Part I – Autumn



From the Court Column of the Daily Post, 30th July, 1931.

‘Mr Rainford and Miss Fane.

‘The engagement is announced between Basil Rainford, FRCS¹⁴, eldest son of Colonel and Mrs Rainford, of Government House¹⁵, Rawalpindi, India, and Hilary, only daughter of Professor James Fane, MA, LLD, and Mrs Fane, University Close, Edinburgh.’

 

ST CHRISTOPHER’S HOSPITAL

August 31st

Telephone messages

For Mr Rainford

Taken by Porter

Miss Fane wishing to say that she has decided in favour of flying scotsman leaving waverley stn ten am to-morrow can Mr Rainford come to station if not she will be in all evening packing furiously.

H Munroe (Porter – W Door)

To Porter

Ring up Miss Fane (Univ 309) to say Mr Rainford at present in theatre, regrets he has a hysterotomy¹⁶ at eight o’clock to-night. Will do what he can to be at station to-morrow.

B R

 

Mrs Fane to Lady Barnley

University Close
Edinburgh

August 31st

My Dear Bertha,

How good of you to wire congratulations as soon as you heard! And of course I understand how my letter has only just reached you at Pau. It’s always the same on holiday – one’s correspondence so persistently follows one about.

But it is nice, isn’t it? Have you met Basil? He’s a remarkable young man, with a big career in front of him, James says. James has an immense respect for his brains – I don’t feel that I really know him yet.

They’re not to be married for a year. I don’t approve of long engagements, but in this case Basil’s work makes one necessary, and Hilary is determined not to spend the time at home doing nothing. Of course we’d love to have her – but you know how things are just now. I never realised before how many of James’s offices were honorary! The child says that she won’t have us scraping to give her an allowance. It’s most unfortunate that the Library here couldn’t keep her on. But one knows that they’re hard hit too. Her present idea is to go to London with money for a month, and look for a temporary job there. I’ve made no objections – I’m sure the change will do her good – but of course I’m privately hoping that we shall have her back again by Christmas. She’s going to the Minerva Hotel, which you always recommend. Mary Finnegan and the Bardsleys used to stay there, you remember. It’s home like, as I told her, and quiet. Mercifully we managed to persuade her against unknown, cheap lodgings.

James sends his love, and would have added a note, but he is quite overwhelmed by his proofs of the last book on pre-Hellenic Greece at the moment. The study hasn’t been touched by brush or duster for six weeks. You may just be thankful that Tom is a business man and safely out of the house in the mornings!

With best wishes to you both,

Your affectionate sister-in-law,

Margaret Fane

 

Telegram

September 1st

Fane university close Edinburgh

Safely established at Minerva lots of letters follow

love,

Hilary

 

 

Minerva Hotel
Beddington Square
W2

September 1st

Basil Dear,

I’ve arrived, and the country post goes in five minutes. I don’t like this hotel much. My bedroom is hung round with miniatory¹⁷ notices:

No Washing or Drying of Garments May Be Done in the Bedrooms

Guests are Requested to Observe Economy in the Use of Electric light.

One Day’s Notice Must Be Given Before Leaving: Otherwise Rooms Will Be Charged For.

Their cumulative effect is shattering. Write me a long letter, not too obstetric.

Good-night: bless you,

Hilary

 

 

Minerva Hotel
Beddington Square
W2

September 2nd

To: –
The Advertiser
Box 3141
Daily Post

Sir,

In reply to your advertisement of to-day’s date offering a ‘Lucrative Position to a Woman of Personality’, I beg to apply for the post in question.

I am twenty-seven years of age, educated at Homedean School and Lady Hilda’s College, Oxford, where I obtained an Honours Degree (Class II) in History.

For three years I was Assistant History Mistress at Glengyle High School for Girls, near Glasgow, and since then I have had considerable and varied secretarial experience. I have also acted as one of the Librarians at the Municipal Library, Corstorphine, Edinburgh. This post I held for two years, and left it solely because recent conditions necessitated a reduction in staff.

You do not state what qualifications are required, but I am confident that my general training would enable me to acquire any special knowledge easily and quickly. I am capable of taking responsibility and anxious for it.

I shall appreciate the favour of a personal interview at your convenience. Further particulars as to salary, hours, and nature of the employment offered would be welcome.

Yours faithfully,

Hilary Fane

 

The Minerva

September 5th

My Dearest Family,

I’ve been too busy for a mid-week letter, but I hope you liked the Houses of Parliament. The Minerva doesn’t print postcards of itself, or I’d have put the proverbial cross below my window. Not that I’ve been there much: I’ve been chasing jobs, and heard of several, though I haven’t actually got one yet.

Two interviews with possible employers are pending, though, and I do think that’s encouraging, don’t you? It’s not as if I were hard to please. Almost any interesting job would do for a year. At about four pounds a week, I thought. After all, I’m not proposing to make a life-work of it.

I promise, though, that I won’t hunt indefinitely. If nothing materialises you’ll have me back in six weeks. (Don’t count on that, of course, with two interviews to-morrow.)

Which shall I be, Confidential Secretary to a Psycho-therapeutist, or a Woman of Personality in a Business Concern? Both seem to think that I may be just the woman for them, and both use extremely impressive notepaper. And both promise Substantial Remuneration to the Right Personality.

On the whole, I think that the Business Concern would be best. The Psycho-therapeutist might clamour for shorthand, which would be so difficult. One may bluff about most qualifications, but one just either knows shorthand or not. And in my case not.

Good-night, my dears. I’ll try to write fairly often once things settle down. In the meantime don’t mind if my letters just let you know that I’m well and happy.

Hilary

 

 

 

Minerva

September 6th



From which you’ll gather, darling, that I’ve retired to bed. I do understand now why it is that the Unemployed need to rest so much in the intervals of Genuinely seeking Work. It’s just terribly exhausting. I’ve tried everything, from the grander kind of Advisory Bureau which caters for the University Woman to the Advertisements in the daily press and the Labour Exchange. No results so far.

I used to think that I’d a qualification or two: (they paid me rather heavily to teach History to the daughters of gentlemen.) But now, I doubt it. I started out, all buoyed up, for the Advisory place. They instantly charged me a fee, and then said that if I had capital to invest in training as a Decorator, Nurse, Window-dresser or Masseuse, they would be pleased to help me. So then I pointed out that I expected people to pay me. They gave me one look and said: ‘In that case we don’t think you’ve much chance. Still, you might try the Labour Exchange.’

Words passed. I began to think that a few pennyworth of stamps would be cheaper than expert advice. And said so. And swep’ out. I went home, with the Daily Post – our paper – while my rage was still on me, and turned to the Situations Vacant. There were several exciting offers which began: ‘Lucrative Position for Woman of Personality’, and I felt sure that there couldn’t be enough Women of Personality to go round them all. And wrote to ten, as impressively as possible. You remember that bit of typing I did for you in the summer? It may surprise you to know that it figures as ‘considerable and varied secretarial experience!’ So far only two of the advertisers have taken any notice. And to-day I went to interview them both.

Not a success, Basil, either of those interviews. I sat at the end of the first queue for an hour; then I was shown into a split-new office, where a beautiful and surprisingly cordial young man greeted me and offered a buoyant arm-chair. I sat into it, and he began to talk about Personality, Opportunity, and Ideals in Business. He went on for a long time, with suitable gesture, and I could neither get away nor bring him to the point.

Eventually it proved to be Corsets. It was further conveyed to me that I was expected to put down thirty pounds – what with one thing and what with another – for the privilege of selling them. The serpent said that it was a mere nothing ‘compared to the profits’. And he seemed to think that I’d have quite a success with the Stout Gents’ Belting. I don’t doubt it, but I feel that with your prejudice against women in business you could hardly be expected to welcome the idea of me in Gents’ Corsetry.

So I explained that I had neither thirty pounds nor a kind friend who would give or lend it, pawnable property nor sufficient faith to enter upon his sort of commercial venture. If his firm wanted me they could pay me to come to them. He dismissed me with evident nausea and sent for the dim spinster who had been before me in the queue.

I went on to my next interview a little dashed. This time it was with a purveyor of Psycho-therapy. He had a perfectly normal (female) secretary, so that I wasn’t prepared to find him in a Biblical bath-robe, contemplating eternity in front of a Grecian vase with one lovely flower in it. I can’t think what my duties would have been, but the word ‘salary’ shocked him nearly as much as the Corset gentleman. He murmured (in one of those organ voices) that he could not EMPLOY anyone untrained, though for a consideration he might allow me to serve him. After an exchange of banalities we parted – again, my dear Basil, quite largely because of my dutiful feelings towards you.

I made one more effort. I called on the Ever Ready Helpers. Have you heard of them?

Got a problem? We’ll solve it!

Need help? We’ll give it!

Got a talent? We’ll use it!

Lonely? We’ll find your twin soul!

So marvellous, don’t you think? I paid half a crown for the privilege of laying my talents before them; but when they found that I didn’t ‘adore children’ and wouldn’t go and be a Mother’s Help in the country they rather lost interest. I said something about being a secretary-chauffeuse, and they said: ‘Oh, a secretary­-chauffeuse … Yes. But we’re afraid you’re not the type.’



Finally, I went to the Labour Exchange. I felt that they at least might know of jobs with salaries attached and guaranteed respectable. Nobody’d call that place attractive, by the way. It’s one of those unpleasant, dark-brown rooms with hard chairs and clerks with colds: the walls are hung with curling, dirty notices, all about Life in the Colonies, and a framed copy of the GFS¹⁸ Words to Girls Travelling. About half a dozen of us were waiting: different ages, shapes and sizes but all depressed. It was rather like the Out patients at Christophers – but undisinfected.

We waited … for Hours. I was the last. When I was brought up before the Powers – two thin women – they asked me what kind of a job I wanted. I said: ‘Oh, almost anything’, and they cheered up. But when they found that I wasn’t a cook they were terribly short with me. I asked if there weren’t any other sort of places, and they looked me up and down and said darkly that it all depended. They had placed twenty people from Wales last week, but I was more difficult. (I hadn’t the courage to ask why.) At last somebody had an idea. They suggested that I might be a Good Saleswoman. And what about a Bookshop? A degree, they said, would matter less there. It might almost cease to be a disadvantage.

Anyway, there are two definite openings! Messrs Brown’s Universal Bookshop requires young ladies for their library, and there is another vacancy in Everyman’s Stores. I’ve applied for both.

What sent my temperature rocketing up I don’t know; but the main thing is to get it down in case either of them wants me. I’ve spent to-day recuperating, and it has stretched out beyond all recognition. I’ve slept a little, and read a little, and the hotel people have grudgingly brought up meals and clattered them down on my knees. Dreary meals, but possibly sustaining.

To think that it’s less than a week since I left you, and that you didn’t want me to go and I might have stayed … Only, I know I couldn’t wait for you if I were idle, sitting about and trying to fill the gap between one lovely experience and another with those dreary little sociabilities that you despise as much as I do. I wish I had the kind of talents that you’d really like to have about the house, my lamb. It would all be so much simpler if my bent were music or if I could write. But it isn’t any use, Basil, I haven’t any talents; even my drawing’s always got me into trouble. I’ve just got undecorative ability and too much energy to be happy without a job.

But – oh, dear!

H

 

 

Minerva Hotel
Beddington Square
W2

September 9th, 1931

To: –
The Staff Supervisor
Everyman’s Stores
Oxford Street
W1

Madam,

The Labour Exchange, Great Yarmouth Street, has informed me that you require an assistant in one of your departments, and I therefore venture to apply for the post, enclosing their introduction.

I am twenty-seven years of age, and have had some secretarial experience. During the past two years I have been employed in the Municipal Library, Corstorphine, Edinburgh, but a reduction in staff has made it necessary for me to leave.

I should be most grateful if you would consider my application: if you wish to see me, I can come for an interview at any time.

Should you require testimonials I will send them, and I enclose a stamped and addressed envelope for a reply to this application at your convenience.

Yours faithfully,
Hilary Fane

 

 

 

EVERYMAN’S STORES

Oxford Street
W1

‘Our business is your pleasure.’

September 10th, 1931

The Staff Supervisor will be glad if you will come and see her at the above address to-morrow morning at eleven o’clock.

(Signed)
M E Ward
Staff Supervisor

 

Miss Hilary Fane
Minerva Hotel
Beddington Square
W2

BT/MEW

 

 

Telegram

September 11th

Fane university close Edinburgh.

Got a job details follow.

Hilary

 

 

 

The Minerva

Friday evening
September 11th

Basil Dear,

I meant to write to you last night, but I waited, because I thought there might be a letter. And there was – a very sweet one. Bless you! But I don’t think one enjoys: ‘I told you so’ however beautifully it’s put. It isn’t true, either. I’VE GOT A JOB. So I won’t be coming to heel just yet.

All the same, to be quite honest, I’m not so very pleased. I’d set my heart on the bookshop. It’s nearer my own line. But they wouldn’t have me. They said I was too tall; certainly all the people I saw to-ing and fro-ing were neat little creatures. The officials were gentle and kind, but utterly unencouraging: I didn’t venture to mention the word ‘waiting-list’. Besides, I’m not really prepared to wait.

So I went on to Everyman’s, more or less as to my last hope. And it materialised, Basil, into an offer of work, immediate, whole-time, salaried work. For that I’m thankful. For the rest – well, one can’t judge yet.

I began wrong, of course. I went in at the main entrance, and one of those large, buttoned men they keep loomed up at me and asked if he ‘might help, Madam?’

I said: ‘Well, I’ve got an appointment with the Staff Supervisor’, and I think that his face went through the funniest transformation I’ve ever seen in my life. There was a sort of convulsion, and when it was over all the deference had gone. However, he did indicate a door with a curtain over it, and told me that if I went that way no doubt I should find someone to direct me. I got as far as the Supervisor’s room and then had another of those waits outside it, on a hard chair in a draughty passage. Finally I was summoned, and left alone with a large lady, very well girthed, in a room full of weighing­-machines and card-indexes. I stood meekly till she asked me to sit down, and began a series of questions, none of which seemed relevant. I kept my degree dark for quite a long time, but it shocked her less than I expected when I finally owned to it. She said, yes, they did take on some graduates now and then, but only as an experiment, of course. Titles were better value, I gathered.

 

 

 



‘A Large lady, very well girthed’

Then she discovered that I’d done librarian’s work as well as teaching. That seemed to interest her, and she asked so many more questions that I thought a really exciting job might be forthcoming. It wasn’t. She ended the catechism by asking if I ‘liked gels’. I said that I didn’t, but that I could cope with them, and she told me blandly that if I realised how dull the work would be, and if, in spite of that, I really wanted the post, she could offer me £2:10:0 a week. So I goggled, but kept my head sufficiently to ask what exactly the work would be. She went vague at that, like everybody else, but said that perhaps I would do better on the Book Floor than in the Millinery, where they were also short­handed. I thought that sounded likely and said so, and she explained that I should probably not be in the selling department at all, of course, but somewhere behind the scenes. As a clerk. Somebody insignificant developed appendicitis last night, it seems. That’s why they’re taking me on.

