by Mary Portas
‘I’m okay,’ I say.
‘And how’s college?’
‘Okay.’
‘Joe said you had a job?’
‘It fell through.’
‘And John?
‘We’ve finished.’
Surprise flickers across Dad’s face. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
I look around as I shift from foot to foot. ‘I’d better be getting back. I’m in Menswear today.’
I want to turn and fling myself at Dad as I walk away. I want to run to him as I did when I was a child, slip my hand into his and feel safe because I’m more afraid now than I ever have been: no home, no money, no job, no John.
But I will not give Dad the satisfaction of asking for help, just as I won’t beg Dora. Something has hardened inside me. I have only myself to rely on. If I don’t get myself out of this mess then no one else will. I can’t keep begging favours from people and asking for handouts.
Breaking and entering is the answer. Knowing that Dora keeps the key to her office tucked on top of the doorframe when she goes for lunch each day, I ask Suzanne to stay on watch in the corridor while I steal the key, let myself into Dora’s office and use her phone to ring the Harrods personnel department. The young man at the other end listens patiently as I explain that I need another interview. They got it wrong. I’m perfect for Harrods. I’ll work hard. I have ideas. I’ll do a good job.
‘But all our positions are filled,’ he told me. ‘I do not have a job to offer you.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Completely sure, Miss Newton.’
‘A hundred per cent sure? Harvey Nichols offered me a job. I think you would, too, if you gave me another chance.’
‘I’m sorry but we don’t have a vacancy for a junior display assistant. There is really nothing I can do to help.’
I cannot give up. I start to steal the key to Dora’s office each lunchtime. As my hand closes around it at twelve thirty every day, my heart beats like a drum because I know this is my final chance to get the job I want.
‘Any vacancies yet?’ I ask the man on a Monday.
‘No, Miss Newton.’
‘Anyone turned down a job?’ I say on a Tuesday.
‘No, Miss Newton.’
‘Are you sure there isn’t a job for me?’ I say on a Wednesday.
‘No. But if one becomes available then I’ll be sure to let you know.’
‘Just checking that no one has dropped out?’ I ask on a Thursday.
‘No. No one has dropped out.’
I can hear him laughing.
‘It’s a personal call,’ I tell the Harrods telephonist on a Friday, to avoid being cut off.
It takes weeks to make him crack. But three days after leaving Cassio, I go up to Harrods for another interview. Putting on my best Miss Selfridge pencil skirt, a white shirt and stilettos, I stuff my portfolio with half of Suzanne’s work and walk through the store doors. By the time I get home, there is a message waiting for me. I have been offered a job.
Mink, macaroons and alligators
Some came to buy a mink coat or a bottle of champagne to drink with a box of rainbow-coloured macaroons. Others were looking for a bale of the finest Egyptian cotton towels or diamonds that would drip from their ears for years to come. There were lights handcrafted by artisans in Venice, antique Indian art and carpets woven around the world; monogrammed stationery, silver cutlery and pedigree puppies. Harrods was the store where almost anything was possible.
Covering four and a half acres, it stretched across seven floors and underground into a warren of rooms that connected to the huge depository building on Trevor Square. There were carpenters and chocolate-makers, waiters and seamstresses, liveried liftmen and sales staff working either on the shop floor or behind the scenes for more than three hundred departments – all of which had plinths, cabinets and internal windows that needed to be designed and styled by the sixty-strong display team. The jewel in Harrods’s crown was the seventy-two ground-floor windows facing onto the streets of one of London’s most exclusive neighbourhoods. In them, dreams became reality and customers were enticed over the threshold into the magic kingdom.
The back windows that faced onto Basil Street were filled with a mix of products from home, beauty, fine wine, childrenswear and books to cookshop, accessories and food while menswear was displayed in those along the side of the building in Hans Crescent. The front windows facing onto Brompton Road boasted big-ticket furniture items and bridalwear but were mainly designed around the most expensive designer women’s fashion, jewellery and accessories because fashion was one of Harrods’s main draws.
