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  ‘Have you ever done any interviewing?’

  I said, ‘Yes.’ And Miss Ward said, ‘Oh.’ And we walked on.

  But as we were going up to her room in the Lift, she said: ‘Well, I think you might help me by weeding out some of the obviously hopeless ones. You can have the room next to mine and send away anybody who looks unfit or mentally deficient.’

  Could one be given a more dreary job? But I could hardly refuse. So I gathered paper and a pen and my most official expression, and went into the room next to Miss Ward’s. Then I told the first in the queue to go to Miss Ward and the next to come to me. The rest of that morning is a story in itself, and too long to add to this letter. Because if I miscalculate and it’s too heavy, Mrs MacQueen is quite fit to return it to the postman before you have time to appear grandly and say that to a man of your means a penny is neither here nor there. Rather than risk that I’ll tell you about the interviewing next time.

  H

  EVERYMAN’S STORES

  Oxford Street

  W1

  ‘Our business is your pleasure.’

  November 22st

  Saturday morning

  Basil Dear

  This is an extra letter, wrongfully written in the firm’s time and on the firm’s best notepaper. I’ve never been grand enough to use either for letters before. But now I’m writing in my own office, at my own desk. If, that’s to say, one can so glorify the six-foot space between two frosted glass partitions, a window and a door. Probably it used to be a stationery store, for brown paper parcels fill the shelves along one wall and people rush up now and then to ask if they may take one away. But the half-glass door has been newly painted, and to sit and spell out ASSISTANT Staff Supervisor backwards is worth any number of boxes of envelopes and quires of typing paper.

  I still have to poke out occasional letters on the typewriter myself, of course. Which is not so grand. I cope with Miss Ward’s more compromising memoranda, all about the greater members of the firm, which is often rather terrifying. I look at buyers like Mrs Banbury, and wonder if she can really be going to have her teeth out65 at Easter and what she’d think if she knew that I knew about it. People have such a complex about teeth. If they’re having an appendix out or a toe off they talk to you about it, willy nilly, for months. But teeth are only extracted in secret. I suppose it’s these advertisements for disinfectants that ‘do the work while you sleep’, and the thought that any burglar would have you entirely at his mercy till you found the tumbler.66

  Then I still have to carry Miss Ward’s pencil and make notes for her when she tours the departments. But she also expects me to do a certain amount of what she calls ‘weeding’ among the applicants from the Labour Exchanges, and that means that I have to look over the ten most unlikely creatures, and try to think of ten ways of telling them that they haven’t a chance.

  It doesn’t usually surprise them. Some are so obviously unfitted for any but the brighter professions.

  Some are straight from school, drearily submerged in mother’s cast-off coat and almost any sort of hat: and some are just those aimlessly stubborn people who resent any effort to employ them. When they’ve demanded employment and been refused the matter ends. I had one of them this morning: she seemed rather more hopeful than most. So I said that we might be able to do something for her if she were less untidy. She said: ‘Quite all right, thank you, miss. I’m on the Dole. Sign my card, please.’

  

  But one child looked so wretched when I said no that I took it back, and let her go on to see Miss Ward. But Miss Ward just said: ‘My dear Miss Fane, why on earth did you bother me with her? Didn’t you see her feet?’ So then I stayed and listened to Miss Ward interviewing her batch of applicants. No mere customer realises the elements of a successful Lift Girl even after years of watching the contemptuous young women in blue leather breeches and silver piped Eton jackets who run ours. But Miss Ward has a way of unerringly selecting Lift Girls in embryo from the rows of shiny-hatted, brass-buttoned young women who present themselves. She has flair: she just knows that for some reason not apparent to the rest of humanity one young woman has the elements of a successful Lift Girl or a Query Clerk or an assistant for the Gramophones or Wireless or Lingerie or Perfumes or the makings of a waitress or a Rest Room attendant, and the twin next her hasn’t. So useful. I blunder along by taking thought, but the results haven’t been nearly as good so far.