A clerk: it sounds dreary, but I daren’t refuse. It may lead to something, after all. (I wonder how many people get themselves landed for incredible years by that hope and by being too scared afterwards to throw up one job and look for another?) Anyway, I took it. I may have been a fool. I know there’s precious little prospect of advancement unless one’s head and shoulders better than the other people. But if I am, and if someone who matters notices it in time, I shall have my chance.

Only, you can see why I’m not jubilant.

Tell me about yourself. I expect you’re hideously busy now you’re back from that shooting party. I must say I was hurt when never a bird reached London, though, as you very properly pointed out, I wouldn’t have known what to do with game in a hotel.

Is your assistant to be long away? I’m afraid you won’t have much chance of getting on with your book for a while. Or does difficulty wake the same devil in you as it does in me, I wonder. (I don’t mean that for virtue. Rather the contrary.) Something cussed makes me lie flat on my back and purr when things go well. My sort of weakling can only get things done under opposition, I suppose. And that’s partly why I’m taking on this job, my lamb.

They want me to begin on Monday: I must go to bed now. Good-night: I love you.

Hilary

PS – How long does it take to have appendicitis? Comfortably, I mean.

 

 

 

From the Official Records of Messrs Everyman & Co

 

APPLICATION FOR EMPLOYMENT

Name (in full) Hilary Ervine Fane,

Present Address Minerva Hotel, Beddington Sq, W2

Permanent Address University Close, Edinburgh

Age Twenty-seven

Nationality Scots

Denomination

Last Employment Assistant Librarian

Department Municipal Library, Corstorphine, Edinburgh

Cause and Date of Leaving Deductions in Staff. May 1931.

Qualifications B.A. (Hons) Oxon. Three years teaching; two years librarian work. Typing. French and German.

I, the undersigned, declare that these facts are, to the best of my knowledge, correct, and I agree to the following terms on which employment with Everyman’s Stores Limited, depends: –

Salary 2:10:0 per week Hours 9-6

Date of commencing Work Monday, September 14th, 1931

Employment may be terminated by one week’s notice from either party. In the event of any misdemeanour, this notice may be waived by the Company.

(Signed) Hilary Ervine Fane

Health and Unemployment cards must be handed to the Cashier on beginning work. Failure to do this involves a fine.

 

 

Minerva Hotel

September 12th

Dearest Mummy and Daddy,

Yes, it is rather a comfort, isn’t it? I’m glad that you thought the occasion called for a telegram in reply to mine. I have a suspicion, though, that you were subterraneously sad as well as pleased. I know what a lovely welcome you’d have given the prodigal if London hadn’t wanted her. And during the last week I’ll admit that I thought London was going to have nothing to do with me at all.

Jobs aren’t as easy to find as they seemed: most of the ones I investigated weren’t suitable. So I’ve had to take what I could get, as everyone else is doing. Probably, of course, it’ll lead to something more exciting. Its beginnings don’t sound much. I’ve been offered a clerical job in Messrs Everyman’s big store in Oxford Street. You know it – the Our Business is your Pleasure people. Aunt Bertha used to send us their catalogues and a few rather remnantish presents now and then when Uncle Tom was first made president of that Amalgamated Board, you remember. I don’t quite know the connection, but there is an almost directorial one, I believe.

I’m to begin at once. Somebody has thoughtfully got appendicitis and I’m deputising. So of course I mean to make myself essential enough to be kept on when she recovers. I was only interviewed by one official who appointed me, and I don’t know anything about the work except that I’m to be attached to the Book Floor, which is pleasant. (Think of me in the Haberdashery, trying to add up one-and-eleven-threes!) I’ll be able to tell you more on Monday. It’s going to be very amusing, I expect. And after all, isn’t half the English aristocracy earning its living by selling hats or displaying gowns or making face­creams or breeding dogs or foxes or poultry or ponies? So don’t be disappointed. Basil won’t really mind, either, you know, though of course he felt he had to protest. It was only becoming.

And after all, dears, a year can’t reasonably last longer than twelve months, and in a year I shall come home and be unobtrusively married. Then we’ll be more or less on your doorstep. It isn’t as if Basil were apt to go off and grow cotton in the Sudan or plant tea in India. He’s only going to operate in Edinburgh, and once housekeeping worries begin you’ll be liable to have more than enough of me. I shall annex your recipes and harry you with questions about servants’ wages and leaving cards and sending out invitations and seating people at dinner, and washing curtains and making marmalade. And we’ll borrow Anderson to wait on our statelier parties.

So make the most of this year’s grace!

Very much love,

Hilary

 

 

 

EVERYMAN’S STORES

For use in inter-departmental correspondence only.

From Staff Supervisor To Miss Hopper C/D

Book Floor

September 12th

 

Subject Temporary Staff. Clerical Department B/F

Memo

I have arranged for a new assistant to take over Miss Pim’s duties during her absence (appendicitis). Miss Fane will report to you on Monday morning at nine o’clock in the Clerical Department. She has had no previous experience of this type of work, and it will therefore be necessary to train her most carefully in all the details of departmental routine.

MEW

BI/MEW

 

 

 

The Minerva

September 14th

Oh, Basil darling, I suppose there have only been the usual number of hours since eight o’clock this morning. But it’s hard to believe. I had breakfast then, in the empty dining-room. A depressed maid brought it and she seemed undecided whether to sympathise or to despise me, because I had to be up almost as early as she did. I left the hotel in a flutter and before they’d finished the doorsteps.

Of course I was too early. After ten minutes in a bus quite indecently full of human knees and elbows we turned into Oxford Street, where Everyman’s big clock said only twenty minutes to nine. So I got out and wandered up the mews to the Staff Entrance. No swing doors for us of course.

Members of the Staff Must Enter and Leave the Building by the Staff Door. They are Forbidden to Use the Front Entrance (or the Lifts).

The Staff Door is in Manifold Lane. I knew where that was, because I went prospecting on Sunday and liked it too much to regret the commissionaires. Manifold Lane must be one of the villages that were swallowed up alive by London in the eighteenth century, and managed to go on living. Very cramped, of course. Like Jonah in the whale.

So this morning I had time to enjoy the last ten minutes of being unemployed. I looked at people as one does on the way to the dentist, envying them because their morning was going to be smooth and usual. The Lane’s a cheery place, paved with a gentle tilt towards the gutter in the middle. The crumbling little shops sell a muddle of antiques and cigarettes and chocolates and Italian cheeses and German sausages and jellied eels and jumpers and spectacles and stationery and walking-sticks and toupees and face powders. There’s a flower shop at one end and a fish shop in the middle. The fish man had laid out his herrings and lobsters, and eels in patterns and he was festooning poor limp rabbits round the windows as I came past. Then he backed across the gutter with his head on one side. Like an artist at a Private View.

But at the Everyman’s end of the Lane the flags¹⁹ change to cobbles and the elderly shops to hustling garages. Big, bright blue vans with Everything from Everyman’s placarded up on their roofs like cocks’ combs were sliding out and backing up, and having parcels shot into them by men in shirt-sleeves. I stood and watched, till a sort of fire-alarm thing above the Staff Entrance went off and made me jump like Cinderella. It’s not merely nine to six for inmates of Stores like Everyman’s, you see. We clock in at ten to nine and out at ten past six, they tell me. Streams of people were making for the Staff Entrance: I was nearly at the end of a very slow-moving line. I couldn’t imagine why it was so slow till I got inside; then I saw a row of large dials like telephone automatic things in a nightmare. They were as big as cart-wheels and there were hundreds of white discs round the rims of each, with red and black numbers on them. People came up and pushed their special number in. Apparently the abominable thing records the hour, the minute and the second on which everyone enters that building on three hundred and however many working days there are a year.

I couldn’t clock in, because I hadn’t got a number. So the man in charge kept me back on suspicion. I stood beside him in his cubby-hole while the rather breathless people at the tail of the queue came up. They all eyed me: it reminded me of the time I was knocked out in a car smash and found myself on the pavement with a crowd round me. Rather terrifying. A sort of jungle look. I tried to forget them and listen to the timekeeper’s running commentary instead. He was a cheerful person, without much to do except look out for numberless creatures like me, and prevent other people from dialling their best friends’ numbers while they took a day off. He sat just outside the notice at the end of the passage which promised that Any Member Of The Staff Found smoking Beyond This Notice Will Be Instantly Dismissed, with a cigarette rolling on his lower lip. He had tilted his kitchen chair on to its hind-legs:

‘Now then, Miss Brown … never a smile to-day? Get out of the wrong side of the bed Monday mornings, eh? … Half a minute to spare, Mr Henry? That train’s been up to time at London Bridge for once! … Better weather over the week-end, Mr Willis…And how’s the old complaint, Alfred? … Back to the grindstone, Miss Anderson … that’s right. Shame, isn’t it, for that pretty nose? ...’

When the last had gone through he swung his chair round and asked me what he could do to oblige. So I told him that I’d come to work, and waited while he thumbed and licked his way through a pile of elderly papers. He rang up one or two people on the telephone beside his chair, shouted up the stairs to a Mr Hardway on the floor above who either didn’t hear or didn’t answer, and then went off down the passage grumbling to find someone who knew something about me. Presently he came back. ‘OK, Miss. You’ll be all right to-morrow. Your number’ll come through by this evening or should do.’

I’d always thought that it must be utterly dreadful to be just a number. But you try not having a number at all, and to all intents and purposes no name either. It’s an incredibly left-out-at-Creation feeling. Next morning, I thought, I should be able to stare at the numberless with the rest of the herd.

It is an amazing place, Basil. Stairs and stairs. As a customer one used to sail into a lift and say ‘Fifth, please’, without a notion of what’s involved for the people who walk. We climbed and climbed. Conversation faltered after we’d passed the third floor, and I caught up the tail at the fourth, where it had died altogether.

Six floors up we seethed through a door marked Cloakroom Women Staff, and into a large unpleasant room. It was pinkly distempered²⁰ and tapestried with people’s coats and hats. I suppose there had been pegs, but they were submerged. I laid my coat on the floor and wondered what came next. But a forbidding person in uniform came up and pointed at it. ‘Pick it up,’ she said. ‘Catching the dust like that. Most unhealthy.’



And she went on to explain that the cloakroom was provided for people working in the Departments. Who was I, her tone suggested, a mere cipherless newcomer, to walk in and expect pegs all ready for me? I gathered that I would be lucky if I were allowed occasionally to turn a wash-basin tap, tip one of the soap vases, provided by Messrs Jeevers & Co as an advertisement, and to stand in a queue during the less busy hours. (Life, my dear, seems now likely to resolve itself into a series of those queues. And I’m so bad at them.)

Who was I, anyway, said the blue-uniformed person? She, for her part, was Sister Smith, and responsible for the health of the Female Staff. (So Biblical, that classification! Is there a Brother to look after the health of the males in their cloakroom?) I explained. I had come for the first time. I had no number, but I believed that I was to go to the Clerical Department on the Book Floor. It seemed that there had been a culpable oversight on the part of Somebody. I, as a newcomer, ought never to have been allowed to set foot in that building until I had been examined by Sister Smith. ‘It’s too late now, of course,’ she told me. ‘You may have brought in anything with you. Anything.’

Then she said quite kindly that of course it was mere formality when all was said and done, but that I’d better come to her room at eleven and she would see to it. In the meantime she found a peg for me behind the door and took me to the Clerical Department of the Book Floor, one flight down. When we arrived Sister Smith called through a blinding racket of typewriters for ‘Mr Simpson, please’. The women all raised their heads and gave me another of those jungle looks, but the racket went on as fast as ever. That glimpse of expert typing terrified me: I have to keep my eyes glued on my keys throughout.

Then Mr Simpson came round a wall of books. He’s a large, baldish, undefined sort of person, who moved, but vaguely. Rather like a cloud. None of his clothes fit him: his knees sag in shiny striped trousers. But he smiled at me and I smiled back thankfully. He said:

‘So you’ve come to help us, Miss. That’ll be nice.’

There was a pause. Sister Smith, who presumably has no patience with pauses, said: ‘Well, there you are then.’ And went off, clapping the door behind her. Mr Simpson stood and watched it swing for a little, then looked at me uncertainly. He tried again:

‘You’re to work for Miss Hopper, Miss, so they tell me. She’s over there.’ He pointed somewhere behind me. ‘That’s her table. She’ll be back in a minute, I expect.’

I walked between books and typewriters to Miss Hopper’s table, slowly, because it was something definite to do, and after I’d done it I didn’t know what to do next. When I got there, I just stood, like a cow looking over a gate, and waited for something to happen.

It’s odd: the things that aren’t alive in that Clerical Room – typewriters and chairs and filing cupboards – seem much more vital than the people, who are. I noticed the books next. There were masses of them: all colours, reds and greens and blues and oranges. They were in baskets, in gaping parcels, in tottering piles on tables, each with a pinkish slip of paper sticking out, like a tired dog’s tongue. (Customers’ names and addresses, I found out later.) More books were ranged round the room, looking normal because they were on shelves.

At last someone came. I guessed it was Miss Hopper, because she said she’d been expecting me. She was a sagging sort of person with short, just greying hair. Wearing red. She opened one of the table drawers and dragged out a checked duster. ‘I suppose you’d better get on,’ she said. ‘My last girl used to have done dusting by now.’

I said: ‘Oh. What do I dust?’ And Miss Hopper supposed it was the table. So I took up the checked duster while she stood lop-sidedly on, one leg and watched me. After a few minutes she supposed I’d been used to keeping my place tidy at my last job. Of course she’d always had a girl. Her other girl had been ever so neat and filled the ink-pots every morning. But just at that point I knocked one over, and as I clawed at the blotting-paper some of the books went too. Miss Hopper said: ‘Oh, dear, miss, that’s a pity, isn’t it?’ and went on watching while I mopped and picked up. By that time it was, incredibly, only ten o’clock, but Miss Hopper supposed again that we’d better get on.

She sat down and asked me if I was a good writer. I looked at the stacked books and said hastily that I didn’t write at all. But Miss Hopper was so utterly taken aback that I gathered that she meant could I use a pen so that the result would be legible on labels. That shook me, but I said that I could print quite neatly, I thought. It seemed that that would do, though postmen wouldn’t enjoy it so much.

