just alighted from the London train I saw them stacked in the guard’s van of an express that was steaming out of the station bound for the south. Another time I saw them all sink into the Mersey when the hook came off the crane that was loading them into the Irish Packet. I was delighted, business was difficult, I was selling stock and the contents were adequately insured.

To reach my customers, besides trains and ships, I used motorcars, taxis, buses and once, during a strike which paralysed the entire island, a bicycle. Air travel was normally too expensive with such a weight of luggage but once I went to Belfast by plane five days after having had my appendix out and conducted my business propped up against the wall of a stockroom in the Grand Central Hotel. Like Mr Wilkins before me I too reached Inverness only to find that it was an early-closing day. I also spent Shrove Tuesday, 1949, marooned in Scarborough because for some unfathomable reason the inhabitants were all on the beach having a tug-of-war.

Fortunately for me, however absurd it may seem in retrospect, I had a private dream to sustain me.

One of the defects of character that I shared with my father was that I had a receptive air which encouraged other people to share with me their secret aspirations. The results of this were not always happy. In 1941 whilst I was in Tobruk a rather elderly Naval Commander approached me with the suggestion that I should test out the prototype of an infernal machine which he had invented – a torpedo that required a human being to guide it to its target which was to be the seven-thousand ton Italian cruiser,
Raimondo Montecuccoli
. The snag so far as I was concerned was that the apparatus was constructed in such a manner that its detonation required the operator to go up with it. When I showed reluctance to take part in this experiment and suggested that he should do it himself the Commander was affronted. He pointed out that if he allowed himself to be blown up with the prototype there would be no one left to construct an improved model. There was a certain truth embodied in what he said which has since gained universal acceptance amongst men of science. He never spoke to me again.

In prison I had consorted with numbers of amateur explorers: Himalayan mountaineers; men who had spent months on end in airless South American forests (one had contracted a loathsome disease in the Matto Grosso which made him yearn to eat earth); Frenchmen who had burrowed deep into the Sahara in Citroen motor-cars; and others, mostly officers of the Indian Army who had spent their leaves before the war travelling, generally without official blessing, in High Asia.

Talking with them about the wind-swept places they had visited was an agreeable form of escapism from the confined circumstances in which we found ourselves. In this cloud-cuckoo atmosphere extravagant plans were laid for vast journeys which we were to carry out together when we were finally liberated. I found myself being invited to cross Sinkiang in the opposite direction to that taken by Peter Fleming; to set off in search of a curious tribe who were reputed to live in nests in trees somewhere in the East; and to join a semi-private army called the Tochi Scouts which spent its peacetime existence skirmishing vigorously on the North-West Frontier of India.

It is a measure of my eccentricity that when I returned from Germany one of the first things I did was to prepare myself carefully for the sort of Buchanesque existence I had imagined in
prison, and which I expected to begin as soon as I had ‘found my feet’.

I ordered a formidable pair of boots from a firm that had been making the same sort of article at the time when Whymper climbed the Matterhorn. In fact, I first saw their advertisement in Murray’s Guide to Switzerland, 1878, and was agreeably surprised to find that they were still in existence.

I also expended a large number of clothing coupons on a stout knickerbocker suit made from a strong-smelling tweed, the product of a peasant industry that folded up in 1946. This together with some hairy pullovers and some stout stockings from the Outer Hebrides set me up sartorially.

Realising that it was not enough to have the proper clothes I joined a Learned Society and attended the annual dinner at which I sat between a Central European savant who spoke no English and a Rear-Admiral who turned out to be stone-deaf. I was ready for anything – but nothing happened. The men I had known in prison had returned whence they came. I felt a little hurt and very much alone.

But although this came as a shock to my pride I was determined to use up some of the excess energy and imagination I had accumulated and I took to packing my knickerbocker suit and my great boots at the bottom of one of the wicker baskets whenever I was doomed to spend the weekend away from home. So that on Friday evening if I found myself in Newcastle I used to put my baskets in the Left Luggage at the station, change into my grotesque outfit and set off for the lonely country beyond the Roman Wall.

In Glasgow I used to leave the collection hanging up in the sitting-room at the hotel. During working hours I used to hide my boots in a wicker basket and my hairy suit hung on one of the rails with the other suits in the collection as far away as possible
from the things I hoped to sell. In spite of this it was actually ordered on one occasion by the owner of a small business in Galashiels who was under the impression that it formed part of the collection.

