CHAPTER FOUR Travels in Harrods

      As I indicated in an earlier chapter, my mother was a customer of Harrods before I was born. She had worked as a model girl in one of its fashion departments as long ago as 1912 and could probably have found her way around the place blindfolded. At the time she worked there it is unlikely that she was a model girl in the present sense of the word. Poiret, it is claimed, ‘invented’ them in 1919. Her job, or part of it, would probably have been to try on new stock when it came into the store so that the buyer, who at that time would have also been the department manager, or one of her deputies if they were inexpensive versions of ‘models’, could detect any defects which could give her the excuse, always a temptation if the buyer had over-bought, to send the garments back to the suppliers with a debit note. In the jargon this operation was known as ‘passing’.

      For those who have not read Something Wholesale, an account of my life with my parents in the garment industry, this would seem to be an appropriate moment to interpolate a little more information about my father.

      My father was apprenticed to the drapery trade in 1887 at the age of thirteen, in the Brompton Road, where he slept under the counter of the shop, which was then commonplace. Later he graduated to the drapery department of Debenham and Freebody, which he left to become a partner in the firm of Lane and Newby, Mantle and Gown Manufacturers and Wholesale Costumiers, which was how the firm’s letterheading described the scope of its activities well into the 1950s. He was an all-round sportsman, a pupil of Sandow, the strongest man in the world, who eventually destroyed himself by lifting an enormous motor car out of a ditch unaided. My father used to go down to Whitechapel to be ‘pummelled’ by pugilists in order to toughen himself up, and after vigorous outings on the Thames in what are known as tub pairs and tub fours, used to bathe, winter and summer, in the now-polluted waters of the river Wandle where it entered the Thames at Wandsworth, before setting off to work in ‘The Drapery’. He was a rowing man before everything, even before his business. So great was his passion for rowing that he had left his newly married wife (my mother-to-be) at the wedding reception at Pagani’s in Great Portland Street on learning that it was just coming on to high water at Hammersmith and had gone down to the river by cab for what he described as ‘a jolly good blow’ in his doublesculler with his best man, who eventually became my godfather, returning hours later to his flat to find his bride in tears and having missed the boat train for Paris where the honeymoon was to be spent at the Lotti. His ambition was that I should win the Diamond Sculls at Henley, and in this ambition he was aided and abetted by my godfather, a crusty old Scot if ever there was one, who had himself won the Diamonds and the Stockholm Olympics in 1912.

      To help me to victory in this and life’s race my father insisted that my bowels should open at precisely the same moment every morning (this was at a time when certain Harley Street surgeons were advocating the removal of whole stretches of their patients’ digestive tracts in the belief that whatever was passing through would emerge at the other end with as little delay as possible and thus avoid ‘poisoning’ the owner). In addition, he made me sniff up salt and water so that my nasal passages might remain equally clear, and have a cold bath each morning, winter and summer. When I was older I learned from him that besides keeping one in trim, cold baths were an aid against filthy thoughts, although I never found them to be of any remote use for this purpose (as useless as telling an Eskimo that he won’t have filthy thoughts if he sits on an iceberg). In the early mornings I accompanied him on brisk trots along the towing path at Hammersmith, or down deserted suburban streets, punting a football, which I thoroughly enjoyed. At the age of six or so I learned to row our sumptuous, Three Men in a Boat-type, double-sculling skiff, which was kept at Richmond and in which we used to go camping ‘up-river’, wielding one enormous scull as an oar. In the same way my mother, who had been a model girl in my father’s firm, and who was more than twenty years younger than he was and still went with him to Paris long after they were married to buy models from Poiret, Chéruit, Patou and others which were made to her lath-like proportions, had been turned into a very stylish oarswoman.

      Although my mother no longer worked for Harrods she had not lost her enthusiasm for the store. She was no mean spender, my mother, and she went through the place like a combine harvester on my behalf. This trait of extravagance was belied by her rather sad, tranquil expression when in repose, just as it belied her vivacity and fondness for company.

      Thus a complete set of gear awaited me on 6 December when I turned up, most of it procured from Harrods ‘on account’. It included the pram with its fringed sun awning, an ‘extra’ bought in anticipation that I would survive until the summer of 1920, the ‘French bassinet’ with its iron stand and an arm which supported the baldacchino of fine cotton voile under which I lay tippling gripewater; a white-enamelled folding-bath, complete with soap dish containing a cake of Harrods’s ‘own make’ baby soap and a sponge tray with one of their ‘specially selected sponges’ in it; a spring balance with a wicker basket, capable of weighing babies up to twenty-five pounds, which was later converted for use in the kitchen by the substitution of a metal pan for the basket; and a nursery screen. Surrounded with this and other equipment (I cannot remember the lot, but this is some of what survived until I was older and could remember), I must have looked like a beleaguered traveller behind a makeshift breastwork awaiting a charge by fuzzy-wuzzies.

      If anything ran short which she thought was better ordered from Harrods than bought locally, or she saw something that caught her fancy in their catalogue, my mother used to say, ‘I’ll get on the telephone to Harrods,’ the telephone being a solid, upright metal instrument with a separate receiver, weighing pounds, which householders were beginning to find useful for laying out the first wave of post-war housebreakers who were now just beginning to come back into circulation, a process that could operate in reverse if the burglar picked it up first. To my mother, the possibility of being able to telephone for a consignment of Harrods’s Finest French Sardines in Olive Oil or some bottles of Rubinat Water, which she used as an aperient, and receive them that same afternoon, delivered in a shiny green van with the royal arms on it, was magic.

      What was probably my first visit to Harrods, the first I can remember, anyway, took place on the occasion of the rigging out of Lily in Nurses’ Uniforms, at that time on the first floor. I remember it not because it was intrinsically interesting but because it took ages and because at one stage all three of us, together with a saleswoman, were crammed into a very small, stifling fitting-room, like the Marx Brothers in the cabin scene on the transatlantic liner in A Night at the Opera.

      From Nurses’ Uniforms I was