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  (iii.)From subscribers variously disappointed with the Mail Provincial Subscriptions run in connection with Rational Reading or Rational Reading de Luxe Services.

  NB – Find with reference to these, that subscribers in a fine heat of indignation almost invariably understamp letters. One communication reads: ‘I am sending this bill back to you unstamped to teach you not to pester me with such things again.’

  Preliminary Record

  Subscriber: R/R de Luxe Sub. 4532 (Canterbury)

  Complaint:Ordered The Suez Canal And Its Traffic Problems. Received Clearing the Alimentary Canal.

  Comment or Suggestion:

  Recommend more careful use of digestive treatises in future.

  Subscriber: R/R Branch Service Sub. 4567 (Ascot)

  Complaint: ‘Why don’t you send the book I ask for: Accident in A Hotel by Baum?’

  Comment or Suggestion:

  Have sent all works of this author, seriatim.

  Subscriber:Fiction A. Delivery 6 Sub. 8945 (Harrow)

  Complaint: Where are my library books? I wrote three times last week. Still no books. Surely a firm of your standing …’

  Comment or Suggestion:

  Exhaustive inquiry has produced three post cards.

  (a) Unsigned

  (b) Without titles

  (c) Quite blank

  Subscriber: R/R Non-Fiction A. Fiction B. Prov. Sub. 4452 (Godalming)

  Complaint:‘Kindly note. I will not have:

  Books by Women.

  Books on sex

  First novels.

  Short Stories.

  Realism or Morbidity.

  Travel or Biography.

  Essays.

  Comment or Suggestion:

  Return his money

  Subscriber:R/R Prov. Non-Fiction A. Sub 5768 (Cheltenham)

  Complaint:‘Have subscribed to your library for six months and made my wishes abundantly clear to anyone with modicum of intelligence. But have received consistent stream of trash. Consider Shakedown absolutely beyond the pail (sic.).

  Comment or Suggestion:

  Curry-gutted Anglo-Indian

  Soothe

  Note – Find ‘Assistant’s oversight’ had been regretted in all cases. Do not consider this elastic phrase altogether happy and recommend variety.

  November 10th

  Darling,

  I was thankful to find your letter waiting for me this evening. Last week has been abominable. In another two days I should have broken out into abject apologies. But your forgiveness arrived in time to save my face. So now I can say how really sorry I am about that last letter of mine. Considering provocation, you’ve shown enough forbearance to make me feel a worm and not enough to make me turn on you.

  Letters are difficult though, don’t you think? I didn’t realise how mine would read, next morning, over Mrs MacQueen’s tea and kippers and blackened toast. And I’m sure that if you were here I could explain, and you would see why I’ve got to stay. Because you don’t quite, even now. I suppose it sounds unlikely that one should begin to count in a firm of this size after two months. But I think it’s true. Anyway, they’ve raised my salary. Isn’t that fairly convincing?

  My pay envelope had Four Pounds in it last week. The extra notes were wrapped round a card, With The Compliments of the Management. So I’m not a clerk any longer. I’m a Business Woman. Unfortunately for my Budget, I brought neither of the extra notes home. I didn’t touch my basic £2:10:0 (I have a conscience), but I bought a hat in one of the unfashionable shops that stay open till seven o’clock, a flask of eau-de­-cologne, and fifty wickedly expensive Turkish cigarettes. I put my new hat on in the shop and dropped the old one into a perfect stranger’s dustbin. Then I felt better, so I had dinner at the Criterion and went on to an Upper Circle57, spending sixpence at Piccadilly Circus Underground telephoning various ex-Oxford people who were all too startled and poor to come with me.

  And I was so overpowered by affluence that I slept in this morning and had to take a taxi to work. Which means dipping into the Emergency Fund. I’ve always distrusted Sudden Riches.

  And it also means that for the rest of the week I shall have to lunch on one and threepence and have No Tea. Which is sure to larn58 me. Especially this weather. I always have a half­crown hunger in an east wind. And there’s one at present that seems to strip the clothes from your body and the flesh from your bones.