Selfridges, Harvey Nichols and Liberty had yet to be reinvented as fashion destinations and the high-street revolution was a distant dream. Everyone, from international jet-setters in search of glamour to tourists who wanted a glimpse of it, came to Harrods. Silk, satin and velvet from the big French and Italian houses, like Dior, Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent, were taken off shelves and out of boxes to be put at the centre of fantastical scenes, alongside pieces by classic British designers, including Janice Wainright and Jean Muir, and newer Italian talents, like Armani and Cerruti.
Windows, windows, windows, I silently intoned, when I walked into Harrods for my first day, knowing that Danielle had been assigned to the ground-floor beauty team.
‘Second floor, home department,’ my new boss John McKittrick told me.
My heart sank.
The Face magazine
A month later I was sitting with my new colleagues on the back-windows team after finding out they needed a junior and going straight to see Mr McKittrick.
‘I’d like to transfer,’ I said, when I walked into his office.
With a long face, overhung jaw and slightly droopy air, Mr McKittrick resembled a camel and was constantly orange because of too much time spent on a sunbed in Marbella. His eyes flicked up towards me as he sat at his desk. ‘You’re on the second floor!’
‘I know. But they need someone on the back windows. I got my best college marks for windows. I’d really like to learn more about them.’
‘It’s not normally how we allocate roles,’ Mr McKittrick said, as he shuffled some papers. ‘But it’s true. They do need a junior.’
‘I’m a junior!’
He sighed. ‘I know you are, Mary.’
‘And I’d love to get the chance.’
‘All right, then. But if it doesn’t work out we’ll have to transfer you to another floor.’
I made sure that didn’t happen. Ripping up floor coverings, unscrewing light bulbs and returning products to their departments, I dismantled windows as the rest of the team prepared to fill them again. Caroline, the display manager for back windows, was strongest at bold interior styling – transforming products by draping fabrics or grouping lights without so much as a backward glance as she chatted to me about which pub or club she’d been to the night before. Her deputy, Elaine, the senior dresser, was the perfect foil: good on the tiny details that made windows look polished. Fiona and Roger, the dressers who made up the team, assisted them both and I was the junior at the bottom of the pile.
Once the windows had been emptied and Caroline’s designs for new displays signed off by Mr McKittrick, I’d follow whoever I was helping around the store as they picked new products. Steaming and ironing clothes in the studio, collecting boxes of bulbs from the store, cutting up felt to make floor coverings or digging through the huge stock of general props – everything from bunches of plastic grapes and lamps, to cut-outs of moons and suns or wood lettering – I did anything that was asked of me and quickly learned about the store as I went from department to department.
Our titular bosses were Mr McKittrick and his deputy Lou Desmond, a small man with the unfortunate habit of licking his closed fist before dabbing it on a face that always seemed to be overheating.
‘Never forget we’re selling a dream!’ Mr Desmond would singsong, at the end of each morning’s briefin
g as he pawed his face – even though his squealing, high-pitched commands during the other seven hours and fifty minutes of the working day had earned him the nickname Desdemoaner.
But Mr McKittrick and Mr Desmond were merely bit players as far as the windows teams were concerned. For us, there was really only one person in control: Berge, the head of fashion and queen of the store. Tall, dark and thin as a whippet, he looked like a cross between Rudolf Nureyev and Freddie Mercury without the buck teeth. With a moustache clipped pristinely above his top lip, Berge favoured mohair jumpers worn with such closely cut lilac or lemon trousers we all knew on which side he dressed and spoke in a lisping drawl that had a hint of his Armenian background when it was raised to concrete-digger level.
‘Theees is fucking sheeeet!’ he’d yell as assistants trailed in his wake, flailing around him as he shot out commands. ‘Do eet again!’