‘Now that’s the sort of jacket our ladies like, Mr Newby. It’s a great pity you haven’t anything else like that. I should have ordered it. But you know what Galashiels is. I can only have one of a style.’

Glasgow was my real stepping-off place. On Friday evenings I used to leave for the hills, returning by an early train on Monday morning covered in mire. In this way I made solitary and to me impressive excursions into the wild country about Ben Ime and Ben Vorlich; once I crossed the Moor of Rannoch in a snowstorm.

The only persons who knew anything about these journeys were Wanda and the Hall Porter at the Station Hotel. It was his job to look up the trains and work out the connections that would get me back to Glasgow on Monday morning. He regarded it as a piece of amiable lunacy, less demanding than some of the requests made to him by commercials stranded in his hotel for the week-end.

If I had to take a model girl with me on the journey these arrangements became even more complicated. I usually managed to avoid this by showing the dresses ‘in the hand’ but with some of the more sophisticated evening dresses which I was trying to foist on the customers it was commercial suicide to show them on a hanger and I had to take a model girl. It was a depressing business; either they were the victims of long-standing engagements and were saving-up for three-piece suites or else they suffered from weak ankles. Only one insisted that she was an outdoor girl and set off to accompany me to the summit of Arthur’s Seat, an eminence in the outskirts of Edinburgh, in high heels – the only shoes she had with her. She made it but although
it was a remarkable tour-de-force the experiment was never repeated.

In spite of my enthusiasm, after two years I cancelled my subscription to the Learned Society. The reports in the Journal of ‘A New Route Through the Pamirs’ or ‘Some Notes On A Visit To The Nomads of Central Afghanistan’ had for me a mocking quality in the way of life in which I found myself. Even the tickets for the monthly lectures went unused, except as firelighters.

It was not until 1956 when Lane and Newby’s as I knew it was no more that someone suggested that I should go on an expedition with him to a range of mountains called the Hindu Kush.
^*

^*
See
A Short Walk in The Hindu Kush
.

For my father the peak of the year was in July when he went up to Henley for the Regatta. At Henley he was a member of Remenham. The Remenham Club is situated just short of a mile from the start. It only really exists at the time of the Regatta, when large marquees are erected in which members and their loved ones gorge themselves on lobster and strawberries and cream. There is an excellent bar for those who have outgrown food.

If ever there was a place where the stiff upper lip was cultivated it was the Remenham Club. An Englishman needed it in the years following the war in order to support such a succession of foreign victories. There, before the installation of loud speakers which allowed members to hear what was going on elsewhere on the course, one could pass the whole week of the Regatta in a cloud-cuckoo-land of one’s own creation, admittedly seeing the racing at a crucial point, yet never actually seeing a finish. In all the years my father was a member I don’t believe he saw the finish of a single race.

Members and their guests sat in deck chairs behind a privet hedge or in a sort of striped gazebo which was pitched on a slight eminence, only rising from time to time in order to shout ‘well rowed’, usually, more’s the pity, to Kent School or Massachusetts,
before sinking down and relapsing into a coma until the next race. Members of American crews would sometimes, provided that they had been knocked out of the racing and were allowed to eat as other men, be invited to a solid tea. With their crew-cuts, at that time still a novelty, they made a startling contrast to the members in their club caps, blazers and white trousers, like visitors from outer space which, in a sense, they were.

For very old, very respected members there was a raised seat built of teak, the gift of an elderly benefactor. Although it gave an excellent view of the course downstream to Temple Island where the start was, it was noticeable that anyone who sat on it, however robust, rarely lasted more than a few seasons.

‘I’m blowed if I’ll sit on it,’ said my father when some ancient oarsman invited him to do so. At this time, in 1947, he was seventy-three. ‘I’ll wait a bit, until I’m old.’

And by the standards of the rowing world he really was young. One of his great cronies had been W. H. Eyre. Eyre – everyone called him ‘Piggie’ – was born in 1848 and had rowed in the Thames Crew that won the Grand Challenge Cup in 1876. He spoke a wonderful English that has gone completely out of use, the sort that people talk in novels by Surtees and
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
, and he was very deaf.

‘Can’t hear a word the young feller’s saying,’ he once roared in the middle of the Prince of Wales’ after-dinner speech to the Thames Rowing Club.

At Henley he was a tremendous figure, wearing a black-and-white straw hat with a serrated edge like a circular saw. He used to put up at the Red Lion by Henley Bridge and was sculled about each day in a skiff as big as a Royal Daimler by a succession of oarsmen who were on a roster for instant call should he want to go down the course.

