The Last Grain Race. Eric Newby
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whenever a Director appeared. It was nothing for a client being hurried past the Layout Department to less controversial regions to be treated to a display of paper dart flying. (Once a potential customer was hit on the nose by an ink pellet.) The Prep-School Heart still beat strongly in Layout and Ideas.
I had started my uneasy career in the Checking Department at the age of sixteen. Miss Phrygian had escorted me there. On the way we passed the Porter’s cubby hole; inside, half a dozen evil-looking messenger boys were waiting to take blocks to Fleet Street. There were more seats than messenger boys and I found Miss Phrygian casting a speculative look at the empty places. For a moment I thought she was going to enlist me in their ranks, but she must have remembered my father’s insistence on the value of the business methods I was going to learn, and we passed on.
In the narrow, airless transepts of the Checking Department, where the electric lights burned permanently, I thumbed my way through the newspapers and periodicals of the world to make sure that our advertisements were appearing on schedule and the right way up, which they failed to do quite frequently in some of the more unsophisticated newspapers from rugged and distant parts of the globe. Some of the advertisements had to be cut out and pasted in a book. We always cut out Carter’s Little Liver Pills, but I never discovered the reason. Turning the pages of thousands of newspapers day after day, I accumulated knowledge of the most recondite subjects – croquet matches between missionaries in Basutoland, reports of conventions of undertakers at South Bend, Indiana, great exhibitions for tram ticket collectors in the Midlands – the world spread out before me.
When I was not speculating about what I read, I would fight with Stan, a great dark brute of a boy, one of the two assistants in the Department, to whom I had become quite attached. Both Stan and Les, the second assistant, called me ‘Noob’.
‘’Ere, Noob, what abaht a pummel?’ Stan would croak invitingly, and we would pummel one another until Miss Phrygian banged furiously on the frosted glass of her office door to stop the din.
Les, the other checker, had a less rugged exterior than Stan and a passion for Italian opera on which he spent all his money. He would often appear in the morning, dark-eyed and lifeless after long hours in the Gallery at Covent Garden, drop a leaden hand on my shoulder and greet me: ‘’Lo, Noob. Jer ’ear Gilli lars ni’? … Bleedin’ marvellous.’
The Department was presided over by a gnome-like little man who knew everything there was to know about his job and had such a retentive memory that he could tell you without hesitation on which page of some old Regimental magazine a sherry advertisement had appeared. Quite naturally our behaviour often exasperated him and he would turn to Stan and me, who were locked in an orgy of ‘pummelling’, and say: ‘’Ere, for Christ sake! turn it in!’
From time to time we would be visited by the Contact Men who dealt personally with Wurzel’s clients and handled the advertising accounts. They would stand gingerly in our den and turn the pages of the glossy magazines with beautifully manicured fingers. They were all youngish, perfectly dressed in Hawes and Curtis suits, and they smelled of bay rum. The amorous complications of their private lives were hair-raising. One of them owned a Bentley. They all wore clove carnations every day except Saturdays when they were in tweeds and went to the ‘country’ around Sunningdale. I always felt a clod in their presence and for some time after their visits disinclined to pummel. More popular were the visits of the typists. Wurzel’s was run on pseudo-American lines and had a splendid collection. Two of the most popular were Lettice Rundle and Lilly Reidenfelt. Lilly was the more provocative of the two. It was generally conceded that Lettice was the sort of girl you married and had children by after trying Miss Reidenfelt, who was expected to run to fat.
When Miss Reidenfelt entered the Checking Department, Stan, the Man of Action, would be stricken dumb and with eyes cast down would trace bashful circles amongst the waste paper with his toe. Les, Socialite and Dreamer, knew better how to please, and, more forthcoming, usually succeeded in pinching her. At such times what little air there was would be so heavy with lust that I would develop an enormous headache of the kind usually brought on by thundery weather. When Miss Reidenfelt had finally minced away inviolate, Stan would fling himself at the piles of newspaper in the steel fixtures and punch them in torment, crying: ‘Oh, you lovely bit of gravy.’
After what seemed an eternity in this very unhealthy place, I graduated to the Filing Department where the proofs of the advertisements were kept. Here I had Miss Reidenfelt all to myself when she visited me in search of proofs; but I was much too much in awe of her to take advantage of my hard-won advancement. I found that the white-collar boys in the outer office, where twenty telephones rang incessantly, felt just the same about Miss Reidenfelt as Les, Stan and I had in our more private labyrinth. In a more primitive society Miss Reidenfelt would have been the central figure in a fertility rite and would by now have rated a six-figure entry in the index to ‘The Golden Bough’.
Next I went to ‘Art’, of which I remember little except wearing a smock, being covered with bicycle tyre solution (which ‘Art’ used in gallons), and my surprise, when, after standing for hours being sketched for an advertisement for mass-produced clothes, I found that I had emerged on paper as a sunburned, moustached figure wearing a Brigade Tie and a bowler hat. Long afterwards I cherished the hope that this picture might lure some unwary Adjutant of the Grenadiers into our clients’ emporium, where he would certainly be provided with a very remarkable suit. Julian had had one of them by his desk for some time. He said it inspired him. The canvas used in its construction was so stiff that with a little effort it could be made to stand up alone like a suit of armour.
From Art I moved to the outer office and bought myself some white collars and a more grown-up suit. Here I was in full view of Mr McBean, the Scots Manager, who, with his bald head, horn rims and slightly indignant expression, seemed to swim in his glass-bound office like some gigantic turbot; only the absence of bubbles when he dictated to Miss Rundle showed that Mr McBean breathed the same air as the rest of us. He had a facility shared by fish and London taxis for turning very rapidly in his tracks, and sometimes, thinking myself undetected, I would find him glowering at me from his aquarium. He disapproved of frivolity and my reputation had preceded me when I joined his department.
With such experiences behind me it was easy to believe the Porter when he said I was going to be sacked, and when I went into the main office through the swing doors in the reception counter I was filled with strangely pleasant forebodings. By this time the place would normally have been a babel, but this morning the atmosphere was chilly, tragic and unnaturally quiet. Lettice Rundle was having a good cry over her Remington and the group of young men who handled the Cereal Account were shovelling piles of proofs and stereos into a dustbin and removing their personal belongings from drawers. Years later I was to witness similar scenes in Cairo when Middle East headquarters became a great funeral pyre of burning documents as the Germans moved towards the Delta. But this was my first experience of an evacuation.
It was easy to see that besides myself quite a number of people were about to leave. Those remaining pored over their tasks with unnatural solicitude and averted their eyes from their unfortunate fellows. I had no personal possessions to put together. My hat was in the cloakroom where it had remained for two years. I had never taken it out but sometimes I dusted it, as Mr McBean from time to time checked up on the whereabouts of the more junior and unstable members of the staff by identifying the hats in the cloakroom. This was my alibi; with my hat in its place I was permanently somewhere in the building.
This morning Mr McBean was not in his office. He was not an unkindly man and the decimation of his staff had probably upset him. I went up to Leopold, the bright and intelligent Jew who looked and sounded so much like Groucho Marx that I had once seen him signing the autograph albums of eager fans in the street. He was smoking an enormous Trichinopoly cheroot – the product of one of the smaller accounts which he helped to handle in addition to breakfast food. I asked him what went on.
‘We’ve lost Brekkabitz, dear boy.’
‘I suppose it was your fault, Leo. I must say I thought some of the stuff you put out was positively filthy.’
He removed the cheroot from his mouth and blew a great cloud of smoke in my face. I began to understand why the sales