up on the second floor, what customers of my age group and most grown-ups called the zoo. In it the noise was deafening, what with macaws that could live for sixty years or so, Electus parrots in brilliant greens and reds and purples, according to sex, parrots that could speak – they had to pass a test to ensure that they did not use bad language – and other rare Asian birds, as well as puppies, kittens, guinea-pigs, mice, tortoises, armadillos and Malabar squirrels. I got my first mouse at Harrods.
But the greatest treat of all was a visit to the Book Department. I was not allowed to visit the Toy Department, except for my birthday, or at Christmas. In fact it was not very interesting except at Christmas time when it expanded for a month or two, then contracted again when the sales began in January, until the following November or December; and it was never as good in those days as Hamleys Toy Shop in Regent Street.
Although my mother refused to supply me with toys on demand on these journeys through Harrods (for that is what they were to me), she would always allow me to choose a book. The first book I can ever remember having, a Dean’s Rag Book, printed on untearable linen, came from Harrods, although even then I found it difficult to think of something printed on linen (or whatever it was) as a book. Once I was in the Book Department it was very difficult to dislodge me, and it was only because I was actually being bought a book that I left it without tears, and to this day I find it almost impossible even to walk through this department en route elsewhere, without buying a book I didn’t know I wanted.
Beyond the Book Department was the huge, reverberating, rather dimly lit Piano Department, where salesmen who dressed and looked like bank managers used to hover among the instruments, trying to put a brave face on it when I ran my fingers along the keys of their Bechstein Grands as we passed through, probably on our way to Gramophone Records, of which my mother, who loved dance music and dancing, had already amassed a large collection. Sometimes a visitor to the store who was also a pianist would take his seat at one of the grand pianos and this otherwise rather gloomy room would be filled with wonderful sounds.
It was from this department that there emanated, by way of Accounts, a bill made out to my father for one of these grand pianos, at a cost of something like £125 ($531) but expressed in guineas, which when it was finally sorted out was reduced to one of about £1.25 ($5.31) for a couple of visits by a piano tuner to Three Ther Mansions in order to tune our modest, upright Chappell, the grand piano having been charged to him in error. Until long after the Second World War, really until they installed a computer, Accounts had a dottiness about them that was sometimes, but not always, endearing; and until the computer was installed it was perfectly possible to order a pound or two of smoked salmon to be delivered from the Food Hall and not actually pay for it until three or more months later.
After seeing some or all of all this, for if my mother went to Harrods in the morning she would also spend part of the afternoon there, she would whisk me off to the Ladies’ Retiring Room on the fourth floor where she freshened us both up before taking me to lunch in the Restaurant where, jacked up in a special infant’s chair which elevated my nose and mouth above what would have been, sitting in an ordinary chair, the level of the table, I ate what at that time was my favourite meal, half portions of tomato soup, fried plaice and creamed potatoes. After this we again repaired to the Ladies’ Retiring Room, which I recall as being rather grand and commodious, for a brief period of doing nothing.
It is now many years since I have visited this room. Even when I used to visit it fairly frequently you had to be pretty young to be allowed in if you were a man; but I distinctly remembered on one occasion seeing what even I could recognize to be a very elegant, very emaciated lady who was wearing a bandeau on her head, which was very fashionable then – or could it have been an ice-pack? – and who was reclining on a wicker chaise longue and uttering a series of ‘Oh God’s’ at intervals.
At least I thought I could remember. However, when I reminded my mother of this incident, in the mid-1960s, she said it could not possibly have been at Harrods.
‘No, it wasn’t Harrods,’ she said, ‘it was Dickins & Jones. I remember they were building Liberty’s, the half-timbered part that looks like an old house, in Great Marlborough Street, almost opposite Dickins & Jones. It must have been 1923. The builders were making a terrible noise with drills and things, and that poor girl, the one you remember, she was very smart, had a terrible headache. She’d probably been to a party the night before. There were lots of parties then. Besides, there was never anywhere to lie down at Harrods so far as I can remember, except in the Furniture Department, and that would probably have meant buying a bed or a sofa.’
Although my mother’s recollection of where this event actually took place also made me an honorary member of Dickins & Jones’s Ladies’ Retiring Room as well as Harrods’s, I never really liked the Regent Street store. Partly because in my opinion there was not much worth looking at, although I liked the smells in Scent – no zoo, no Book Department. But my real reason for disliking it was because my mother used to take me up to one of the Fashion Departments and display me to the buyer, whom she knew, and to the salesgirls, just as she used to do at Harvey Nichols, Debenham and Freebody, and Marshall & Snelgrove, a process which to me seemed to take an eternity.
After this mandatory rest in Harrods’s Retiring Room, my mother used to take me to the Picture Gallery, which I loved and still do. Then, as until recently, the strictly representational nature of the pictures on view underlined as nothing else does in the store, except perhaps in Gifts, the basically unchanging taste of Harrods customers.
In it hung paintings, most of them in cheerful colours: of clipper ships sailing up the Channel under stunsails; the pyramids with fork-bearded, armed nomads and their camels silhouetted against the sunset; lovers in gondolas passing beneath the Bridge of Sighs; bewigged eighteenth-century gentlemen dallying with ladies in perfumed, English rose gardens; scantily but always decently clad Circassians languishing under the wild eyes of prospective buyers in Moorish slave markets; snow-covered Alpine and Rocky Mountain peaks, bathed in shrimp-pink evening light; unlubricious nudes; ducks flighting in Norfolk; Highland stags at bay; Indian tigers and herds of African elephants sufficiently hostile-looking to make it pretty certain that the artist had painted them from photographs, or while up a tree; race horses at Newmarket, and all the animals too large to be stocked in Livestock; riots of cardinals surprising clutches of nuns or, surrounded by empty jeroboams, complimenting the chef on an unusually rich dinner in some French palais. Here, a world beyond Harrods’s world opened out before me.
Here, in Harrods to this day I can evoke the happiness and more occasionally the miseries of the first twenty-five years or so of my life. It was where I went in Harrods, rather than what I bought or what was bought for me, that I remember, the genus loci of the place: which is no doubt what the now long-forgotten architects Stevens and Hunt (the latter of whom was immortalized as Munt by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner in his great work, The Buildings of England) intended: the lonely staircases, which no one ever used because everyone travelled by lift, led down so quietly that standing on them you could hear the wind whining round the building; the ceilings supported by green marble columns decorated with gilded Egyptian motifs on the ground floor in Gifts, and the elaborate white plaster ceilings on the first floor, rather like the decoration on what they called ‘Our Own Wedding Cakes’ which, like their own Christmas puddings, bread, pastries, sweets, chocolates, veal and ham pies, and goodness knows what else, were made in their own factory over the road. And there were the, to me, beautiful bronze lifts, embellished with what looked like strips of woven metal, one of which still survives. One of these lifts in those years after the First World War was operated by an ex-serviceman with one arm, just conceivably the ‘Ex-Service Man. Loss of right arm, seeks situation as Window Dresser or Shopwalker’, who advertised in The Times on the day I was born but failed to secure one of these positions.
Also on the ground floor, not far from Gifts, was a vast room which housed Jewellery, Silver, Optical and Cutlery. Jewellery was furnished with little, green leather-topped tables, with looking-glasses
