Something Wholesale (16 page)

‘This is Polly,’ said Mr Goldfinch. ‘Mr Newby, a friend of mine in the business.’

Polly glared at me.

‘I want to show Mr Newby some of our things,’ he said.

‘Well, no one’s stopping you,’ said Polly.

‘I told you,’ said Mr Goldfinch, hissing in my ear confidentially, ‘you see what a little bitch it is.’

He gave me a cigarette marked ‘Sweetie-Pie’.

‘Now this,’ he said, taking a cotton dress from the rail, ‘has been Big. We’ve sold this very Big. McIntyre’s had a hundred and fifty and repeated.’ It was a topless cotton sundress overprinted with a tasteful design of liqueur labels:
Parfait Amour, Crème de Cacao
and so on. At this hour of the morning the effect was disagreeable.

‘I call it Chin-Chin,’ said Mr Goldfinch.

‘Who buys them at this time of the Year? Isn’t it too cold for this sort of thing?’

‘I don’t know who buys them,’ said Mr Goldfinch a trifle brusquely. ‘How should I know who buys them. All I know is the cotton season’s practically over in January.

‘This is a lovely number. Look at this one.’ This one had a little bolero. It was an ingenious garment. Front and back the design was the same. It represented the Empire State Building. By
removing the bolero the wearer also took off the observation platform and the top twenty floors.

‘The Way to the Stars,’ said Mr Goldfinch, lovingly.

Both dresses looked a little woebegone. Perhaps the tremendous weight of the collection had crushed the life out of them. Mr Goldfinch sensed what I was thinking.

‘Of course they’re better seen on,’ he said.

‘They get a bit tired on a journey,’ I said, trying to be sympathetic.

‘Listen,’ said Mr Goldfinch. ‘If you’d been on as many women as these dresses you’d be tired.’

To my surprise later in the morning Mr Wilkins proposed that we should go out.

‘A breath of fresh air, Mr Eric,’ he said. ‘We might go for a ride on a tram. It will work up a thirst. I went once before on a Sunday to a place called Rouken Glen. A beauty spot.’

We set off on a tram, swaying through streets that were utterly deserted. Mr Wilkins smoked his pipe in silence. After an interminable journey we arrived in an outer suburb.

‘Rouken Glen,’ said the conductress. ‘All change!’

Solemnly we disembarked and waited in the rain until it was time for the tram to return to the city.

At midday the hotel lounge was filled with commercials like ourselves marooned in Glasgow for the week-end, all gazing into nothingness. The only woman was Mr Goldfinch’s Polly, who hid herself resolutely behind a magazine. Nevertheless the atmosphere grew heavy with lust. There was no draught beer, presumably it was not considered a sufficiently genteel drink for a hotel, and soon the tables were littered with empty bottles. It was like being in the second-class smoking room of the
Titanic
. At any moment I expected someone to start singing ‘For those in peril on the sea.’

In the afternoon Mr Wilkins had a nap and I read a letter that had been sent on to me from Edinburgh. It was from my father.

‘Do not be cast down by your experience with Miss Reekie,’ he wrote. ‘At heart she is a good woman, but good women are sent to try us.’ He also counselled me against what he described as ‘Mean night adventures in the streets.’ Looking out of the window it was impossible to imagine having any kind of adventure at all unless dressed in oilskins and gum boots.

After a hearty tea Mr Wilkins proposed another trip to Rouken Glen. It was a measure of my demoralisation that I saw nothing extraordinary in his suggestion. It seemed as good a place as any other and I went with him. That night we took the train to Manchester. By this time Mr Wilkins had almost succeeded in driving me insane.

^*
The Station Hotel is a vastly different place today.

‘You look a bit peaky,’ my father said. ‘Why don’t you go off with Wanda for a few days?’

It was December and miserable weather. I was not the only one who was ‘peaky’. Wanda was expecting a baby in January. She was like a vast balloon filled with hydrogen and equally dangerous. Bus conductors turned green when she tried to board their vehicles. In London we lived on the fourth floor of a block of flats. There was no lift and no coal. It seemed a sensible idea.

‘Dungeness is the place,’ said a man we met at a party that night. He was a copywriter from J. Walter Thompson, with horn rims. ‘It’s desperately eerie. I stayed there for a week with my friend. We adored it. The people are very strange. It’s out of this world.’ He went on to speak of the roaring fires they had made with driftwood they had picked up on the beach. It sounded splendid. He was about to give us the address of this copywriter’s home-from-home when our hostess took him away to introduce him to someone else, at the same time deftly substituting a monoglot Finn with braided hair and pimples who remained with us for the rest of the evening. We never saw him again.

Dungeness in December was out of this world alright. The wind howled over the shingle and among the dilapidated wooden
buildings. At the water’s edge gulls fought savagely over something nasty thrown up by the sea. Eastward of the point tankers whistled mournfully as they came in close to take a Thames pilot. In the open there was not a soul to be seen. The inhabitants all seemed to have gone to earth for the winter.

