Climbing the Stairs

by Margaret Powell

  And the way they decorate and furnish places! They look clinical, like something out of the Ideal Home Exhibition. But pubs aren’t homes or they shouldn’t be. You come out of your home for new surroundings and what do you find? Thick carpets, soft armchairs, a sort of cocktail-lounge effect. And the breweries say that’s what the customers want. How do they know? Did they ask them? And if the customers want that why aren’t they there to use it? A lot of people – people like my husband and me – feel out of place in these cocktail-lounge kind of places. But you’ve got to go there because they’ve done away with the private bar and you’ve only got two grades now – public bar and this kind of phoney set-up.

  Then they haven’t got the drinks you want. My husband likes drinking beer – mild beer. And they don’t serve it except in the public bar. And when you ask you can see them thinking, ‘What are you doing in here then if you can’t afford expensive drinks?’

  It’s not just television. Maybe it’s because in an affluent society people don’t need what we do – the support and company of other people as a sort of prop in our leisure time. Perhaps money does that for you. Makes you independent. But if that’s what being rich means, I don’t want it. I still need to depend on people for my enjoyment.

  It was strange how packed the pubs used to be during the war – and I don’t think this was just because we had to have the alcohol. In a time of adversity we wanted the feeling of togetherness. It’s a pity that it takes a war to give us this kind of unity with each other.

  7

  GLADYS WAS THE under-housemaid at my first place in London. She was a year older than me and although she wasn’t what you’d call a pretty girl she had loads of personality. I used to look forward to our Sundays off together. Every other Sunday we got and we always started by going out to tea.

  We used to go to rather posh places where they had all gold paint and plaster cupids and marble pillars, and for the price of a pot of tea and two or three cakes you could really feel that you were living it up. We’d sit there and there’d be well-dressed people all around us with their high-faluting talk. And wooing young men would have their girls there.

  Personally I could never see why people wanted to do their courting in restaurants. I think there’s nothing less conducive to love than seeing people opposite you chewing all the time. I never could understand this mania that English people have for eating out. Either the food is so wonderful when you eat out that you’re not in the least bit interested in your partner, or else you’re so interested in him that you aren’t taking a bit of notice to what you eat.

  When I was trying to get a young man I’d never go eating because the way some young men eat – shovelling away at their food, chewing with their mouths wide open – you can’t help thinking, ‘Heavens above, would I have to sit opposite that every day of my life if we got married?’ So it’s best not to know.

  All men have got defects, we know that, but you don’t want them paraded in front of you before you’ve taken them on, do you? After you’re married you can do your best to eradicate the defects but you can’t start eradicating before you’ve got your man up the aisle.

  Then there’s the kind of man who always props a newspaper in front of him. Of course you can’t see him eating but you want a man to talk to you.

  The whole art of spending a married life together is not just popping up to bed. Your husband should be able to talk to you. Perhaps when you’ve been married years you don’t worry so much, but when you first get married you visualize dainty food, a nice tablecloth and the man sitting there and talking to you about interesting things. Of course it’s all in your mind. It doesn’t really materialize, but that’s what you think it’s going to be.

  So I don’t think eating goes with courting.

  Drinking is another thing altogether. You go into a pub or a lounge and you have a glass of wine with a stem to it and you sit there holding the stem and you gaze into each other’s eyes over this glass of wine. You can really feel romantic like that. Love and wine go together but love and food don’t.

  Mind you, you never found any young men in those kind of teashops because no unattached males ever went there. You’d find them in Lyons if you wanted to pick up a couple, but never if you went in those kind of semi-posh places.

  Still we had to give up the chase some time, didn’t we? We couldn’t devote our whole lives to looking for men.

  One particular Sunday we decided that we’d go to the Trocadero. It was a place that we’d only been in once before and we’d found it too expensive for us. It was the height of luxury. They had very deep carpets and beautiful subdued lights, and there was a band that played sweet and low music.

  One of Gladys’s uncles had just got a job there as a trolley waiter and we thought we might get things a bit cheaper so we decided to chance it.

  It really was marvellous.

  They served tea in silver-plated teapots and instead of knives to cut your cake with you got those little forks with two prongs. I know it’s daft but nevertheless you feel that you’re really moving with the high-ups when you don’t have a knife to eat your tea with.

  The only thing was that Gladys’s uncle struck a somewhat incongruous note in all these luxurious surroundings. I suppose it was because he was over sixty and he’d got flat feet, a very red nose and he’d a scraggy neck so his Adam’s apple bobbled up and down in a very peculiar way the whole time he talked.

  Still when he brought the trolley to us I’d never seen such lovely cakes in my life – and he whispered to Gladys, ‘Have two for the price of one.’ And we did this two or three times.

  The beauty of the Trocadero was that you didn’t have to hurry. In some of the teashops we went in we didn’t like to linger because somebody might be wanting the table. But in there nobody seemed to bother. It was a sort of afternoon ritual. We sat there nearly two hours.

