A Traveller’s Life. Eric Newby
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also on the first floor. There, the infant Newby was shaped up again, after having spent some happy minutes snipping away at his noddle with a pair of stealthily acquired nail scissors while seated incommunicado on the pot in front of the gas fire which by this time had replaced the coal fire in my nursery at Three Ther Mansions.
To me Harrods was not a shop. It was, apart from being the place where I had my hair cut, a whole fascinating world, entirely separate from the one that I normally inhabited. It was a world that, although finite in its extent (it covered thirteen acres), I never explored completely, never could, because although at the early age of which I am writing I did not realize this, it was one in which fresh vistas were constantly being revealed, as the management either opened up new, sometimes ephemeral departments or introduced innovations within existing ones.
For instance, in 1929, following Lindbergh’s solo crossing of the Atlantic, they opened up an Aviation Department and taught some of their customers to fly. Eventually, when there were not enough potential aviators left untaught among their customers to make it worthwhile keeping it open, it quietly faded away.
‘Hold my hand tight, or you’ll get lost,’ my mother used to say, as she moved through the store, browsing here and there like some elegant ruminant, a gazelle perhaps, or else walking more purposefully if she was on her way to some specific destination, as she often was. My mother was not the sort of person who only entered Harrods in order to shelter from the rain. Once she was in it, she was there as a potential buyer.
And I did hold tight. Get lost in Harrods and you had every chance, I believed, in ending up in the equivalent of that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns, which when I became a grown-up with an account of my own I located somewhere between Adjustments and Personal Credit (which comprehended Overdue Accounts) and the Funeral Department, for those whose shopping days were done but whose credit was still good, both of which were on the fourth floor.
This world, which I was forced to regard from what was practically floor level, was made up of the equivalents of jungles, savannas, mountains, arctic wastes and even deserts. All that was lacking were seas and lakes and rivers, although at one time I distinctly remember there being some kind of fountain. The jungles were the lavish displays of silk and chiffon printed with exotic fruits and lush vegetation in which I was swallowed up as soon as I entered Piece Goods, on the ground floor, which made the real Flower Department seem slightly meagre by contrast. The biggest mountains were in the Food Halls, also on the ground floor, where towering ranges and isolated stacks of the stuff rose high above me, composed of farmhouse Cheddars, Stiltons, foie gras in earthenware pots, tins of biscuits, something like thirty varieties of tea and at Christmas boxes of crackers with wonderful fillings (musical instruments that really worked, for instance), ten-pound puddings made with ale and rum and done up in white cloths, which retailed at £ 1.07½ ($4.17) the month that I was born. Some of these apparently stable massifs were more stable than others and I once saw and heard with indescribable delight a whole display of tins of Scotch shortbread avalanche to the ground, making a most satisfactory noise.
In the great vaulted hall, decorated with medieval scenes of the chase, and with metal racks for hanging the trophies of it, where Harrods’s Fishmongers and Purveyors of Game and the assembled Butchers confronted one another across the central aisle, there were other mountainous displays of crabs, scallops, Aberdeen smokies, turbot and halibut, Surrey fowls and game in season on one side; and on the other, hecatombs of Angus Beef, South Down Lamb and Mutton.
The savannas were on the second floor, in Model Gowns, Model Coats and Model Costumes, endless expanses of carpet with here and there a solitary creation on a stand rising above it, like lone trees in a wilderness.
To me unutterably tedious were the unending, snowy-white wastes of the Linen Hall, coloured bed linen, coloured blankets, even coloured bath towels, except for the ends (headings) which were sometimes decorated with blue or red stripes, being – if not unknown – unthinkable at that time (coloured blankets, usually red, were for ambulances and hospitals). In it articles were on sale that not even my mother was tempted to buy: tablecloths eight yards long to fit tables that could seat two dozen guests, sheets and blankets ten feet wide, specially made to fit the big, old four-poster beds still apparently being slept in by some customers, in their moated granges.
Higher still, on the third floor, were what I regarded as the deserts of the Furniture Departments. It took something like ten minutes to get around these vast, and to me as uninteresting as the Linen Hall, expanses, in which the distances between the individual pieces were measured in yards rather than feet.
This ‘Harrods’s World’ even had its own animal population in what the management called Livestock up on the second floor, what customers of my age group and most grown-ups called the zoo. In it the noise was deafening, what with macaws that could live for sixty years or so, Electus parrots in brilliant greens and reds and purples, according to sex, parrots that could speak – they had to pass a test to ensure that they did not use bad language – and other rare Asian birds, as well as puppies, kittens, guinea-pigs, mice, tortoises, armadillos and Malabar squirrels. I got my first mouse at Harrods.
But the greatest treat of all was a visit to the Book Department. I was not allowed to visit the Toy Department, except for my birthday, or at Christmas. In fact it was not very interesting except at Christmas time when it expanded for a month or two, then contracted again when the sales began in January, until the following November or December; and it was never as good in those days as Hamleys Toy Shop in Regent Street.
Although my mother refused to supply me with toys on demand on these journeys through Harrods (for that is what they were to me), she would always allow me to choose a book. The first book I can ever remember having, a Dean’s Rag Book, printed on untearable linen, came from Harrods, although even then I found it difficult to think of something printed on linen (or whatever it was) as a book. Once I was in the Book Department it was very difficult to dislodge me, and it was only because I was actually being bought a book that I left it without tears, and to this day I find it almost impossible even to walk through this department en route elsewhere, without buying a book I didn’t know I wanted.
Beyond the Book Department was the huge, reverberating, rather dimly lit Piano Department, where salesmen who dressed and looked like bank managers used to hover among the instruments, trying to put a brave face on it when I ran my fingers along the keys of their Bechstein Grands as we passed through, probably on our way to Gramophone Records, of which my mother, who loved dance music and dancing, had already amassed a large collection. Sometimes a visitor to the store who was also a pianist would take his seat at one of the grand pianos and this otherwise rather gloomy room would be filled with wonderful sounds.
It was from this department that there emanated, by way of Accounts, a bill made out to my father for one of these grand pianos, at a cost of something like £125 ($531) but expressed in guineas, which when it was finally sorted out was reduced to one of about £1.25 ($5.31) for a couple of visits by a piano tuner to Three Ther Mansions in order to tune our modest, upright Chappell, the grand piano having been charged to him in error. Until long after the Second World War, really until they installed a computer, Accounts had a dottiness about them that was sometimes, but not always, endearing; and until the computer was installed it was perfectly possible to order a pound or two of smoked salmon to be delivered from the Food Hall and not actually pay for it until three or more months later.
After seeing some or all of all this, for if my mother went to Harrods in the morning she would also spend part of the afternoon there, she would whisk me off to the Ladies’ Retiring Room on the fourth floor where she freshened us both up before taking me to lunch in the Restaurant where, jacked up in a special infant’s chair which elevated my nose and mouth above what would have been, sitting in an ordinary chair, the level of the table, I ate what at that time was my favourite meal, half portions of tomato soup, fried plaice and creamed potatoes. After this we again repaired to the Ladies’ Retiring Room, which I recall as being rather grand and commodious, for a brief period of doing nothing.
It is now many years since I have visited this room. Even when I used to visit it fairly frequently you had to be pretty young to be allowed in if you were a man; but I distinctly remembered on one occasion seeing what