Climbing the Stairs

by Margaret Powell

  We were on a tram once and I could see a man sort of leaning on his elbow in one of them – for all the world as though he was there to have a rest. And we went in a café on our own the first day and when I went to the toilet I stood outside waiting and a man came out. Embarrassed? I went the colour of a beetroot. Then another one I went into was just two toilets and a sort of half-tiled wall and I discovered there were three men sitting with their backs to me. They’ve got no reticence at all. Talk about all friends together. The funny thing is that after you’ve been there a couple of days – you keep drinking that awful beer that runs through you – you don’t take a bit of notice. It just shows what a thin veneer civilization has really.

  After lunch at this posh hotel we set off for home. The trip back wasn’t too bad. It was smooth. But I still couldn’t enjoy a cheap whisky because after we’d bought some cigarettes and some wine to take back, we’d nothing left. By the time we got to Liverpool Street Station we were a sorry-looking lot.

  In the brochure there was something about the friends we were going to make and I’d had visions of exchanging addresses and writing to these friends and keeping in touch. Instead of that – not only was nobody speaking to the courier – they weren’t even speaking to each other.

  When we got back home I said to Albert, ‘Let’s have another look at this brochure and go through the things that weren’t as they said they would be.’ But as we read it again we saw in very small print at the bottom ‘Turn to the back page’. So we turned to the back page. There again in very small print was written ‘On this tour the agents exercise the right to make any alterations that circumstances may demand’. So that it had just been that in our case the circumstances had been very demanding.

  4

  TO SAY THAT I was surprised to get a date after being in London barely a week is to put it mildly. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Surely, I’d thought, there must be more of a scarcity of females up in London than there is down in Hove. And not only that – I’d got a date with a man who had a regular job. A bus conductor.

  My mother was always on to me about the merits of getting a young man who had a regular job. ‘It doesn’t matter how small the wages are,’ she said, ‘so long as it comes along regularly every Saturday.’ My poor old mum must have felt it with Dad’s irregular work. Some weeks there was no money at all. She often used to say to me, ‘If only I could be sure of two pounds a week I’d be in heaven.’ So there was I, in heaven, too.

  As I’ve explained, my afternoon and evening out was on Wednesday, except of course if they happened to have a dinner party on that night. If they had, you were expected to give it up. You weren’t expected to have made plans so it couldn’t matter to you whether you had Wednesday, Thursday or any other day.

  Anyway this Wednesday was all right and I met my Percival. He’d told me he liked to be called Percival. I thought both Perce and Percival were terrible names, but after all beggars can’t be choosers.

  When I met him he told me he was going to take me to his mother’s to tea. Well, if he’d told me he was taking me to the Ritz I couldn’t have been more astounded. I mean in our circles you were never taken to tea to a boy’s house unless you’d been going steady with him for a long time. To be taken to tea to his mother’s house was tantamount to being engaged to him. This put the wind up me properly. It was going to be an ordeal meeting Perce’s mum. It hadn’t happened to me before. I’d never been out with a boy long enough ever to get round to that stage. But I knew girls who had and they’d told me how they’d had to run the gauntlet. They said it was something that required the strongest nerves.

  Anyway to Percival’s home we went to meet his mother – or ‘Ma’ as he called her. I’d never have dared call her Ma even if she’d become my mother-in-law, which she never did. I’d never have dared call her anything but Mrs Tait, which was her name.

  She was about five feet nothing in size but in strength of character I reckon she was about ten feet tall. I was overwhelmed by her. There was no sign of a husband and at first I wondered what had happened to him – whether he’d departed this life or what. But she told me a very mysterious story how one day he went off to visit some relatives. He took nothing with him because he was only going for the day – no money and no clothes – and was never heard of again. He never came back. He never even visited the relatives. So I said to her, ‘Whatever did you do, Mrs Tait – did you notify the police?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘But you must have nearly gone mad with worry,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it was the Lord’s will.’ See, she was one of those who when anything happened it was the Lord’s will. She asked me how old I was and as I’d already put two years on my age and told Perce that I was eighteen I had to tell her the same.

  During the course of the tea I discovered that she’d had three sons, triplets, and she’d called them Lancelot, Tristram, and Percival which was the one I’d got – this Percival. She’d got the names out of a book called Morte d’Arthur, which she’d found on a second-hand bookstall when she was pregnant. At that time I’d never even heard of the book, but later when I did I found it was the last book I’d have read when I was pregnant. I never heard such rubbish. Tales of knightly chivalry when you’re lugging around a stomach the size of a pumpkin. I always was large when I was pregnant and after all she was carrying triplets.

  Also, I couldn’t help feeling that the names Lancelot, Tristram, and Percival were unfortunate names to have to go to school with. Percival told me that they were shortened to Lance, Tris, and Perce so I suppose they got away with it. But when I was at school there was a girl in our class named Cecilia who didn’t. Then we had an Anastasia and her mother said to the teacher that she didn’t want her name shortened; she was to be called by the whole name. We did just that and she had a hell of a time. You know how cruel children can be. I was glad my name was ordinary. Nobody wanted to be different then – not at the kind of school I went to anyway.