After that Miss Hopper produced the labels. They were a quite unreasonably unpleasant pink, with dotted lines for the addresses. Books appeared too, clamped together in twos and threes by rubber bands. Sometimes there were ten books inside the band and then it generally snapped in my face when I tried to push a label inside. ‘Why didn’t you take that band off first?’ said Miss Hopper each time it happened.

I wrote labels till eleven, with interruptions from people called Packers, who seemed short-­tempered. At least they brought back several of my labels and pointed out that I had forgotten part of the address. At eleven o’clock someone telephoned to say that Miss Fane was to go to Sister’s room at once. Miss Hopper said: ‘You can’t miss it’, but Mr Simpson wandered up and pointed out the way.

Both the windows in Sister’s room were open. So was the door (opposite) and I stood in the draught, wondering how much I should have to undress. Sister Smith said: ‘Shut the door. Take off your shoes. Stand on that weighing machine. Left foot first.’

Then she pulled a sort of medical catechism out of a pigeon-hole in her bureau and read out the questions while I dithered on my perch. They began with ‘state of head’ and worked intimately downwards. Finally Sister looked at the weights, and said, ‘Nine stone ten. Your feet aren’t flat – yet. Step off. Right foot.’

I shuffled into my shoes while she asked me if both parents were alive and did I suffer from nerves. I said: ‘Yes. Church of Scotland. I don’t know what nerves are.’

Sister told me severely that denomination was a matter for the individual conscience, but that nerves were not. They might affect the Firm. And she did hope that I hadn’t the habit of taking a morning in bed now and then. Because once a thing like that crept in among the people who ought to know better what was one to do with the junior typists?

Then she sent me back to the Clerical Department, and I went, wondering how long it would be before my feet flattened. I shall have to leave before then. I’ve heard your views on flat-footed women.

After that I wrote more labels, till they let me out at half-past twelve. I suppose I went and ate something somewhere, but when I came back again afterwards, Miss Hopper said that she didn’t want me any more that afternoon, and I’d better go and ask Miss Sparling in the Library if she had any letters. That was, if I could type. Could I? I remembered the women who had beaten the typewriters when I came in and hesitated to own to my two-fingered champings. But with my sort of horror of being flung out I had to say I could.

‘That’s right,’ said Miss Hopper. ‘Well, you’d better go to Miss Sparling. Take that door opposite (but mind you shut it behind you. It’s the Shop out there, and customers aren’t supposed to see the Clerical Department.) Go through the Shop and if you turn to the right through the swing doors you’re in the Library. Miss Sparling’s the lady at the big desk.’



The Shop (that seems to be the local name for the selling department of the Book Floor) was interesting. Books were in their element there, praised and ranked and jacketed, handled respectfully by a polite young man and six polite, sleek little girls who ran about among the well­-dressed customers with dogs on leads.

I would have liked to stay and look at things, but I was feeling intimidated, so I went straight through to the Library, which is a long, busy room with ticketed shelves and people reading in corners. It was quite easy to find Miss Sparling. She had the biggest desk, and was bristling behind the vase of semi-putrid Michaelmas daisies which stood on it. She had a nasty, pointed, rattish face. When I said: ‘Miss Hopper sent me from the Clerical Department to see if you could make any use of me,’ she lifted her nose at me quite malevolently. ‘Make use of you? No.’ And she picked up another pile of papers and fussed it from one side of her desk to the other, as if I’d disappeared through the earth. And I’m sure I was quite meek.

So I went back to the Clerical Department, thinking, in my innocence, that they might send me home as they’d no work for me. But they didn’t: work at that level means primarily being on and about the premises for a certain number of hours to take what people put on you. That’s what they pay us for. And finally, I was given something to do. They made me write things on little buff cards till six o’clock. Then Mr Simpson roused me and explained that it was all over.

Darling, don’t scold me for taking this on. It’s hard, but it may improve. I’m too dazed just at present to judge its points. And such lots of people would jump at it. They wouldn’t even think it hard. It’s all so relative.

I met a woman in the bus this evening who was teaching with me at Glengyle. She went on to a big advisory post with a firm in Nottingham – she had a First-class degree in Science – a brilliant woman. But they’ve cut down their staff too, and she’s been workless for six months, so desperate that she seriously considered trying the corset job that I turned down. She’s thirty-seven, of course, not twenty-seven. I can fail and start again. And with you to believe in my work, I could.

Only, now and then, I feel you don’t. Do try to. I mean, think of me as a creature, not just as a possible wife who will persist in doing things that tend to disqualify her. I love you frightfully; but I want your companionship and tolerance and understanding even more than other things. I wonder if you see?

Good-night, my dear,

Hilary

PS – This is an incredibly long letter: all about Me.

PPS – Still, it is funny, don’t you think? Or don’t you?

 

 

The Minerva

September 15th

Basil Dear,

I was very glad to get your letter. It’s good news that you think you can afford to run a car this year. I’ve always thought it would be worth while, in many ways. As you say, it’ll mean getting to the golf course in a quarter of the usual time. It may sound absurd, but I’m still enjoying buses. I had to stand this morning all the way, because I didn’t use my elbows as well as usual at Lancaster Gate. And I even liked swinging about and watching London from the knees down.

I admit that it’ll wear off, but just at present I like seeing people scrambling for the Tube Stations and getting in the way of the other people trying to sweep doorstep dust into the gutters and sluice pavements and deliver milk and empty dustbins, and do all the things that are finished with and hushed up when the merely leisured come out of their houses at eleven o’clock.

I like the wet door-steps and polished door­knobs and piles of newspapers in sheltered corners, and shops with the shutters and grid things half-open and men with bowler hats ducking in and out, and girls in bedroom slippers putting last touches to window displays.

There seem to be so many more horses about at nine o’clock too. Lots of philosophic, chilly-­looking men on drays refuse to be hurried, and to-day four carts were racing round Marble Arch in front of our bus. They’d come from Covent Garden and their drivers were waving whips and cursing cheerfully. A little man with a cartload of cabbages and a trotting donkey was behind them, taking up most of the fairway. Our conductor leant out, and shouted: ‘Now then, Ben Hur, get off the rails!’²¹ And the donkey bolted.

Opposite Bond Street I get off and walk up Manifold Lane to the Staff Entrance. The Lane’s busier than Oxford Street at this time of day. I’ve no idea that so many old women went to work on outside jobs: I met dozens of them, plodding about with string bags or queer parcels. I suppose they’re chars, or dailies²², coming from making other people’s breakfasts; quite unresentfully, most of them, because they’ve done that sort of thing all their lives. And some still older women go from one dust-bin to another with sacks at this time of day: they lift the lids and finger the muddle inside with grey, careful hands that never miss a bottle or a crust.



‘older women go from one dust-bin to another …’

Half-way along the Lane I usually begin to run, hypnotised by that clock over the Staff Entrance. After that come the million stairs to the Cloakroom (Women Staff) so that I inevitably arrive on the Book Floor without a breath in my body. While dusting Hopper’s premises my heart returns to normal and my face de-purples itself. I’ve begun to know the geography of the place now, so I’m less bewildered, though I don’t know the people as well as I know the places where they work, on the whole. They still tend to be rather cardboard, except Miss Sparling, who’s something much more malignant, and Mr Simpson, who’s like a wax figure on a warm day instead. In an emergency he’d be liable to melt altogether. He’s continually bullied by Mr Millet, whose efficiency is almost indecent. I suspect Mr Millett of being one of those magnates in the making. Five years ago he was riding an errand bicycle (with his hands in his pockets instead of on the handle-bars, I expect) and twenty-five years hence he may be writing his memoirs. In the meantime he treats me kindly and Shows me the Ropes.



Talking of magnates, there’s one called Grant who runs the firm’s publicity and seems to be making himself generally felt throughout the building. I gather from Hopper that his visits to the Book Floor are cyclonic. She was reverential about his new circular introducing our Rational Reading Service; but I brought one home in case I got depressed. It’s all about his latest library system. Books are to be delivered to subscribers daily at the same time as groceries, shoes, silk underwear, model gowns, or whatever those subscribers have bought at Everyman’s. You see the idea? One department helps another, and the blue vans deliver the lot.

And, incidentally, every blue van carries a new placard these days. Most sensational:

Bread for the basket?

Yes!

Books for the brain?

Everyman’s bring them

And

Change them again!

I can foresee some truly marvellous complications. His circular buttonholes the British public:

We know your trouble. You never have a minute. Yet you love to read. And you are right. Good reading is as essential as good living. But in the fret and fume of modern life how are you to find time to choose, from the multitude of books published every day, yes, almost every hour, the best for your reading? For it must be the best. We know that. May we not help you? Everyman’s will provide your mental food as well as your daily stores. We will send novels with your groceries, biographies with your butcher-meat, plays with your fruit. More. They will be the best. They will be chosen for you, with special reference to your individual and entirely personal taste and views on literature, by our cultured, experienced librarians, whose fingers are ever on the pulse of modern literature.

‘That’s me,’ said Hopper, breathing proudly down my neck. I told her that I thought it was lovely, but what I wanted to know most was whether this man Grant has a really reliable sense of humour or just a very earnest, high­-powered commercial mind. What did she think?



She looked rather staggered at that heretical problem, and said that she’d never really thought about it at all, but surely I never thought the circular funny, did I? I changed the subject, and asked her if she chose all the books. She said yes, she did. And Miss Sparling too, of course. It was ever so interesting. I should be able to help her a little, perhaps, when she’d trained me. But until I’d mastered the routine of the business she couldn’t expect me to be much use to her, of course.

Then I asked her how long she thought it would take me to learn, and she supposed that all depended. But it seems to be a question of years, if not decades. By the look she gave my last batch of labels, I’m afraid she favours the decades. Still, she said that I might begin to learn the card-indexing system in a day or two, if I didn’t get behind with my labels. So I started in at once. After two hours my wrist ached till I thought it would be better if it did drop off, but Hopper counted my labels in a surprised way and promised to show me the card-index to­morrow. Largely, I think, to keep me quiet. I’m afraid she finds me turbulent: too many things upset in my vicinity.

To-night I walked home across the Park. It was very pleasant; a clear sky with the beginnings of frost. I went very fast, and by the time I got to Beddington Square I was hot and tired, and muddled with mental arithmetic.

Because, if I could walk home every day and get up a little earlier in the mornings to walk to work I should save fourpence a day. And, taking four days a week – in case it rained once or twice – that would be one and fourpence saved in a week. And five and fourpence a month. Quite a lot can be done with five and fourpence: a Pit²³, a day in the country, a shampoo and set. No more buses.

But when I went upstairs to change I found a large, potato-shaped hole in each heel.

In favour of walking, twice daily for one month:   5/4

Against: one new pair of stockings daily:      5/11

That’s how life gets you!

Love,

Hilary

 

 

Lunch Time

September 17th

Well, Darling,

I’m writing this in a teashop. It’s called Green Corners, I suppose because the tables are painted an unpleasant pea-soup colour. No table­cloths. But one can get an eatable and filling lunch for 1/6. So I shall come here often. They leave you in your corner for long peaceful intervals. Soup … meat … sweet … and /or coffee. Since I’m not in a hurry, it doesn’t drive me mad. I bring a writing pad or a book, and watch people between whiles. I come a little late, to have the long half of the day behind me. Of course my inside is a protesting vacuum during the last hour. But it’s worth it. I emerge, triumphant and ravenous, about half-past one.

More ravenous than triumphant to-day. It’s been one of those grey mornings with the streets full of cripples. One’s mind see-saws between pity for oneself and for all the people who walk lame or trundle barrel-organs or sit propped up against the railings of the Park with a row of decorated flagstones in front of them. Only a hundred yards of street between Everyman’s Staff Entrance and the teashop, but by the time I’d reached Green Corners I could hardly bear life.

But the people who come here to lunch every day seem quite pleased with things. There are lots of young women in hip-length fur (or fur-like) coats from offices or the other big shops round about. I’ve never seen anybody from Everyman’s here. I know that lots of them eat at the Canteen. But I didn’t take kindly to the idea. ‘All girls together …’ No thank you. So I race out and compete for the corner tables with the other people who set store by them. There’s one little clerk who glares at me as if I’d done something mortal whenever I get to the window table before he does. And I glare back. But when he gets there first and I glare at him he filters his soup triumphantly through his moustache as if I weren’t on the planet.

There are lots of unexplained people. I want to know about the two who have a table reserved for them every day. The woman always comes, but sometimes the man doesn’t turn up. Then she waits half an hour and goes away again, without lunch. They’re middle aged, and the man wears spats which shine among the wrinkling socks of Green Corners. They always have a great deal to say as if it were their only opportunity. And there are three spinsters with that look of calculated cheerfulness that’s so dreadfully depressing. They come up from the country once a week or thereabouts and talk about what’s happening to Mary … and Beryl … and Joan … since she left school. There’s one girl who comes occasionally, with a face like a Bellini Madonna and Home Chat²⁴ under her arm.

I wonder where the men on the Book Floor lunch. On the one occasion I visited the Canteen very few males were there. Do they go to Lyons²⁵? Or to pubs? Or Dining Rooms²⁶? There are some steamy-windowed ones in Manifold Lane which have a fascination for me. I’ve not dared to investigate so far. Tell me about Dining Rooms: can a girl go there? Alone? Or should I have to persuade somebody to take me? I have a feeling that Mr Millett and Mr Salt lunch in a Dining Room. Certainly they go off together, looking odd. Mr Millett’s education was County Council²⁷, Night School²⁸, and a day trip to Cambridge at Whitsun. So he wears grey flannel trousers and a brownish, hairy tweed coat and no hat in the street, because he knows that those are the things that count²⁹. And Mr Salt was a noise in the crowd at Trinity³⁰, so he wears a celluloid collar, bowler hat and striped trousers because he knows that those are the things that count. (Being in Rome …) I believe that they’re great friends. But neither challenges the other’s costume in spite of all the meals they eat together.



‘They go off together, looking odd.’

Yesterday Miss Dowland asked me to share her tea-table in the ABC³¹. (More about meals, Basil. I always seem to be writing at them or about them. But they loom so, when you pay cash.) Anyway, I went to tea with Miss Dowland yesterday. The waitress asked her what she would take. She said:

‘Well, I don’t feel just like cake. I think I’ll just have the tea, Mabel.’ And the fat Mabel said:

‘Oh, there now, you know you ought to. It keeps the strength up.’

Miss Dowland wavered.

‘Perhaps I’ll have a bun, after all.’ But she looked at the cakes (twopence each) on the cut­glass stand. I asked her if she usually came to that shop. She said: ‘Yes. Fifteen years, off and on it’ll be now.’