The rest of the time, Berge spoke hardly a word. You’d never find him laughing at a joke or sniping a witty comment at another dresser. While the rest of us laughed, gossiped and argued together in the studio, Berge was always serious, a man apart with two ways of being: stalking around the ground floor with his eyes narrowed or sitting with the fashion buyers in the canteen – women so sleek and groomed they looked like a flock of swans – with his eyes narrowed. He didn’t muck around, he wasn’t bitchy: he was driven, and part of his job as head of fashion was to create the most beautiful windows I’d ever seen.
Even a novice like me could see that Berge had extraordinary talent. Staring at his windows, I’d wonder not just at the scale of his imagination in designing the displays but his technical detail: skirt hems that looked as if they were fluttering in the wind, silk and velvet scarves pinned so that the luxury of the fabric was revealed in a single shadow falling on a tuck.
The front-windows team worked with him to create this and was made up of men whose moustaches were so luxuriant they often came round the corner before they did. Clad in skin-tight denim and reeking of aftershave, they wore shirts with enough buttons open to reveal at least a large portion of their hairy chests if not a hint of their navel. Rumour had it that some stuffed socks down their jeans in order to up the ante even further.
You could tell the straight ones by the way they dressed. Peter Harvey, who was on the front windows and mainly styled interiors, was instantly recognizable by his checked shirts, cords and leather jacket. It was all in the best possible taste but a very different look – he still had the hairy chest but hid most of it bar a few curls, thanks to the impeccably white Hanes Ts he wore underneath his shirts. Keith Mowser, who ran the side windows, had a beard, a twinkle in his eyes for the ladies and favoured elephant cords and cashmere jumpers. His assistant, Jill, had such long blonde hair that we nicknamed her Joyce McKinney, even though she’d never made a sex slave of anyone. Their junior was a guy called Sam, who dressed like a Teddy Boy and had been at Cassio with me.
Occasionally I was asked to assist in other windows but the back ones felt like home. I enjoyed the breadth of product they contained, which meant that I was learning about the whole store. But mostly I treasured my friendship with Caroline, Elaine, Fiona and Roger. It was a lifeline. They had no idea just how much I needed them and I don’t think I did either.
The five of us are sitting now in one of the back windows that we’re supposed to be restyling. The blinds are down and passers-by on the street outside will see a hand-painted sign in the window, saying, ‘Pardon our appearance while we dress our windows.’ But instead of working, we are staring at Siouxsie Sioux on the cover of this month’s Face.
I’ve been almost as addicted to the magazine since it was launched a few months ago as I am to Siouxsie: the way she writhes around the stage with the air of a woman so completely in control of herself, her music and everyone around her. I’ve been to see her and the Clash and the Pretenders, and how anyone can bear to hear Abba bleating on about the winner taking it all is still beyond me.
Siouxsie is wearing black-and-white tartan and a huge lace collar. Her hair is cut in her trademark spiky black crop that matches her thickly pencilled eyebrows. The only colour on the page is the magazine’s logo, a couple of headlines and Siouxsie’s bright red lips.
She is so beyond cool.
‘Do you think I should cut off my hair like Siouxsie?’ Fiona says.
‘Would you really do that?’ Roger squeaks.
In his stone-washed jeans and loafers, Roger’s idea of musical heaven is Sylvester singing ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’.
‘Yes, I would,’ says Fiona. ‘I’m bored of my hair. I want to do something different.’
We stare at the mass of dark curls tumbling down Fiona’s back.
‘You’ve gotta do it!’ I shriek.
‘When?’
‘Tonight! If you think too much you’ll lose your nerve.’
‘Right. I will. And I’m going to save up for some new leather trousers too.’
We all sigh in admiration. Fiona is going to get a Siouxsie cut. It’s like Kate Bush has announced she’s going punk.
N. Peal cashmere socks
There are two types of mannequin: the ones that wear shoes and the ones that don’t. Adel Rootstein mannequins wear shoes and are held in place with fine wire that’s almost invisible when it is pinned to their waist and tacked to the floor to keep them upright. These are the willowy blondes or brunettes decked in designer clothes and shoes that you see in the front windows of stores.
