Business as Usual Page 14
Mildred Lamb came to see me this morning. I think I’ve written about her; that rather nice child from the Book Floor Clerical. She said she wouldn’t have dared speak to Miss Ward or to Sister. But I was different. She was in trouble69: wanted advice. Of course I’ve met this Victorian complication before, but it was startling to find that it could obtrude itself in these sophisticated surroundings. Surely typists don’t have babies; even on the films? Miss Lamb isn’t a likely victim either: she’s a semi-educated, competent, but badly frightened young woman with no family and a landlady out at Cricklewood with ‘her own living to earn’. It’s the sort of crisis in which the shillings in the Superannuation Fund won’t help much. Neither will Authority. Authority might shame the two into marrying each other, but Mildred is honest enough to admit that she doesn’t want to. She’s perfectly willing to accept the consequences if somebody will tell her what to do. And I think that sort of attitude always appeals, don’t you? All convictions apart, I mean.
So I told her rashly that I’d see to it, without an idea in my head except that the situation had to be coped with, as reasonably as possible. This afternoon I thought of you.
She’ll leave, of course. But if you could take her into Christopher’s later on, I gather that an obscure Scots aunt might help her afterwards. Then her savings would probably last till she got another job, perhaps in Edinburgh.
I told her, futilely, not to worry. But you’ll let me know what you think you’ll be able to arrange for her quite soon, won’t you? I’m going to post this on my way home, so I won’t write more. This isn’t a letter, just an SOS.
With my love,
Hilary
EVERYMAN’S STORES
For use in inter-departmental correspondence only
From G Grant
To Miss Fane
December 2nd, 1931
Subject
Miss Lamb, C. 284. Book Floor
Memo. CONFIDENTIAL
In accordance with this morning’s request I will arrange for Miss Lamb to draw out the total amount of her Superannuation payments at the end of March. She may then take a month’s holiday on full pay prior to her resignation for reasons of health. I will then make a recommendation to a doctor of my acquaintance.
In your place, I should advise her to try to obtain work in Scotland when she wishes to take another post. If she is not successful, she may apply to me.
M G G
NS/MGG
23 Burford Street
December 2nd
Dear Basil,
I disagree with you entirely. But your letter leaves no more to be said, does it? Except that your attitude to ‘such sentimentality gone mad’ is fortunately not universal, and I have been successful in making other arrangements.
Hilary
EVERYMAN’S STORES
Oxford Street
W1
‘Our business is your pleasure.’
December 10th
Dearest Mummy and Daddy,
I’m writing at once to make sure of the country post. I’ve just been arranging my holiday. Most people get from Thursday, after work, to Monday morning. But what with one thing and what with another and being Scots and looking tired I’ve got till Wednesday! Nobody who hasn’t worked in Oxford Street knows what an Immense Concession those two days are. If it hadn’t been for Sister Smith weighing me and shaking her head I doubt if Miss Ward could have put through the recommendation. But Sister Smith said, most reasonably, that it’d be worth the firm’s while for the work I’d do afterwards. And Miss Ward’s so surprised and pleased at my usefulness that she agreed at once.
Tell Basil when you see him, so that he can arrange to be free. Letters are impossible just now.
In a fortnight I’ll report in person.
So much love,
Hilary
Burford Basement
December 16th
My Dear,
I’m sorry not to have written to you for the last fortnight, but as you only wrote once yourself I don’t feel really guilty. And what Aunt Bertha calls the Far Side of the Counter is not a leisured place during the Christmas season.
Miss Ward says she’s run off her feet, so I’ve been promoted from carrying her pencil and making her notes and weeding out the unsuitable applicants to engaging extra staff on my own. Which is much more cheerful. It’s so much easier to say:
‘Yes. Report for work to-morrow. Health and Unemployment cards, of course,’ than the dreary:
‘I’m afraid …’
And then, in my official capacity I have to take the pulse of at least a dozen departments daily, and decide whether their buyers are really overdriven and under-staffed as well as proclaiming to heaven that life is intolerable and their one desire a decently quiet grave. I settle disputes, administer sal volatile and good advice, placate and guide any customers I may meet clamouring for mechanical toys among the ironmongery. And so few people have the remotest capacity for grasping directions. Tell a couple of harassed aunts that the Crackers and Caps are ‘Straight through, second on the left’ and they set off, go through two archways, turn to the right and arrive, flustered and unbelieving, among the Perfumes and Bath Salts.
And nobody reads notices. Ours are so blatant, too. Enormous red and white placards sprayed with holly hang just high enough to miss people’s heads, but nobody ever lifts a nose the necessary two inches. We might as well not have printed things like:
PRESENTS FOR HIM FIRST TO THE LEFT
PRESENTS FOR HERSECOND ON THE RIGHT
BOOKS FOR BAD BROTHERSFIFTH FLOOR UP
BARGAINS DOWNSTAIRS
They always ask: they always choose an assistant who is audibly adding: and they leave snowdrifts of nameless lists among the Gents’ Haberdashery or the Handbags and Umbrellas. Such anxious, calculating things they are, with rows of names and ticks and prices and question marks.
