Business as Usual Read online

  Jobs aren’t as easy to find as they seemed: most of the ones I investigated weren’t suitable. So I’ve had to take what I could get, as everyone else is doing. Probably, of course, it’ll lead to something more exciting. Its beginnings don’t sound much. I’ve been offered a clerical job in Messrs Everyman’s big store in Oxford Street. You know it – the Our Business is your Pleasure people. Aunt Bertha used to send us their catalogues and a few rather remnantish presents now and then when Uncle Tom was first made president of that Amalgamated Board, you remember. I don’t quite know the connection, but there is an almost directorial one, I believe.

  I’m to begin at once. Somebody has thoughtfully got appendicitis and I’m deputising. So of course I mean to make myself essential enough to be kept on when she recovers. I was only interviewed by one official who appointed me, and I don’t know anything about the work except that I’m to be attached to the Book Floor, which is pleasant. (Think of me in the Haberdashery, trying to add up one-and-eleven-threes!) I’ll be able to tell you more on Monday. It’s going to be very amusing, I expect. And after all, isn’t half the English aristocracy earning its living by selling hats or displaying gowns or making face­creams or breeding dogs or foxes or poultry or ponies? So don’t be disappointed. Basil won’t really mind, either, you know, though of course he felt he had to protest. It was only becoming.

  And after all, dears, a year can’t reasonably last longer than twelve months, and in a year I shall come home and be unobtrusively married. Then we’ll be more or less on your doorstep. It isn’t as if Basil were apt to go off and grow cotton in the Sudan or plant tea in India. He’s only going to operate in Edinburgh, and once housekeeping worries begin you’ll be liable to have more than enough of me. I shall annex your recipes and harry you with questions about servants’ wages and leaving cards and sending out invitations and seating people at dinner, and washing curtains and making marmalade. And we’ll borrow Anderson to wait on our statelier parties.

  So make the most of this year’s grace!

  Very much love,

  Hilary

  EVERYMAN’S STORES

  For use in inter-departmental correspondence only.

  From Staff Supervisor To Miss Hopper C/D

  Book Floor

  September 12th

  SubjectTemporary Staff. Clerical Department B/F

  Memo

  I have arranged for a new assistant to take over Miss Pim’s duties during her absence (appendicitis). Miss Fane will report to you on Monday morning at nine o’clock in the Clerical Department. She has had no previous experience of this type of work, and it will therefore be necessary to train her most carefully in all the details of departmental routine.

  MEW

  BI/MEW

  The Minerva

  September 14th

  Oh, Basil darling, I suppose there have only been the usual number of hours since eight o’clock this morning. But it’s hard to believe. I had breakfast then, in the empty dining-room. A depressed maid brought it and she seemed undecided whether to sympathise or to despise me, because I had to be up almost as early as she did. I left the hotel in a flutter and before they’d finished the doorsteps.

  Of course I was too early. After ten minutes in a bus quite indecently full of human knees and elbows we turned into Oxford Street, where Everyman’s big clock said only twenty minutes to nine. So I got out and wandered up the mews to the Staff Entrance. No swing doors for us of course.

  Members of the Staff Must Enter and Leave the Building by the Staff Door. They are Forbidden to Use the Front Entrance (or the Lifts).

  The Staff Door is in Manifold Lane. I knew where that was, because I went prospecting on Sunday and liked it too much to regret the commissionaires. Manifold Lane must be one of the villages that were swallowed up alive by London in the eighteenth century, and managed to go on living. Very cramped, of course. Like Jonah in the whale.

  So this morning I had time to enjoy the last ten minutes of being unemployed. I looked at people as one does on the way to the dentist, envying them because their morning was going to be smooth and usual. The Lane’s a cheery place, paved with a gentle tilt towards the gutter in the middle. The crumbling little shops sell a muddle of antiques and cigarettes and chocolates and Italian cheeses and German sausages and jellied eels and jumpers and spectacles and stationery and walking-sticks and toupees and face powders. There’s a flower shop at one end and a fish shop in the middle. The fish man had laid out his herrings and lobsters, and eels in patterns and he was festooning poor limp rabbits round the windows as I came past. Then he backed across the gutter with his head on one side. Like an artist at a Private View.

