Skin Lane

by Neil Bartlett

  I’m sure you know the sort of thing.

  The building Mr F entered when he pushed open that door was a warren, cobbled together out of several even older premises. According to the Corporation of London Survey produced as part of the plans for the redevelopment of the north bank of the Thames in 1966, this corner block was Number Four, Skin Lane; and according to the Fur Trade Directory, Number Four housed three separate businesses; The Astoria Fur Company, A&D Eshkeri Ltd (both of these are listed as importers, who presumably only used the building as their City office address; their store-and workrooms are listed as being in Wembley and Plaistow respectively), and M. Scheiner Ltd, which is listed as a manufacturing furriers. This last was Mr F’s employer. The firm was unusual, in that it was an actual manufacturers -the relatively high rents in the City meant that most of the actual workrooms were to be found further out — and in its scale of operations. With nineteen workers (most of the firms on the Lane were much smaller), the building must always have felt crowded — and it was far from being purpose-built. The machine-room, for instance, was in a half-basement at the bottom of the building, while the cutting-room was right at the top — a highly inconvenient arrangement that necessitated endless journeys up and down the building’s narrow staircases. Offices, lavatories and stockrooms were hidden on each of the landings, and most of the rooms were small, and dark. There was one exception; if you stood out on the corner of the Lane and looked up, you’d have seen that the top storey of the building at least was paradoxically open to inspection. A strip of south-facing windows ran the entire length of the cutting-room, overlooking the roof of St James’s church, and these windows were kept permanently uncurtained. This was were the cutting-benches were; the intricacy of the work required constant and direct illumination, and so you might have said that this was the one part of the trade which was conducted in broad daylight — except that up there on the top floor, the windows were too high for anybody to have looked in through them anyway.

  The rest of the building was as secretive as its front door. The glass of the lower half of the ground floor windows, for instance, was kept whitewashed, to prevent any passer-by from watching the proceedings inside. The windows were also barred — the trade is, after all, a luxury one, and its raw materials are sometimes of considerable value. In the retail branch of the business, of course, up on Bond Street and Wigmore Street, things were done differently; the West End showrooms of this period were all plate glass windows and acres of polished parquet floor — but even there, discretion was exercised; tact. The finished coats and stoles were displayed on decorous, sexless stands, or at best stiffly draped on extremely ladylike dummies. Nothing hinted at what was, by common consent, best kept hidden. The stench of the pelts when they arrived, stiff and greasy, skin out; their raw sensuality as they hung in glistening rows at auction; their unnerving softness as they submitted to the knives and needles — all that was kept out of sight, down on the Lane.

  There was one further twist to the odd air of secrecy about Scheiner’s old premises, and it is clearly shown in the photograph I mentioned. The barred basement window to the left of the front door looks as if it is glazed in plain frosted glass, but the one to the right has somehow managed to retain its old plate glass from before the war — they must have kept it sandbagged. In black letters, on white paint, it still bears, for no apparent reason, the cryptic legend “And Sons”.

  So far as I can see, the employees ranged on Scheiner’s front steps in the photograph are all smiling. The women in particular — with the exception of one short, fierce-looking lady standing in the middle of them with her arms crossed -look cheerful. There is nothing secretive about them. However, if ever he was asked what he did for a living, or where he worked, Mr. F would usually evasively answer that he worked “over in the City”. For reasons that he himself didn’t quite understand, he still worried, even after all these years, that to describe too accurately what he actually did every day would seem grotesque. There was too much skin and hair involved, too many knives — and there was the smell, of course. He worried that it might still be there, clinging to him; worried that despite the nightly scrubbing, the carbolic and the lanolin, he would never quite have got it out of his skin. On occasion, he resorted to telling people he was actually a bank-teller. Once, bizarrely, when filling in a form to join a library, he had even put down Zookeeper.

  Mr F had joined Scheiner’s in 1934. He’d started in the downstairs workroom, as a sweeper — which was the first time in his life he’d been surrounded by women. They didn’t make it easy for him, it must be said. Something about this big, quiet boy fresh out of school made the half dozen female machinists delight in competing to see who could make him blush the deepest. They would surreptitiously kick at the scraps of fur caught under their treadles, sending up an invisible cloud of floating hairs to catch in his nostrils and mouth, forcing him to spit to get them out. The boy would always try and do this when he thought no one could see him — he’d bend over his broom and try and do it in a corner, because he thought it was disgusting, the sensation of hair between your teeth, and he hated spitting anyway -but their eyes were sharper than his, and someone would always spot him and sing out Are you alright there, darling? which was everyone’s cue to stare, and for the blood to rush to his face. He hated that, too, but the women were merciless - Aaah; bit of someone’s fur stuck between your teeth -anyone we know, darling? If he could have understood all of the accompanying ribald comments about the promising size of his feet and hands — at fourteen, he had still to grow into his extremities — he would have blushed even harder, but the young Mr F was one of only two or three non-Jews in the twenty-strong workforce at Scheiner’s, and since the ladies’ filthiest comments were always screeched above the din — the constantly blaring radio, the staccato, guttural whirring of their fur-sewing machines — in Yiddish, he was spared the explicit details of his humiliation. (That explains why Mr F got home when he did on a winter Friday, by the way; like most of the rest of the London garment trade, the workforce at Scheiner’s had to be home before sundown on a Friday night, and so the workshops always closed early.)