Silk stockings for Beryl, say 5/11?
Bath salts for Aunt Mary (if cheque)
Mrs Jameson. Calendar. (Or shilling card?)
The assistants gather them up philosophically and send them to Inquiries in sheaves with a ‘Wait till called for’ notice on them. And on the 27th of December, I understand, they are summarily destroyed.
The Temporary Staff, heaven help them, all develop an appalling tendency to add on their fingers in a crisis. (Just like me.) I suggest fiercely that if they must use their fingers they might have the grace to barricade themselves behind a show-case. Some customers mind so. Of course some laugh, and this morning I heard one humane woman in the Provisions say to a terrified Temporary: ‘Look here, you seem to hate arithmetic as much as I do. If we did that sum together we might manage, don’t you think?’ Salt of the earth!
But can you wonder at things like manual arithmetic and those occasional flares of temper when you remember how exhausted everyone is? I’ve kept Christmas with the best but I’ve never provided it before. I hadn’t an idea what December could be like for the people who did. I looked down from the third floor gallery this morning in half a second’s lull: the ground floor was solid with desperate-looking people – screwing heads and jutting elbows and flapping lists on one side of the counters, and a rattish scurry of assistants on the other.
And the evenings are pandemonium. That’s the worst of all this rivalry in illuminated, jack-in-the-box window-dressing. Such crowds come to watch our life-sized Father Christmas sledging across electrically moon-lit roofs to drop presents down real chimneys. What’s the use of exhorting the suburbs to shop early when the fun doesn’t begin till after dark? And it certainly helps to fill the basements with bargain hunters. Most of our girls don’t get home before ten o’clock at night during the weeks before Christmas. And no number of overtime shillings make up for the strain of that sort of a day.
Well, there it is. I expect the family’s told you that my particular holiday is to be specially extended till Wednesday morning. I shall travel north by night on Thursday and come south by n
ight on Tuesday. That’ll give us five complete days together, which will be much better really, than the snippets of evenings and the short week-ends we’d have had if you’d been able to come up to London when I wanted you to. (That’s not to mean, of course, that I despise any such evenings or week-ends that may be possible in the future. It’s just present vainglory.)
Five days at home! When I think of it the toes curl inside my shoes with excitement. I love night journeys. I know they’re either stuffy or arctic: I don’t sleep and the other women snore: I always arrive looking filthy and hag looking. But it’s so marvellous to get into my sleeper (3rd class) at Euston and out of it in Edinburgh. I wouldn’t miss a single uncomfortable, anticipatory minute. I like watching everything before we start. The platform’s mounded with H M Mails and pillows, and people’s queer luggage. There’s a good minute when the train begins to rock across the points … Oh, fun, Basil.
All my love,
Hilary
University Close
Edinburgh
December 28th, 1931
I’m sorry I didn’t come to the station, my dear. I admit that I was rather sore. Can you wonder, on the whole? I’ve come north, for the first week-end since September to find that you’ve arranged to rush to London on Sunday night for a conference and banquet. Nothing dragged you there during the four months I’ve been south, but you leave me here at a moment’s notice and pay London a twenty-four hours’ visit because of an invitation which had been lying forgotten in some pigeon-hole for the last six weeks, and found by accident two days ago.
You must know how proud I am when you’re asked to grand functions of that kind. And I’d hate to feel that I kept you from them. But if I’d known – if you’d had the sense to ask me what my plans were when that invitation came I’d have arranged to take the extra day before Christmas instead of after it.
I can hardly alter my arrangements now. After all, I haven’t seen the Family for four months either, and when they’ve killed so many fatted calves for my homecoming I can’t leave them to eat the carcases alone. So I’ll travel down on Tuesday night as I told you.
H
Train
December 29th
Dearest Mummy and Daddy,
Another of those train-written letters! I apologise. Still, you’ve brought this one on yourselves. But for your representations I’d be travelling south to-night, and harmlessly asleep. This is a criminal way of spending a whole day of my specially stretched-out Christmas leave. Nothing but your lurid descriptions of my exhausted state and certain blunders after a night in the train would have persuaded me to allow such an anti-climax. Probably one day isn’t a tragic sacrifice, either, but this journey’s a gruesome end to any holiday, you’ll admit.
We’re crashing through the Midlands now, past slag-heaps and pools scummed with empty tins and cigarette cartons and twisted, hopeless bits of iron and old boots. Rows of drearily identical little houses have their washing flapping among the smuts. If I were going north instead of south, I’d be noticing the way the sunset circles the carriage as the train swings round, and the gas flares tossed about high in the air outside factories, and the furnace-red inside them. But you know how I hate things ending. Even holidays.
It’s been a grand week-end: you’ve both been so lovely to me. And the last two days have been more of a rest than they could have been if Basil hadn’t had to go south so unexpectedly.