  Now and then, when I’ve dismissed one queue and my next job isn’t too imperative, things are quiet in my office, and I can look out of the window which is the best thing in it – apart from its being new and mine. The window looks over Manifold Lane and the garages and the Stock-and-Store Rooms that belong to us and all the small shops on the far side of the Lane which don’t.

  There’s a barber’s saloon and a pub and a grocer’s and an antique shop crammed with oddities; plush chairs and bronze statuettes and palm pots and milking stools and witch bowls and old pictures and muskets and finger-bowls and china figures and a pale ivory crucifix and candlesticks and chessmen. And there’s a mirror that’s tilted up this morning to reflect an oval of clear sky with puffs of cloud.

  When I walk down the Lane at lunch time I always see an old man sitting in a back room reading his paper among all the frowsty bits of things and some perfectly lovely pewter. He never seems to sell anything, or to mind.

  Three or four barrel organs are always up­ended outside the pub, and sometimes a flower seller leaves his tray of out-of-season snowdrops tied up with ivy leaves outside too. Which seems rash. But nobody notices them.

  And I’d no idea till I got my office how many people earn a living by singing ‘Annie Laurie’. They walk up and down the Lane between the barrel organs and sing outside the pub till they’ve got enough pennies to go inside it. Then someone comes out to claim his barrel organ and goes off down the Lane with it. Presently a cheerful, tinny tune gets the better of the gear­changing outside the garages. I suppose barrel organs will mean Manifold Lane to me for the rest of my life.

  Later

  I was interrupted then by the Head Post Girl, who’s lean and thirty-five, but will be a girl, ex­-officio67, till she’s superannuated. She tramped into my office and presented a sniffling junior clerk more or less by the ear. Presumably she had told the child what she thought of her on the stairs. At any rate, she had no breath left when she arrived, and could only thump a letter and an envelope zig-zagged with post-marks in front of me and point at her victim. Then she stood there, purpling, while the poor little clerk quivered and squeaked.

  I picked up the letter. It was one of our more effusive ones and the customer had sent it back, enclosing our envelope, which she had covered with the sort of hand-writing typical of one’s moneyed aunts. Part of it was a further order, but the last sentence said:

  ‘I think it only kind to tell your clerk that it costs 2½d to send letters abroad.’

  Of course I was paralysed. It struck me as comic, but rather less than kind. There was a pause. ‘After six weeks on the post,’ said the Post Girl. And waited expectantly. I was blank. Miss Ward would have seized the opportunity for a talk on the importance and inter-dependence of detail and discipline and duty. But I only wished that they’d dealt with the crime in the Post and Despatch. Finally, I said that if the Post Girl weren’t there to supervise, the other clerks would be sending out letters without any stamps at all. That must have struck home, for she went. And left me with the criminal, longing to laugh. Finally, I pulled myself together and asked her if she’d anything to say. I believe that’s always done by Inquisitors, from one’s first nurse to the hanging judge. But she just burrowed in the pocket of her overall and bleated: ‘I’ll never be able to stamp another letter right, I know I won’t.’ Which seemed so likely that I looked up her dossier and the Staff List, and turned her into an errand girl on the spot, changing a very tough errand girl, who’d done well at school, into a post clerk. I only hope that Miss Ward won’t go th
rough her records till it’s past history, and I can say: ‘Oh, don’t you remember making that alteration?’ with some hope of carrying conviction.

  By the way, did I tell you that I was going to change my rooms again? That flat has been at the back of my mind ever since I got my first extra pay. And now I’ve found it – two rooms and a kit-bath where you fry your bacon in one corner and turn on your bath in the other and iron things on the bath lid. Most compact and not necessarily sordid. The present tenants haven’t moved out yet, which suits me, as I shall move in over the New Year, much as I’d like to be settled in before Christmas. But with the rush beginning next month, and an hour’s overtime every night up to Christmas Eve, I doubt if anything like a move would be humanly possible.