We found accommodation with suspicious ease in a disused railway carriage close to the east lighthouse, one of a pair high on the shingle, at the extraordinary rental of four shillings and sixpence a day. Although in our hearts we knew that there must be something seriously wrong with the railway carriage, at such a price it seemed worth the risk.

Forewarned, we had brought with us our own bedding and a Primus Stove. The water supply was some way off but, as Wanda pointed out, ‘In my country you wouldn’t expect running water in a third-class carriage.’

‘You won’t be lonely,’ the woman in the shop who gave us the key said. ‘The other carriage is occupied too. Sisters. Quite elderly they are. Still it’s nice to have company. And I’ll give you the telephone number of the doctor. Just in case.’

That night we visited a pub. It was one of those bleak modern buildings with a huge, empty parking lot in front of it that was capable of holding a fleet of motor coaches. The bar was equally empty. It was not one of those places that the copywriter had described to us ecstatically as being full of local colour. Dejectedly, we bought a bottle of rum and left. Outside it was fearfully dark. I reversed the car and there was a rending crash. With a car park as big as an airfield at his disposal someone had left his machine nose-to-tail behind our own.

It turned out to be a large lorry loaded with shingle. The lorry was undamaged but the whole of the back of our motorcar was squashed flat; worst of all petrol was trickling from the tank. The lorry driver was still asleep inside the cab of his vehicle.

At this point he woke and put his head out of the window. There was an orgy of mutual recrimination followed by an exchange of addresses. As there were no witnesses both sides were able to draw freely on their imaginations. I was angry because it was my fault for not looking where I was going and the lorry driver was angry because he had no business to be anywhere near Dungeness and had only come there in order to take a load of shingle which he was going to sell elsewhere. When, after a long wait, a mechanic arrived his verdict on the mishap was the same as mine.

‘You’ve got a hole in your tank,’ he said after regarding the piece of rag with which we had plugged the hole for some minutes.

‘Brilliant!’ said Wanda who was making rapid strides with the idiom.

‘Can’t mend it here,’ he went on, disregarding her. Have to send it to Folkestone. Get it back Tuesday if there aren’t any power cuts. Best I can promise.’

It was Wednesday. We were marooned at Dungeness.

For two days and nights the wind blew force nine from the south-west. By day, bent by the wind, soaked to the skin by driving rain, yet exhilarated, we crept along the shore combing the shingle for treasure thrown up by the storm. We found hatch covers, rope fenders, the husks of coco-nuts, empty tins that had once contained metal polish or curry powder, a German mine and dozens of unexploded shells and mortar bombs, but no pieces-of-eight, messages in bottles or church plate from the wreckage of the Armada; nothing that would make our fortune and no wood dry enough to start the roaring blaze that we had been promised in South Kensington. The only fire that I managed to initiate required the best part of a pint of paraffin to get it going and then smoked like a funeral pyre in the rainy season.

By night, huddled sleepless in a bed that would have been
inadequate for two people of normal proportions we listened with awe to the storm as it howled about our meagre habitation, which was by no means watertight. Soon the floors of the various compartments were littered with cooking-pots and old tin cans into which the rain dripped mournfully. Once or twice we saw a light in the other carriage, but it only flickered for a moment and then went out. Of the sisters themselves there was no sign. On Saturday evening the wind fell away completely. The rain ceased. Inland a wall of fog rose over the marsh and began rolling seawards towards the point.

‘I vonder what that man is doing?’ said Wanda. She was looking towards the lighthouse from the kitchen window, a non-smoking compartment. One of the keepers was unlocking a door in the side of the white building which supported the light turret.

It was just growing dark. Although the man left the door open when he went into it, it was impossible to see what was inside it in the failing light. There was the sound of a motor running for a moment, then the man came out and locked the door.

At eleven o’clock that night the carriage rocked as though it had been straddled by a broadside. Huddling on our coats we went outside, expecting some spectacular disaster. But there was nothing to be seen. Everything was enveloped in thick fog. Except for a dull glow from the carriage next door we were in utter darkness. Then it happened again. RRRRRR … OOG. It was more than a mere noise. It was a violent physical sensation, like being hit between the eyes.

Twin apparitions in the fog materialised as a pair of elderly ladies in red dressing-gowns with their hair in curlers – our neighbours.

‘Good evening,’ I said. It was all I had time for before I received another blow between the eyes.

‘It’s the ’orn,’ said the taller of the two, despairingly. ‘Now the fog’s come down it may go on for days. One short. Then a long one. Then a short.’

RRRRRR … OOG went the ’orn as if to confirm what she said.

‘It’s terrible,’ said the other one. ‘You must think us unneighbourly not having called before, but we’ve been getting some sleep while the weather was fine. We shan’t get any now until the fog lifts.’

I shuddered. In the fine weather of the last three days the lifeboat had been out twice and a bungalow had been swept away by the sea.

The lighthouse keeper, used to conducting holidaymakers over his spotless domain was more informative when we approached him the following morning. Although he said it was not usual in winter time he offered to show us the apparatus.

‘This here instrument,’ he said affectionately patting the foghorn which resembled a pair of enormous ear trumpets, ‘is a Diaphone, “Twin G”.’ RRRRR … OOG roared the diaphone in its hateful voice.