After three months in digs it’s been so marvellous to be able to go up and downstairs and along the passages of a house that wasn’t divided up among a dozen irrelevant lives. So nice to smell dog and books again, too, instead of kippers and people’s washing. There’s something about home meals, apart from knowing that nobody’ll come up to you with a bill afterwards. (Though that’s a comfort too.) I hate eating in restaurants – one reason why I’m looking forward to having my flat. I take possession on the first of January. Did I tell you? Lovely, but think of the flitting!70
Does anybody collect junk as infallibly and chronically as our family? Not with any particular end in view, I mean, like jumble sales or things Coming in Useful. Just cheerful magpieness. I came into Burford Street three months ago with one big suitcase and one little one, but I don’t see how I can possibly get out of it without a pantechnicon.71
I hadn’t even the sense to annex an extra trunk this morning, from the glory-hole under the stairs. I shall importune the local grocer for packing-cases, so on and after the first of the year write to me in Chelsea. I’ll be there – in the intervals of carting possessions across London.
With very much love,
Hilary
Chelsea
January 2nd, 1932
My Dear Basil,
Am I to take your letter as an ultimatum? I understand that you accuse me of spending four months in a picnic existence of which you tried to show your disapproval from the first, and therefore you resent my calling you inconsiderate. Evidently you were merely applying my own methods when you left Scotland last Sunday.
You also consider that I try to use your professional prestige for my own convenience (that’s Mildred Lamb, I suppose). Also that I am sentimental, illogical and unbalanced.
I’m repeating what you wrote, not because I want to be dramatic or anything, but only to make sure that you both wrote and meant those things – of me.
I’d like to know, please.
Hilary
From the records of H M Post Office
January 7th, 1932

Part III – Spring

2A Christchurch Street
Chelsea
January 22nd
Dearest Family,
I don’t know whether you have any chairs that you’re not actually sitting on, but if you have I’d welcome them. Somehow, one doesn’t realise how many things there ought to be in a room till one takes possession of three entirely empty ones, and goes echoing about with pots of distemper for a week. There was a vast pile of luggage when I loaded up at Burford Street; what happened to it on the journey I can’t imagine.

So I’ve been spending all my lunch hours in or about Woolworth’s. It’s a mercy that they send orders over six shillings, as I could hardly go back to Everyman’s hung round with ironmongery. The kitchen’s filling up nicely, and I’ve got a bed with the sheets and blankets I brought south, and the three big packing-cases the grocer gave me. They make lovely tables, but rather unsympathetic chairs. And there are all my college things – a trifle æsthetic and skimpy. Still, they include four bowls for bulbs and several cushions. So I was surprised and hurt when my new charlady asked for a day’s money in advance before she took her hat off.
I said that I was furnishing by degrees, and she said so she supposed, but had I seen the lovely sofas they gave you on the Hire Purchase System? She couldn’t understand, apparently, how any creature could prefer packing-cases to leatherette and fumed oak.
After that she revolved on her axis and demanded dusters. And mops. And leathers. And scrubbing soap. All the things I’d forgotten to get at Woolworths. So I sent her out to get them on the King’s Road. She came back before I’d finished my breakfast and laid them out in front of me happily, like a good retriever. I left for work feeling that I’d acquired a Household. Weighed down, you know, but proud.
I’m having Mrs Bland for two hours every morning and three evenings a week. So, with three really filling suppers a week I can afford to dabble in cookery between whiles. That row of Woolworth pans demands experiment.
I’ve a lot to do, you see, quite without manufacturing any of those dreary occupations which must be so much worse, on the whole, than doing nothing. And I did appreciate what you said in your letter about Basil. I knew you’d take my word for it that our engagement had to end, but I hadn’t counted on such unqualified support. It’s most sustaining.
Lots of love,
Hilary
EVERYMAN’S STORES
For use in inter-departmental correspondence only
From E Ward
To Mr Grant
February 2nd, 1932
Subject
Assistant Staff Supervisor, Miss Fane
Memo
In reply to your inquiry of yesterday’s date I am finding Miss Fane a capable assistant.
I am pleased to be able to say she did very well during the Christmas rush, when I was compelled to leave more responsible work in her hands than I would otherwise have done.
She is thoroughly reliable, pleasant and tactful in her dealings with the staff. Perhaps she is inclined to allow her sense of humour to run away with her, but time and experience will no doubt remedy this.
I am quite in agreement with you in thinking that it would be wise to confirm her appointment, and that her salary should be increased by a further 10/- per week.
M E WARD
Staff Supervisor
BT/MBW
EVERYMAN’S STORES
For use in inter-departmental correspondence only
From G Grant
To Miss Fane
February 3rd, 1932
Subject
Your appointment as Asst. Staff Supervisor
Memo
You will have heard from Miss Ward that your appointment has been confirmed, and I am glad to be able to tell you that her report on your work is very satisfactory.
Now that the Christmas rush is over, it will be possible to complete the reorganisation of the Library and Rational Reading Services at present under consideration. I shall require you to supervise this work in person, and should therefore like to discuss the various aspects of it with you.
I expect to be free about 3.30 this afternoon, but perhaps you would ring up my office before you come, in case I should have been delayed.
M G GRANT