CHAPTER TEN
Why the leather trade? Father had met a man who belonged to the Chamber of Commerce and who had said he knew a firm of Leather Factors that had an opening for an office boy. Begin (he said) at the bottom of the ladder, like Henry Ford. I shall not forget that spiritless January morning when Father took me to a place in the Bermondsey district of London. The one pleasant but intimidating thing was that for the first time I sat with Father in a corner seat of a First Class compartment of the train on the old South Eastern and Chatham railway. I was wearing a new suit, a stiff collar that choked me, a bowler hat which bit hard into my forehead and kept slipping over my ears. I felt sick. There were two or three city gentlemen in the compartment, smoking pipes; my father presented me with a copy of the Christian Science Sentinel and told me to read it while he closed his eyes and prayed for me. I disliked being seen with this paper. He prayed as far as Hither Green—I opened my eyes for a glance at a house which had been torn in half by a bomb in the autumn raids—and then he leaned across to me and, not as quietly as I would have liked, for the city gentlemen were staring at us, he reminded me of the story of the infant Samuel. Father was becoming emotional. To me the situation was once more like the sacrifice of Isaac.
“When he heard the voice of God calling, Samuel answered ‘Speak Lord, they servant heareth.’ When the manager sends for you, I want you to remember that. Say to yourself ‘Speak Lord …’ as Samuel did and go at once. It’s just an idea. You will find it helpful. I always do that when I go to see the Buyer at Harrods.”
I had thought of myself as growing up fast at school. Now, under my bowler hat, I felt I was sinking back into infancy. At London Bridge, where we got out, a yellow fog was coating the rain as we went down the long flights of sour stone stairs into the malodorous yet lively air peculiar to the river of Bermondsey. We passed the long road tunnels under the railway tracks, tunnels which are used as vaults and warehouses convenient to the Pool of London. There was always fog hanging like sour breath in these tunnels. There was a daylight gloom in this district of London. One breathed the heavy, drugging, beer smell of hops and there was another smell of boots and dog dung: this came from the leather which had been steeped a month in puer or dog dung before the process of tanning. There was also—I seemed to be haunted by it at the critical moments of my childhood—the stinging smell of vinegar from a pickle factory; and smoke blew down from an emery mill. Weston Street was a street of leather and hide merchants, leather dressers and fell-mongers. Out of each brass-plated doorway came either that oppressive odour of new boots; or, from the occasional little slum houses, the sharp stink of London poverty. It was impossible to talk for the noise of dray horses striking the cobbles.
We arrived at a large old-fashioned building and walked into a big office where the clerks sat on high stools at tilted desks. The green-shaded lamps were lit. A hard bell struck over an inner door. “Speak Lord,” I instantly murmured—and a smart office boy who had given a wisp of vaseline to his forelock took us to the office of the head of the firm.
This ancient gentleman was like God himself—Grandfather and all Victorians would have recognized him. He was a tall, massive, hump-shouldered man in his late seventies, with a waving mat of long thick white hair which had a yellow streak in it, and a white beard. He had pale-blue eyes, very sharp, a wily smile and an alert but quavering voice. He was the complete City gentleman of the old school. My father and he were courtly with each other; the old man was soon on to the slump of the 1870’s when his uncle had sent him to Vienna for the firm and where (he slyly said) he had got the better of a competitor because of his knowledge of German. He said he was glad to hear I was a church-goer, for he himself held a Bible class every Sunday; and his secretary, an old woman like my grandmother, taught in Sunday School too. He mentioned his eleven children, four of the sons being in the business. My father said I was good at French. The old gentleman suddenly snapped at me:
“Assez pour tirer d’affaires?”
I was bowled out and could not speak. The old gentleman grinned kindly. We were interrupted by a sugary, languid tinkle on the old-fashioned telephone that stood in the middle of his large desk. It was really two desks joined; it had spawned some odd side-tables and was covered with papers, letters and periodicals. I watched the bent knees of the old man rise, then his back heave up, then the hump elongate itself and finally a long arm with a powerful and shaking hand on it stretched across the wide desk and reached the telephone. The quavering voice changed now to a virile, barking note, the mild blue eyes became avid, the teeth looked the teeth of a lynx. His talk was brisk and commanding: when it was over he sank back in his chair and gazed at us as if he had never seen us before and, panting a little, said:
“The Arabic has docked with 4,000 bales.”
His knees went up and down under his desk feeling for a concealed bell, and the office boy came pelting in.
