Something Wholesale (10 page)

During these re-unions Miss Stallybrass and the Buyer exchanged significant glances while the proprietor and my father talked about old times and Mr Wilkins, as suave and non-committal as ever, thumbed through the models on the rails, searching for something suitable for the wife. These customers from old-established businesses lent a certain humanity to the business of buying that was lacking in their more sophisticated
counterparts from the cities. Many of them brought offerings of farm produce which were presented to my parents and Miss Stallybrass; a reminder that London in 1946 was still a beleaguered fortress.

More remote were the Buyers for ‘Export’, a word currently fashionable that had even reached Lane and Newby, where it was regarded as one of the more harmless foibles of Sir Stafford Cripps. They arrived hot-foot off the boat from Dar-es-Salaam and Mombasa in company with agents whom they regarded with suspicion. They spoke of a way of life in the rarefied atmosphere of the African highlands which it was difficult to envisage in Great Marlborough Street. We were seldom able to satisfy them. Nothing made by Lane and Newby was washable.

Within these divisions there were Good Buyers; Dishonest Buyers, who expected presents in kind and whose orders were scaled precisely to the amount of entertainment they received; Mad Buyers, who gave enormous orders, perhaps as a form of emotional release and then cancelled them as soon as they returned home; Drunken Buyers with faces like beetroots; and Buyers with extra-mural interests. There were Buyers who took the
Reader’s Digest
– Cultured Buyers; Buyers devoted to Buchmanism, with fixed smiles for everyone; Buyers devoted to cats, budgerigars, spiritualism, knitting. Their interests were legion. Most of them had had to fight to get where they were. Most were proud of the distance they had come, others were almost pathologically ashamed. And there were the Scottish Buyers, the most likeable of the lot, loyal to their suppliers and desperately underpaid.

Our failure to satisfy the Buyers from Africa did not go unnoticed by my father. Although he disapproved of the Government, faced with the alternative of exporting or going under he rose to the challenge. He wrote a long letter to the Board of Trade in which he said that Lane and Newby were anxious to participate in the export drive.

In reply he received a courteous letter telling him that everything possible would be done to assist him and a few days later an official from the Board of Trade arrived at Great Marlborough Street to find out whether our productions were exportable.

It was perhaps unfortunate that the man who was selected for this mission had only recently been transferred to the Board of Trade from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. He had spent most of his working life on statistical work connected with the processing of herring. It was not surprising that he knew nothing about women’s clothes and he looked at Miss Stallybrass’s productions with considerable awe.

‘You can see for yourself that they are of excellent quality,’ my father said to him.

‘That’s what we want – quality,’ said the official, a Mr Pocklington, eagerly taking the bait which was offered to him. ‘I
was told to be particularly careful about the quality. Your goods seem, if I may say so, to be of particularly robust construction.’

‘Well, Mr Newby,’ he said, rising from the show-room settee still grasping his umbrella from which all attempts to separate him had proved futile. ‘I think you’ve got what we want – what the Country wants, I shall say as much to the Head of my Department when I make my report. Of course, you must realise that, so to speak, I am only the “Deus ex Machina” but I don’t think we shall encounter any difficulties.’

‘What about a cup of tea?’ said my father who was himself longing for one.

The whole business of assessing the export-worthiness of Lane and Newby had taken far less time than Mr Pocklington had bargained for. He had allocated the entire afternoon to his investigation. Loath to return to his uncomfortable office (he was not in a grade which entitled him to a carpet on the floor) he accepted gratefully. As a result he spent the rest of the afternoon in my father’s office talking about the North Sea and fish, subjects which they both found more congenial than the export business.

‘You know,’ said my father when Mr Pocklington had left, ‘I found him a very decent sort of fellow. It’s a pity they don’t employ more of these out-door sort of chaps instead of all those whey-faced johnnies. He may not know much about fashion but at least he’s the sort of man who gets things done. The sea teaches you to make decisions,’

‘I don’t think he’s ever been to sea,’ I said. ‘I thought I heard him say that he’d always been in an office.’

‘Men like that don’t go around boasting about what they’ve done,’ he said. ‘That’s why it’s called “The Silent Service”.’ Triumphantly, he looked at me over his glasses.