And she still counts the days. ‘This is my seven-hundredth-and-fiftieth Monday,’ she told me when I crawled upstairs at the beginning of this week. So she once expected something to happen. And in another twenty years or so something will. She’ll collect her superannuation and her pension and retire. She has a house: ‘So nice, Miss Fane, quite in the country. Out at Harrow. The air’s so fresh, I always say.’ She lives with her friend, who’s been ‘out’ this last six months. ‘We hope she’ll get something – anything almost – soon. It’s a little difficult for the two of us when only one’s earning.’ And I saw her look at my ring. I don’t want to gloat, but I am glad about us, Basil.

Time’s up. I’ll post this on the way back.

Love, always,

Hilary

 

 

Bus

September 18th

Pay Day, my lamb. And I’m alive to claim it! No earnings have ever pleased me so much. And I’m fairly certain that the management have seldom spent a salary to less purpose.

To label-writing: two pounds ten. Well!

Goodness knows I’m neither deft nor diligent, and even you can’t (always) read my writing.

But they paid me. In a little, thick, yellow envelope, with the flap so glued down that it defied even the most honest efforts to up-end it. The name of the department was stamped in bright blue letters; my own above was neatly printed in block caps. Inside were two pound notes, two half-crowns, three shillings, a sixpence and three coppers. By rights there should have been the two pounds ten they promised me, but Ill-health and Unemployment have to be considered. They make you contribute to these things. Did you know? I was told on my first day that I must get my Unemployment card at the Labour Exchange in some street or other whose name I instantly forgot, and the Health card at any Post Office. Can you ever find Post Offices at a crisis? I can’t. But they subtract the one and threepence, just the same.

Anyway, the envelopes were brought round after tea by our Mr Simpson. His boots squeak, but his feet are beautiful on the mountains³² on those occasions, and he knows it. There is a sort of annunciatory³³ expression on his flat face which is most suitable. I didn’t know whether one thanked him with all the gratitude one felt or ignored the existence of anything which might give the lie to the Work for Work’s Sake notice which hangs opposite Miss Sparling’s desk in the Library. So I watched the others from my corner. No one said thank you; so I didn’t. Miss Lamb beamed: Miss Hopper pushed her envelope quickly into her bag; but Miss Watts sat back and counted every item with the lovely crackling tweak at the corners of her notes that I’ve envied bank cashiers all my life. There was a new, Friday evening sound in the Department; the semi-surreptitious counting of everybody’s loose change, guardedly, so that other people mightn’t see exactly what was going into each handbag or trousers pocket.



I’d hardly stowed away my share before Mr Sirnpson came up to me again, this time more or less on tip-toe, and asked me whether I would like to start paying in to the Superannuation Fund when I was eligible. That, of course, wouldn’t be for six months yet. I thought it was a charity. But he explained, and it seems that whenever one has been six months in the firm one begins to save against the day when failing eyes, legs and ears force one to leave it. I hedged a little, and he told me that they all did it, even Miss Lamb. (And she’s twenty.) So when he had assured me that I could get it back ‘in the event of dismissal’ (that seemed to be the only reason for leaving which occurred to him) I promised to contribute.

Later

Your letter came in by the last post and I thought I’d add a bit to mine before going to bed. I’m writing in dressing-gown and bedroom slippers, comforted by a bath rather more than by your lecture on morbidity. But I’ll give your remarks my attention. I’m quite meek, you know. In essentials.

Perhaps my last letter was a bit full of pavement artists and indigent spinsters. And, as you say, they probably neither deserve nor want to be pitied. It doesn’t hurt them (as people say when they kill moths). Of course they like crowds. Look at Blackpool. And work, because, as you say, they wouldn’t know what to do with leisure if they had it. Though that does seem such a hoary and suspicious argument – or do I mean specious, by any chance? Of course, I know you’re right up to a point. They’re not unhappy. I was watching Miss Lamb this morning, during a beatific pause in the label-writing due to a failure in the supply of raw material. She was completely absorbed in typing her letter. She never wasted a second or made an unnecessary gesture whipping out one sheet and putting in another. There must be some satisfaction in doing anything, even if it’s mechanical, quite as well as she does. And yet, there’s nothing to show for all her work but her initials sandwiched with those of her principal in the bottom left-hand corner of hundreds, thousands, and perhaps, in twenty years, millions of letters. Which is probably a very sour­grapeish remark. I couldn’t turn out Miss Lamb’s faultlessly typed pages if I tried all my life.



But Miss Lamb doesn’t mean to spend a life­time on hers. She was talking to me about the Future in the cloakroom queue before lunch to­day. She’s got permission to leave early to-night. They allow us an hour off every month, for shopping. Not that she means to shop, she says. But her Boy has got an hour off too. Her Boy has a car, and in the summer she’s going to learn to drive it. He’s in Everyman’s, I believe, though I haven’t tracked him down yet. And he’s just got a rise, says Miss Lamb. So one hopes that he’ll come up to the scratch soon, and marry her. Meanwhile, of course, she pays into the Superannuation Fund, because she’ll get it out when she marries. It’s as good a way of saving as any other. And either way, she’s safe.

Miss Watts, the other typist, is older. She might be thirty-five or thirty or even twenty­-eight. It depends on the time of day, and the weather, and the light in which she’s standing, and whether anything pleasant is liable to happen, like the rain stopping at lunch-time. She doesn’t seem to have a Boy, or if she has she’s more reticent about him. Perhaps, at thirty-five (or thirty) financial security is the only thing that matters. But I doubt it. And I’m twenty-seven already.

Do you remember how you railed once against the mentality which demands and gets a safe job for forty years, and is rewarded by a marble clock, suitably inscribed, on retiring at the end of the forty-first? Could there, by the way, be a more ghoulish gift?

Anyway, good-night,

Hilary

 

 

Martin’s Restaurant

Saturday, 1.30
September 19th

Oh, Basil, there are compensations! It’s worth sleep-walking from nine to six all the week just to wake up on Saturday with half a day and a night and another day after that unquestionably one’s own. I came out of Everyman’s and watched all the other people with hockey sticks and skates and suit-cases tearing for buses. But I strolled, feeling marvellous. Rather as if I’d kicked off a tightish pair of shoes.

It’s just petty-cash pleasure of course. I can count all the things that go to make it. Hours of idleness ahead; nothing heavy to carry; nowhere to go in a hurry; dry pavements underfoot; all the back-street restaurants to choose from, and most of Friday’s envelope still in my bag.

God, I’m so happy! Isn’t it absurd? I suppose we’re so bottled up during the week that Saturday’s uncorking is apt to let off a colossal head of excitement. Set down on paper, though, I expect it all just looks rather tiresome. I wish I had you here. It’s such a waste being happy alone. Happiness won’t hoard, either. It isn’t the least use trying to keep it for the next black mood. It won’t even keep overnight.

Here’s my lunch. A rump steak with crisped potatoes, and green things, because of your food lectures first: biscuits, Camembert cheese, black coffee and a cigarette coming.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .              

Those dots mean that I’ve eaten the rump steak (bi-manually). Cheese and biscuit stage now; so I can write again. Oh – writing! Shall I rush into the Post Office next door and put through a trunk call to Edinburgh? I suppose not. It would spoil Mrs MacQueen’s Saturday afternoon so to know that your young woman had rung up from London (the wickedness of it!) when you were out. I don’t know that talking’s much good either on second thoughts. Perhaps there isn’t any way of making contact. It’s alarming, sometimes, to think of all the other things there are in your life besides me; and all so gravely important. But you know I adore you to be busy and talked about as the coming authority on pre-natal metabolism.

I love calling for you at the Medical School and watching your students crash out with their note-books full of your ideas. I’m blown out with pride when you come up to me and dust the chalk off your fingers on to the sleeve of my coat. Oh, Basil, fake up a conference quite soon and come up to London, and dine at length with all the European authorities on obstetrics and take me out to supper afterwards in some minor pub.

Well, in the meantime there’s this week-end. I shall go down to the Embankment after I’ve posted this, and walk as far as Chelsea. Water and thin sunlight and spotted plane trees spilling leaves into it. Pleasant. There was frost last night. Then I’ll buy bread and fruit and chocolate at one of the little shops which don’t close on Saturday, and take a bus back to the Minerva after tea. I’ve got three books for the week-end, but this evening I shan’t mind doing all the save-­sixpence jobs: stocking washing (surreptitious, because of the notices about washing of garments. One wraps the Lux in a bath-towel, usually upside down and leaving an accusing, paper-chase trail).

After that, dull letters, even bills; shoe-cleaning; a book and a cigarette to make up for it all afterwards. Ten hours in bed … breakfast just when I feel like it and where I wake up. I’m going to eat rolls and fruit and chocolate instead of going downstairs. There’s always Eno’s³⁴ if I’m taken with thirst. I won’t move till eleven.

If it’s sunny I’ll go out for an hour to watch the dogs and ducks swimming in the Serpentine. If not, not. And after lunch I shall read …

I may write to you again, too.

Love, darling,

Hilary

PS – Now I know what people mean by ‘A month of Sundays.’ Heaven!

 

 

Minerva
Saturday Evening

September 19th

Dearest Family,

I’ve washed six pairs of stockings and darned three, ironed two blouses and two sets of collars and cuffs, and run yards of elastic into everything I could lay hands on. Laundry’s such a fierce item that I’m going to try to do it myself. But I thought I’d begin gradually.

Thank you for the biscuits and cigarettes and most appropriate Lux and the money for a library subscription. Such intelligent presents, as if you’d both worked in London on £2:10:0 a week and knew just what it won’t run to! I’ve eaten some biscuits and used the Lux and smoked two cigarettes, and taken out a subscription (Fiction C³⁵ offered to the Staff at a reduced rate) from Everyman’s Library.

Don’t worry about the hours of work. They’re long, but at present nobody could call the work I do intellectual or exacting. I mean, it oughtn’t to kill anybody merely to copy hundreds of people’s names and addresses from the library folders (where we keep the lists of books the subscribers want sent to them) on to the labels which go out with the books. And that’s all I do so far. So I don’t think you need be anxious. At least two-thirds of my brain is free to think about irrelevant things, such as new rooms and plans for the week-end. (Though if more than two-thirds of my attention wanders, very odd things happen to the labels.)

I don’t think, incidentally, that I’m going to stay at the Minerva much longer. If you’re working in London it’s exasperating to come too much in contact with people who’re merely living there. I don’t see anybody at breakfast of course, but their talk at dinner is all about bridge parties and charity and the people they’d met in the Park. If I lived in rooms I needn’t hear them.

I’m going to spend this weekend in utter laziness; but next Saturday I shall interview landladies. Can you give me any idea of the sort of questions one asks? What does a room look like when it is:

(a) Damp?

(b) Verminous?

(c) Unventilated?

After the profound interest I took in the Housing Problem during my second year at Oxford you’d think that some of the details would have stuck in the memory. But I’d be grateful for all the practical points with which you could stiffen my theoretical knowledge before next Saturday.

And now I think I’ll go to bed. It’s wonderfully soothing to know that I can stay there to-morrow morning for As Long As I Like.

Much love,

Hilary

 

 

The Minerva
Wednesday

September 23rd

Basil Rainford, Esq:

Dear Sir,

Herewith we beg to enclose the penultimate paragraph of our previous communication of Saturday’s date. This page was inadvertently omitted; it had become detached and was not discovered (under the wash-stand by an interested chambermaid) until the letter of which it was part had been despatched. For this oversight we trust that you will accept our apologies, together with the assurance that everything in our power will be done to prevent the recurrence of such a mishap.

Have you ever noticed, Basil, how Commerce jibs at the simple statement? Circumlocution creeps into one’s blood. Nothing is ever just ‘lost’ though it may – and often does ‘become detached’ and is in consequence ‘temporarily mislaid.’ We commence … communicate … insert … query … indicate … proceed …But on the other hand we even things up by talking about Jan … and Feb … and corres³⁶ … and sub … and memo … and advert … and par³⁷ … Like a man in top hat and shirt sleeves, it takes getting used to. Sometimes we make ‘slight slips’; ‘some assistant’ is a useful scapegoat for an ‘inexplicable oversight’, even for a ‘gross blunder’ (committed, more often than not, by the person composing the letter). It’s a good game. Played occasionally. But think what it must do to your way of thinking after twenty years. Miss Sparling’s an expert at it. Her mind must be incapable of unstereotyped thought. Except, perhaps, her dislike of me, which is a new and most luxuriant growth. But then, of course, she’s one of those trap-mouthed women who’d rather wrangle than not.

Talking of Miss Sparling, I’ve disgraced myself to-day. Not irrevocably, Mr Simpson assures me. Still, quite prominently, as usual. Monday morning began it. The room was cold and the clock-hands seemed to have stuck somewhere between nine and ten. Label-writing became more than I could bear. It does, you know, very soon. At first it’s a game; then it’s just dull; but after two hours it’s so gruesomely boring that it’s not to be borne. I always wonder how Miss Hopper gets through the day at all, even though she does choose people’s Books for the Brain. She seems to do nothing much but ‘check’ the things I’ve done already. She looks to see that the addresses are right and the labels in the proper books, and if the cardboard library folders have been written up properly and filed in the right drawers. She watches me, too, quite a lot. It’s sometimes unnerving. The other day she said: ‘I do like to watch you write, you know. You do it so easily. You must have done ever such a lot of it.’

But to-day I suddenly felt that I couldn’t bear to scratch on in the usual way that meant reaching the bottom of the pile of books to be sent out somewhere in the middle of the afternoon. So I worked furiously and as fast as I dared. When I’d finished that pile I filed all the library folders I could find, tidied everything I could see, filled Miss Hopper’s ink-pot and unobtrusively went to lunch.

I only got as far as the cloakroom. I was pulling on my hat in front of that mirror when I heard Miss Hopper behind me. She said: ‘Aren’t you feeling quite well?’ I said: ‘Oh, yes, thank you.’ And smiled quite kindly at her because I’d done such a lot of work and was feeling proud. Then I picked up my bag and tried to get past.

‘You’re never leaving the building?’ said Miss Hopper. ‘You can’t, you know, not without Sister or Miss Ward give you leave.’

‘But how does anybody ever get out?’ I said as I pulled on my gloves. ‘One must lunch, after all. I’ve never asked Sister yet.’

‘But you can’t lunch at half-past eleven when your time is one,’ said Miss Hopper.

‘But it is one o’clock,’ I said. (Though I had a horrid, sudden doubt.)

Miss Hopper just said: ‘Come downstairs and look at the clock.’

She showed me three, and they all bore her out. It was all very public and shaming. For once the typists stopped: Mr Simpson came up and murmured: Miss Dowland said: ‘If you bring chocolate, dear, it helps.’