  I hope you’ll like the flat: it’s at the top of one of the houses in Christchurch Street, Chelsea. The river’s only half a street away, so that I’ll hear the water slapping at the Embankment on quiet nights and the steamers always. Unfurnished, of course, but better people than I have set up house with a bed and a packing-case. Rent thirty shillings a week. Gas fires, unfortunately, but the meter’s decently hidden in the cupboard and, anyway, I’ll rip one out of the sitting-room. I must have one coal fire.

  What do you think about Christmas? Will you be as busy as you were last year? Or is it impossible to tell? Would you like to come to us over the week-end? I must see something of the family and as much as I can of you and that might be a way out of the difficulty. But I suppose if you have to be at Christopher’s a lot, Mrs MacQueen’s is more convenient, being on the doorstep.

  Do just what you think. But come if you can.

  H

  EVERYMAN’S STORES

  For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

  From  E Ward

  To Miss Fane

  November 23rd, 1931

  Subject

  Seating accommodation for Clerical Staff (Book Floor)

  Memo

  It has been brought to my notice that a number of chairs in use by the Clerical Staff are of an inconvenient size and that some clerks are in the habit of bringing cushions to sit on.

  Please report on the necessity for these.

  M E WARD

  BT/MEW

  EVERYMAN’S STORES

  For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

  From  Fane

  To Miss Ward

  November 23rd, 1931

  Subject

  What our typists sit on

  Memo

  I have to report that no chairs in the Clerical Department, Book Floor, seem to be the right height, size or shape for people who type. The following expedients are in use:

  Miss Dowland sits on a pink cushion provided by herself.

  Miss Hopper sits on a jersey and Roget’s Thesaurus. Her chair is intrinsically high enough, and she does not type much, but she says that the seat is cold and therefore injurious to her health.

  Miss Watts sits on Aristotle.

  Miss Lamb sits on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Vol 3.

  Mr Millett sits on a packing-case.

  Mr Simpson sits on his coat.

  There is a good case for cushions, except perhaps for Mr Simpson who should not be encouraged to sit, and Mr Millett, who hardly ever does, and prefers a packing-case, anyway.

  23 Burford Street

  WC1

  November 26th

  My Dear Basil,

  I’m writing most uncomfortably, with my hair hanging over my face in wet strands and dripping on to my paper. I’ve been swimming. In the depths of winter. Definitely heroic, don’t you think? I admit that the idea wasn’t mine: actually I was more or less shamed into it by Mary Meldon. We had been discussing the difficulty of playing games in London over one of our rapid lunches, and I was mourning the lost grand days when I’d been rather good at hockey, and giving the impression (without actual boasting) that I hadn’t been bad at anything athletic. But what with the hour it took to get to any club ground and the other hour it took to get back, and the time wasted over tea and team sociabilities, I couldn’t bear to think of giving a whole half-Saturday to getting exercise. I said it was incredibly unfortunate, but by the end of the winter I should look like one of those long, white, unhealthy bits of grass that survive under planks.

  Mary Meldon said: ‘My dear, that’s quite true.’ (Which I thought unkind.) ‘And what you ought to do is to swim. It only takes half an hour, after work, and you feel you could push a street down when you come out.’

  I said, ‘Really? ‘And Mary said, ‘Really!’ in the tone that people use when they mean to make you do something for your good, from trying a new face cream to buying a house. I struggled feebly, but I knew it was all settled. We arranged to meet at the Oxford Street end of Manifold Lane, at six o’clock on Thursday. Mary said she would take me to her favourite baths. Quite new, she told me. And warm.

  That sounded reasonable, but this evening it rained and the cold pounced round the corner at me as soon as I came out of the Staff Entrance. I blundered along Manifold Lane, praying that she wouldn’t be there, or wouldn’t see me or something, so that I could climb into a bus and be carried safely home. But:

  ‘Here you are, darling. Marvellous!’ said Mary. ‘Just the night for a swim. The colder it is outside the better one feels afterwards.’ (Which struck me as just nonsense.) ‘We’ll take a penny bus – people won’t believe it, of course, but one does. Glad you’ve got some sense.’