  But it’s fun to play Spartan for a week, knowing that four pounds will come to the rescue on Friday. I punched an extra hole in my belt to-day with nail scissors, and went about feeling like an hour-glass. But I doubt whether it’s a practical expedient. My stomach got pins and needles in the middle of the morning, and I had to let myself out.

  Heroically yours,

  Hilary

  EVERYMAN’S STORES

  For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

  From Staff Supervisor

  To Miss Fane

  November 10th, 1931

  Subject

  Confidential

  With reference to your appointment to the library (Fiction C) kindly note that this cancels your status as Junior Assistant S (T) 801. It will not be necessary for you to be given a library number in your new and more official capacity. Sister Smith will arrange accommodation for you in the Senior Staff Cloakroom. You will also have the privilege of entering by the West Door and of using the Lifts. (Except during the rush hours.)

  I am sure you will appreciate that this position carries with it an added responsibility, not to be lightly assumed. I understand that you have Mr Grant’s authority to make a certain number of investigations, and I shall always be ready to give advice where necessary. You will, of course, realise the need for tact and moderation when introducing innovations likely to affect persons of longer standing in the Department than yourself.

  M E WARD

  November 12th

  Really Basil,

  How you and Miss Ward distrust me! She copes with me gingerly as if I were a bomb without a safety catch, and you say in effect that I ought never to have been promoted, because people are bound to resent it.

  Actually, I’d thought of that for myself. Of course they would resent me, the people who had been clerks or typists for a dozen years and are going to be the same sort of underling for another twenty, unless they’ve saved enough money from a three-pound wage to buy themselves a little hat shop or one of those parrot­-painted restaurants where they manage to give business girls lunch for one and six with coffee extra.

  Of course, they were going to resent my being picked out and given the extra thirty shillings a week that would have brought the tea shop so much nearer. There wouldn’t be any reason for the change as far as they could see: I typed worse than any of them, my labels weren’t legible, I knocked books off tables and made my bills out wrong. How could they see the justice of picking out anyone for promotion just because of some nebulous quality that they had never had or that had been beaten out of them long ago? They wouldn’t think it important that somebody anxious for responsibility should be in a position to take it (though later it might be very useful to be able to slide the responsibility for a misguided decision on to somebody else’s shoulders). They wouldn’t recognise that sort of ability. But they’d be bound to notice the messy typing and incorrect bills and things. They show so. And they’d put all the obvious things together and total Favouritism. That word would hiss round and round the Book Floor, only just out of my hearing. Oh, I knew. I’d been through it before.

  So I was frightened, though I couldn’t let anybody – not even you, for some reason or other – know it.

  And the first day was unpleasant. I sat behind Fiction C’s desk most of the time, and walked forbiddingly about, when I felt it necessary to show that I wasn’t even aware of other people’s eyes. I went into the Book Store and asked questions, and into the Clerical Department and asked more questions, and wrote the answers
on little slips of paper which I was terrified of leaving about and which I usually lost through sheer panic. Then I stopped in the Shop to speak to Mr Salt. He was sympathetic, but cautious, so I guessed that he’d been hearing things about me. Obviously nothing would persuade him to discuss books with my sort of be-ribboned pi-dog59 any more.

  But, since that first day, they’ve been very good to me. Miss Dowland and I still have tea together: Miss Hopper told me this morning that Miss Pim isn’t half such a quick writer as I was, and Mr Simpson comes into the library specially to tell me about the re-binding of my very worst Fiction Cs, and stays beside my desk, staring into the distance, and talking about the sort of novels that people really like. ‘Nothing too psychological,’ he thinks (meaning sex). But I disagree. Fiction C adores sex. Suitably be­glamoured.

  Mr Millet draws me into the Book Store and tells me how many little matters we must look into together, and how, in his opinion, various things (and people) require expediting. If we could see eye to eye we might make a clean sweep. And after all, two heads are better than one, as they say.