  And these teapots that they gave you. You could get four cups of tea for each of you if you kept sticking the hot water in. Of course eventually it came out almost like pouring it straight out of the hot-water jug but that didn’t matter. We got four cups each so we sat there sipping away and listening to the band.

  And the toilets there! They were an absolute revelation. There were three of them and they were lovely ones. The walls stretched right up to the ceiling – not like those where there’s no top or bottom. There were basins to wash your hands and as many towels as you wanted.

  So we really had a wonderful afternoon at the Trocadero.

  That evening Gladys suggested we went round to see her aunt – the wife of this uncle. They lived just off Ladbroke Grove.

  It was a terrible place. A house with five floors if you included the basement, and there were three families living on every floor. Four rooms on each floor. One family had two rooms and the other rooms had one family each. The smell when you went in the passage was appalling. It was compounded of stale food, dirt, and the smell of sweaty humanity.

  Mind you, Gladys never turned a hair. It could have been the roses of Picardy for all she knew. Maybe coming from Stepney as she did she was used to it.

  I’ve seen some slummy places in my own home town but nothing to compare with that. You didn’t dare put your hand on the banister – it was coated in filth. Each particular family was supposed to take turns doing their bits of the stairs down from one floor to another, but with three families on each floor there were quarrels as to whose turn it was and nothing ever got done.

  Gladys’s aunt lived on the top floor. All they had in the way of water was one small sink on the landing halfway up and that had to do for those two floors. So that there were six families using one tiny sink and one lavatory.

  The contrast between this and the Trocadero!

  I said to Gladys, ‘Surely your uncle can afford a better place than this?’ She said that he probably could if he stuck a job but he drank a lot, which accounted for his red nose. Apparently he was always drinking and losing his job and I suppose th
at was what they were reduced to. It was a terrible hole! I didn’t know how anyone had the spirit to keep clean there.

  Gladys’s aunt had been in domestic service and she bitterly regretted ever leaving it. She’d loved the place where she worked. And she was delighted to have an audience of two who themselves were in service. She was on about Sir and Madam and Master Gerald and Miss Sarah. I thought it was absolutely stupid. After all those years still calling the people you worked for Sir and Madam and Master and Miss. It just shows you, doesn’t it – there is a type of person who likes domestic service? They feel there’s a certain prestige attached to serving the high and mighty.

  While I was there she got out some newspaper cuttings about this Miss Sarah who was in the suffragette movement and I was interested in this.

  This Miss Sarah wasn’t one of the more militant ones – not like the Pankhurst woman. She didn’t go around setting fire to churches, slashing valuable paintings or putting lighted paper through people’s letter boxes. But there were a couple of newspaper photos of her. In one of them she’d got a policeman’s helmet stuck on her head and in the other she was there with a lot of other women debagging a policeman.

  I must say I was surprised because I hadn’t realized that these suffragettes came from well-to-do homes. I couldn’t think that people who’d got a comfortable home and didn’t have to work could really feel there was anything they ought to fight for.

  My mother was a very strong-minded woman – what you would call a militant woman – but she never bothered about the rights of women. So long as she’d got the vote in her home – and, believe me, she had – she couldn’t care less about the political vote.

  Some Sunday evenings Gladys and I used to go to Lyons Corner House which was a very lively place. The only snag was that we had to leave by half past nine and really it was only beginning to warm up then. We used to get there about eight o’clock. We’d choose the cheapest thing on the menu – egg on toast or sometimes beans on toast. And then we’d perhaps have a glass of shandy or if we were very daring and we weren’t too hard up we’d have a glass of wine.

  There used to be two women who went there regularly. We saw them every time we went. They were about thirty – very sophisticated type of women – hair cut very short. They used mascara, lipstick, and a dead-white powder. I suppose in a way they looked like clowns, but we didn’t think so.

  The most daring thing was that they used to smoke cigarettes. All right, Gladys used to have a puff now and then up in the bedroom that we shared. I’d keep cave and we’d open the window and flap a towel about if we thought anyone was coming. But to smoke in a public room – and not only that, they used long holders too, like Pola Negri on the pictures – we thought was the height of sophistication.

  We used to try to get a seat near the band if we could because it gave a sort of cachet. Everyone tried to get there. It was an eight-piece outfit.

  After we’d been going there about half a dozen times we got to know some of the players and we thought they were marvellous. They had a kind of uniform of black, very tight-fitting trousers with a red stripe down the side and red jackets with black facings. And we found them very attractive-looking indeed. And of course we were flattered that they took any notice of us.

  Two of them in particular we had our eyes on. Fortunately we didn’t each have our eyes on the same one. Gladys was keen on the one who played the drums, and the one who played the piano I thought would do all right for me. That is if we ever managed to get out with these two remarkable young men.

  One night they began calling out to us asking what tunes we’d like them to play – and that was something that sort of made you feel somebody.

  I forget what sort of numbers were popular at that time or how we knew they were. I suppose the errand boys were our disc jockeys then, because whenever a hit tune came out all the errand boys would be riding about on their bicycles whistling it.

