A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (22 page)

By the time we had finished breakfast it was ten past nine. In twenty minutes the first customer was due to arrive.

There was no time to wash or shave. We raced to the Stockroom. To me it seemed inconceivable that one night in a cabin trunk could have wreaked such havoc upon dresses that had been packed with such care. Mrs Ribble’s crêpes looked as though they had been used for the purpose of garrotting someone. Even the woollen dresses looked as though they had been trampled underfoot as I hung them on the rails which had been provided by the stockroom porter. Only Mr Wilkins’ coats and suits, heavy, tailored garments, had escaped unscathed. By this time I was used to Mr Wilkins’ monopoly of good fortune. He seemed to bear a charmed life.

‘Now, Mr Eric,’ said Mr Wilkins, ‘this is the programme for today.’

It was now nine-twenty-seven. He handed me a sheet of hotel writing paper, part of a large supply which he had filched on the way to breakfast, on which he had drawn up a time-table:

To me it seemed more like a gathering of the clans in some rainswept glen than an assignation to buy dresses in the sub-basement of a Railway Hotel.

In the three minutes that remained to us before the arrival of Mrs McHaggart, Mr Wilkins briefed me on their idiosyncrasies. Just as a last-minute revision outside the examination hall is useless so Mr Wilkins’ brilliant summing-up only increased my confusion.

‘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 otherwise – and she knows it. The women here know everything,’ he said, gloomily. ‘You can’t keep anything from them. They all have friends and 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 then we don’t show the things she’s chosen 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 important thing is to keep the three of 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. 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 to them all at the same time – we don’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 we don’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”,’ said Mr Wilkins, ‘on account of her name being Reekie. I usually take Miss McTush and Mrs McHavers out to lunch together because Mrs McHavers comes from Dundee. On Tuesday I take Mrs McHaggart. First thing on Tuesday morning I call on the ones who haven’t given us an appointment. With luck we see some of them in the afternoon or on Wednesday morning. We usually manage to get off to Glasgow on Wednesday afternoon for an appointment in the evening.’

‘Don’t you give Mrs McRobbie lunch?’

‘She’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. We were off.

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 motor-cars, 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.

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 Matter-horn. 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.

Realizing 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 week-end 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.

At that time I was working for Worth-Paquin, a couture house in Grosvenor Street.

With all the lights on and the door shut to protect us from the hellish draught that blew up the backstairs, the fitting-room was like an oven fitted with mirrors. There were four of us jammed in it: Hyde-Clarke, the designer; Milly, a very contemporary model girl with none of the normal protuberances; the sour-looking fitter in whose workroom the dress was being made; and Newby.

Things were not going well. It was the week before the showing of the 1956 Spring Collection, a time when the
vendeuses
crouched behind their little cream and gold desks, doodling furiously, and the Directors swooped through the vast empty showrooms switching off lights in a frenzy of economy, plunging whole wings into darkness. It was a time of endless fittings, the girls in the workrooms working late. The corset-makers, embroiderers, furriers, milliners, tailors, skirt-makers and matchers all involved in disasters and overcoming them – but by now slightly insane.

This particular dress was a disaster that no one was going to overcome. Its real name, the one on the progress board on the wall of the fitting-room, pinned up with a little flag and a cutting of the material, was
Royal Yacht
, but by general consent we all called it
Grand Guignol
.

I held a docket on which all the components used in its construction were written down as they were called up from the stockroom. The list already covered an entire sheet. It was not only a hideous dress; it was soaking up money like a sponge.