  Miss Sparling, of course, is permanently hostile. But I think that’s more constitutional than anything else. She has one of those painful smiles at the best of times and even with our most influential subscribers.

  Anyway, there are only one and a half more working days, and I’ve promised myself a Sunday out of London. Early breakfast, a packet of sandwiches, and a Metro train as far as it’ll take me.

  I might ring up various people and get them to come too, but I don’t think I feel like company. When you work in a firm of fifteen hundred it’s a new idea to be alone. If you were here it would be different. But I just don’t feel promiscuous.60

  H

  Burford Street

  Saturday evening

  November 15th

  Dear Basil,

  I came in half an hour ago, just as it was getting dark. I’ve walked all day: I’m full of bread and cheese, and country air and blown out with pride at having done something that was good for me as well as being fun. It was one of our kind of walks, but unfortunately not to be followed by one of Mrs MacQueen’s high teas. And I’d like one more than I can conveniently say.

  The trouble about London, of course, is that it lasts so long, and even when one’s twenty miles from Piccadilly Circus (or wherever they start the tape-measure) you find those Seven­Hundred-Pound Palaces festering all over perfectly good fields. But there was a west wind and a lovely curve of ploughed hillside against a pale sky, and the common I finally reached was purple and bronze and green with bracken and brambles. The sun came out as I was eating that bread and cheese in a circumspect little clearing among the bracken and silver birches. But even there the people were nearly as prevalent as the villas. Three gangs passed me: you know the type – sticks and mackintoshes and broad, sedentary beams61, walking to whistles blown by young men with pink spots.

  

  They passed me at full tilt, but later a youth who looked like Christian62 before the bundle fell off came up, and asked me if I could direct him. I said, ‘What to?’ And he said, ‘The Windmill Inn’. So I told him, thinking it was because of beer, that I’d seen an inn of sorts at the edge of the common. Was I sure it was the Windmill. No, not a bit, but did it matter? He said it was vital, and did you pass a pond on the way to it?

  

  I didn’t think so, but I told him that there were lots of ponds, and did it have to be a special one? He said yes, and I said why and he explained that it was Marked in his Diagram.

  So I rose to the occasion and said (quite recklessly) that he must bear half-right and then left, and then half-right again at the blasted beech stump. And he did. I choked down my last bite and hurried off, in case he should work out my directions backwards and arrive to complain. Then I went and had a cigarette on quite a different part of the common, and walked back to the station.

  The station reminds me: when I got into the train at Baker Street this morning I saw Mr Salt, of all people, fidgeting on the platform, looking odd without his celluloid collar. He had reverted to type and was wearing incredibly dirty flannel bags, with a comparatively respectable brown tweed coat and drastically striped tie. Of course I hung out of the window till the last minute to see who would arrive. And it was Miss Lamb! It’s startling, somehow, to think of Mr Salt as Miss Lamb’s Boy. They looked a little surprised at sight of each other, I thought. Miss Lamb was very grand but rather unfortunate in her dearest clothes, which were definitely high-­heeled and urban. But they went off together rather obviously hoping for the best.

  They can’t have been out in the country before, in spite of the car that Miss Lamb was going to be allowed to drive when the summer came. What has he done with that car, anyway? And why Baker Street Station? Cheap day ticket, I expect. So much less exacting than sedentary amusements.

  Six weeks till Christmas. Or is it seven? Shall I get longer leave now I’m so grand? Or none?

  I love you,

  Hilary

  Burford Street

  November 16th

  Basil Darling,

  Such disgrace! My relations have let me down.

  You remember my dear Aunt Bertha, who took us to eat unseasonable things at the Carlton in my last Trinity term? She beamed on you and said surely there wasn’t much money in science, but everybody did do such odd things nowadays, didn’t they?

  Well, I might have guessed that she’d be a Rational Reader de Luxe. (A. Fiction and A. Select, six books at a time.) And I did know that yesterday was Remnant Day in all Depts. Poor Aunt Bertha! Neither a pork pie title nor ranks of lackeys can keep her from plunging passionately into the Sales. I ought to have expected her.