They all hustled me back to my labels, and for the next hour and a half I just obstinately sat, though I may have written two more. At five minutes to one Mr Simpson came up and said that he’d see I wasn’t idle. So after lunch he gave me a list of books that I could type for him. It was nice to get to know their names, wasn’t it?

I spent the afternoon over his list. It wasn’t altogether wilful meandering, either. I just couldn’t get the prices to add up right, and whenever I was half-way up the shillings column Miss Hopper sent me to get something for her or a packer brought me back one of my more illegible labels and I had to begin at the bottom again.

I have to remind myself quite often these days that I’m doing a job and justifying my existence, and helping patriots to Buy British; and oftener still that in the natural course of events it won’t last for ever or even for very many months. Because I’d hate to be Miss Lamb and type hundreds of form letters a day; letters to say how obliged we are for an esteemed order, and how we beg to hand people an invoice therewith, and that we can’t imagine what’s happened to their goods, but we will take the matter up with the Postal Authorities.

If anyone wants to do this sort of work really well or happily she has to be either so stupid that elementary detail is enough for her or else so efficient that she hardly needs to think of it at all. I’m neither. So, at the moment, Basil, dear, it hardly looks as if I’d make my mark. There’s nothing remarkable about this sort of work unless you do it badly.

And yet, it is work, and masses of people haven’t got it and would probably jump at it. Oughtn’t that dog-in-possession feeling to be enough to satisfy a girl?

What a Mondayish letter! I’d better go and have a bath. That’s to say, supposing I can afford another sixpence. And that reminds me, I’m going to look for a room somewhere else. Not, of course, altogether because I grudge the sixpences. But when one uses hot baths as pick-me-­ups in the evenings and for practical purposes in the mornings as well, it begins to come expensive. Besides, I like the hotel even less on second thoughts: I don’t like the people who are unfriendly in an Anglo-Indian way³⁸, and the people who insist on being friendly are worse. Besides, typists don’t live in hotels: as far as I can make out they live with aged parents or in hostels, where you get a cubicle and bed-rock board for twenty-something shillings a week. I doubt if I could bear that, but if I’m to rent a small flat when my salary makes it possible, I’ve got to live on my week’s earnings now. Twenty pounds sounds well, but it doesn’t go far when one’s furnishing – even two rooms and a cubby hole.

So I’m collecting information about all the people who let lodgings and can be recommended as respectable (remem-bering the Corset gentleman and his proposals) for a working girl of just the most moderate means. There should be lots of names on the list by the end of this week: on Saturday I’ll go and look them up.

Tell me, what about the book? Oughtn’t it to be emerging into the proof stage quite soon? Of course I shall want to see it, just as soon as there is anything to see, even those galley things like fly-papers which are so difficult to read and so exhausting for the arms unless one could become a fly for the occasion and have them hung up to crawl over. You know, dear, that any opinion I may form will be entirely valueless, but I shall understand (remembering) the bits you explained to me in the summer. And I shall enjoy strewing those galleys about my room and nonchalantly inviting people in to see me.

Oh, darling, I must tell you, Mr Simpson intercepted me when I was creeping home at six o’clock and said that I was please not to worry about my slight slip this morning. He did hope that I wouldn’t let it get on my mind. Bless him!

And you,

Hilary

 

 

Minerva

Saturday, September 26th

Oh, My Dear,

Hunting rooms is almost as bad as hunting jobs. And quite the world’s worst way of spending any Saturday. I set out with my list, very cross, and went grandly to look at Ladies Clubs. But of course they were much too expensive. And, anyway, I dislike their elderly boarding-school atmosphere. So I went in to the place which advertised Bed-sitting-rooms for Ladies instead. All dingy and unreasonably far from bus stops. I tramped about with my list, grudging the September sunshine that would have been lovely on nearly everything, but which showed up holes in carpets and dirt on windows and lines on landladies’ faces. Dust danced in it and smells rose through it and I turned tail in the middle. I dashed down to the Embankment to smoke a cigarette and watch seagulls. When I felt better I stroked off the names of the places I’d been to and started off again.

And now I’ve found some sort of a hole for myself. It belongs to a house that provides homes for Ladies Only – all sorts of impoverished ladies from midwives to ministers’ widows. It’s run by the inevitable Colonel’s wife who’s come down in the world.

Something obscure seems to have happened to that Colonel: she doesn’t like him mentioned except for purposes of advertisement. No palm­-pots here, of course: you walk into a narrow passage that smells of damp oilcloth and mice. But not, thank heaven, of meals either past, present or to come.



At the end of the passage there’s a door marked Office in amateurish printing. Behind this the Colonel’s wife lives, in a bed-sitter like everybody else; only, because her room is also the place of business there’s more sit and less bed about it than most. Of course, the japanned³⁹ screen shouts wash-stand⁴⁰ at anyone, but the divan⁴¹ and the arm-chair and the bureau with its elephant-foot letter-weights and its blotting-pad are most convincing. The Colonel’s wife was inclined to be rather Anglo-Indian with me at first, especially as most of the rooms cost more than I’d decided to afford. But just as I had given up hope she owned to one at seventeen shillings a week.

‘It mayn’t be quite as comfy as the others,’ she said. ‘But then  – well, we can’t have everything for nothing in this world, can we?’

All the same, I like it. It’s small and down the basement stairs, but there’s an antique kitchen stove which nobody has taken the trouble to screen, and I shall be able to stow away any amount of things in its ovens. I like the white walls, the red cotton curtains, and the shabby red carpet. And I like the narrow panes of glass above the ex-area door⁴² and the foreshortened view of passing ankles. I prefer my bed to be a bed, which is fortunate. For seventeen shillings a week one doesn’t get a divan. That sort of elegance costs twenty-five and sixpence. There’s a basket-chair which creaks and reminds me of Lady Hilda’s. And a table with one leg shorter than the rest. But mercifully the bath (which is miles away on the first floor), the gas-fire and electric light are penny-in-the-slot. I’m all for the copper standard and I’m moving in to­morrow. Address, 23 Burford Street, WC.

Basil, won’t it be fun when you can get a week-end off? I shall make you take me out and provide an expensive dinner followed by Turkish coffee and old brandy. Then we’ll dance, and afterwards I’ll bring you back to my basement and give you herring-roes personally cooked over a pennyworth of gas. When will you come? Soon, please.

Hilary

 

 

23 Burford Street

October 2nd

My Dear,

A good day; we were paid, and your letter was waiting for me when I got home. Such a nice, partisan letter too. You said all the things that I secretly wanted to hear about the absurdity of an educated woman working at menial jobs for a mere pittance and living in a basement on a few shillings a week, about the waste of making people like me write labels that a Board School child would probably do better, anyway. (This not so welcome, perhaps. But true.) Your indignation was most infectious. I was quite furious myself as I read your views on vitiated atmospheres and impossible hours, and things being different for me because I wasn’t used to them.

But on the other hand, Basil, it’s just because I’m not used to them that things like living in a basement, earning two pounds ten a week and budgeting every penny, are amusing. (On Pay Day.) I suppose it’s not a fair test of this sort of life, either. I can always run away. They – the other people with basements and nine-to-six and two pounds ten a week – can’t. You remember the story that Byron shut himself up in one of those dungeons for a while to get the atmosphere for The Prisoner of Chillon? I always thought that was cheating: all he had to do was to yell and he’d have been set free.

So you needn’t worry quite so indignantly about me. I could run away. But I don’t want to. Which, as you’ll tell me if I don’t mention it first, is just sheer, thrawn, wicked pride. No, it isn’t, either. Not entirely. I do want to go on supporting myself, unaided, during this bad year. Then I needn’t panic at the thought of letting you support me for the rest of my life.

Well, we were paid to-day, and I felt better afterwards. This time I brazenly counted the money in my envelope twice, instead of shoving it into my bag as if I couldn’t take time from my labours to make sure of the hire. Then on the way home I called in at one of those sub­-restaurants where they feed people; (just food: no frills). I had an enormous bowl of soup; a cut from the joint with two vegs; an apple dumpling; bread and cheese and coffee. Then, over a cigarette, I worked out the week’s budget.

I’ve never kept accounts before, except at school and under compulsion. But I’m proud of my budget. Everything is accounted for: nothing remains. Here it is:



 

I did that sum this evening over the wreckage of my big meal. Then I took half a crown out of the Emergency Fund to pay for it (it’s to be hoped that nothing dire happens this week, as it now contains sixpence), and came home, feeling good.

But, for all that, the budget isn’t a really reliable joke. I don’t suppose, for instance, that it’ll stand much repetition. And I’ve been rather dreary until to-day – not getting as much fun as usual out of living on £2:10:0 a week. Of course I can comfort myself by writing to you about it, but sometimes I almost forget that it isn’t really a trap that I’ve got to run round for the rest of my life. When I say that I look on you as a bolt-hole it isn’t as rude as it sounds.

I know I shan’t spend my life this way. I won’t. But the others, Miss Hopper and Miss Watts and Mildred Lamb, will. And they know it. It’s the only way they can be safe; sure of a place to sleep in, food, and those tidy, monotonous clothes. But they pay so much more for that safety (in things that aren’t money), than the basic two pounds ten a week.

The worst of earning one’s living, Basil, is that it leaves so little time over to live in. During the winter you’ve got to hand over the eight daylight hours to Everyman’s, and only keep the twilight bits at each end. And most of them go to waste in sleep.

In fact, I’ve been drowning myself in lacrimae rerum⁴³ all week. And it rained too: I hated my stove because nobody cooked meals on it any more: I hated the red carpet because the floor underneath was stone and damp: I minded the rain coming in under the ex-area door because it made a pool, and my one good pair of shoes was standing in it next morning. I couldn’t get to sleep most nights because the sheets were horrid. The darns scratched me. One blanket was too short and the other too narrow and both were dirty. I couldn’t tuck my coat round me because it was damp. Last night my only two pennies flickered out simultaneously in the gas fire and the electric light at five minutes past eight, and I spilt my supper half-pint of milk as I was getting into bed.



This morning Mrs Hemming, who’s the ‘service’ included in my rent, mourned over the mess.

‘Does seem a shyme, don’t it miss? ‘Owever I’ll get this grate clean I do not know, and me with twenty in the ‘ouse to do for. Not that it’s the work I object to, miss. It’s the waste. It may be nothing to you, miss, if you’ll excuse my saying so. No doubt you can go and get a good meal when you like. But if you was goin’ to throw it away, you might ‘ave given it to them as needed it first. Not that I’m thinking of meself. But there’s them girls upstairs. You get a bed to yourself when all’s said and done, but if you lay three in a bed and often ‘aven’t enough milk to make a cup of tea with, let alone kippers and such’ – at this point she picked up the remains of mine by the tail and threw it into the dust-bin as if I’d stolen it – ‘for your supper – well, you look twice before you throw away a ‘ole ‘alf­pint, that makes work for others in the clearin’ of it up. No offence, of course, but there’s no good saying one thing and thinking another, as Mr Hemming always says.’

Still, she has cleared it up. And I’ve put three­pence in the gas all at once, left the fire on while I spent twopence on a bath, piled all my coats on the bed and sagged into it, warm and well fed, with your letter. You could have chosen, my lamb, between a snippet of a reply posted this evening which would greet you with your breakfast to-morrow, and a long letter which won’t arrive before the last post. I thought I’d choose for you (it’s raining), and I hope you’ll approve. To-night I’m a luxurious animal: I refuse to get my feet wet again. I’m just gloating over the comfort of being warm and loved.

You do love me, Basil, don’t you? Oh, I know; but I’d just like to see it in writing again. You were so voluble over my wrongs that you forgot to mention it.

Bless you, anyway,

Hilary

 

 

 

23 Burford Street

October 8th

Basil, My Lamb,

Something actually happened to-day. Something startling, I mean, not like the things which keep on happening all the time without anyone being the better for them. It was during the lunch hour: Miss Hopper had gone early – she has a queasy stomach, she says, and can’t do with a Long Morning. So she goes to lunch at twelve-fifteen. Very useful. Anyway, there I was, alone at her table, and, by the mercy of heaven, working hard. In other words, carefully ‘inserting’ a card into the index every five minutes. (At that rate I can make the job last for an hour.)

Suddenly there was a pause in the typing; then it went on again like gun fire. The whole atmosphere crackled. Obviously some sort of an Olympian had come in.

I didn’t actually look up, but I felt him come down the narrow gangway between book-cases and tables, and all the books that were half on and half off the tables fell off them at once. I thought, ‘Well, I’m safe, anyway. He can’t know I exist.’ So I put three cards into the index at once and kept up that sort of terrorised efficiency till I thought he must be well away. Then I looked up, and he’d stopped six inches off, staring at me. Very god like. (But clean-shaven.)

He said: ‘Miss Hopper, can you explain this?’ And he floated a letter down on to my index cards. (They were wet, of course, but I daren’t protest. An efficient woman would have had blotting paper.)

I grabbed the letter, and said: ‘Certainly.’

He looked again. ‘Are you Miss Hopper?’



I said: ‘Certainly not!’

He said: ‘Then you can’t. Most annoying.’ (Very short.) I said: ‘Why not?’ And kept hold of the letter, though he seemed inclined to grab it back. It was the sort I’ve met quite a lot lately, tilted, bad-tempered handwriting that crawled up one page in the third person and down the opposite side in the first. In the middle there were exclamation marks, and the writer demanded her money back.

I didn’t actually understand what it was all about, but mercifully the name and address came first, and were followed by something about unsuitable literature and crass carelessness. Then I remembered the ‘biographies with your butcher meat’ phrase, and guessed that some Rational Reader must have been given kippers and Marie Corelli when they’d ordered Galsworthy and caviare. I stopped being frightened then and consulted the card-index in a dazed but competent way, found Mrs Pillington-Smythe’s card, picked it out without the usual shower of adherent, next-door tickets, and read out all the particulars on it.

The Minor Prophet just looked at me, and said, ‘Well?’ and, ‘How do you explain it?’ So I read the letter through again and took it in this time.

‘Mrs Pillington-Smythe’ (it said) ‘is amazed that any firm of your standing should encourage the sale of books which can only undermine the morals of the country. If certain people choose to demand such literature (save the mark) that is their own affair. But surely, even in these degenerate days, youth is still sacred. As the Headmistress of a school to which many prominent people send their daughters you will appreciate that I am in a position of some trust.

‘I subscribed to your Service on the understanding that you would keep my school supplied with what is best in modern literature. I particularly explained that if fiction be sent at all, it must be only such fiction as leaves the reader the better for having read it, such fiction as she may confidently put into the hands of the daughters of prominent people who attend her school. Mrs Pillington-Smythe gave a list of her preferences, which included Biography, Travel, Memoirs and History, in that order. She understood that she would be supplied with select literature only, and considers that her confidence has been abused. She would be obliged if Messrs. Everyman would refund the amount which she paid them in advance.’