  After we’d had tea this Mrs Tait subjected me to such an interrogation as to my antecedents that I felt she’d missed her vocation. She should have been a member of the Spanish Inquisition. It was so ridiculous too, as it was the very first time I’d ever been there and it was quite likely I wouldn’t go again. I couldn’t understand at first why Perce didn’t put his oar in and tell her to shut up. Then of course I realized that he was over thirty years old and he must have got used to it. By his age he’d probably brought a number of girls home to be inspected and rejected.

  I discovered that Lancelot and Tristram had escaped their mother’s clutches, for which I didn’t blame them. One had gone to Canada and one had gone to Australia and they’d both been gone about ten years. During this time they were writing letters home saying how much they missed their mother or so she said, but neither of them had made the trip back. So I could see by all this interrogation and all this talk that she was determined not to lose Perce and I suppose you couldn’t really blame her. She’d got no husband and only that one son to keep her, so life would have been difficult for her without him. Yes, it would have had to have been a very determined girl that would stick to Perce if she’d been got at by his mother every time he took her home.

  Much to my relief, at about half past six Perce suggested that we go out. Just him and me. We were to have gone to the films but when we got outside he suggested we went to a dance instead. Well, I wasn’t too keen on going to a dance. I had to be in by ten o’clock which would mean leaving about half past nine, but he said he didn’t want to be late because he’d got an early shift, so off we went.

  It was a small suburban hall, not a bit like the Palais de Danses that you get now. Just a large bare room with a few fancy shades hanging down and a three- or four-piece band right at the end. The floor was smothered with some kind of powder stuff. It was the kind of place where they held meetings and socials through the week, not a proper dance hall. It only cost one and three to go in and although it was still only seven o’clock there were alrea
dy a lot of people there.

  Most of the girls were dressed up. Some had got knee-length dresses and some had got what were fashionable at that time, dresses hanging down longer at the back than at the front. And they wore very light flesh-coloured stockings which were all the go too in those days.

  The men hadn’t bothered at all. They were mostly in Oxford bags – trousers about two foot wide at the bottoms. To me they seemed a very weedy-looking lot, but as I’d gone with a partner I could afford to be critical.

  Of course like all dance halls at the time there were a lot more girls than boys and there were none of these courtly gestures of a boy escorting you back to your seat. No, they just left you bang in the middle of the floor and went and congregated at one end while you made your own way back to sit and become a wallflower again.

  I couldn’t help thinking how pretty and sophisticated the London girls looked in comparison to those from my home town. Some of them had got Eton crops which were coming into fashion at that time. My sister used to have an Eton crop but you’ve got to have the right face for it. With my kind of features if I’d had an Eton crop I’d have just looked like a hard-boiled egg with a top knot.

  After a time Perce went off to get me a cup of coffee, and while he was gone a young man came up and asked me to dance. Well, I thought, here goes. I’m not bound to Perce. After all he hadn’t bought me body and soul for one and three which was all he’d spent so far. So I got up to dance with this fellow.

  ‘I haven’t seen you here before,’ he said. ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s my first time.’ ‘Are you with anyone?’ he said. ‘Yes, I’ve come with a boyfriend.’ He turned a bit pale at this. ‘Won’t he mind you dancing with me?’ ‘Why should he mind?’ I said. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that just shows you’re a stranger here. When you come with a boyfriend you don’t get up and dance with someone else.’ I’d seen quite a few girls dancing with more than one partner and I said so. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but they all know each other or else they’re related. No complete stranger who comes with a boyfriend ever dances with anyone else. What will you do if he’s annoyed?’ I said, ‘What will you do?’ He swallowed hard and then said, ‘I shan’t do anything – I’m off. You see I’m known here.’ And he left me in the middle of the floor.

  Anyway just at that moment Perce came back. He’d seen what had happened and his face was black as thunder. I felt as though I’d been caught in some sort of orgy. He said, ‘Never you do that again. I’m known here and it makes me look bloody silly when I bring a girl and I leave her for a minute and she dances with somebody else.’

  Now who’d have thought there was all that ridiculous protocol? All this ‘I’m known here’. What a funny way of going on. I thought about my mother and how she’d said that London dance halls were dens of vice. Well, I thought, she should come and see this one. Talk about the height of respectability. And if this was London, the city of sin, it looked as if I was going to leave it as unsullied as when I came to it.

  Anyway, eventually Perce calmed down. He even saw me to my bus. But I remember thinking on my way home – this isn’t going to last much longer, and in short supply though men were I can’t say it worried me. Still, before Perce and I parted we’d arranged another meeting for the following Wednesday – a proper glutton for punishment I was.

  5

  LITTLE DID I think when I’d agreed to meet Percival that Wednesday that this included his Ma once again. Apparently every Wednesday evening when he was on early shift they went together to a Meeting. I soon found out that going to a meeting meant going to a sort of church thing for an hour and that they belonged to a strict rigid religious sect called ‘The Ruth Elders’. I’d never heard of it before, nor have I ever heard of it since. But according to his Ma it was a breakaway from the Evangelical Church. They’d done away with all forms of ceremony, no infant baptisms, no stained-glass windows and no ceremonial robes or anything like that.