  At sixteen, Mr F had been offered an apprenticeship as a cutter, and, swapping his brown apron for a four-buttoned white coat, had moved up the narrow, twisting staircase to the all-male workroom at the top of the building. This was where the knives were kept; where the furs were sorted, cut and nailed to their patterns, ready for seaming at the machines downstairs. The segregation of the workforce into male and female workrooms was not peculiar to Scheiner’s; tradition dictated that in the fur trade there was no such thing as a female cutter or a male machinist. Everything in the trade was sexed; even the skins themselves were sorted into male and female before going to auction, and priced accordingly (the boy never forgot being taken to the great high-ceilinged Beaver House auction room for the first time, and hearing the words themselves - male!, female! - shouted out across the echoing floor). Once the skins arrived on the Lane, both men and women handled them, of course — but their hands moved in very different ways while they did it. Men sliced; women stitched. Men owned the businesses (in this case, Mr Maurice Scheiner, a fifty-year-old second generation Londoner), men ran the auction houses, men ran the showrooms, it was always men who paid for the finished furs — but it was only ever women who wore them. Somehow, the unspoken rules and principles of sexual division clung to the garments as insidiously as their faint but unmistakeable smell; they were worked into them with every delicate stitch, with every painstaking incision. Even though it is hard to describe in figures, and rarely features in anyone’s accounts, there is an economy of desire, and of beauty, just as there is of everything else — and that economy was the Lane’s business. Men brought their women to be dressed in fur because they thought it was right and proper; they thought it bestowed on a woman all the qualities she should have — elegance; obviousness; animal heat. It put all her secrets right where they needed them to be — on the outs
ide. It could (and, of course, can) make a wife as desirable as a secretary, or a shop-girl as grateful as a wife; even more importantly, it can confer on even the most ordinary of men, as he writes out his cheque for a wrap or coat, a long list of all those things that people who don’t have it mistakenly think money just can’t buy. Generosity. Princeliness. Dominion.

  No wonder they pay. No wonder the trade still flourishes.

  Of course, the women on the machines at Scheiner’s used rather blunter words than I have to talk about the men who visited the Lane. “New Styles This Season my arse”, as one of the younger girls put it, extinguishing her fag before starting work on seaming up a big new order. No one in the machine-room ever spoke to the young boy directly about any of these things — no one ever does — but surely, at the tender age of fourteen, he must have sensed them. Sensed them, hanging there behind the jokes in that hot, dense air -thick with fur, and loud with raucous laughter.

  Whatever the reason, he was glad to get upstairs.

  Nearly thirty-three years later, he was still there, up on the top floor of Number Four, and Mr F of Scheiner’s, as he was universally known, had become one of the fixtures of the Lane. Despite his seniority (it was the Head Cutter’s place he now occupied, in the centre of the long workbench, and even Mr Scheiner himself occasionally deferred to his judgement), no one ever called him anything else. The nickname had originally been given him when he first moved upstairs; this particular junior’s arrival had meant that the cutters’ benches were then staffed by a Mr Davison, a Mr Eisenberg, a Mr Freeman (which is our Mr F’s proper name), a Mr Greenberg (who preferred to be called Mr Green) and a Mr Hoffmann. Naturally the clerk in charge of wages had saved himself time by entering them in the company’s wage-ledger as Mr D, E, F, G and H — and the names on the wage-packets had stuck. After the war, out of the five, only Mr F had returned to his job, and indeed by 1967 out of all his colleagues probably only Mrs Kesselman, the head machinist and supervisor, could still remember how he had acquired his name. She is the rather forbidding woman (still wearing both her dyed hair and her thick make-up in the extreme fashion of the late nineteen-forties) who is standing in the middle of her colleagues in the photograph — and she, paradoxically, was the only one of them who would sometimes insist on calling Mr F by his full surname. Mrs Kesselman had been with the firm longer than even he had, and her Mr Freeman was the only person in the firm she considered — and treated as — her equal. She wouldn’t hear a word against him.