Mr Pocklington was as good as his word. The name of Lane and Newby was added to a short list of particularly
accommodating exporters which was then disseminated throughout the world by the Commercial Attachés and Secretaries in our Embassies and Consulates. Unfortunately whoever was responsible for drawing up the list forgot to specify what commodities we were prepared to export and throughout the eight years which I spent at Lane and Newby’s we received letters from the furthest-flung corners of the earth asking us this very question. A surprising number of these correspondents didn’t even bother to ask what we dealt in. They simply assumed that, like the Army and Navy Stores before the war, we had everything. The requests poured in: From Nome, where they were short of flannel shirts; Flagstaff, Arizona, where they wanted parts for obsolescent motor cars; Patagonia – sheep dip and umbrellas; Benares – brass water pots for the tourist trade; Fulacuta and Bafata, two places I had never heard of in Portuguese Guinea, alarm clocks and contraceptives (the latter to be sent by surface mail in plain envelopes); bicycles and blankets for places in the high Andes with the unpronounceable names of Inca kings; uniforms for the members of a brass band in a sultanate on the shores of the Persian Gulf (the only people who seemed to want clothes).

Reading these letters was a fascinating experience. Quite suddenly it seemed, 54, Great Marlborough Street had become a shop window of the world. A world in which the laws of supply and demand were temporarily suspended – the suppliers having everything and the buyers nothing.

Nor were the terms particularly onerous. ‘I buy all things, Good and Bad Qualities,’ one merchant, Raschid Ali, wrote with refreshing candour, from Aden. ‘Therefore I think with you we can do good businesses. Please rash me descriptions of your merchandises, prices found on board ships and your best quotations so that we may start our connections.’

My father was delighted and replied to all these
letters personally. Reluctant to sever the ‘connections’ he had so unexpectedly made, he never actually told his correspondents that he was not in a position to supply their needs. His replies always included a short homily on the advisability of only buying goods that were British made. Having raised their hopes in this way he then proceeded to deflate them.

‘As a result of the efforts made by the Old Country in the late struggle,’ he wrote, ‘we now find that many essential materials are “in short supply”.’ This shortage is likely to continue until such time as the present government is put out of office. Meanwhile …’

But although his letters must have mystified the recipients they did little to deter them. The majority, loath to return to the official letter writer in the market place replied with the same letter which they had sent originally; this being the only letter which they had at their disposal in English at any rate.

The letters were only the harbingers. Soon the merchants themselves began to arrive on our doorstep; a succession of picturesque foreigners all of whom had been drawn there by the magical efforts of Mr Pocklington of the Board of Trade. Gathered together they would have made a picturesque group in their various national costumes. There were men from the Ivory Coast wrapped in gaily striped stuffs; enormous banias from Calcutta in mud-splashed dhoties; pock-marked men from Asia Minor in sad civilian suits; Indonesians in gorgeous silks and plastic raincoats, and a host of others. They had two things in common: none of them spoke English; all were blue with cold. Most travelled uneasily with their wives.

My father was in his element. He offered them tea and cake and barley water which most of them declined on religious grounds; promised them sketches and patterns and in certain cases, if he considered them sufficiently comely, even allowed the wives to buy coats ‘wholesale’ from Miss Stallybrass ‘to keep the
cold out’. Outfitted by Miss Stallybrass they looked like peacocks served up at table with greens and boiled potatoes.

This open-handedness was unnecessary in the case of a furtive-looking Sikh who arrived carrying a suitcase to which he managed to transfer unseen a very expensive camel-hair coat at the same time as he was warmly praising the collection – a modern version of the Indian Rope Trick. No more was heard of the Sikh, or for that matter of any of the other visitors.

Another result of the patronage of the Board of Trade was that we suddenly found ourselves licensed to buy materials of a quality that we had believed to be extinct, that were reserved ‘for export only’. Although to the best of my knowledge none of it was ever exported Mr Wilkins and Miss Stallybrass were delighted and soon Miss Webb was busily engaged cutting it up for home consumption in the stockroom. As a result our home trade temporarily improved.

All this activity had a most beneficial effect on my father’s health. When his old friends, the giants of the wholesale manufacturing business, met him in Margaret Street, in answer to their anxious enquiries about what he was doing about export (Haven’t got enough for the home market, let alone for the exports, they used to say, offering him a huge Larranaga) my father would reply that he had as much export business as he could cope with and that it was developing strongly. As a result he found his reputation enhanced and he was asked to serve on a number of trade committees dealing with the problems of export.

Now that I seemed dedicated to the wholesale business whether I liked it or not, I began to take a more intelligent interest in the clothes we were producing.