  But at the Everyman’s end of the Lane the flags19 change to cobbles and the elderly shops to hustling garages. Big, bright blue vans with Everything from Everyman’s placarded up on their roofs like cocks’ combs were sliding out and backing up, and having parcels shot into them by men in shirt-sleeves. I stood and watched, till a sort of fire-alarm thing above the Staff Entrance went off and made me jump like Cinderella. It’s not merely nine to six for inmates of Stores like Everyman’s, you see. We clock in at ten to nine and out at ten past six, they tell me. Streams of people were making for the Staff Entrance: I was nearly at the end of a very slow-moving line. I couldn’t imagine why it was so slow till I got inside; then I saw a row of large dials like telephone automatic things in a nightmare. They were as big as cart-wheels and there were hundreds of white discs round the rims of each, with red and black numbers on them. People came up and pushed their special number in. Apparently the abominable thing records the hour, the minute and the second on which everyone enters that building on three hundred and however many working days there are a year.

  I couldn’t clock in, because I hadn’t got a number. So the man in charge kept me back on suspicion. I stood beside him in his cubby-hole while the rather breathless people at the tail of the queue came up. They all eyed me: it reminded me of the time I was knocked out in a car smash and found myself on the pavement with a crowd round me. Rather terrifying. A sort of jungle look. I tried to forget them and listen to the timekeeper’s running commentary instead. He was a cheerful person, without much to do except look out for numberless creatures like me, and prevent other people from dialling their best friends’ numbers while they took a day off. He sat just outside the notice at the end of the passage which promised that Any Member Of The Staff Found smoking Beyond This Notice Will Be Instantly Dismissed, with a cigarette rolling on his lower lip. He had tilted his kitchen chair on to its hind-legs:

  ‘Now then, Miss Brown … never a smile to-day? Get out of the wrong side of the bed Monday mornings, eh? … Half a minute to spare, Mr Henry? That train’s been up to time at London Bridge for once! … Better weather over the week-end, Mr Willis…And how’s the old complaint, Alfred? … Back to the grindstone, Miss Anderson … that’s right. Shame, isn’t it, for that pretty nose? ...’

  When the last had gone through he swung his chair round and asked me what he could do to oblige. So I told him that I’d come to work, and waited while he thumbed and licked his way through a pile of elderly papers. He rang up one or two people on the telephone beside his chair, shouted up the stairs to a Mr Hardway on the floor above who either didn’t hear or didn’t answer, and then went off down the passage grumbling to find someone who knew something about me. Presently he came back. ‘OK, Miss. You’ll be all right to-morrow. Your number’ll come through by this evening or should do.’

  I’d always thought that it must be utterly dreadful to be just a number. But you try not having a number at all, and to all intents and purposes no name either. It’s an incredibly left-out-at-Creation feeling. Next morning, I thought, I should be able to stare at the numberless with the rest of the herd.

  It is an amazing place, Basil. Stairs and stairs. As a customer one used to sail into a lift and say ‘Fifth, please’, without a notion of what’s involved for the people who walk. We climbed and
climbed. Conversation faltered after we’d passed the third floor, and I caught up the tail at the fourth, where it had died altogether.

  Six floors up we seethed through a door marked Cloakroom Women Staff, and into a large unpleasant room. It was pinkly distempered20 and tapestried with people’s coats and hats. I suppose there had been pegs, but they were submerged. I laid my coat on the floor and wondered what came next. But a forbidding person in uniform came up and pointed at it. ‘Pick it up,’ she said. ‘Catching the dust like that. Most unhealthy.’

  

  And she went on to explain that the cloakroom was provided for people working in the Departments. Who was I, her tone suggested, a mere cipherless newcomer, to walk in and expect pegs all ready for me? I gathered that I would be lucky if I were allowed occasionally to turn a wash-basin tap, tip one of the soap vases, provided by Messrs Jeevers & Co as an advertisement, and to stand in a queue during the less busy hours. (Life, my dear, seems now likely to resolve itself into a series of those queues. And I’m so bad at them.)