  Obviously there was to be no escape.

  ‘People are just sheep,’ said Mary. ‘They get an idea that because it’s a cold day it’s going to be cold in the water. All rubbish. Here’s our stop.’

  We climbed out into the east wind again. By the time we’d reached the baths I’d drafted the telegrams which would bring you and the family to my bedside before pleurisy carried me off.

  ‘Tickets ninepence to-night,’ said Mary. ‘Mixed. You get two towels.’

  I surrendered my ninepence and took my two hard, dish-cloth-like bits of towel feeling most unwilling to be butchered just to provide Mary with her holiday. But it seemed useless to protest so we went through swing doors into a sort of wet Bedlam. The bath was really enormous, new and white marblish, with a great ruffled oblong of startlingly blue water under the arc lights in a remote domed roof. ‘The disinfectant makes it that colour,’ said Mary unnecessarily, as I was enjoying it.

  There were ranks of seats mounting to the dressing cubicles, which were indiscreet little hutches with wooden doors as far up as your waist and curtains after that.

  As we climbed up the nearest stair I had that uncomfortable feeling that something was wrong somewhere, but I couldn’t think what it was till an attendant chased after me to say that we were forcing our way into the Gents Only section. I was covered by confusion but Mary said they ought to have a placard up on Mixed Nights. Could we be expected to know by instinct? And, anyway, wasn’t it just like men to charge you an extra penny, because they’d be there too!

  I took as long as I dared to undress, but finally I had to crawl out and Mary shamed me into jumping in with eyes and mouth screwed shut because of that disinfectant. But she pranced on to the spring-board, and did an irrelevant hand-spring into the water. Once in, it really was rather marvellous. I began to believe all the things that Mary said about winter swimming. Movement through that blue, warmed water is such a queer, clean pleasure. I decided to take real exercise, and started swimming lengths. But I’d calculated without the other athletes and kept being beset by the young women who hurled themselves off the side, approximately parallel with the water, and raised frightful fountains just in front of me.

  

  Nearer the shallow end there were groups of non-swimmers, or chin-held performers, who stood about waist-deep, talking passionately. I just kicked those obstacles in the stomach and swam on. But the deep end, on the return journeys, was very terrifying. Dozens of Greekish young men were propped up against the high diving boards, lo
oking like statuary, except that every now and then one of them would come to life and wander up the ladder to the very highest board. He’d stand a bit there and push back a wet forelock and pummel his muscles while I frogged68 despairingly out of the way, miles below. Eventually he’d launch himself off with a couple of somersaults or a sideways twist or a jack­knife touch-toes-and-out movement. This happened nearly all the time. Sometimes they shouted ‘Hi!’ and sometimes not.

  It was all very dangerous.

  I did four lengths, quite humbly, between the splashes, and Mary kept up the credit of the party by taking turns with the young men for the spring-boards, and allowed people to show her new dives and was thoroughly athletic.

  Afterwards we went and had an enormous, crazy meal of tea and bacon and eggs and bread and butter and honey and plum cake at a small restaurant which makes rather a good thing out of dripping, ravenous people from the baths. I told Mary at least half a dozen times that life was worth living, and I meant to swim every Thursday evening for the rest of the winter. And she was heroically enthusiastic every time.

  But now my hair’s dry I shall have to go to bed. All my muscles are feeling stretched and warm, and I’m sleepy beyond possible resistance. It’s lovely to feel as well as this. Do you suppose that fish race about rivers and jump out of sheer glorification, or is it the dreary, natural history of catching flies after all?

  Now – SLEEP … darling.

  Hilary

  EVERYMAN’S STORES

  Oxford Street

  W1

  ‘Our business is your pleasure.’

  November 27th

  Basil My Dear,

  I’m bothered. Badly. I’ve let myself in for something more than I can cope with on my own. And till I remembered you and Christopher’s, I was scared.