During the war the fashion industry had had to rely almost entirely on native inspiration and what it could lift bodily from the pages of American
Vogue
. This was all very well while the war was still going on but in 1946 the results were alarmingly apparent even to someone as ignorant as I was. Unless they suffered from fallen arches most of the younger dressmakers had joined one or other of the women’s services or had worked long hours in factories with their heads done up in white pudding cloths, making things that were far more lethal than anything they had dreamed up in their own workrooms. Some of the best tailors, but not the majority of course, had gone as far afield as Wales where, raised to the rank of Sergeant-Major, they had set up shadow factories in quarries and churned out battle dresses and shrouds for the duration, returning at war’s end to bore stiff those who had stayed behind with stories of the perils they had undergone from falling slate.

It was not only within the island that simple patriotism had overcome commercial instinct. Across the Channel the French had
been more than equal to the calls that had been made on them. In spite of terrible shortages, with the enemy on their doorsteps, they had put extra yards of material into their productions, ‘pour embarrasser les Boches’, as they put it. Women of fashion, bowed by the weight of gigantic pieces of millinery and garments which contained as much as two-and-a-half times the amount of stuff that had been required to make the same thing in 1939, were hurt to find their motives questioned by the liberators who found them pursuing a way of life that their propaganda had convinced them was impossible. Both sides were incensed.

In England the results were less ludicrous but extremely drab. With a few notable exceptions high fashion had become petrified in a cast that was a vague copy of military uniform. Ordinary clothes were even more ordinary than usual.

It was not long before I had the opportunity to see for myself what we ourselves were capable of at Lane and Newby. Apart from a really gorgeous trousseau of silk underclothes and nightdresses which had been made for her in a nunnery by fallen girls who were in process of being re-claimed by this odd form of occupational therapy, my wife had arrived in England with a very attenuated wardrobe. Foolishly, I had told her that she would be able to get whatever she needed ‘through the business’.

‘It’s quite easy when you’re actually in it,’ I boasted. ‘Much better quality in England.’ At this time my total experience of the business was made up of that disastrous visit to Sheffield, some abortive deep-breathing exercises with Lola below ground and the doubtful privilege of being able to say that I had cut up three-quarters of a mile of material, some of it wrongly.

‘We’ll fix her up with some clothes, dear,’ my mother said on the day following her ‘little talk’ with Wanda. To this day I do not know what the ‘little talk’ was about. My wife was as silent as the
grave about it. Presumably it was to tell her that she had married a lunatic. ‘I’ll speak to Miss Stallybrass about it. We can make something special for her in the Model Workroom.’

I was quite happy about this. I felt that if my mother was taking an interest nothing really disastrous could happen. She herself could take the most ghastly looking dress off the hook, put it on and by doing so turn it into a good dress. It was as if she conferred a benison on the thing by virtue of having touched it. In the Church a similar result is sometimes arrived at by the judicious sprinkling of holy water in some unhallowed place.

But my mother and I were the victims of delusion. I failed to realise that her ability to turn a bad dress into a good one by the simple act of putting it on was nothing more than a piece of sleight-of-hand. She on her part should have known that it is almost impossible for anyone connected with the wholesale to get anything for themselves without suffering humiliation. To have ‘something special’ is to invite real disaster. Perhaps this is the reason why some Savile Row tailors are so badly dressed that, having set eyes on them, prospective customers have been known to make for the door under the impression that they will be fitted out with something similar. But they at least are paying the full price and their own inherent knowledge of what a suit should look like may save them from disaster. In the wholesale there is an unspoken thought that hovers constantly in the air that you are jolly lucky to be getting anything at all.

Wanda had an interview with Miss Stallybrass. It was not particularly reassuring. ‘An old woman came down and took my measures and said she knew what I needed. She was in a hurry. Miss Stallybrass said that she would send me some patterns. Everyone seemed very busy.’

‘That must have been Miss Fitchett,’ I said.

‘She had little, what do you call them?
Baffi
?’

‘Moustaches. That was Miss Fitchett. I only hope she knows what she’s doing.’