  Who was I, anyway, said the blue-uniformed person? She, for her part, was Sister Smith, and responsible for the health of the Female Staff. (So Biblical, that classification! Is there a Brother to look after the health of the males in their cloakroom?) I explained. I had come for the first time. I had no number, but I believed that I was to go to the Clerical Department on the Book Floor. It seemed that there had been a culpable oversight on the part of Somebody. I, as a newcomer, ought never to have been allowed to set foot in that building until I had been examined by Sister Smith. ‘It’s too late now, of course,’ she told me. ‘You may have brought in anything with you. Anything.’

  Then she said quite kindly that of course it was mere formality when all was said and done, but that I’d better come to her room at eleven and she would see to it. In the meantime she found a peg for me behind the door and took me to the Clerical Department of the Book Floor, one flight down. When we arrived Sister Smith called through a blinding racket of typewriters for ‘Mr Simpson, please’. The women all raised their heads and gave me another of those jungle looks, but the racket went on as fast as ever. That glimpse of expert typing terrified me: I have to keep my eyes glued on my keys throughout.

  Then Mr Simpson came round a wall of books. He’s a large, baldish, undefined sort of person, who moved, but vaguely. Rather like a cloud. None of his clothes fit him: his knees sag in shiny striped trousers. But he smiled at me and I smiled back thankfully. He said:

  ‘So you’ve come to help us, Miss. That’ll be nice.’

  There was a pause. Sister Smith, who presumably has no patience with pauses, said: ‘Well, there you are then.’ And went off, clapping the door behind her. Mr Simpson stood and watched it swing for a little, then looked at me uncertainly. He tried again:

  ‘You’re to work for Miss Hopper, Miss, so they tell me. She’s over there.’ He pointed somewhere behind me. ‘That’s her table. She’ll be back in a minute, I expect.’

  I walked between books and typewriters to Miss Hopper’s table, slowly, because it was something definite to do, and after I’d done it I didn’t know what to do next. When I got there, I just stood, like a cow looking over a gate, and waited for something to happen.

  It’s odd: the things that aren’t alive in that Clerical Room – typewriters and chairs and filing cupboards – seem much more vital than the people, who are. I noticed the books next. There were masses of them: all colours, reds and greens and blues and oranges. They were in baskets, in gaping parcels, in tottering piles on tables, each with a pinkish slip of paper sticking out, like a tired dog’s tongue. (Customers’ names and addresses, I found out later.) More books were ranged round the room, looking normal because they were on shelves.

  At last someone came. I guessed it was Miss Hopper, because she said she’d been expecting me. She was a sagging sort of person with short, just greying hair. Wearing red. She opened one of the table drawers and dragged out a checked duster. ‘I suppose you’d better get on,’ she said. ‘My last girl used to have done dusting by now.’

  I said: ‘Oh. What do I dust?’ And Miss Hopper supposed it was the table. So I took up the checked duster while she stood lop-sidedly on, one leg and watched me. After a few minutes she supposed I’d been used to keeping my place tidy at my last job. Of course she’d always had a girl. Her other girl had been ever so neat and filled the ink-pots every morning. But just at that point I knocked one over, and as I clawed at the blotting-paper some of the books went too. Miss Hopper said: ‘Oh, dear, miss, that’s a pity, isn’t it?’ and went on watching while I mopped and picked up. By that time it was, incredibly, only ten o’clock, but Miss Hopper supposed again that we’d better get on.

  She sat down and asked me if I was a good writer. I looked at the stacked books and said hastily that I didn’t write at all. But Miss Hopper was so utterly taken aback that I gathered that she meant could I use a pen so that the result would be legible on labels. That shook me, but I said that I could print quite neatly, I thought. It seemed that that would do, though postmen wouldn’t enjoy it so much.