  I used to like the soulful sentimental numbers like You Were Meant For Me – romantic things – not like these pop things they have now which seem to be full of hidden meanings. You don’t know whether it’s an exercise in sex or whether it’s a song.

  Anyway after we’d chosen a few tunes, a waiter came over with a note from one of them – I don’t know whether it was the drummer or the pianist – asking if we could meet them one night.

  Well, you can imagine Gladys and me; we were in a seventh heaven thinking that these beautiful bandsmen had actually invited us out. We sent back a note by the waiter saying that we’d meet them at five o’clock on the next Wednesday. We said five because that would give us extra time to do ourselves up and make ourselves look attractive.

  And then Gladys said to me, ‘On no account tell them that we’re in domestic service.’

  So I said, ‘Well, they’re bound to wonder what we do because we have to get in at half past nine.’

  We sat there searching our brains. First of all we were secretaries to someone or other and we were doing night work or then we were looking after an art gallery at night.

  I said, ‘They won’t believe anything like that at all, Gladys, so it’s no use coming out with those cock and bull things.’

  At last we settled on a story that we were cousins. We didn’t like to say we were sisters because we were so unlike – and her mother was an invalid and we had to be back at half past nine because the person who looked after her wouldn’t stay any later. It sounded a bit thin but it would do.

  But after all this planning and scheming we got a horrible shock. There we stood on the corner where we’d arranged to meet at five o’clock and when they came in sight a couple of more insignificant-looking creatures you’ve never seen in your life.

  In uniform and sitting down they looked marvellous but out of uniform and standing up they were simply ciphers. Both about five foot four. We towered above them. And they were wearing horrible flashy light-blue pinstripe suits, gingery-coloured shoes and trilby hats. You’ve never seen anything like it in your life.

  I was horrified to think of all the work we’d put in night after night to get this couple to take us out.

  Gladys whispered to me, ‘Let’s get them in the flicks as quick as we can so that nobody sees them.’

  This we did. And while I was sitting there I couldn’t help thinking of all the young men you read about. The favourite novelists at that time were Elinor Glyn, Ethel M. Dell and Charles Garvice. And I don’t know where they found the type of men that they wrote about: the kind of he-men and yet chivalrous with a kind of power over the women so that they made them do what they wanted. I’d never then nor since met any men like it.

  Mind you, all these wonderful lovers on the films Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro – they were just pasteboard lovers, weren’t they? I could never understand women raving and going mad about Rudolph Valentino and sending for his photo. In any case who wants a man that you’ve got to share with a load of other women?

  I used to wish that you could find an Englishman who was a sheikh. And I used to think that with the shortage of men there was it would be nice if a man could have three wives like sheikhs did. You could all take it in turns to be number one wife, couldn’t you? I wouldn’t have minded waiting my turn at all. But Englishmen have got neither the inclination nor the stamina.

  Later when I was married I used to think it would be fine for women to have two husbands because you really need two husbands. One to go out to work for you, to support you and keep a roof over your head, and one for pleasure, because the one that does all the work is too tired for pleasure.

  Anyway, there I sat in the pictures getting some sort of pleasure by watching sheikhs because I knew that these two we’d got with us were no sheikhs. One and six to go into the pictures and a fourpenny ice-cream and that was the extent of what they were going to spend on us.

  When we came out we separated. Gladys and I had agreed on this. We had a kind of code whereby if we’d got two young men who might be dangerou
s if they got us on our own we would never separate. When we used to go to Hyde Park and walk around with guardsmen there we’d never separate. Nothing would have induced me to be alone with a guardsman. I mean, they’d got no money to start with so you could be sure they were on the lookout for some pleasure that costs nothing.

  But these couple of weeds – they didn’t rate.

  When we got outside my pianist steered me down a dark street. Nowadays of course you can’t find a dark street. I don’t wonder people do their courting in broad daylight – it’s either that or not do it at all.

  Well, we walked down this dark street and all of a sudden he stopped and started getting sort of het up – breathing heavily all over me just like a lot of other young men I’d had – puffing, panting, and pawing was about the extent of their repertoire. And it’s so ridiculous, isn’t it, because if you want someone to start patting and pawing you, you obviously have got to have some feeling for them? You’ve got to think that you’d like them to do it. But when you’ve met someone for the first time you can’t have much feeling for them at all, so why should they think you have?

  It just shows the colossal egotism of a man, doesn’t it – that he thinks every woman he takes out wants him to drape himself round her neck and be affectionate to her? They don’t even give you time to get to like them. And the last straw came when he suddenly burst out laughing.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘1 can’t help thinking of the girl I’d arranged to meet tonight. I wonder how long she waited for me?’

  Well, I was simply livid. What a thing to say to me. That he’d arranged to meet another girl and then ditched her at the last minute.

  Just at this time we’d come to an Underground station so I said, ‘Do you mind excusing me for a minute – I want to go to the lavatory?’