Although his appearance was pugnacious he was not so by
nature, and he took a great interest in rowing men who did not belong to fashionable clubs like Thames or London.

‘I see the—Rowing Club Trustees hold a lease under which they are bound to do all repairs which, through my own carelessness (I am not so with clients), I did not know,’ he wrote in a letter to my father in the Autumn of 1938 when he was ninety. ‘You seemed to think they were likely to wind up, but I find they pay their rent promptly every quarter, so I hope they will be able to keep on. I did know two or three of their leading men but I have quite forgotten them.’

At that time, in 1938, Mr Eyre even took an interest in my own more juvenile affairs. Hearing that I was to be apprenticed in a Finnish barque he was most disturbed.

‘It surprises me,’ he wrote in the same letter, ‘that Eric wants to be a sailor, and I do strongly hope that he will reconsider it, as I am certain his Mother is
sure to miss him dreadfully
; as you will also. You say that he is to be apprenticed, but I think he would give it up unless the conditions are very far better than I can remember when I was a small boy of the voyage out to New Zealand, and two years later, when we returned in a 700 ton barque, a most stormy voyage which lasted nearly six months! We were nearly wrecked coming round Cape Horn (Southernmost tip of South America) and had to put in at the Island of St Helena for provisions.

‘I was nearly ten years old then and my brother and I used to go up the masts and out on the yards and do lots of little odd jobs for the skipper and the mates. We knew every rope in the ship and lots of “Shanties”. The apprentice’s life was a
very hard one
and the poor fellows used to get a rope’s ending from our severe old skipper (a very painful operation), but I suppose there will be nothing like that on the “Line” you mention. But he will be away continually, and subject to continual risks so, as he is
your only child, I do hope that you will arrange for him to have a trial voyage before he becomes bound to serve five years, or whatever the term is.

‘Talk it over with Mrs Newby and then, both of you, do all you can with the boy. Surely if he does not like Commerce there are many occupations in which he would probably do well. You might article him in some good solicitors’ firm where he would get plenty of time for rowing and all other amusements whilst serving his time – or a chartered accountants’ is a good “Trade” to learn as they are fit for all kinds of well-paid Government and other posts. As are also properly trained Engineers, either Civil or Mechanical – but you probably know as much or far more than I do about starting a clever young fellow in life.

‘Forgive my bothering you with all this but I cannot help feeling very strongly that, for yours and his mother’s sake, he should be kept in England.’

To any reader who has managed to get this far it must be obvious that the affairs of Lane and Newby Limited were not prospering in the post-war years as they should have been. The business resembled a religious house in which the members are so old that in order to carry on the daily work of the community a whole force of lay-brothers has to be recruited to hew the wood and draw the water. If the business lasted long enough my father and mother were faced with the prospect of having to pension off more than half the staff without the assistance of a pension scheme. To me it seemed better that I should leave, but whenever I suggested doing so I was reminded that the whole thing was being kept going for my benefit. To me it seemed a dubious inheritance.

Now, on every side, new, livelier firms were springing up whose principals appreciated the importance of promoting their products
by giving them brand names that were redolent of candle-light and high-living for which we were no match. Most of our customers removed our labels at any rate, substituting their own; ‘Made expressly for Throttle and Fumble’ they proclaimed or, in some cases, more shamelessly ‘Made in our Own Workrooms’. Whilst flattering, this was unlikely to bring our name before the public.

One of the most insurmountable problems was my father himself. Omnipresent, ever optimistic, constantly devising new schemes for clearing my nasal passages and shoring up the tottering edifice that was his business, but at the same time turning a blind eye to the retribution that overhung us like a great stalactite, which after five thousand years has been rendered dangerous by high explosive, he had two blind spots in his make-up that ultimately were to prove our undoing. Chartered Accountants and Income Tax.

After the ruinous departure of Mr Lane my father had taken into partnership another man, who had been a member of Lane and Newby’s since its inception. Unfortunately, although the new partner was morally blameless, he was far less competent than his predecessor and the business suffered even more. Eventually death had removed him too and my father was forced to turn his business into a Limited Company.

It seems probable that no one ever succeeded in explaining to my father what the formation of a Limited Liability Company entailed. I think he believed that it was a polite fiction that divested him of the onus of liability and at the same time allowed him to be a partnership without a partner.

