A Traveller's Life (20 page)

Relatively little of a Central Buyer's time was taken up with actual buying. Much more of it was spent deciding how much of the total season's budget ought to be committed initially; how much of this to devote to each category – evening dresses, wedding dresses and so on – and how many of each size to buy.

Much of my time was spent travelling between Oxford Street and Brixton, Southampton, Sheffield, Liverpool, Sloane Square, Nottingham, Holloway, Reading, Hampstead, Cambridge, Southsea and Windsor, marking down slow-moving stock and discussing
one's mistakes and successes, if any, with the department managers, those sterling women who, having been in wholesale myself, I felt I had known for most of my life. By the time this enormous round was completed, it was time to start all over again. I felt like one of the painters of the Forth Bridge.

Living in this way it was only too easy to forget to look and see what women were actually wearing in the field, as it were, and on one occasion my attempt to find out involved me in what promised to become a
cause célèbre
. This was when, with the knowledge of the Director of Buying, Fashions, my immediate boss, I paid a visit to Epsom and Ascot in order to find out what women were wearing at the races, the visit to Ascot taking place while on my way back to London from a visit to our branch at Reading. Having done this I found that the Director of Buying, Fashions, was reluctant to countersign what were my comparatively modest expenses, which included the cost of entry to the paddock at both courses.

20 June 1961

Memorandum. Director of Buying, Fashions, from Central Buyer, MG Department.

Request that the Director of Buying, Fashions find out from whatever authority is appropriate whether or not expenses incurred in obtaining entrance to those parts of Ascot and Epsom Racecourse frequented by women who might be expected to be wearing outer garments costing more than ten guineas (retail) are chargeable to expenses when such money is spent by a member of the Partnership
wholly
with the intention of furthering his knowledge of such merchandise with a view to improving his buying of it in the future.

In reply the Director of Buying, Fashions, received a memorandum from the Director of Trading (Department Stores), headed Mr Newby's Expenses at Ascot and Epsom, his note to you of 20.6.61, to the effect that to the best of his knowledge no Partner had ever asked to be reimbursed for expenses incurred in going to Ascot and Epsom and into the enclosures, and he was doubtful whether such expenditure would prove to be allowable for tax in the Partnership's accounts. However, on the assumption that I had incurred this expense in the genuine expectation that the Partnership would be ready to reimburse me, he would be prepared to agree to that being done, but only on the understanding that it was not to be regarded as a precedent, and that no similar claim for reimbursement was to be made in the future unless prior agreement to the expenditure had been obtained.

26 June 1961

Memorandum. Director of Buying, Fashions, from Central Buyer, MG Department.

… in spite of the ruling of the Director of Trading (Department Stores) and in order that there should be no misunderstanding about the motive of the enquiry I have decided not to charge the expenses for the visits which I made to Ascot and Epsom and I would be glad if you will inform him that I am not doing so.

22 August 1961

Memorandum. Director of Trading (Department Stores) from Central Buyer, MG Department.

No. 217    Your Memorandum 2586

1. While understanding that it is necessary to record all the salient points in an interview such as the one that took place yesterday I do feel surprised that you should have recorded your remarks to me about Ascot in paragraph 7 of the above memorandum, particularly as this memorandum will take its place in my permanent dossier and might be seriously misinterpreted by someone who, unlike yourself, is not in full possession of the facts … [A reading of this paragraph might give the impression that I had been detected on a clandestine visit to a racecourse in the pursuit of pleasure in the Partnership's time, which was not the case.]

On 24 August 1961 the Cavendish Registrar received a memorandum from the Director of Trading (Department Stores) with reference to memorandum no. 217 written by me to him. The fact was that the visit to Ascot referred to had been made with the full knowledge of my Director of Buying, and that he thought the best and fairest way of meeting this point would be for his memorandum and mine to be filed with his earlier memorandum 2586.

This was not the end of the matter. It continued to rumble on and be referred to in other memoranda as if it had never come up for consideration before, and I realized that although I had won a battle I was in process of losing the war.

It was not only in the realms of the higher bureaucracy that I was running into danger. One of the advantages or disadvantages – according to what sort of temperament one possessed – of working for such a paternalistic, some might say maternalistic, organization as the Partnership was that its members were not only encouraged to engage in one or other of the extramural activities which it sponsored but, when the chips were down, were expected to do so. Thus, with the Partnership looking on benevolently from some ivory tower, if you were not careful you could
easily find yourself playing football, learning to dance the carioca, sailing round a lighthouse and back, not with your ‘partner in life's race' but with another sort of partner who, if you went on doing it, might quite easily usurp the position held by the real one. Even worse, you could find yourself engaged with them in developing photographs, playing the lead with them in
Blithe Spirit
, spending weekends with them in Partnership houses, even skiing with them in the Alps, although at that time invitations to the Alps were issued by the Chairman only and were normally only extended to those who showed promise of becoming exceptionally Partnership-minded. Apart from the skiing party, these pleasures were open to all Partners whatever their rank, and in fact if one indulged in even a small part of the activities available to Partners during one's time off, there was scarcely any need to go home at all.

But in accepting the position of MG Buyer I soon discovered that I had become a member of a hierarchy within the Partnership which comprised the upper crust, and one which was able to indulge itself with a minimum of expenditure in pastimes that I had previously thought of as only being available either to the very rich or else to landed members of the upper class. As a member of this hierarchy I could, if I wished to do so, spend my weekends in a splendid country house in Hampshire, one that was equipped with good cellars and with excellent pheasant shooting and some of the finest fishing in the world immediately outside its door. These were not the only pleasures available. In summer I could, and did until I got bored with it, go yacht racing in the Channel with other members of the upper hierarchy – none of the lower ones was ever present when I was a member of the crew. I later learned that because of my previous experience as a sailor it was particularly hoped that I would interest myself in the Yacht Club, the commodore of which was a member of the Royal
Yacht Squadron, and when I failed to do so I knew (because someone in a position to know told me) that a black mark had been recorded against my name.