Although the keeper’s lips continued to move it was some moments before we were able to distinguish what he was saying.

‘… and is a most powerful instrument,’ he went on. ‘It has a range of about six miles. But with favourable conditions its range is considerably greater. It emits three blasts every two minutes. One short – one long – one short.’ (As if living next door to it we didn’t know.) ‘It is unwise to stand in front of the instrument while it is functioning as this may lead to permanent injury of the ear-drums. Thank you very much, Sir, Madam! Very kind of you.’ RRRRRR … OOG.

By Monday morning we were at the end of our tethers. There
was no question of sleeping. We simply waited for the thing to go off. Lying down one had the sensation of being kicked in the stomach – the effect on my wife can only be imagined. Sitting up the blast brought on a splitting headache of the sort usually reserved for sufferers from sinusitis. If the noise had stopped for even five minutes we should have both fallen asleep and not woken again. The two-minute interval was too short.

On Monday afternoon we took a bus into Rye and tried to take a room in the town but without success. Everywhere it was the closed season. Beds not already occupied, we were told, were too damp for occupation. At the best hotel the manageress thought we required a bedroom in the middle of the afternoon for immoral purposes. It was difficult to see how she had reached this conclusion.

‘She must be blind,’ said Wanda, as we stood once more in the street listening to the mocking sound of the diaphone as it came to us across ten and a half miles of marsh, sand and shingle.

Another night of horror. At ten o’clock on Tuesday morning the fog lifted. Our motor-car was returned to us. We paid our dues; took leave of the two sisters and set off in brilliant sunshine to have a good sleep on some sand dunes near Camber that a local fisherman had recommended to us as being ‘nice and quiet’. After the shingle in which we had wallowed for days the sand dunes were like heaven. We found a hollow out of the wind and lay down to sleep for the first time for five nights. Through half-closed eyes I could see great banks of cumulus moving majestically across a cold blue sky. In the hollow the sun was very warm.

‘DER DER DER DER DER. You’re dead!’ said a voice. For a moment I really thought we were. Standing over us on the rim of the hollow was an extraordinary figure – a young man of about twenty with a thin beard, dressed in a khaki shirt and corduroy trousers. On his head he wore a forage cap decorated with fronds
of laurel. He was pointing a piece of curiously shaped drift-wood at us that was obviously intended to be a sub-machine gun. Although he looked a lunatic, he was as surprised as we were. ‘I’m ever so sorry,’ he said, ‘I thought you were my friend.’ He made as if to go.

I was both fascinated and frightened. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ I said.

‘Well, you see,’ he said, ‘we’re playing at Dunkirk. I’ve got my tommy-gun and my barrack ’at all camouflaged’ – he pointed at the extraordinary confection on his head – ‘and we’re playing at Dunkirk. My friend’s a Jerry, not really of course,’ he explained, ‘and we’re stalking one another, going DER DER DER DER DER.

‘It
is
like Dunkirk, isn’t it?’ he asked, appealingly. ‘I expect you were there. Makes me look a bit silly, doesn’t it?’

The only dunes I had seen were on the day I had made my ignominious journey to the Belgian coast when we had been stoned by the population who were under the impression that we were German prisoners.

‘I don’t think it’s silly at all,’ I said. ‘It’s just like Dunkirk.’ ‘Do you really think so?’ he said, eagerly. ‘I looked at all the photos before we came. I want it to be right. We came down specially.’

‘The only thing is,’ I said, ‘I don’t think you’d wear laurel leaves in your hat if you were fighting a rearguard action on a sand dune.’

‘You’re right,’ he said with enthusiasm. ‘Those are the sort of details I miss. Not having been in it. I picked those leaves on the way down.

‘Did you see that film “All Quiet on the Western Front”?’ he went on, forgetting about the laurels. ‘That was a smashing film. Do you know the part I liked the best? The part with the machine guns. Where they were all advancing and you saw the men working
the machine guns, DER DER DER DER DER DER. They killed ’em in thousands but they still kept on coming. I liked that,’ he said. ‘It was smashing. But war’s awful, isn’t it?

‘Well,’ he said reluctantly, ‘I’d better be getting on, otherwise my friend will be wondering what’s happened to me.’ He disappeared, but not for long.

‘Sorry to trouble you again,’ he said, ‘but I don’t often get a chance to talk to an expert. Do you think I could put seaweed in my barrack ‘at? That would be better than laurel, wouldn’t it?’

‘I shouldn’t bother to put anything at all. It’s the man who’s quickest on the trigger in this sort of fighting,’ I said. ‘Seaweed won’t do you much good.’

‘Thanks ever so much,’ he said. In the distance we heard the sound of DER DER DER DER DER.
^*

‘I’ve had enough of the seaside,’ Wanda said. ‘I want to go home.’

More dead than alive we returned to London.

^*
Although at the time we regarded him as an object of derision, our friend who went DER DER DER DER showed remarkable prescience. It was not until more than ten years later that a film company used the dunes at Camber for the filming of an expensive epic entitled ‘The Sands of Dunkirk’.