Weeks passed. The weather grew colder. In despair Wanda went off to Harrods and bought herself some warm clothes. Because we were in the wholesale, at Lane and Newby’s we were showing clothes intended to be worn in the sort of summer that occurs in Britain only twice in a century. On Monday mornings before the antiquated heating arrangements got going Rosie and Julie, rooted from their looking glass, left vapour trails in the air as they went through their act, rigged out in the putty-coloured rayon shantung that Miss Stallybrass had decreed as being OK for Garden Parties in 1946, and their teeth chattered modishly like castanets. Only Bertha, with whom I was scarcely on speaking terms, more generously upholstered by mother nature, seemed impervious to the fearful cold. The following summer when for the first time since the end of the war the use of fur was permitted and we showed coats that were intended to be worn in the depths of winter, they all crawled about like displaced esquimaux. It was an odd business. Living always six months ahead of myself time soon ceased to have any meaning. At twenty-four, old age came zooming towards me.

Months passed. There was still no news of Wanda’s ‘specials’. When I mentioned them to Miss Stallybrass she laughed, said something about Rome not having been built in a day and made a note on her blotter. As she changed the blotting paper every day I was not confident that anything would come of it. I also spoke to my mother.

‘It can’t be long now,’ she said. ‘You must remember that I have very little control over Miss Stallybrass. It’s just as difficult for me, dear. Besides, I thought Wanda had bought some clothes.’ Then suddenly, when the first crocuses were emerging suspiciously in the parks she was hailed to Great Marlborough Street for a fitting. It seemed odd when she had not even chosen the material.

She returned from it strangely silent. On her face was a look that I had seen only once before; when we returned to the village where her father and mother and their ancestors before them had lived from time immemorial to find it burned to the ground by the Germans. In the night great silent tears rolled down her cheeks. I was very disturbed.

One evening I came home to find the drawing-room full of tissue paper. There was no sign of Wanda. ‘Don’t come in,’ she said from the bedroom. ‘I’m just putting my “specials” on.’ She gave the word a most sinister emphasis.

I waited. ‘You can come in now,’ she said. ‘Look what they’ve done to me, your bloody firm.’

At first I couldn’t believe that it was my wife. She was dressed in a wool georgette coat that was a purplish shade of navy. The style was what is known in the trade as ‘edge-to-edge’ – that is to say it had straight fronts drawn together at the waist by a pair of braid buttons that were like enormous joke cuff-links. The shoulders, which were also enormous, were absolutely square and must have been stuffed with several pounds of wadding to produce such an effect. But it was the sleeves that really compelled attention. From the shoulder to the elbow they were narrow, below it they opened out like the calyx of some monstrous flower. The cuffs had little points which hung down forlornly. On the right breast someone had stitched a little bunch of artificial snowdrops. It was the sort of coat into which very, very old ladies are inserted by their faithful maids on those occasions on which it is imperative that they should be exposed to the public gaze.

‘That’s the coat,’ she said, flinging it on the floor. ‘And don’t you tell me that it’s too big. I’m size 12. They told me it was better to have it a bit bigger because I would probably put on weight and it would save an alteration. Now look at the dress!’ She burst into tears.

The dress was of the same material as the coat, only this time it was the colour called ‘wine’. Whoever had dreamed up the ensemble must have thought that a cross-over bodice would make a nice contrast to the edge-to-edge coat, because it had a cross-over bodice. A cross-over bodice is mistakenly believed in the wholesale to be good for large sizes. The edges were trimmed with white piqué which showed up nicely against the dark red material. The skirt was the product of a really diabolical imagination. It had four separate sets of pleats in it, two at the front and two at the rear, presumably to allow the occupant to ‘get about’ more easily. It was like a maternity dress for the wife of the oldest man in the world still living somewhere in the Anatolian highlands. I had never seen anything like it in my life.

‘Good God!’ I said.

‘Boo-Hoo!’ roared my wife. ‘And do you know what one of them said when they all stood round looking at me like a lot of crows? ‘You know, Mrs Eric, you’re going to be a really distinguished-looking woman – when you’re older.’ And Miss Stallybrass said that she knew a wholesale place where I could get a nice hat that would be an exact match.’

‘I don’t think they meant it like that,’ I said, without conviction. ‘Well you tell me what they did mean,’ she mooed. ‘I’m so unhappy (she pronounced it ‘unhoppy’) I want to go back to my country and my people. I wasn’t rich but nobody treated me like this.’

Later that night we took the whole dreadful outfit into the garden and set fire to it. There were a number of complaints from neighbours about the smell and it was an undoubted extravagance with millions starving in Europe but I felt that it was justified.

A few weeks later the head of the ‘Gown Department’ suddenly died after years of faithful service and I persuaded my parents, much against their will, to put me in charge of it. I felt that in the circumstances it was the least that they could do.