It was unfortunate that I was not interested in doing any of the things that the Partnership had dreamed up on my behalf and that of my fellow Partners, at least within the Partnership. My ideas of pleasure did not include drinking even the best of wines under the beady eyes of some director of something or other and his wife, either one of whom might make a mental note if one helped oneself too freely and might communicate this information to some higher authority, who might very well note it down and have it filed away in one's personal dossier. Nor did they include shooting with him or fishing with him or sailing with him. The last thing I wanted to see after the day's work was done was a Partner in any shape or form, and the truth was that I was not cut out to be one.

In order to gather inspiration at more rarefied levels than the rather mundane ones at which the nature of their tasks required them to operate, and also as a change from the interminable round of branch visiting, most of the fashion buyers used to go twice a year to France and sometimes to Italy in order to attend the showings of the couture and boutique collections there.

Among the stranger forms of prohibition which operated at that time within the Partnership was one which forbade buyers on Partnership business from travelling first-class by air, although it was perfectly permissible when going abroad to travel first-class by train. (Whether this prohibition extended to all members of the upper hierarchy, I do not know, nor do I care.)

As a result, the majority of fashion buyers (what the buyer of Oriental Rugs did, who might well have had to visit China, is not clear), thoroughly fed up with endlessly travelling round England in second-class railway carriages while visiting the branches,
elected to travel first-class by train when they went abroad, justifying the extra cost of doing so with the words that all Partners had used since time immemorial when justifying some piece of conduct that was just teetering on the edge of being unacceptable: ‘The Partnership would wish it.'

And it really was expensive. If one was going to visit the Paris collections and travel by train, the most sensible way was to take the Night Ferry from Victoria by way of Dunkirk which left London after dinner in the evening and arrived at the Gare du Nord the following morning at 8.42, in good time to allow one to start work, always providing that there was not a storm or fog in the Channel, in which case it was not unknown to wake up the following morning tucked up in one's wagon-lit in Dover Harbour.

If a band of us was going to Florence, for example, then the cost was astronomical. Looking as unnaturally elegant as store buyers of both sexes contrive to do, we would board the Golden Arrow on a Sunday morning and, as the Pullman cars trundled over the bridge which spanned the Brixton Road, we would wave a symbolic goodbye to what we called ‘the Bon', the Bon Marché, one of the older Partnership stores which stood in it, while we waited for a steward to bring on the Bloody Marys.

In Paris, unless the train had been delayed by rough weather in the Channel, there would usually be time for drinks at the Ritz before boarding the night express from the Gare de Lyon on which a whole block of sleepers had been booked for us in a wagon-lits. Other acquaintances would sometimes join the train in Paris, among them Norman Parkinson, tall, thin, moustached and immensely elegant, who could be seen striding up the platform, preceded by a porter pushing a trolley loaded with great boxes of photographic equipment, on his way to record the Italian collections. And on one occasion there was a pair of fabulous twins
who worked for
American Vogue
, complete with ladies' maids and Vuitton trunks. Because of this, dinner on the train was enormous fun, and no one went to bed until the small hours of the morning by which time, in winter, the train would be through the Alps and beyond Turin, ploughing its way through the fog and slush of the Lombard Plain. Then, around 7 a.m., beyond Bologna, where it was still dark in winter, it burrowed beneath the Apennines and emerged in Tuscany, in the meadows beyond Prato, where the sun would be coming up like a huge blood orange over what was then still, at least in part, an exquisite, generally fogless and often snowless, man-made landscape.

In July 1963, after sitting through the showings of twenty-six different boutiques in one day in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, I was left with a dog-eared notebook filled with such enigmatic observations as ‘sandals with chain balls round ankles', against which I had forgotten to record the name of whoever showed them. Although I did not know it then, this was the last time I would visit the fashion collections in Florence, Rome or anywhere else, as a buyer. This was the summer when a large, exotic insect flew across the vast white room in the Palazzo Pitti, biffed one of the buyers of I. Magnin of San Francisco on the nose and then fell dead at her feet, as if conscious of the enormity of its offence. ‘You should put it in your memory book, dear,' said Russell Carpenter, I. Magnin's Director of Fashion Buying, who bore some resemblance to Noël Coward and attended each session of the fashion showings in a different suit of clothes.

That same afternoon, while sitting in the Sala Bianca, I received a cable from New York which read, ‘Can you come New York as Associate Editor, Holiday Magazine? Reply soonest. Sions.' Sions was the man who had given me hell when the upper case button of my typewriter went on the bum. Nevertheless, I was tempted. Time seemed to be running out at the Partnership. The
memoranda were showering in on me thick and fast from those twin scourges, the Director of Trading (Department Stores) and the Director of Buying, Fashion.

I decided to test American opinion on the spot; after all the Palazzo Pitti was crammed with it. I asked Russell Carpenter what he would do. I asked Hannah Troy, who always sat in the front row so that she could catch a strand of some rare fabric from a passing dress under her fingernail to take back to New York for
her
memory book, and who looked like an aged but affluent fortune teller on Blackpool pier. I asked Mrs Guggenheim Henry of Wanamakers, Philadelphia where the publishers of
Holiday
hung out. I asked Mrs de Mille of the Associated Dry Goods Association and a number of others whose names I have forgotten. One and all – after ascertaining my salary with the Partnership – advised me to take off without further ado for New York and not bother to go back to London at all.