  After that Miss Hopper produced the labels. They were a quite unreasonably unpleasant pink, with dotted lines for the addresses. Books appeared too, clamped together in twos and threes by rubber bands. Sometimes there were ten books inside the band and then it generally snapped in my face when I tried to push a label inside. ‘Why didn’t you take that band off first?’ said Miss Hopper each time it happened.

  I wrote labels till eleven, with interruptions from people called Packers, who seemed short-­tempered. At least they brought back several of my labels and pointed out that I had forgotten part of the address. At eleven o’clock someone telephoned to say that Miss Fane was to go to Sister’s room at once. Miss Hopper said: ‘You can’t miss it’, but Mr Simpson wandered up and pointed out the way.

  Both the windows in Sister’s room were open. So was the door (opposite) and I stood in the draught, wondering how much I should have to undress. Sister Smith said: ‘Shut the door. Take off your shoes. Stand on that weighing machine. Left foot first.’

  Then she pulled a sort of medical catechism out of a pigeon-hole in her bureau and read out the questions while I dithered on my perch. They began with ‘state of head’ and worked intimately downwards. Finally Sister looked at the weights, and said, ‘Nine stone ten. Your feet aren’t flat – yet. Step off. Right foot.’

  I shuffled into my shoes while she asked me if both parents were alive and did I suffer from nerves. I said: ‘Yes. Church of Scotland. I don’t know what nerves are.’

  Sister told me severely that denomination was a matter for the individual conscience, but that nerves were not. They might affect the Firm. And she did hope that I hadn’t the habit of taking a morning in bed now and then. Because once a thing like that crept in among the people who ought to know better what was one to do with the junior typists?

  Then she sent me back to the Clerical Department, and I went, wondering how long it would be before my feet flattened. I shall have to leave before then. I’ve heard your views on flat-footed women.

  After that I wrote more labels, till they let me out at half-past twelve. I suppose I went and ate something somewhere, but when I came back again afterwards, Miss Hopper said that she didn’t want me any more that afternoon, and I’d better go and ask Miss Sparling in the Library if she had any letters. That was, if I could type. Could I? I remembered the women who had beaten the typewriters when I came in and hesitated to own to my two-fingered champings. But with my sort of horror of being flung out I had to say I could.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Miss Hopper. ‘Well, you’d better go to Miss Sparling. Take that door opposite (but mind you shut it behind you. It’s the Shop out there, and customers aren’t supposed to see the Clerical Department.) Go through the Shop and if you turn to the right through the swing doors you’re in the Library. Miss Sparling’s the lady at the big desk.’

  

&nb
sp; The Shop (that seems to be the local name for the selling department of the Book Floor) was interesting. Books were in their element there, praised and ranked and jacketed, handled respectfully by a polite young man and six polite, sleek little girls who ran about among the well­-dressed customers with dogs on leads.

  I would have liked to stay and look at things, but I was feeling intimidated, so I went straight through to the Library, which is a long, busy room with ticketed shelves and people reading in corners. It was quite easy to find Miss Sparling. She had the biggest desk, and was bristling behind the vase of semi-putrid Michaelmas daisies which stood on it. She had a nasty, pointed, rattish face. When I said: ‘Miss Hopper sent me from the Clerical Department to see if you could make any use of me,’ she lifted her nose at me quite malevolently. ‘Make use of you? No.’ And she picked up another pile of papers and fussed it from one side of her desk to the other, as if I’d disappeared through the earth. And I’m sure I was quite meek.

  So I went back to the Clerical Department, thinking, in my innocence, that they might send me home as they’d no work for me. But they didn’t: work at that level means primarily being on and about the premises for a certain number of hours to take what people put on you. That’s what they pay us for. And finally, I was given something to do. They made me write things on little buff cards till six o’clock. Then Mr Simpson roused me and explained that it was all over.

  Darling, don’t scold me for taking this on. It’s hard, but it may improve. I’m too dazed just at present to judge its points. And such lots of people would jump at it. They wouldn’t even think it hard. It’s all so relative.