  I suppose she’d spent a happy afternoon in the Soft Furnishings, trying to pick up some dragoned chintzes for chair covers at one and eleven-three or something equally impossible. Then, of course, fate must arrange for her to think of tea. And in the lift, it would occur to her to pop into the Library and tell the girl just what she thought of the latest de luxe books: not what she calls good reading – nasty things, so thin, and such wide margins, and those wood-cuts! So peculiar! Nothing in the world to do with the story as far as one can see. (Darling Aunt Bertha buys books by the barrel, and wouldn’t really mind what we sent her as long as there were plenty of it for the money.)

  If I’d been in retreat as usual, doing Fiction C, I might have escaped, but I’d just gone to help Miss Landry when Aunt Bertha exploded through the swing doors. She bore down on A. Select, flung her books on the desk, tugged her hat over one ear, pushed her furs off her shoulder and began her piece. Then she recognised me. The desk was between us, but that didn’t stop her.

  Her arms, furs, plumes were all round me instantly. The whole room echoed with my name. (Platforms have made Aunt Bertha so devastatingly audible.) She said: how quaint of me to serve in a shop; and wasn’t it amusing to find that I was the gel who sent her those dreadful books; and why – why was I doing it and did my Mother not know? I said ‘Hush,’ and ‘Yes,’ and ‘Wasn’t it,’ and made faces, and tried to disentangle myself. But nothing stopped her.

  

  ‘Her arms, furs, plumes were all around me.’

  Finally, she pulled me out, more or less by the scruff of the neck, tucked my hand under her arm, and announced that we would go and have a cup of tea. ‘Where we can talk quietly,’ she said, looking round the quite obviously enthralled spectators like Marie Antoinette from a tumbril. My dear, I absolutely ran her down the library. If tea would stop her, she should have it, even if I had to have it with her. Besides, I thought that no one knew me in the Restaurant, and anything to get her out of the Library, away from Sparling who seemed likely to have apoplexy behind her Michaelmas daisies.

  I sat and listened to Aunt Bertha for forty-five minutes. She ordered muffins and went on to cream buns – because, as she says, if you are a little addicted to adiposity, you’d better eat what takes your fancy and be happy. She is
, too. Both, bless her!

  But of course we were in full view of the door by the Lifts, and I doubt if any creature in the Library, the Clerical Department, or the ‘Shop’ failed to find an errand to take him (or her) past it. The glass panes were so misted by their incredulous breathing that Mr Simpson had to wipe an eye-hole before he could locate me.

  I never realised before quite what a Public Woman Aunt Bertha is. But since Uncle Tom was made a knight, she is in the public eye more or less continuously. Opening things, you know, and breaking bottles over liners. Quite one of Everyman’s star customers, in fact. What Miss Sparling would call a ‘familiar figure’.

  So what with one thing and what with another, and food and guarded explanations and sociability it was more than three-quarters of an hour before I crawled back to Fiction C feeling rather bloated and longing for sleep, like a snake that’s over­eaten itself and would like to cast a skin. Miss Sparling looked at the clock, her watch and me as I came in; then she went on writing something so furiously that her pen spat.

  When six o’clock eventually struck I was in such a bad temper that I just sat there for five unnecessary minutes clearing up to spite myself. Then I prodded my way out and climbed crossly on to a bus and sat down beside Mary Meldon.

  You remember Mary? She used to live two doors away from us in University Close, and we’ve always been friendly. We’ve each known the other was in London for months, but in spite of all modern inventions we’ve lived within a ten minutes’ bus ride and never been able to get into touch. As one does.

  

  So to-night, when I plumped down beside her we were both as startled as if the other had returned from somewhere as proverbially remote as Timbuctoo. But we were both very pleased with each other, and I took her and a pound of sausages home to supper. We thought that we’d go to a theatre afterwards, but our respective nine-to-sixes had left us both too exhausted to bear the idea of moving the body or exercising the brain any more.