Departures and Arrivals. Eric Newby
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there we were looking for the spookiest place in Riverview Gardens and this was it. But the most memorable time for our gang was when my mother, who liked the idea of a gang, rigged us out as ghosts, using old dust sheets. Dressed all in white, with tall, conical hats stuffed with tissue paper to keep them upright and slits for eyeholes, we looked like miniature members of the Ku-Klux-Klan, or penitents in Holy Week.
Wearing these outfits, we used to swoop down The Gardens, making ghastly ghostly noises, alarming the inhabitants of the flats and gesticulating at the passengers on the upper decks of the Number 9 buses.
By the time I married Wanda in Florence in 1946, I had already lived for nearly twenty years in Castelnau Mansions and I felt that I had had enough of it. Already, by the time I was nine or ten and was at Colet Court, the alleyways that had served as trenches in which we played our war games, pelting one another with clay bombs of varying degrees of hardness, now seemed nothing less than squalid, and the smell of dustbins and cats insupportable. And with all this against it our gang simply melted away, and the whole tiny area became intolerably sad.
I made what I now see to have been two attempts to get away from Castelnau Mansions, the first in 1938, when I became a sailor, the second in 1939 when I became a soldier. Both times I found myself inexorably drawn back to them. Even when Wanda came to England in 1947 and we had to find somewhere to live, we had to stay with my parents at Three Ther Mansions. They were heroic because the flat was pretty small for four of us. There was a double bedroom which just took a double bed, with views down The Gardens to the astonishing great hulk of Harrods Furniture Repository, a single bedroom, which had been mine, a small drawing-room and dining-room, both overlooking the reservoir, a very small hall and a minute bathroom. And there was a kitchen and the minute domestic’s bedroom, which my father kept his suits in as there was no living-in domestic any more. And in it he also kept, done up with string, hundreds of back copies of the Morning Post. And there was the terrible loo on the backstairs.
Why my parents, who were only badly off intermittently up to that time, chose to live in such crowded quarters when there was no need for them to do so was a mystery to me. I can only think that they weren’t really interested in homes in the accepted sense of the word at all. Years of rag-trade travelling, anywhere from Bradford to Berlin and Perth to Paris, where they bought ‘models’ to copy, most of the time living in hotels, with all the advantages of having room service at the press of a button and not having to make beds, may have blunted their taste for the homely hearth. Whether this was true or not they used to spend several months of the year travelling, which seemed like whole ages to me.
It could have been worse. They left me in the care of a housekeeper, a Miss Roy, a good, kind woman whose Liverpudlian accent I used to try and copy, and of whom I was very fond, so that I could not have had any real need to be sorry when my parents set off on what they called ‘The Journey’ in order to sell their productions, something that I was to set off on some twenty years later. Nevertheless, I always found myself crying as they went down the stairs and through the door with the brass doorknobs to the taxi waiting outside The Mansions, wondering if I would ever see them again.
In January 1947 the British coal industry was nationalized and in one of the coldest winters anyone could remember there was no coal. In these inauspicious circumstances Wanda gave birth to a daughter in Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital across the river near Stamford Brook. At that time we were living in a small, top floor flat round the corner from Three Ther Mansions at 24 Castelnau Gardens, for which we paid what seemed the high rent of £63 a year. If anyone thinks that life with Wanda was dull in that flat, or later, when we lived in Riverview Gardens, then they have got it all wrong. It was in Castelnau Gardens that she let slip a can full of garbage which she was trying to insert into one of the lifts on an upper floor of the building – it fell on one of the porters down below. He didn’t sue us. It was a miracle. Later, in Riverview Gardens, she forgot to turn the gas off. This led to a spectacular explosion which destroyed a stuffed fish; but not as spectacular as the one when she boiled a kettle full of methylated spirits, under the impression that it was water, while camping on the banks of the Somme en route for Italy.
In the summer of 1947, when the baby was about seven months old, Wanda decided to take her to visit her parents who lived in the Carso, the strange limestone country around Trieste, leaving me to get on with the execution of the autumn orders, some of which we would soon be delivering to the shops. At the time I was working for the family firm as a commercial traveller in the fashion business.
Although she had been very reluctant to do so, being of an economical turn of mind, she had eventually been persuaded to travel by wagon-lit. At this period, with large areas of Europe still in a state bordering on chaos, it seemed a justifiable extravagance for a woman travelling alone with a baby.
I had also arranged for her to travel in a through coach from Calais, which meant that when the train reached the Gare du Nord, instead of getting down there and taking a taxi across Paris to the Gare de Lyon, she could remain on board and be shunted round the city on what is known as the Ceinture to the Gare de Lyon, where it would be attached to the Simplon-Orient Express.
I got the two of them to Victoria in good time for the boat train to Dover, in our Hillman Minx; but as we were walking to the platform preceded by a porter pushing the remainder of her luggage and with the baby swinging between us in a portable cot, Wanda suddenly said, ‘I’ve forgotten the basket!’
The last time I had seen the basket was in the hall of the flat. It contained all the mysterious necessities of weaned-baby travel, many of which I had myself regarded as mandatory when I was a baby – huge quantities of nappies, boiled water and a complete menu of baby food and drink for three days on a train. The extra day’s supply was in case the train broke down. At that time, with the war only recently over, baby food was not so easily obtained in Europe as it is today and Wanda had prepared purées of fresh vegetables and farmyard chicken, none of them out of tins. ‘Where I come from,’ Wanda said, ‘we don’t give babies tings from tins.’
‘Hurruck,’ she said, which at that time was still the nearest she could get to a correct pronunciation of my Christian name, having considered the implications, ‘I must have zat basket.’
In 1947 traffic in London was not yet the problem that it was shortly to become. In fact it was perhaps less dense than it had been before the war. I had something like half an hour to get to Hammersmith Bridge from Victoria and back again before the train left; but in spite of everything en route being in my favour I arrived back at the station with the basket just in time to see the end of the train disappear beyond the end of the platform. I asked for an interview with the Stationmaster and explained the situation to him. He was dressed in a morning coat and black top hat, having just seen off some distinguished personage by the same train. ‘That’s a bad business,’ he said. ‘You can’t have a baby eating all sorts of messed-up foreign stuff, I can see that.’ And he busied himself with the telephone, but to no avail.
‘We can’t stop the boat train,’ he said. ‘It’s not as easy as that. I wish I could send an engine after it but we can’t do that either and, anyway, it would never catch it up,’ which evoked memories of Mr Toad being pursued by an engine-load of beefeaters and policemen all shouting at the tops of their voices ‘Stop, Stop, Stop!’
‘Have you thought of the air?’ he said finally, speaking of it as it must have seemed to him, an unfamiliar element from another world. ‘Why not try the air? Ring up the airline people. You can use my telephone.’
On the telephone, however, I was once more a man of no account, a man without qualities – ‘I am speaking from the office of the Stationmaster at Victoria Station’ cut little ice with the man I was speaking to at the airline’s office, who was soon convinced when I unfolded my problem to him that he was dealing with a lunatic. And it became obvious that the only thing to do was to go to their office, taking the basket with me, which I did.
There I was told that if the basket was to stand