I said: ‘Yes, that must be For One Night Only. I did ask Miss Hopper if it was quite safe for Mrs Pillington-Smythe and her girl’s school, but she said that they always had the Book of the Week, and if a book was the Book of the Week, it was always Quite Nice.’

‘Yes, yes, but what do you propose to do now?’ said the Minor Prophet. I was tempted to say that I’d leave it to Miss Hopper, but with that eye upon me, some sort of action seemed imperative.

‘She ought to have a very careful letter,’ I suggested. ‘We might say that these books are kept solely for a small clientele with advanced – I mean peculiar – views. And while we may deplore their tastes …’ (The Minor Prophet finished the sentence as I’d hoped.) ‘We are nevertheless obliged to satisfy their requirements.’ His voice wobbled a little, but when I looked hopefully up at him his face was grimmer than ever. ‘And then,’ I said, ‘we’d send a much more expensive and extra pure book in exchange – no further charge, of course.’

He said: ‘Possibly. Write the letter.’ As an afterthought, he asked: Did I type? Good. No shorthand? Serious disadvantage. Well, I’d better type out the letter and send it up for his signature. That was all he’d come to say. I could tell Miss Hopper that I was acting on his instructions. Then he walked out. But of course I hadn’t the remotest idea who he was, so I went up to Miss Dowland and asked her. She said: ‘Oh, I thought you didn’t know. That was Mr Grant.’ (The man who made up those rhymes. I wrote about them. No wonder he was furious about a brain and bread-basket blunder.)

I said: ‘Oh, was it. Thank you,’ and wondered what she had on her mind. She went on talking and seemed to have got lost in a sentence about business etiquette, and it all being so strange at first. Eventually, she got round to it, and it appeared that I ought to have called him ‘Sir’ and she did hope that I wouldn’t mind her pointing it out: she couldn’t help hearing that I’d never said it: I’d got such a clear voice: it wasn’t as if she’d listened. I was please not to think anything of the kind and not to worry, anyway, because he’d know I was new to the business and never dream of holding it up against me.

Well, that hadn’t occurred to me as a possibility, and I didn’t let it prey on my mind. I made up a really lovely letter to Mrs Pillington-Smythe, full of apology and flattery and an appeal to her superior insight (not too good English, because that would have annoyed her but with all the best commercial circumlocutions). I wound up with a long sentence of abnegation in which I said that we perfectly understood that, in the circumstances, she would like to have her money back. We were putting the matter through at once, and in the meantime we trusted that she would accept a copy of The Roof Tree of the World at thirty shillings, without, of course, any further charge. It’s been remaindered at five, but who’s to know? Not Mrs P-S. I enjoyed writing that letter. I wasn’t quite sure of the placatory technique, so I asked Miss Dowland about credit notes and special deliveries and she told me. But the typing! I did it five times, incredibly slowly, and each time I made a mistake nearer the end.

Miss Dowland came up when I was finishing the fifth copy and asked me whether I’d like her to type it for me, as it was so difficult, wasn’t it, once one let a thing like that get on one’s nerves. And of course Mr Grant was ever so particular. I said, ‘Thank you. I’ll manage.’ And put an irrelevant question mark into my still unblemished fifth version. Miss Dowland said: ‘And he’s got a wicked eye for erasures.’ Mercifully, after that she went away, and I champed through the blistering letter once again, took five minutes over the envelope, wrote a little note of explanation and put the thing in the messenger girl’s box for Mr Grant.

And that, I hope, will be the last of that. But at least I’ve never known an afternoon at Everyman’s go so quickly as this one; nor have I ever worked so hard. When I’d finished and came back to Miss Hopper and her labels, she said: ‘You’ve just time for half an hour’s work. All that time off! Gets me so behind, you know.’ Time off! Time off! I ask you!

I went home muttering, and pushed my way on to a bus in front of two innocent people who had their arms too full of parcels to push back. ‘These shop girls,’ said one of them, and the other said, ‘Tck-tck, no manners!’ as the bus left them on the pavement.

There was a letter from the family waiting for me. They said, among other things, that you’d been round, interviewing Father about something encyclopædic, and afterwards stayed to dinner. They’d liked that. I wonder if you’d still have been escorted to the door afterwards by Father in the old way if I’d been there, or whether my official standing gives me the right to drag a usurping parent back by the coat tails. Probably.

They said you had a cold again. I’m sorry. Does that Mr. MacQueen look after you in the competent Scots way with whisky toddy and mustard baths and stockings round the throat and hot bottles⁴⁴ and blackcurrant tea? There’s no fun in a cold unless people treat it like pneumonia.

Please report progress.

Love,

Hilary

 

 

Covering Note

To Mr Grant

Memo

Herewith the letter of apology to Mrs Pillington-Smythe. I understand that in an emergency it is permissible to employ a special messenger to deliver goods. I have done this, and hope you consider the action justified.

I know that there need be no delay, strictly speaking, in putting through a credit note. But I thought that it might give Mrs Pillington­-Smythe time to do something gracious – even to change her mind about cancelling her library subscription.

Pending this I have marked her folder as follows:

CAUTION – SCHOOL

EXCLUSIVE: NON-FICTION

(No Sex)

From:

Hilary Fane

Book Floor

October 8th, 1931

 

 

 

EVERYMAN’S STORES

For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

From  G Grant

To Staff Supervisor

October 9th, 1931

 

Subject Junior Clerk, 537 (H Fane), Book Floor, Clerical

Memo

Her record (education and previous posts) seems to indicate that she is fitted for a better position than that of Junior Clerk.

This is confirmed by an incident of yesterday’s date. A most serious complaint in connection with our new Rational Reading Service was brought to my notice. In Miss Hopper’s absence, Miss Fane was able to give a lucid explanation of the occurrence. She also showed herself capable of handling the situation and drafted a suitable letter (2 erasures) for my signature.

I doubt her proficiency as a clerk (she has no shorthand), but consider that she might with advantage be given more responsible work.

I should welcome your views.

MGG

SN/MGG

 

 

EVERYMAN’S STORES

For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

From Staff Supervisor 
To Mr Grant

October 9th, 1931

 

Subject Junior Clerk, 537 (H Fane), Book Floor, Clerical

Memo

Miss Fane is a very good type. Had she training and experience she might be well fitted for promotion, but she is handicapped by lack of both.

She was engaged, on a month’s trial, at short notice to replace Clerk 536, Miss Pim (absent appendicitis). I have had no complaints about her work, though I hear from Sister Smith that she is not well adapted to routine and does not make use of the canteen or other social amenities.

I regret that you should not find her typing good. Unless she is thoroughly proficient, she can hardly be given promotion.

Shall I speak to her and suggest a night school?

MEW

BT/MEW

 

 

EVERYMAN’S STORES

For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

From  G Grant 

To Staff Supervisor

October 9th, 1931

 

Subject Junior Clerk, 537 (H Fane), Book Floor, Clerical

Memo

Certainly not. We have too many shorthand typists and not enough intelligent assistants.

When Miss Pim returns to her duties, arrange for Miss Fane to have a few weeks on the Selling Staff in the Book Department. She might then go on to the Library.

Please obtain reports on her work from time to time and pass them to me.

MGG

SN/MGG

 

 

 

23 Burford Street

October 11th

Dearest Family,

What’s all this about my being Alone in London? What have you been reading? And what made you think of those possible friends for me who might be lurking, unfriended, in Everyman’s? I’m not in the least solitary, you know, except on purpose.

But I like being alone now and then. Not morbidly, just quite simply, like Kipling’s cat. It’s a useful, inexpensive taste. It’d be so inconvenient to be like one of the few young people in the Minerva who spent every Friday evening in terror that she’d be left alone for an hour over the week-end. The whole lounge used to echo with her miserable telephoning.

No, I haven’t been to see Aunt Bertha. And I’m most certainly not going just at present. She doesn’t know I’m in London. And I’d be obliged if you’d not tell her. I haven’t the sort of hat that’d keep me in countenance in Cadogan Square. And even if I had the hat, no coat and gloves and shoes, and handbag and umbrella would coincide enough for a poor relation to visit a very rich one without discomfort.

There are lots of ex-Oxford people in London, you know, and I see them occasionally, more often by accident than by telephone. And, anyway, I know they’re there if I feel social. So you needn’t worry.

About my room. I think it’s a successful change. There’s so much more fun in being on one’s own than herded, and as a place it’s amusing. Warm, you know, because it’s not very big, and odd because it’s below the street level, though it’s not a basement, of course, because I have a perfectly good window that opens. It’s wire-­netted to prevent cats from coming in, and that’s a blessing. Much as I adore cats, I don’t find myself drawn to the average London slum-stinker. (Not that Burford Street’s a slum. Far from it: it’s a most respectable, clerkly neighbourhood.)

Basil says that he spent a very interesting evening at University Close this week. Do I recognise the festival described in Thursday’s letter, when Daddy and Basil held a two-hour discussion on pre-Hellenic civilisations and you thought out three ways of arranging the drawing­-room furniture when the spring-cleaning came round?

The water for my hot-bottle is boiling, so I’ll stop. Notice how I surround myself with all the comforts of home.

Very much love to you both,

Hilary

 

 

 

23 Burford Street

October 12th
Really Early
(Before getting up.)

Darling,

How sweet of you to write at once. Yes, it would be grand if I’d really impressed the Minor Prophet favourably, wouldn’t it? But so far he’s vouchsafed no sign.

I was slightly cowed by your lecture on efficiency. But, you know, I am efficient in important things: it’s only that I do so grudge spending energy on mechanical work. I have to spend so much more of it than other people, and I do the work so much worse in the end. It’s galling, to say the least of it, to do badly what an elementary school child half my age would do really well. So I try. I try incredibly hard, to be quite honest. I see that labels have to be well written – by somebody. Only I doubt if that person is – or can be – me. I’m getting quite good, though, at Neat Printing.

It’s when the future seems to present an unending vista of neatly printed labels that I quail. However …

It’s an enormous relief to know that your cold’s better. I was horror-struck yesterday by the thought that it might be turning into flu: I remembered Mistress MacQueen and the two husbands she had buried. So easy just to let you slip away with pneumonia.

It’s a mercy that Arnold Grieves is back; much less dreary and laborious for you. And I’m glad that he likes your book so much. But I don’t think you ought to give up golf at the week-end even for the blessedly important final proofs of The Prime Factors in Pre-Natal Metabolism. You don’t get enough fresh air as it is. (Though heaven knows that nobody’s practice is further from his precept than a really eminent surgeon’s.) What you really want, of course, is a secretary – but I don’t suggest myself for the job. You need Mechanical Efficiency in the highest degree. Why not find someone who will type very fast and set out your figures regimentally for you? You’ve no idea what a comfort it would be. Wait till I come to Edinburgh. I’ll find you an unprepossessing pearl.

The main point is that I implore you not to overwork. And – but it’s after eight o’clock, and I ought not only to be up and eating my breakfast, but actually on my way to the bus stop.

I’ll finish this later, when I’ve written another thousand labels.

Bless you.

(I shall be quite IMPOSSIBLY LATE …)

Later – I was. And my name went down in a book which Mr Simpson bore away with him, I believe to check with the clocking machine’s damning record. I fancy there’s a penalty, but so far Nemesis has not shown herself.

 

EVERYMAN’S STORES

For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

From Staff Supervisor

To Clerk537, H Fane

Book Floor

October 12th, 1931

 

Subject Transfer to Selling Staff

Memo

Miss Pim, whom you are replacing, will be returning to her duties on Wednesday, October 14th.

You will then be required to serve in the Book Department.

Kindly see Sister Smith about your transfer to Selling Staff and arrange for a staff dress (Blue, model B.501 Junior Saleswoman) to be put through on a rush order.

Also note that your number will be changed from C.537 to S. (T) 801.

MEW

BT/MEW

 

 

Hilary to Basil (Contd.)

23 Burford Street

My dear, things have happened. Oh, nothing spectacular. And quite unconnected with the Minor Prophet’s visitation, I’m afraid. Merely what they call a ‘Meemo’ (with the ‘e’ long as in the pronoun). It comes from the Staff Supervisor: it says I must go and sell books next week, and therefore must have a new dress and a new number. All quite willy-nilly, of course.

I don’t object, particularly. After all, I can’t go lower (unless they make me a cleaner and tell me to scrub floors). So let’s suppose I’m going higher. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for the upheaval, though, except that the Appendicitis Case is coming back after six weeks exactly, as you said. Anyway, they haven’t sacked me in consequence. Which is something.

And I escaped from my labels for an hour this morning. Half of the time went in waiting to see Sister, who says that she ‘hasn’t the ghost of a notion why they’re changing me and wouldn’t tell me if she had. The idea!’ And she did wish I’d try to be a bit more sociable. She wouldn’t forbid me lunching out, if I must do it, but why didn’t I use the Canteen more? I’d get a real good diet there and the other girls would help to take my attention off myself. She knew what it was: I felt a bit out of things. But I must be careful not to give myself airs, though I might come from a better home than most. And I ought to have an arch support put in my left shoe, otherwise my foot would be flat in a week. And before I went into the Shop would I please to kindly have my hair trimmed and my stockings drawn tight with the seam straight. I gather that a hole in either heel is a capital offence. Heaven help me, Basil. I shan’t survive a week.

Sister Smith inspects the Selling Staff from time to time; I suppose to gauge the depth of rouge on the cheeks and the flatness of the feet. All my points went down again to-day on another card, and the date on which I’m to get my new dress went with them. They take two days to make it. Rush Order. And in six months, Sister says, I’ll be due for another. ‘It may go for another three if you’re careful.’ I doubt it. If I don’t spill my tea over it, someone else will.

But Sister Smith said it was my duty to the firm to get the last inch of wear out of that dress. Then, before I could be expected to agree, someone was dragged up to her door in a faint. She said: ‘Dear, dear. That’s the third this morning. This heat is not seasonable. Will you kindly move so that I can get at the Medicine Cupboard.’ So I went.

I spent most of my lunch hour over that dress. (Staff Discount is only to be had between nine and ten or one and two.) I walked into the Inexpensive Gown Department on my way out (in my hat and coat) and said that I wanted something very special, because I didn’t know how to begin about the Staff Dress. They fetched a Sales Manager to me, quite in a flutter. (Marvellous to be called ‘Moddom’ again, Basil!) But it didn’t last. When she found out what I wanted she wasn’t at all pleased. Apparently it damages the dignity to entertain employees unawares. She gave me just one look and called the youngest child in the department, indicating me with a little finger. And sailed away.