It would be easy to lay the blame for this at the door of his accountants, but it would scarcely be just to do so. They were a firm of almost incredible rectitude. For years they had been imploring him to let off those parts of the premises that were put
to no practical use. The building was held on a lease and there came a time, in the middle of the Blitz, when it would have been possible for the Company to acquire the freehold extremely cheaply. But at the time my father was seriously ill and convinced that I would never return alive and the project was allowed to lapse. It is difficult to believe that it was allowed to but it was. Overnight we acquired new landlords and things were not as they had been. The new lease was extremely short and the rent rose to an unprecedented level.

Far worse was the question of expenses and taxation. As a partnership my father’s business was inextricably mixed up with his private life. If he wanted a boat varnished he had it varnished. If he wanted to go to Henley he went to Henley. He never experienced any difficulty. For years and years his business was solvent and, providing that his partner did not object, there was no one else to object.

Once Lane and Newby became Lane and Newby Limited everything was quite different – except to my father. The elderly accountant, who used to spend a week on our premises each year getting out the figures was in despair. He used to hover apprehensively in the hall for hours with a list of unacceptable expenses waiting for my father to arrive.

‘Mr Newby, I must speak to you.’

‘Ah, nice to see you, Perkins,’ my father would say genially. He had probably just returned from some eccentric errand such as the one when my mother, who had a house property in a seedy part of Pimlico, had asked him to collect the rent which had fallen into arrears. Apparently the house had become infested with whores.

‘I’ll get ’em out!’ said my father, ferociously, and proceeded to give my mother a lecture on the folly of being soft-hearted with her tenants and her general incompetence as a Landlord. He had
returned some time later without the rent, having bought the elderly mother of the three tarts a bottle of Guinness.

‘She was a miserable old thing with varicose veins,’ he said. ‘There were three daughters. They all had children, all illegitimate. One of them had a nasty cough. People like that have no idea how to manage their own affairs.’

‘Mr Newby,’ Mr Perkins would say, ‘I’m afraid there are certain expenses here that the Inspector is likely to query. In fact I fear that he may find them totally inadmissible. Perhaps you would be kind enough to cast your eye over them … For instance, this!

‘Doing up bathroom in flat £20 0s. 0d. I don’t think the Inspector will accept that.’

‘Oh,’ said my father, bristling as he always did when the Inspector of Taxes was mentioned. ‘And why not? It’s my bathroom, isn’t it?’

‘That’s just the point, Mr Newby, it’s your bathroom, not the property of the business.’

‘We used to have a bathroom here at 54, until the fire. Surely I’m entitled to a bathroom?’

‘You can build a bathroom here at number 54 if you want to, Mr Newby, although I imagine the Inspector would query that too; but you can’t charge up your own bathroom.’

‘I can’t see why not,’ my father said. ‘There’s still only one bathroom.’

The Accountant abandoned the struggle. ‘You want to leave it in?’ he said.

‘Well I’m certainly not going to pay it out of my own pocket. This fellow’s just a doctrinaire, Jack-in-office,’ my father said.

‘Then there’s this item. “Visit to Naval Review, Spithead. Fares. Train to Portsmouth and ticket on paddle steamer and return.” Mr Newby, the Inspector will have a fit.’

‘We had a jolly good day,’ my father said indignantly. ‘We saw
the
Vanguard
, a magnificent vessel but a complete waste of taxpayers’ money. It’s people like me who paid for it.’

‘But Mr Newby, were the expenses incurred solely and wholly on the Company’s business? If so you can charge them as “Visit to Portsmouth” and they will be allowable.’

My father ignored this helping hand.

‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘I took the day off.’

‘You know,’ he said when the Accountant had withdrawn to his cubby hole, ‘these taxation people are strangling the country – cutting off its life-blood.’

The financial difficulties in which the firm found itself were not of particularly recent origin. Paradoxically, only the outbreak of War had saved it from extinction. In the winter of 1937 a serious crisis arose but on that occasion it seemed that financial assistance might come from an unexpected quarter and put the business on its feet when one morning a letter arrived from Mr Eyre inviting my father and myself to lunch with him at his club in Pall Mall. In spite of the fact that I knew that I myself was unlikely to inherit anything from anyone, on this occasion, although I was only eighteen years old, I did cherish a hope that perhaps something might be forthcoming that would at least help my father to emerge from the financial labyrinth into which he had already strayed and from which there seemed to be no visible exit; especially as Mr Eyre’s letter was couched in what, to say the least of it, were rather mysterious terms.

‘I think that it is time for us to meet and have a good talk about the future,’ he wrote. ‘Although I feel in good health how long will it last if I get no more hard exercise?’