roads, only the potholes in the pictures were shell-holes and the trees had been shattered by gunfire, all painted by war artists on Flanders and other fields. It was therefore not surprising that when the fields were finally built over some years later and the lane became a respectable suburban road, whoever was in charge of naming roads in Barnes gave it the name it bears today, Verdun Road.
Against the largest and most decayed of these ruined trees a fire was burning, eating its way into the heart of it, and sitting close to the fire, although it was late afternoon it was still warm, were three of the hideous hags who, when the tide was right, slept up against the abutments under Hammersmith Bridge. And on the fire was an iron pot. It would have been impossible for anyone to say how old these creatures were. They were so blackened by smoke and smeared with filth that it was difficult to identify them as human beings. One of them was singing in a wild, tuneless mindless way and another was screeching at the third member of this ghastly triumvirate, while picking away like a monkey in her long, lank hair. The third one was tending the pot.
As we came abreast of them, the one who was looking for lice or nits in her companion’s hair (for that is what she must have been doing), got to her feet and came towards us with surprising swiftness, with her horrible discoloured stockings dragging around her ankles, mumbling something about ‘the baby’ between her broken teeth. It was too much for me and I began to bellow; and it was too much for Lily who kicked up her heels and fled, pushing the mail cart through the water-filled potholes which she had previously carefully skirted, so that it bounced up and down on its springs, soaking herself in the process.
She did not stop until she reached the corner of Madrid Road where we were once again on a real, made-up road and enclosed by comforting suburbia. By this time she had more or less succeeded in calming me down.
‘Horrible old thing,’ she said, ‘I thought she wanted to eat you up.’
And this not only set me off again but crystallized the dream so that it would always unfold in the same way: myself alone, forced by some irresistible power to walk along the lane with the sun sinking behind the corrugated-iron fence and the dying trees to the one where three cackling hags sit round a fire burning in the heart of it, preparing to make a cannibal feast of the infant Newby.
It was about this time that the tragic demise took place of Mrs George. Mrs George had been our cook/housekeeper since before I was born and it was to her that my mother used to pass on her copy of the Daily Mirror when she had done with it. When I was born she ceased to ‘live in’, arriving each morning before eight o’clock from where she lived, over the river in Hammersmith.
When she retired, early in 1923, she went to live in a house, so far as I can make out, in Glentham Road and continued to visit us. Glentham Road led down by what must have been one of the few hills in Barnes from Castelnau by the side of the reservoir from which the spray used to blow across the road. Mrs George was white-haired, fresh-complexioned, large enough to qualify for one of the smaller sort of coat that my father sold to the Dutch, and motherly. Seen from the front, protected by an expanse of spotless, white starched apron she looked like a spinnaker that was drawing nicely. I loved Mrs George. She smelt lovely, of the things she was always baking and she let me help her to stir the Christmas pudding mixture which was delicious in its raw state but emerged from the oven in the form of puddings as heavy and black as cannon balls.
Mrs George called my mother ‘Ther Missus’ and my father ‘Ther Master’. She called the enormous ochreous, to me rather creepy building at the bottom of Riverview Gardens with the words HARRODS FURNITURE DEPOSITORY written large on the side of it, ‘Ther Suppository’.
Each week on her afternoon off Mrs George used to set off with her friend, another cook from round the corner, for Pontings store in Kensington High Street, always a magnet for domestics on their afternoons off, travelling on the No. 9 or 73 bus. With her, rain or shine, summer and winter, she always carried an umbrella and often, even when it was not raining, she used to be seen in the street with it up. This was her only eccentricity and no one will ever know why Mrs George took it into her head one day when the tide at Hammersmith Bridge was sufficiently low for her to go down some steps to the muddy foreshore and, fully clothed and with her umbrella up, although it was not raining, enter the water and be swept away by the still ebbing tide. It was not for lack of money. She was of a prudent nature. The coroner recorded a verdict of ‘suicide while of unsound mind’ which was more or less mandatory at that time.
‘George gone,’ I said when the news was eventually broken to me.
CHAPTER FOUR Travels in Harrods
As I indicated in an earlier chapter, my mother was a customer of Harrods before I was born. She had worked as a model girl in one of its fashion departments as long ago as 1912 and could probably have found her way around the place blindfolded. At the time she worked there it is unlikely that she was a model girl in the present sense of the word. Poiret, it is claimed, ‘invented’ them in 1919. Her job, or part of it, would probably have been to try on new stock when it came into the store so that the buyer, who at that time would have also been the department manager, or one of her deputies if they were inexpensive versions of ‘models’, could detect any defects which could give her the excuse, always a temptation if the buyer had over-bought, to send the garments back to the suppliers with a debit note. In the jargon this operation was known as ‘passing’.
For those who have not read Something Wholesale, an account of my life with my parents in the garment industry, this would seem to be an appropriate moment to interpolate a little more information about my father.
My father was apprenticed to the drapery trade in 1887 at the age of thirteen, in the Brompton Road, where he slept under the counter of the shop, which was then commonplace. Later he graduated to the drapery department of Debenham and Freebody, which he left to become a partner in the firm of Lane and Newby, Mantle and Gown Manufacturers and Wholesale Costumiers, which was how the firm’s letterheading described the scope of its activities well into the 1950s. He was an all-round sportsman, a pupil of Sandow, the strongest man in the world, who eventually destroyed himself by lifting an enormous motor car out of a ditch unaided. My father used to go down to Whitechapel to be ‘pummelled’ by pugilists in order to toughen himself up, and after vigorous outings on the Thames in what are known as tub pairs and tub fours, used to bathe, winter and summer, in the now-polluted waters of the river Wandle where it entered the Thames at Wandsworth, before setting off to work in ‘The Drapery’. He was a rowing man before everything, even before his business. So great was his passion for rowing that he had left his newly married wife (my mother-to-be) at the wedding reception at Pagani’s in Great Portland Street on learning that it was just coming on to high water at Hammersmith and had gone down to the river by cab for what he described as ‘a jolly good blow’ in his doublesculler with his best man, who eventually became my godfather, returning hours later to his flat to find his bride in tears and having missed the boat train for Paris where the honeymoon was to be spent at the Lotti. His ambition was that I should win the Diamond Sculls at Henley, and in this ambition he was aided and abetted by my godfather, a crusty old Scot if ever there was one, who had himself won the Diamonds and the Stockholm Olympics in 1912.
To help me to victory in this and life’s race my father insisted that my bowels should open at precisely the same moment every morning (this was at a time when certain Harley Street surgeons were advocating the removal of whole stretches of their patients’ digestive tracts in the belief that whatever was passing through would emerge at the other end with as little delay as possible and thus avoid ‘poisoning’ the owner). In addition, he made me sniff up salt and water so that my nasal passages might remain equally clear, and have a cold bath each morning, winter and summer. When I was older I learned from him that besides keeping one in trim, cold baths were an aid