The room, I saw, was like a studio under a dirty glass roof, and was supported by iron pillars here and there. In two corners of it were two more crowded desks and against one of the walls was a large Victorian fireplace. The smoke of the coal fire mingled with the fog that had entered the room.
I worked for four years, until I was nearly twenty, at the leather factors, starting at 12s. 6d. a week and finishing at 18s. 6d. The firm was one of the most important factors in the trade. Other factors, it was said, were merchants on the side, a lack of probity which the firm denounced: we—as I quickly learned to say—sold on commission only. We—it turned out—were the agents of a very large number of English tanners and fell-mongers, also of large sheepskin tanners in Australia, of hide merchants in general and dealt also in dry-salted South American hides. More rarely, and reluctantly “we” dealt in Moroccan and India dressed leather and woolled sheepskins. There was more money in the raw material. A large part of this stock was stored in the warehouse attached to the office, but also in the docks, in the wharves of the Pool of London and in the cold storages. The firm also dealt in tanning materials: oak bark, shumac, myrabolams and tanning extracts. The correspondence came from all over the world and was heavy; the size of the cheques the firm paid out astonished me; they ran often into the thousands; all of them bearing the large, spidery, childishly clear signature of the old gentleman. It was incredible that a firm in such shabby, old-fashioned offices should be so rich.
The premises were opened at 7:30 in the morning by an old clerk called Haylett who wobbled in fast, lame and gouty, but always wearing a flower in his buttonhole. He was one of those gardeners of The Waste Land. He was satiny pink, fat and very bald and went about singing bits of music-hall songs or making up words. He then went over to the warehouse and let the workmen into the warehouse. One of these, a young, feeble-minded man, cross-eyed and strong, would lumber down to the safes and carry up a load of heavy ledgers which he set out on the various desks. Dust flew out of them. His name was Paul—he, like one of the carmen, who was known as Ninety, because it was the number of the house where he lived—had no surname. Paul lived with his mother and was very religious. When he had put down his ledgers, Paul would advance upon Mr Haylett and say his usual morning greeting in a toneless voice and unsmiling:
“Well, my venereal friend.”
To this the gay old Mr Haylett replied:
“Good morrow, good morrow, good morrow.” And add one of his made-up words: “Hyjorico,” and shake with laughter. Paul, who wore a heavy leather apron, lowered his head and looked murder at Mr Haylett, and went off on his bandy legs, waving his clenched fists dangerously.
At eight we office boys arrived and often saw this scene. The other boy whose name was Les Daulton had to teach me my job. He was a weak-voiced, fair creature, as simple as Paul and also famous for his comic mis-pronunciations. Offices—like my mother’s shop in Kentish Town of the earlier generation—depend for their life on repeated jokes. Goods were often collected from Thameside quays: Daulton always called them “Kways” and the clerks c
oncentrated on getting him to say it. Daulton gave a simple smile. He knew he was a success. Once we had arrived Mr Haylett went to the W.C. in the basement where he sat smoking his first cigar and reading the paper; Daulton and I followed him down, taking with us the packs of rubber sheets which were used in the copying of letters in the letter presses, and soaked them in the wash-basins. This done, the boy took me out with the local letters that had to be delivered by hand. We went down to the hide market, to the tanners and leather dressing firms and then came back to our main job: answering the Chairman’s bell. This bell was fixed outside Mr Kenneth’s door, in the main office, and snapped in startling, rusty and panicky agitation.
“Boy. Bell,” Mr Haylett would call out in panic, too.
“Speak Lord, Thy servant heareth,” I murmured. One of us would jump off our stools and go in to see what the old gentleman wanted. Sometimes he handed us an urgent letter which had to be copied, but often his knee had pressed the bell by mistake; or he had forgotten he had called us and he gazed at us blankly with the lost, other-worldly eyes of an old man.
Occasionally the bell was rung from another desk in Mr Kenneth’s office. This was the desk of another old man, Mr James, Mr Kenneth’s brother, well-known to be the fool of the business and never trusted with any serious matters. He wandered in to “work” at eleven or so, wrote a private letter to Lord This or Lady That—for he was vain of aristocratic acquaintance—and would then shuffle out into the main office, calling out “I’m going to get me hair cut” in a foggy, husky voice. Sometimes he would wander into the warehouse and watch the bales of leather swinging on the crane.