  I didn’t see how I could get out of going. I thought perhaps it was another test to see if I would be a fit companion to go out with her son. I mean, I’d already had the interrogation about my antecedents the first time and I thought – oh well, this is the second round.

  Mind you, I’d already made up my mind that nothing on earth would induce me to see his Ma again because I knew that it was becoming a sort of tug-of-war and I wasn’t going to join battle. If he wanted his Ma more than he wanted me well then that was that as far as I was concerned. I didn’t really care.

  So we went to this hall where The Ruth Elders met and most decidedly she never exaggerated when she said that they went in for stark simplicity.

  It was just a bare hall – cold as charity, wooden floors with hard wooden benches and lit by a gas light. There were about thirty people there and much to my relief we sat down in the back row.

  Everyone was old. Apart from me Perce was the youngest by far. They had a pastor though I don’t know if you would call him a pastor. I call him a pastor for want of a better word, but he didn’t wear any dog collar or cassock and surplice or anything like that at all. He was just dressed in a dark suit.

  He said a little prayer to start with and we all had to kneel down on this wooden floor. I was thinking about my silk stockings all the time. Then he gave about a ten-minute sermon promising us that hell and damnation would follow for anybody who deviated from the straight and narrow path. I remember looking around at the congregation and thinking that such a chance would be a damned fine thing for any of them.

  After the sermon there was silence for about a couple of minutes and then all of a sudden to my amazement, and to my horror too, some woman got up and started declaiming loudly about the sins that she’d committed since she’d been there last.

  Talk about audience participation. One after another they all got up and started shrieking out in a loud voice of all their wickednesses. And these sins were the silliest things. Like they’d taken too much pride in their appearance or they had a ha’penny too much given them in change and they hadn’t gone back to the shop with it. And one of them had lost her temper at home. The last female that stood up – she got into such a frenzy, I thought she was going to throw a fit.

  Looking back on it I suppose all this bursting forth was a kind of outlet for their repressed sexual emotions which no doubt they never gave rein to at home or elsewhere.

  There she was ranting and raving and thrusting her arms towards the pastor. I said to myself – steady, girl, here it comes: the big sin of the week. Then came the awful truth. One morning she felt so tired she didn’t get up and make her husband’s breakfast. Well, I ask you. Omission it might be – sin never. It was all so piddling.

  Then, after calling for a few minutes’ more silence, the pastor said that if there were any troubled souls there, would they come up to him for advice, and he’d lay his hands on them.

  Well search me, if I’d had all the troubles in the world nothing would have induced me to have gone up and let him lay his hands on me. I mean, all right if he’d been one of those intense, spiritual-looking aesthetic priests, but a portly, smug-faced man that looked as if he’d just left the mayoral banquet – nothing would have induced me to have gone up there. In any case they’d have all passed out if I’d have told them my sins, and even mine weren’t that bad. That was the end of The Ruth Elders.

  Then Perce said, would I like to go round to the working men’s club with him? I’d never been to a working men’s club before and I had no idea what it was like so I agreed. This was going to be another first and last for me.

  Oh, what dumps they are! Maybe they’re not now but they were then. It was another bare room with nothing in it at all. No carpet, no rugs, no nice tables. Talk about a boost to the male ego. Everything was there for men but nothing for females at all. Men had got billiard tables, card tables, and darts but all the women did was just stick up at one end of the room. It was a working men’s club but never mind about the working men’s wives or their girlfriends.

 
; When we got there Perce dumped me at the women’s end while he went off to play billiards. This after the prayer meeting was not my idea of going out with a young man.

  Yet none of the other women seemed to mind about being down there, with their boyfriends and husbands up the other end all clubbing together. Some were knitting and some were just talking. They tried to be friendly, I’ve got to give them their due. They asked me what I did so I said I was in domestic service and they said, ‘Oh, a skivvy!’ Not nasty at all; it was just their name for domestic servants, but you could tell by the tone they said it in that none of them would ever be seen dead in service, for which I didn’t blame them.

  One of them worked in a fried fish and chip shop. She needn’t have bothered to tell me that because you could smell it a mile off. One of them took rather a fancy to me. She was a woman of about thirty-five – not married – a barmaid. Violet her name was. She said to me, ‘I wouldn’t stick that life. Why don’t you take a barmaid’s job?’

  Why? My mum and dad would’ve gone stark raving mad if I’d ever written home and told them I was a barmaid. They’d have been up post haste to rescue me. All right. Nowadays barmaids have got a certain status. Pubs are nothing like the riotous places they were in the old days, and half of them have been made into these cocktail-lounge things. But then a barmaid was a low job. There weren’t many of them – mostly there were barmen.

  I remember when Mum and Dad used to get me to go round on a Saturday dinnertime to get half a pint of Burton from the bottle and jug department. It was right next door to the public bar and the language of the barmaid in there was worse than any bargee or labourer that I’ve ever heard.