‘Bitch!’ said the child when she was approximately out of earshot. ‘That Miss Methuen’d slit your throat as soon’s look at you when her corns hurt her. Don’t you mind. Bust … 34. The things she does you’d not believe. Lift your arms, dear. Waist … 26. Here, you’re not breathing.’ Then we started to giggle, and the Sales Manager loomed up round one of the show-cases. The child went on muttering things which may have been measurements into her Sales Book.



‘Bitch!’ said the child

 

My dress was put down as S. (T) 801. Model B. (Rush Order.) Royal Blue. Junior Assistant. I chose the pattern out of the three possible ones. All hideous – jail-plain. Decorative effects are reserved for Senior Saleswomen and you can’t command black satin and ruffles on the tail till you’re a Sales Manager at least. I’ve to go for a fitting to-morrow. (In the lunch hour.)

The child said I’d be bound to find the life hard on the feet. ‘It’s something cruel, the first week or two. You try Radol. Sit with your feet in boiling water for ten minutes and it helps a lot.’ (Kill or cure, presumably.) ‘You’ll have a bit of bother with your bills, I should think too.’

I shall. Sales Books have five carbons which must all be shot in different directions, customer, cashier, departmental records … goodness knows where else. The customer is the only obvious person, and she’s apt to crunch it up and leave it underfoot for you to pick up. (I’ve done it so often, in my customer days. But never again.) Then the child stopped in mid-sentence and said she mustn’t waste any more of my time. Actually, she’d seen a customer, and fairly raced across the room to get ahead of the other visible assistant, who was a slow starter. Commission mounts up so.

So I’ve only got two more days of label-writing, Basil. Can you believe it? And I may be a very good saleswoman and Rise Rapidly. Anything may happen, after all. Turn again, Whittington!⁴⁵

Yours, on the ladder,

Hilary

PS – What about buying your medical books from Everyman’s? The postage would be a mere trifle. And what is postage compared with our willing, expert service?

PPS – Mrs Pillington-Smythe has renewed her subscription. There!

 

 

23 Burford Street

October 14th

Darling,

The first day’s over. I’m derelict. My feet are seething in that bowl of Radol and my head is bloody but unbowed.



I started off, in my new Staff Dress and reached the Book Department, locally known as ‘the shop’, radiating brightness and efficiency (according to my lights).

It was disappointing to find that a day in the shop begins with a duster, just like a day of being Hopper’s girl. And Mr Salt is there to see that you use it. He seemed disposed to be kind to me, though. Which is lucky, as he’s quite an important person, nearly as important as fat Mr Hibbert who is really in charge of the department but spends most of his time sitting in a corner pencilling catalogues. Mr Hibbert’s rather reticent at present, having just had his front teeth out. I always wondered what people did during the interregnum between sets. Mr Hibbert just carries on in a Trappist sort of way.

So it was Mr Salt who did the honours. It seems that it’s one of his jobs to wield the pencil when underlings call out ‘Sign, please’. He demonstrated the technique for my benefit behind the Children’s Fiction. There’s more in it than you’d think. One mustn’t shout. But one must be heard. ‘Clear, not raucous, Miss Fane. All a question of voice-production.’ He was really very kind, but rather like the White Knight⁴⁶. You know, lots of patents; ways of fitting carbons⁴⁷ into Sales Books at speed, working out those nightmarish sales summaries, and finding out the price of second-hand books by the hieroglyphics inside the cover. (T/R means 8/6, Basil. The Key Word’s Palmerston⁴⁸ in our shop.)

Then he walked me up and down pointing out landmarks: the Cash Desk, the Pocket Editions, the Latest Fiction, the Select Books of Travel, and the two discreet shelves for the classics and Marie Stopes⁴⁹. Somebody came up to say that one of his sales girls was ill (had gone to bed with a doctor’s certificate was the term used). But at that point a customer came in: Mr Salt intercepted her: Mr Hibbert took off his bowler. The day had begun.

And how!



I sold books: lots of books. It’s easy enough just to sell them: it only means being attentive and sympathetic and admiring and good-tempered and patient and unobtrusively determined. It’s when you have to add in a hurry: there’s the rub!

 

Your pencil strays at unfortunate moments: and when you’ve taken ten minutes to tie up a parcel with a fretful customer almost snatching at the string the thing deliberately uncoils itself before he gets it to the lift.

The efficiency goes first. Then the brightness. Your shoes come undone: hairpins drop out – just like that. Everywhere. The new staff dress begins to droop. You make an effort for a lady with a train to catch and collide with an Olympian.

 

After that, nothing matters. You are stricken with deafness and palsy at the sound of an order.

And when it is all over you crawl home and Cut off your Boots.

Will Radol work miracles? Or shall I go to work in bedroom slippers to-morrow?

Anyway, I ‘took sixteen pounds’ and Mr Salt’s surprise was very comforting.

I love you, dear. But, oh, my FEET!

Hilary

 



 

 

23 Burford Street

October 17th

Dearest Family,

You remember that I came to Everyman’s instead of someone who was ill? Well, the creature’s had appendicitis rather quickly: she came back to work this week. Apparently I’ve managed to satisfy the management, because I’m not being flung out. The first I knew about it was a note transferring me to the Book Department of the Shop. It’s a merciful change from writing people’s addresses on labels, and I think I’m going to like it on the whole.

I’ve been there since Wednesday, and still feel a little uncertain about the addition of the longer bills. But I can find dictionaries and classics and detective stories and military biographies from their shelves without running to ask Mr Salt.

He, by the way, is one of the black-coated young men in office there, and he’s given me most of my information. He said on my first morning that I would find the customers very agreeable. People who bought books were so much pleasanter than the ones who bought boots. I should have thought that even they had their off moments for soling and heeling, but I hadn’t the heart to wreck his epigram. His spiritual home is Cambridge, but he’s making a career of Commerce. And I think he quite likes his little distractions by the way. He’s been most helpful, and perfectly right about the customers, so far. They’ve been very nice to me. I’m developing quite a fairy-godmotherish manner towards people looking for birthday presents. I beam on them and lead the way to the gift and special bindings (leather, tooled, from half a guinea upwards). On the other hand, I’m extremely understanding and helpful to the people who begin with, ‘I want you to understand that in these times …’ Better a second-hand sale than none. There’s rather a fascination, of course, in making somebody buy a guinea book when they’d meant to have one at half a crown.

Something rather amusing happened yesterday. I wasn’t serving anybody, so when an odd customer strayed in I went to him. He’d a yellowish face and an eye-glass and a stick and an Inverness cape and a bull terrier, on a lead as prescribed.

I thought he was rather comic and old at first, but he had a lot of black hair and a quite undecrepit voice. Hopelessly puzzling. But he asked me for ‘that book on Pre-Hellenic civilisations. You won’t know it. Five years old: published by the University Press: better fetch me the Manager.’

I said: ‘Do you mean Early Minoan Cults by James Fane?’

He said: ‘That’s it. That’s it. Bring me a copy. Want a look at it. May not throw any light on …’ He murmured on for a bit without looking at me, but I recognised some phrases belonging to the chapter when Daddy was trying out the dictaphone and we all listened in to the records with great excitement. So I was able to say: ‘I think it does. Chapter Five.’ (Very proud.) He looked at me then. ‘Know about ancient Greece?’ I said no, but I knew that book, and the author’s work.

‘Do you, indeed? How’s that?’



I explained, and he twitched his eyes and shook hands with me. Such glory! Everyone in the department was watching. (Though on second thoughts, they may just have thought he was my uncle.) Anyway, I gave him the bill, and he said: ‘Good man that. Send me his next book.’ Then he jerked the bull terrier round and wandered off. Wasn’t it nice? And I’m sure he was somebody of immense importance.

But no one actually knows. Speculation has been running high, as he’s not one of our ‘steadies’. Mr Salt can’t remember ever having seen him before, though he’s sure he’s a ‘familiar face in Cambridge’.

But where am I to send Daddy’s next book, when written?

Hilary

 

 

EVERYMAN’S STORES

For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

From  E Ward 

To Mr Grant

October 21th, 1931

 

Subject Junior Assistant S (T) 801. Book Floor

Memo

I enclose Mr Salt’s report on Miss Fane’s work. She does not seem to be entirely justifying your confidence. I have spoken to her myself and pointed out that she must take her duties more seriously, and that it is impossible to over-estimate the importance of efficiency in detail. But I am not confident of having impressed her as I could wish. Miss Bryant actually found a drawing among her bills, which she very properly brought to me. Herewith.

BT/MEW



 

 

EVERYMAN’S STORES

For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

From  Salt

To Miss Ward

October 21th

 

Subject Junior Assistant S (T) 801. Book Floor

Memo

Miss Fane has worked in the Book Department for a week. Her daily takings average £20. Manner with customers good. Shows great promise as a saleswoman, but Miss Bryant (Cash Desk) complains that her arithmetic is very poor. Six of her bills have been returned to her this week. Four required correction and two were illegible.

She needs constant supervision in this respect, and I have seen her counting on her fingers, which does not tend to inspire confidence in customers. Otherwise she has been satisfactory.

BT/MEW

 

EVERYMAN’S STORES

For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

From  G Grant 

To Miss Ward

October 21th, 1931

 

Subject Junior Assistant S (T) 801. Book Floor

Memo

Try her in the library. Believe they add less there.

SN/MGG

 

 

 

23 Burford Street

October 23rd

My Dear,

They’ve moved me again. Into the Library this time, which means direct proximity to Miss Sparling and seems one of the less likely successes. Psychically our auras can’t match or something. In effect, we like each other less and less.

I’m sorry to leave the ‘Shop’, too. When one wasn’t being harried by bills and parcels and sales summaries it was an amusing place, and Mr Salt and I had begun to appreciate each other. I listened for half an hour yesterday to his views on Let’s Join the Nudists. (Select non­fiction, 21/-, with eighteen photogravures, a signed photograph of the author, clad, and various bowery glimpses of him unclad, as the title had led one to hope.) Mr Salt holds rather progressive views, but I can’t help feeling that he’s one of the people who are better undenuded. Business doesn’t develop the right muscles. As he says, ‘it’s the sitting that’s the trouble’. And after beagles⁵⁰ and the Cam, Paddington Recreation Ground hasn’t much to offer a man.

I’ve listened to quite a lot of his reminiscent talk, one way and another, so when my transfer came he was good enough to tell me that I should be missed in the department, where, if he might say so, I had already made my mark. (Which is such a grand way of saying that I’d taken £112:5:6 in a week. I’d like to know, incidentally, how that compares with the takings of the child in the Inexpensive Gowns who gave me my first glimpse of sales technique in action.)

Well, I was sent to the Library yesterday, after a series of epic interviews with Miss Ward. I’m afraid she’s disappointed in me. We don’t see eye to eye over essentials. She thinks that Detail is Duty: Duty Detail … Also that one cannot be efficient and draw faces in Sales books. It wastes paper and encourages levity in others.

As for Miss Sparling, she can hardly bear to explain things to me. She spent an hour elaborating the details of her system, all of which I forgot because she couldn’t or wouldn’t mention any underlying principle. Things, she told me, had always been done in a certain way, and therefore must always continue to be done just so. She may have had her reasons, but she refuses to part with them for my benefit. And I’m sure that’s suspicious.



For instance, she told me that the folder for Mrs Jackson’s library list must be marked R/R and Miss Graham’s R/R – O ps/3. I said why? And she told me that there was a very good reason. When I said that I didn’t doubt it but that I’d like to know, for my own edification what it was, she said that no department could be run without co-operation and that I was showing quite the wrong spirit.

After that she told me to take charge of one of the subsidiary desks, and showed me grimly where the folders were kept. From what Miss Ward said I gathered that I wasn’t to be given a desk, but to spend my time learning the library system. It isn’t entirely satisfactory and Mr Grant wants a report. But I expect Miss Sparling thought it would humble me to be given charge of Fiction C. It might, possibly, keep me out of mischief and prying. She gave me to understand that Fiction C was an extremely unimportant section, so that I would be likely to do less damage by making mistakes there than anywhere else.



The best people don’t have Fiction C subscriptions, because they only cost 10/- a year and provide the copies that other people have spilt tea over or dropped in the bath. The titled or indolent send menials to Miss Rivington for Fiction A or to Miss Landry for A Select. All the A subscribers come under the Rational Reading scheme, but the Fiction C pariahs appear unobtrusively in person and carry their books away in leathercraft satchels⁵¹ or string bags.

I shall have to do my researches during the lunch hour, as I don’t know whether Miss Sparling’s underlings are well disposed. I think that they look on me (with reason) as a snake in the grass.

So much for me. How are you? I hear from the Family that all the pipes have burst at University Close, after a fortnight’s trial by frost. Father has retired in dudgeon to a hotel to finish his book, but Mother is standing siege to set an example to the maids. What about Mrs MacQueen’s pipes? Has she managed to nurse them through the convalescent stage, or are you angrily shaving in kettlefuls of hot water from your sitting-room fire? I pray that the frost doesn’t migrate to London, or my basement will be uninhabitable. So far it’s merely rained, which is hard on the one-pair-of-shoes girl, but not chilling to the bones.

Now, bed. I embark on semi-criminal investigations to-morrow. And if the truth must be told I’m feeling my position.

You may not get a letter till next week, because I’m going to the Bellamys’ for the week-end, and you know dear Margaret and George think that if you’re inactive for an instant you can’t be having a good time. Not quite the week­end for a tired business girl. But who cares? Shall I give them your love?

Anyway, mine herewith,

Hilary

 

 

 

Train

Sunday evening
October 25th

My Dearest Family,

I’m writing this on the way back from the Bellamys. Margaret sent you her love. She and George hope to see you on their way north in the spring. They’re going to motor through the Highlands and then tramp. As Margaret says, if she can’t go to Nice she’ll go to Cape Wrath instead. Better to be braced in Scotland than drenched on the English Riviera.

It was a very grand week-end. Perfectly glorious, I suppose, except for some of the usual moments. But if a two-figure income person goes to stay with four-figure friends, she may as well be philosophic and expect them.

I’d got the four figures rather on my mind, of course, in spite of theories, so I started preparations on Wednesday evening. I revived my better evening dress with half a bottle of benzine⁵², and then took the other half to the evening shoes that had suffered from my last partner’s feet. Only, I put them too near the gas fire afterwards, and while I was opening the door to let the petrol out, one shoe quietly went up in smoke. (Keep calm: there was no conflagration, and I didn’t burn a finger-tip. But I was left with one shoe and a smoking puddle of ash.) That rather settled the economies. I took it as an omen and went shopping in the lunch hour. (When Staff Discount is allowed.) I bought a pair of evening shoes and stockings and a pair of pyjamas fit for the Bellamy corridors with the tail-end of my birthday money eked out with some of my deposit account. But I thought my bedroom slippers would just have to do, as a penance, though a mouse had rather eaten the fur in places.