“Coming in or going out?” he would ask, putting on as much of a commanding air as he could manage, considering his voice and the absurd angle of his pince-nez glasses which were held lop-sided on his nose by a piece of black ribbon.
Under his foolishness Mr James concealed the character of an old Victorian rip and he was terrified of his pious brother Kenneth. Mr James’s only work was to hand us our wages every Saturday in a sealed envelope. I was warned that he would slyly pay me too much the first time—another Victorian trick—to test my honesty. Sure enough he did; he gave me fifteen shillings instead of the agreed 12s. 6d. and I had to go through the farce of explaining there had been a mistake. The expression on his face was one of immense self-congratulation at his cleverness. We liked Mr James because his daily hair-cut took place at a smart Bar near London Bridge. Everyone envied his life of folly. We indexed the letter books, putting the number of the previous letter written to the firm at the top of the flimsy page in blue chalk. This indexing took us a large part of the day, for we, as well, had to see the customers at the counter, answer the bell, and begin copying the next crop of out-going letters. Late in the morning, Mr Haylett, our boss, would go off on a round of messages in the City, carrying shipping documents, contracts, cheques and so on, and would return about 3:30, rosy in the face, smelling of cigars and scent.
“Where’s he been, the dirty old man. Up Leicester Square. Lounging in the Leicester Lounge,” the other clerks would greet him enviously.
Les and I, in the meantime, went out to lunch together into the Boro’ to someone’s Dining Rooms, a good pull-up for carmen, near the Hop Exchange. Upstairs we ate the same food for the next year, every day; either steak and kidney pudding followed by date or fig pudding, or steak and kidney pie followed by the same. The helpings were heavy; the whole cost 8d. but went up to 10d. the following year. I was afraid of London and especially of the price of things and it was pretty well a year before I had the courage to go into the Express Dairy Café under the arches at London Bridge Station. We walked back to the office past Guy’s Hospital. The clock crawled from 2 to 2:05, from 2:05 to 2:10 in the tedious afternoon. At four we had a quarter of an hour’s break for tea up in the housekeeper’s kitchen, I having been sent across to a little cake and tobacco shop for sugared buns. Relays of clerks came up for tea. We sat at a kitchen table looked after by a cross woman called Mrs Dunkley or—as she sometimes wrote it—Mrs Dunkerley. The clerks munched their buns and made sly remarks about how much she stole, about her corset, her bottom, what she did with her lodger, and built up fantasies about her sexual life. She (like Daulton) could be cornered into saying one of her classic sentences such as the one made to Mr Elkins, the dispatch clerk:
“Ho, Mr Helkins, I dropped the Heggs.”
Among the clerks there was the weedy, lewd and sarcastic Mr Drake, a sandy-haired man who invented the day’s dirty jokes and backed horses. At a desk under the long iron-barred windows, sat a respectable puffing middle-aged man with a dirty collar, the shipping clerk, his desk a confusion of bills of lading, delivery orders, weight slips. An inaccurate and over-worked man, he was always losing important documents and was often blown up by one of the angry partners, the sons of Mr Kenneth. There was Mr Clark, a dark, drawling defiant figure who looked like a boxer. He was the invoice clerk. He would stand warming himself by the fire, unmoving, even if the head cashier arrived, until the clock struck nine. If the cashier glared at him, Mr Clark stood his ground and said: “Nine o’clock is my time.”
The arrival of the head cashier set the office in motion and something like a chapel service began. He was a tall, grizzled, melancholy man who stood at his desk calling over figures to an assistant, like a preacher at a burial. He was famous for his sigh. It was a dull noise coming from low down in his body. “Um ha ha,” he said. And sometimes he would call to an idling clerk:
“Press on, Mr Drake.”
“Press on what?” Mr Drake would mutter.
“Your old woman,” from Mr Clark.
“I did that last night,” sniggered Mr Drake. “The air raid upset her.”
“Sit on her head,” called Mr Clark.
Conversations that were carried across the office in penetrating mutters. The head cashier’s stomach noise pleased everyone. If he left the office for a moment, it was ten to one that Mr Haylett would mimic it and bang his desk lid up and down, like a schoolboy.
About nine arrived the only two women employed in the main office—there were five sacred typists upstairs. These two women were quarrelling sisters. Women were in the post-corset, pre-brassiere period and it was the joy of the office to exclaim at the jumpings, bobbings and swingings of a pair of breasts. One lady combined a heavy white blouseful with an air of swan-like disdain.
