A Traveller’s Life. Eric Newby
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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