A Traveller’s Life. Eric Newby
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Название: A Traveller’s Life
Автор: Eric Newby
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Хобби, Ремесла
isbn: 9780007508167
isbn:
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 front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
A. H. Clough, Say Not the Struggle
Naught Availeth
In 1925, when I was five and a half, we embarked on what, so far as I was concerned, was the most ambitious holiday I had ever had. In summer my father took a cottage at Branscombe, at that time a very rural and comparatively unvisited village in South Devon, between Seaton and Sidmouth. It promised to be a particularly exciting time as my father had decided that we should travel there from Barnes by motor. This meant that most of our luggage had to be sent in advance by train from Waterloo to Honiton, a market town on the main line to Exeter; at Honiton it was picked up by a carrier and transported the ten miles or so to Branscombe by horse and cart. Others taking part in this holiday, although they did not travel with us, being already foregathered there, were my Auntie May (the aunt who had accompanied my mother and me on the memorable visit to Godshill)and her husband, Uncle Reg. Before the war Uncle Reg had worked as a journalist in Dover on the local paper and in this capacity had been present in 1909 when Blériot landed on the cliffs, having flown the Channel. During the war he had been in the navy in some department connected with propaganda. Later he became editor of the Gaumont British Film News. He was very urbane and elegant. He was later on good terms with the Prince of Wales for whom he used to arrange film shows at Fort Belvedere, and for the Royal Family at Balmoral. For these services he was presented with cufflinks and cigarette cases from Plantin, the court jeweller, as well as other mementoes. He preferred to be called Reginald rather than Reg, but no one ever did so. They put up in the village pub where we, too, were to take our meals.
The third party was made up of three fashion buyers for London stores, Beryl, Mercia and Mimi Bamford, all of whom were friends of my mother, particularly Mimi, and their mother. All three were unimaginably elegant, often almost identically dressed in long, clinging jerseys and strings of amber beads, and they were surrounded by what seemed to be hordes of extremely grumpy pekinese who did not take kindly to the country. Their mother, who did not take kindly to the country either, was even more formidable. She owned a Boston Bulldog called Bogey, which had had its ears clipped, a practice by then declared illegal. Like her daughters she was immensely tall, and must at one time have been as personable as her daughters, but even I could recognize that she was incredibly tough, if not common.
‘She didn’t ought to ’ave ’ad ’im,’ was the comment she made about me, by now a boisterous, active little boy, to my Auntie May while we were at Branscombe, ‘she’ being my mother; an anecdote that my aunt eventually told me, which she did with an excellent imitation of the old lady’s gravelly voice, having put off doing so until only a few years before her own death in 1974 in order, as she put it, to spare my feelings.
Neither Beryl nor Mercia nor their mother ever went to the beach, or even set eyes on the sea, the whole time they were at Branscombe. For Beryl and Mercia the seaside was Deauville. What Branscombe was to them is difficult to imagine, or they to the inhabitants. Only Mimi relished the simple life.
The morning of our departure from Three Ther Mansions was a fine one. We were seen off by the head porter of the flats – gratuity – and by Ellen, the cook/housekeeper, who had taken Mrs George’s place in a resident capacity. At that time Ellen was probably in her late forties. She had smooth black hair parted down the middle with some white strands in it, a pale face and a rather forbidding, if not sinister, appearance – perhaps secretive is more appropriate; in retrospect I think what she most resembled was a female poisoner – and she was stiff, and starchy, or at least her aprons were starchy. In spite of her apparent grimness or strangeness or secretiveness Ellen was always very kind to me, especially when my parents were away, and I think that when they returned she resented their presence.
I found Ellen disturbing in a way which I could not have explained to her or to anyone else, not even to myself. Sometimes I used to ask her to take me in her lap and cuddle me. If she did, and sometimes I would have to ask her several times before she agreed, СКАЧАТЬ