“Things are swinging free this morning, do you not observe, Mr Clark?” Drake would say.
“Do you fancy fish for lunch?” Mr Clark would reply, nodding to the prettier sister.
The elder girl raised her nose, the pretty one shrugged her shoulders and pouted.
Hour after hour, the cashier and the swan carried on their duet.
“Feb. 2 By Goods. Cash £872 11.4.”
And the swan answered:
“£872 11.4.”
“Comm. and dis. £96 16.2,” intoned the cashier. “Um, ha, ha.” The mournful sing-song enchanted us.
At 9:30 the “lady secretaries” arrived. They were the secretaries of the partners, their little breasts jumping too and their high heels clattering. These girls were always late.
“The troops stay so late,” sniggered Mr Drake. “How can a working girl get to work?”
As the day’s work went on, the foremen in leather aprons would come over to the office from the warehouse. They were responsible for different kinds of leather and they usually came over to settle matters arising from the chief problem of the leather trade. Most of it is sold by weight, but leather can gain or lose weight, depending upon the season and the weather. The men in the warehouse despised the “shiny arsed clerks with their four ten a week.” Sometimes Bermondsey life would break in on us. The kids would climb up the wall and, hanging on to the bars of the office windows, would jeer at us. A clerk would be sent to drive them off, but they picked up stones and threw them at him or spattered our windows with horse manure. But often the clerk could not get out because they had tied u
p the door with rope. If a boy was caught and got his ears boxed, the mother would be round in a minute, standing in the office and shouting she wanted “the bleeding fucker” who had hit her Ernie. The mothers were often hanging about in the pub next door, feeding their babies stout or a drop of port to keep them sleepy.
We worked until seven in the evening. On Saturdays we left between two and four, this depending on the mail. In the evenings I went home from London Bridge Station. In The Waste Land T. S. Eliot wrote of the strange morning and evening sight of those thousands of men, all wearing bowlers and carrying umbrellas, crossing London Bridge in long, dull regiments and pouring into that ugly, but to me most affecting, railway station which for years I used. I was captivated by it as I suppose every office worker is by the station in the great city that rules his life. Penn Station in New York, St Lazare in Paris, Waterloo, Paddington and Liverpool Street, are printed on the pages of a lifetime’s grind at the office desk. Each is a quotidian frontier, splitting a life, a temple of the inexorable. The distinction of London Bridge Station, on the Chatham side, is that it is not a terminus but a junction where lives begin to fade and then blossom again as they swap trains in the rush hours and make for all the regions of South London and the towns of Kent. The trains come in and go out over those miles of rolling brick arches that run across South London like a massive Roman wall. There were no indicators on the platforms in my day and the confusion had to be sorted out by stentorian porters who called out the long litanies of stations in a hoarse London bawl and with a style of their own. They stood on the crowded platform edge, detected the identifying lights on the incoming engine and then sang out. To myself, at that age, all places I did not know seemed romantic and the lists of names were, if not Miltonic, at any rate as evocative as those names with which the Georgian poets filled up their lines. I would stare admiringly, even enviously, at the porter who would have to chant the long line to Bexley Heath; or the man who, beginning with the blunt and challenging football names of Charlton and Woolwich would go on to comic Plumstead and then flow forward over his long list till his voice fell to the finality of Greenhythe, Northfleet and Gravesend; or the softer tones of St Johns, Lewisham and Blackheath. And to stir us up were the powerful trains—travelling to distances that seemed as remote as Istanbul to me—expresses that went to Margate, Herne Bay, Rochester and Chatham. I saw nothing dingy in this. The pleasure of my life as an office boy lay in being one of the London crowd and I actually enjoyed standing in a compartment packed with fifteen people on my way to Bromley North. How pleasant it was, in the war years, to stop dead outside Tower Bridge and to see a maroon go off in an air-raid warning and, even better, for a sentimentalist, to be stuck in one of those curry powder fogs that came up from the river and squashed London flat in its windless marsh. One listened to the fog signals and saw the fires of the watchmen; there was a sinister quiet as the train stood outside the Surrey Docks. And when, very late, the train got to Bromley North and one groped one’s way home, seeing the conductors with flares in their hands walking ahead of the buses, or cars lost and askew on the wrong side of the road, and heard footsteps but saw no person until he was upon you and asking where he was, one swanked to oneself that at last one had had a load of the traditional muck on one’s chest.
The Pritchett Century Page 7