When I arrived at Bath, the shining Bellamy car was there to meet me, and the chauffeur beside the ticket collector, touching his cap enquiringly to anyone who looked qualified to be a guest in the Bellamy household. I had an uneasy feeling that he was going to let me pass unchallenged, so I gave him my suit-case and swept out without waiting to see if he were surprised. But from that moment the question of tips (which usually only spoils the last afternoon in the houses of one’s grander friends) worried me to distraction. Ought one in the circumstances, to tip the chauffeur by the piece as it were, instead of as a final gesture? I wished I’d asked you in my last letter as I’d meant to. I began to have wild ideas of stopping the car in the village and sending you a pre-paid wire. But then I remembered that the answer would probably come by telephone and be brought to me vocally by some menial in a very public place.

The Bellamys’ house is five miles out of the village, on top of a hill, with a long avenue of noisy beech trees leading up to it. The outside is just ordinary country house-like and not particularly period or imposing. It’s all in the plumbing: every bed its own bath in appropriately coloured tiles. Mine’s green, with a sunk, jade-coloured pool and every conceivable cosmetic grouped round on glass shelves, and pale green, enormous bath towels warming on racks.

I wanted to stay safely in my room: Margaret and George were out. I thought I might unpack quickly and without any publicity that way. But Margaret’s maid wouldn’t have it: she shepherded me down to the music-room, and assured me that Madam would not be five minutes. The house­party was playing in a golf tournament. It’s a lovely room, of course; cream panelled, with old rose silks for cushions and curtains and a perilously⁵³ parquet floor with Polar bear rugs. I find that sort of persistent beauty much more chastening than Aunt Bertha’s cheerful opulence. Anyway, I sat there, gradually deflating and turning over Society papers⁵⁴ to complete the process, and ultimately then a young man in hairy tweeds whistled his way in. He looked rather disappointed at seeing me, I thought. But he said:

‘Hallo. Did you win?’

I was disappointed too, because I hadn’t thought it was going to be one of those week­ends. It’s so much more fun when you can get Margaret alone. I said, ‘No,’ and didn’t explain till he asked if my partner had let me down. He said: ‘No? Really? Then you’re not the Smithers girl?’

I said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘No?’ and just then Margaret and George came in. I think Margaret was really pleased to see me, but there were dozens of other tweeded, tramping people, all babbling about drives and bunkers and short putts. So it was difficult to be sure. I watched them all to hear who was called Smithers, hoping it might be the fair one with a coat and skirt rather like mine. But she turned out to be the plainish, spectacled creature who was there because the Female Celebrity never Moved without her secretary. Which rather crushed me. And in the middle of tea, the parlourmaid came in and spoke to Margaret. Margaret said: ‘Hilary, darling – your keys. For Bates.’ Everybody seemed to have stopped talking just then, and I daren’t tell them that, having no valuables, I never locked my luggage. (In case they asked the reason.) So I handed over the muddle of half a dozen keys that all unlocked something irrelevant, and were tied together with very chewed string. They were borne off on a salver.

When I went up to change, my possessions were spread out and looking worse than usual. Bates had put out my new stockings with the 5/11 ticket face upwards: the mouse-bitten bed­room slippers were warming in front of the fire: all the oddments of pencil-sharpeners, bits of india rubber, pencils, hair-ribbon and farthings which always collect at the bottom of my case had been ranged neatly on the dressing-table among Margaret’s shagreen brushes and mirrors and crystal bottles, and my two-shilling jar of cold cream. My very sponge-bag was marooned among flagons of bath-salts and vases of cologne and bowls of powder. By the time I’d bathed, though, I felt better, and after sherry I was quite pleased with myself. Dinner was lovely: odd, interesting things divinely cooked and served. The coffee I’d once spilt on my frock didn’t really show, and if the first young man had thought I was like the spectacled Smithers the one sitting next to me seemed to find me amusing. So things were about even on Smithers.

I was rather haunted by the spectre of bridge towards the end, though. It took Daddy five years to teach me auction, as you know, and Basil couldn’t teach me contract at all. Quite apart from the financial problem raised by their probable stakes.

But mercifully the Female Celebrity wanted to play paper games. I saw the unfortunate Smithers wince, and Margaret told me afterwards that the Celebrity made a point of outdoing everyone in vulgarity on those occasions. Last night she certainly succeeded. Smithers kept her head down over her own paper and got gradually purple about the ears, but she managed to win first Prize all the same. I thought that tactless, but apparently it was quite according to plan. She got a powder compact and the Female Celebrity carried off the Booby Prize; gold pencil and lipstick combined; three guineas at Everyman’s, and probably five in Bond Street. I didn’t think it of Margaret, but I suppose that if you have Celebrities to stay you can’t stick at changing round the prizes where necessary.

Then we danced; a merciful change. People danced with me quite reasonably often and the floor was perfect. We went to bed just before two o’clock. (My sheets and blankets were the loveliest shade of new leaf green. Such fun.)

Breakfast appeared this morning about ten, with orange juice for the liver and complexion in a little glass jug. I thought I’d have it always, too. But on second thoughts it makes such a difference if other people can be hired to take out the pips and do the squeezing.

I came down about eleven, and Margaret said that she’d seen nothing of me at all and would I come with her in the car to inquire about a friend’s new baby. It seemed that mere telephoning would be heartless, so we toured the hot houses, collected fruit and flowers, and drove about eighty miles, there and back, before lunch. I think that was the nicest bit of the week-end, for Margaret is such a darling, when she can be prised away from her great possessions.

After lunch some of us played tennis. Margaret lent me a racket and one of her dresses, which she insisted on my taking away afterwards. So I knew that I looked all right. Margaret’s clothes are so lovely: she always makes me feel like a cow in a coat. But I played quite well. Not the grandest green rubber court in the world, of course, could help it being rather sad and autumnal. We had to keep moving all the time and wear gloves on our left hands. Yellow leaves flapped in the wire netting.

I’d only just got warm and begun to wish that I could go on staying when we had to go in to tea. We played again afterwards, but that set was spoiled because the tipping problem came down on me again like an extinguisher. Who, and how much, and when …? They beat us rather easily: 6-2.

Then after all, Margaret drove me to the station herself. So I just didn’t tip that chauffeur. I don’t suppose I shall be asked again, anyway.

On the whole, a lovely week-end. But the trouble about that sort of thing is that one should either do it so often that it gets to be a habit or not do it at all. I meant to tell you all about it, because I’ve been so rushed lately that my letters have been rather short and dull. But on re-reading I can think of lots of amusing things that I didn’t tell you about. Only I must write gratefully to Margaret before I forget.

Keep having Basil to meals, won’t you, even if he and Daddy do go polysyllabic in company. I don’t believe that Mrs MacQueen feeds him properly. And he’d never notice.

With much love

Hilary

 

 

23 Burford Street

October 29th

Basil!

What did I tell you! I knew there was going to be trouble from my first day in the Library. And when the Minor Prophet gave me another complaint to investigate to-day I felt it was due. The details of the complaint aren’t particularly significant, but actually a Rational Reader wrote from Northumberland (Mail Service, Provincial Branch) to protest. His first letter, written months ago, explained his requirements: a biography, a play and a first-class novel every month. His letter hadn’t been acknowledged, and he continued to receive a succession of rubbishy novels – and battered copies at that.

Fiction C, obviously, poor man. Mr Grant passed the complaint to me, because Fiction C was my section. Would I kindly take the matter up? I could use his name as my authority for any investigations it might be necessary to make. I took the matter up with my knees knocking.

Have you ever tried to fix responsibility on anyone, Basil? It’s about as easy as holding an unwilling frog in wet hands. I combed the Library, the Clerical Department, and the very Store Room to find that first missing, unacknowledged letter of September 30th. It took me two hours. In fact, it was more or less a case of:

Pig won’t get over the Stile,⁵⁵

And I

Shan’t get home to-night.

But finding it was worse. I went back to the Library, where Miss Sparling, of course, had never seen the thing in her life. But I thought she looked rather hot and flummoxed, and she’d certainly just shut her Unwritten Letter Box when I arrived. Also, there was a blue letter scrunched up in the waste-paper basket.

‘What’s that?’ I said (terrified).

‘What’s what?’

‘That letter.’

‘What letter?’

‘In the waste-paper basket.’

‘Of no importance, naturally. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be there. Go back to your work.’

‘I’m going to find that letter. I shall look in that basket.’ (Very firm, but quaking).

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort ‘

We’d both raised our voices by then: she was raging like a cornered tabby. Mercifully it was lunch hour and there was nobody in the Library. I could just hear the lunch time music coming across the Lift Hall from the Restaurant. I was angry enough to tear the basket away from her by force, and I must have looked it. She’s a wispy person. So she gave in. ‘Very well. There’s nothing of any consequence that I know of in that basket.’ But she was blotchy with fright.

It was there, of course. I’d known, as if I’d seen her do it, that she’d found it just before I came in and been in too great a hurry to get rid of the piece of evidence that she knew I was looking for. Poor devil. She admitted to an ‘Oversight.’ But looked daggers.

And now I shall have to make a report, heaven help me. Oh, Basil, isn’t losing your temper awful? Don’t let’s ever quarrel. I’m exhausted.

Hilary

 

 

EVERYMAN’S STORES

For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

From  Fane 

To Mr Grant

October 29th, 1931

 

Subject Rational Reading Service

Sub. L. Prov. 5196 (letter attached)

I This complaint is the result of a general lack of method rather than of individual carelessness.

It is almost impossible to apportion the blame because no one will accept responsibility for a ‘slight slip’ – much less for a ‘gross error’.

So far, it has been impossible to prove that the original instructions were received, and if they were not, the whole affair degenerates into an ‘unfortunate mishap’ for which no one can be blamed.

II Attempts to trace the letter.

(a) It is not in the Library.

Miss Sparling says she can never have had it, as she never forgets a distinctive hand, especially on blue paper.

(b) There is no sign of it in the Files.

Miss Lamb says she rather thinks she may have seen a letter something like it, but if she had she wouldn’t dream of sending it to file, and it an incomplete order. She hopes she is giving satisfaction, and she is sure she is very careful over her work. If anyone makes a slight slip and sends an unanswered letter to file, she always points it out to them.

(c) It is not in the Mail Order Despatch.

Mr Simpson, who handles these orders, thinks he saw it, but if so, he must have passed it on to Mr Millet. Otherwise, the books the gentleman ordered would have gone. He is a very conscientious man with a life-long experience of mail orders.

(d) It is not in the Book Store.

Mr Millet says he is sure he saw it. He remembers the notepaper, and the name of one of the books: it was out of stock, so he passed the order to Miss Watts for a letter.

(e) It is not in the Clerical Department.

Miss Watts remembers nothing about it. If an order was given to her to acknowledge, she would have acknowledged it, that is, if it were part of her work. But library queries are not part of her work. If she had such a thing, she would have got rid of it at once, by querying it with Miss Hopper.

(f) It is not with Miss Hopper.

Miss Hopper says there is something familiar about the letter, but she can’t be sure. But if a slip has been made it is not her fault. She might have passed a letter rather like this one to Miss Sparling, because she cannot enter anything on her index without Miss Sparling has had it first and initialled it in red. It’s against the regulations.

(g) Further search only produced more disclaimers, a great deal of dust, several packets of bull’s eyes, some chocolate that had been overlooked, a Home Chat, and a Daily Mail for 1929 and 1930 respectively. These have now been destroyed.

III Conclusion.

It is difficult to estimate the reliability of these rumours about a blue letter passed through the department and left no trace. Probably several people thought they had seen it just to be on the safe side. I believe that proper records could easily be organised to prevent future mistakes, but my experience of the Library and the Rational Reading Services is too short for me to make recommendations of much value. I should say, however, that the whole system suffers from lack of method, and possibly also from lack of imagination on the part of those who chose the books for the de luxe services.

H Fane

2.30 pm
In continuation of the above memo. The letter of September 30th has now been found in the Library waste-paper basket. I have repaired it and attached it herewith. It had apparently been overlooked – in spite of the distinctive hand-writing.

H F

 

 

EVERYMAN’S STORES

For use in inter-departmental correspondence only

From  G Grant 

To Miss Fane

October 30th, 1931

 

Subject Your memo of yesterday’s date

Good. I should like you to remain on the Book Floor for the present, to investigate the system on which the Library and the Rational Reading Services are run, and if necessary, to supervise the introduction of improvements such as you indicate.

Please see me about this at 12.15 to-day.

M G G

SN/MGG

 

23 Burford Street

October 30th, 1931

Darling,

Life is too much for me. I’ve brought off the sleuthing triumphantly and been thanked by the Minor Prophet, and told that I may consider my appointment to the Library confirmed – with a hint of promotion to follow.

But I don’t think that I can bear it. Miss Sparling now loathes me so that it obviously hurts her to pass me on the stairs and her underlings loathe me in proportion. The whole place is vile with intrigue and corner-conversations that stop when I come past. I thought this sort of atmosphere was only found in girls’ boarding schools. It seems to belong to business as well. I’d no idea what devils women could be to other women in an entirely passive way, and I’ve never wanted to talk to you so much in my life. Just to hear you say, ‘My dear child, what does it all matter?’ (in the way that I don’t always like) would make all the difference now. I’ve been saying it to myself all the way home in the bus, but the charm won’t work for me.

I got home late to-night and it was raining, and I’ve got a cold and my basement looked just too cheerless. Mrs Hemming had left the waste­paper basket uncleared and I hadn’t enough pennies for the gas. I sat on the edge of the bed and cried, because I had a cold and made the cold worse by crying. Then I looked round the basement and thought of the house in University Close and the way it would welcome me. Why should I try to be grand and earn my living among Sparlings, and live in a basement just to carve out a career?

What’s the use of being noble and obstinate and uncom-fortable? I shall tell Mr Grant to­morrow that I’m not the creature he thought I was, and that I can’t bear it any longer and will he let me go away with my tail between my legs.

You were right. Everybody was right. And I was wrong. You said that I couldn’t stand the hours and that I’d give it up in a month. I’m a weakling and a worm, and I wonder if I can get off in time to catch the train from St Pancras to-morrow night. Just think of being in Scotland in time for breakfast! Will you be good enough not to say ‘I told you so?’ Not that that’ll matter, since you’ll obviously be thinking it for days. I’m ashamed of myself. I’m dreadfully ashamed of myself, but I’m so miserable that it doesn’t seem to make any difference. The saw­dust’s out of me.

Hilary

 

 

31st October

Hilary to Basil

Telegram

Basil Rainford Christophers Hospital Edinburgh

Cancel letter posted last night deil take the hindmost⁵⁶ staying on.

Hilary