  Mr F took this use of his nickname as a mark of respect, which it probably — mostly — was. He knew it implied neither familiarity nor affection. Despite the fact that he had worked there all his adult life, he didn’t have anyone at Scheiner’s who he would have described as a friend; acquaintance and colleague were the words he preferred. Their formality suited him. No one who worked with him feared or disliked him, exactly, but they all left him alone. His solid build and his always immaculate appearance combined to suggest a temper being contained; his reprimands were certainly never vulgar, but they were always prompt, and meant. The cutters under him knew enough about the seriousness with which he took his work to never be late in the morning, and never to spoil a skin -not when he was watching, at least.

  The world of which Skin Lane was part was a small and crowded one, and almost everyone working in that dense network of streets knew or claimed to know the habits and faults of their rivals. Sometimes a cutter from another firm would remark That Mr F from Scheiner’s, he’s not the cheeriest soul on the Lane — and it was true that even after all these years neither Mr F’s body nor his voice had acquired the characteristic Yiddisher inflections of his trade. His hands never gesticulated; he rarely joked. His manner was at all times sober and, to a degree, withdrawn; this was a man who definitely kept, you would have said, himself to himself. Though no one ever said anything to his face, some of the younger girls downstairs did occasionally (not in front of Mrs Kesselman, mind) raise their eyebrows at this apparent stand-offishness of his. As was only natural, there was some speculation about him.

  About his single-ness, I mean.

  When a man is solitary, people always want an explanation, don’t they — have you noticed that? Especially if he ends up doing something notable, committing a crime for instance, or even just surviving to a very old age. At some point in the conversation, someone always says, I wonder what made him that way?

  As it happens, Mr F’s air of solitariness was something that he had always had. When he was a child, it had had the most obvious of explanations, the one that the female neighbours always liked to dwell on when commenting on the fact that he wasn’t as boisterous as his brothers; of course, you know the boy never knew his mother. That’s why, in the few memories he has of childhood outings to the circus or the pictures or the zoo, it is always his father’s hand that he is holding. The faces of the succession of ladies “down the street” — some kind, some less so — who looked after him while his father was at work are lost to him now; he remembers the house he grew up in as only ever having men in it, and as being small, and dark, and quiet. He remembers how cramped the kitchen was, and how the meals were eaten without conversation; he can still vividly picture his father standing, silent, at the kitchen sink, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his face turned away. He can remember being short enough to have to struggle to reach the kitchen table on a Sunday night, when it was always his task to polish his brothers’ giant shoes over a sheet of spread newspaper — and he can remember a lot of listening. In particular, he can remember sitting at the top of the stairs with the lights turned out and his forehead pressed against the banisters, straining to catch the strange, half-heard sound of men’s voices booming and drifting up the stairs. There were several noises in the house that fascinated him like this. There was the small chink of his father’s wedding ring as he put it in the china saucer on the windowsill when they started on the dishes; the muffled laughter downstairs when his brothers came home after he’d been sent up to bed; and strangest — and perhaps best — of all, the occasional sudden shout or woman’s shriek from beneath his bedroom window late on a Saturday night, followed always by the mysterious sound of someone running (from what? he wondered), by the receding clack and clatter of a pair of high heels.

  He sometimes thought of asking what these noises meant; but he was not a child who ever asked his questions out loud. They stayed inside his head.

  At school, he was what they called “quiet”. At the dinner-break, he often stood apart from the others in the playground, but luckily, he was saved from the bullying usually meted out to any boy less than eager to join in by the reputation of his brothers. In the classroom, he rarely, if ever, volunteered an answer, which gave his teachers licence to ignore him; this reticence infuriated his father, but only sometimes, and not enough for his annoyance to develop into either worry or any great care. Later on, when he started on the Lane, the boy’s inability or disinclination to contribute to the workroom banter was certainly remarked on; but when his apprenticeship proper began upstairs, his quietness was for the very first time appreciated, and even, on a couple of occasions that he still remembered, commended. In a workplace that crowded, his colleagues were probably grateful that for once the junior had little to say for himself. Certainly, no one ever learnt faster or mastered the intricacies of the craft with more studied concentration than Mr F did; at sixteen, he may have showed no desire to learn to swear in Yiddish, and he may never have wanted to go to a dance-hall or yet have struck up a conversation with a stranger on a bus, but the methodical, brow-furrowing dexterity required to handle a furrier’s knife seemed to come naturally. It was as if this was what he’d been waiting for. Even Mr Scheiner, who’d been in the trade long enough to have forgotten more about it than most people had ever known, was impressed. So, the boy was cold fish. By whom was that a problem?