Cheaper mannequins are held in place by spigots – large metal screws embedded in the round or square bases they stand on and fit into holes in the mannequins’ feet. We used these on the back windows and cut holes in tights and socks to get the spigot through because the mannequins had to have their feet covered.
Buyers were constantly sighing when I went to sign out products to use in our displays.
‘We had a Pucci scarf come back with pin marks last week,’ they would snap at me. ‘And a belt with a scuff. We can’t sell those products now, you know. We’ll have to sign them off as damaged.’
As the buyers glared at me, I’d solemnly promise that no harm would come to whatever I was borrowing for our display. Mostly that was true. The only things that were regularly damaged were the tights and socks. But they had to be cut for the spigots.
Mysteriously, though, the male mannequins standing at the centrepiece of a back-window tableau celebrating the joys of golf or small leather goods never wore socks from the cheaper end of Harrods’s sock range. Instead they always had the most beautiful N. Peal cashmere on their feet that had to be written off as damaged against the display department’s budget. They should have been put into a staff sale. Instead they usually ended up on our feet.
Mannequins deserve well-shod feet. It was the first important lesson I learned at Harrods.
Sobranie cigarettes
‘Where did you go trolling off to last night, then?’ the dresser sharing the café table with us says to his friend.
‘I met a crimper and couldn’t resist him.’
My colleagues had been born when homosexuality was still a crime and some of the older ones still threaded Polari – the language that gay men had once used to communicate secretly – through their conversations. I’d never heard it until I got to Harrods where I listened to men use it to talk about the morning after the night before as I sat in the Arco café in Hans Crescent. The unofficial Harrods staff room, the Arco was the place where gossip was constantly exchanged over mugs of tea in a fug of steam, cigarette smoke and the smell of fat. And soon I’d learned enough Polari to understand tales of nightclubs, bars and bondage nights, break-ups, make-ups and everything in between.
As they swapped stories of where they had been and with whom, I learned that the men I worked with couldn’t get enough of the new nightclub Heaven that had opened on the old site of Global Village, which I’d once visited with my brothers. Heaven had brought gay men out of basement clubs into the mainstream and they were ce
lebrating.
‘Why is there no love in my life?’ Roger sighs, as we sit in the Arco deciding what to order. ‘I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong.’
We do. Roger keeps insisting he’s straight.
Luigi walks past our table in his waiter’s uniform: a red shirt, black bow tie and black trousers.
‘“One day I’ll fly awaaaay,”’ he sings breathily, as he stops and bends down towards Caroline. Luigi loves to hear himself sing.
‘“Leeve all theees to yesserdayyyyyy.”’
Caroline looks at him blankly. ‘Can we get five mugs of tea and three rounds of toast, please?’
Luigi’s face falls. ‘“What more could your loff to do meeeee?”’ he whispers plaintively, then shuffles off, Caroline following him to the counter.
‘So are we going to Borshtch N Tears on Friday?’ says Elaine. ‘It’s payday. Shall we treat ourselves?’
Usually we save our money for drinks in the Metro Wine Bar or a cheap meal in Stockpot. But when we’re feeling a bit flush, a couple of days after being paid, we go to proper restaurants with things like white napkins, breadbaskets and candles. I know I shouldn’t treat myself but can’t resist a night out, even though I’m constantly worried about money. Having left Tish’s and moved back to Sheila and Harry’s for a couple of months, I’m now staying with Aunty Mary and Uncle Jim in Tufnell Park because it’s closer to Harrods.
Going from place to place, always aware of relying on people for a roof over my head in already crowded homes, I spend weekends in Watford because then I’m not under anyone’s feet. I also get to see Cathy, Ruth, Jean, Joe and Tish. Joe is still at Clipso, and Tish is now working as a nurse at UCH but living in Watford so they’re always around. Michael and Lawrence are not in Watford as much because Michael often travels for work and Lawrence is busy at weekends with his friends from the police cadets. I still wonder if he’ll actually want to be a police officer when he turns eighteen and starts training for real. Maybe he’ll suddenly realize what it all means. But for now at least he seems happy enough.