remote use for this purpose (as useless as telling an Eskimo that he won’t have filthy thoughts if he sits on an iceberg). In the early mornings I accompanied him on brisk trots along the towing path at Hammersmith, or down deserted suburban streets, punting a football, which I thoroughly enjoyed. At the age of six or so I learned to row our sumptuous, Three Men in a Boat-type, double-sculling skiff, which was kept at Richmond and in which we used to go camping ‘up-river’, wielding one enormous scull as an oar. In the same way my mother, who had been a model girl in my father’s firm, and who was more than twenty years younger than he was and still went with him to Paris long after they were married to buy models from Poiret, Chéruit, Patou and others which were made to her lath-like proportions, had been turned into a very stylish oarswoman.
Although my mother no longer worked for Harrods she had not lost her enthusiasm for the store. She was no mean spender, my mother, and she went through the place like a combine harvester on my behalf. This trait of extravagance was belied by her rather sad, tranquil expression when in repose, just as it belied her vivacity and fondness for company.
Thus a complete set of gear awaited me on 6 December when I turned up, most of it procured from Harrods ‘on account’. It included the pram with its fringed sun awning, an ‘extra’ bought in anticipation that I would survive until the summer of 1920, the ‘French bassinet’ with its iron stand and an arm which supported the baldacchino of fine cotton voile under which I lay tippling gripewater; a white-enamelled folding-bath, complete with soap dish containing a cake of Harrods’s ‘own make’ baby soap and a sponge tray with one of their ‘specially selected sponges’ in it; a spring balance with a wicker basket, capable of weighing babies up to twenty-five pounds, which was later converted for use in the kitchen by the substitution of a metal pan for the basket; and a nursery screen. Surrounded with this and other equipment (I cannot remember the lot, but this is some of what survived until I was older and could remember), I must have looked like a beleaguered traveller behind a makeshift breastwork awaiting a charge by fuzzy-wuzzies.
If anything ran short which she thought was better ordered from Harrods than bought locally, or she saw something that caught her fancy in their catalogue, my mother used to say, ‘I’ll get on the telephone to Harrods,’ the telephone being a solid, upright metal instrument with a separate receiver, weighing pounds, which householders were beginning to find useful for laying out the first wave of post-war housebreakers who were now just beginning to come back into circulation, a process that could operate in reverse if the burglar picked it up first. To my mother, the possibility of being able to telephone for a consignment of Harrods’s Finest French Sardines in Olive Oil or some bottles of Rubinat Water, which she used as an aperient, and receive them that same afternoon, delivered in a shiny green van with the royal arms on it, was magic.
What was probably my first visit to Harrods, the first I can remember, anyway, took place on the occasion of the rigging out of Lily in Nurses’ Uniforms, at that time on the first floor. I remember it not because it was intrinsically interesting but because it took ages and because at one stage all three of us, together with a saleswoman, were crammed into a very small, stifling fitting-room, like the Marx Brothers in the cabin scene on the transatlantic liner in A Night at the Opera.
From Nurses’ Uniforms I was escorted to Children’s Hairdressing, also on the first floor. There, the infant Newby was shaped up again, after having spent some happy minutes snipping away at his noddle with a pair of stealthily acquired nail scissors while seated incommunicado on the pot in front of the gas fire which by this time had replaced the coal fire in my nursery at Three Ther Mansions.
To me Harrods was not a shop. It was, apart from being the place where I had my hair cut, a whole fascinating world, entirely separate from the one that I normally inhabited. It was a world that, although finite in its extent (it covered thirteen acres), I never explored completely, never could, because although at the early age of which I am writing I did not realize this, it was one in which fresh vistas were constantly being revealed, as the management either opened up new, sometimes ephemeral departments or introduced innovations within existing ones.
For instance, in 1929, following Lindbergh’s solo crossing of the Atlantic, they opened up an Aviation Department and taught some of their customers to fly. Eventually, when there were not enough potential aviators left untaught among their customers to make it worthwhile keeping it open, it quietly faded away.
‘Hold my hand tight, or you’ll get lost,’ my mother used to say, as she moved through the store, browsing here and there like some elegant ruminant, a gazelle perhaps, or else walking more purposefully if she was on her way to some specific destination, as she often was. My mother was not the sort of person who only entered Harrods in order to shelter from the rain. Once she was in it, she was there as a potential buyer.
And I did hold tight. Get lost in Harrods and you had every chance, I believed, in ending up in the equivalent of that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns, which when I became a grown-up with an account of my own I located somewhere between Adjustments and Personal Credit (which comprehended Overdue Accounts) and the Funeral Department, for those whose shopping days were done but whose credit was still good, both of which were on the fourth floor.
This world, which I was forced to regard from what was practically floor level, was made up of the equivalents of jungles, savannas, mountains, arctic wastes and even deserts. All that was lacking were seas and lakes and rivers, although at one time I distinctly remember there being some kind of fountain. The jungles were the lavish displays of silk and chiffon printed with exotic fruits and lush vegetation in which I was swallowed up as soon as I entered Piece Goods, on the ground floor, which made the real Flower Department seem slightly meagre by contrast. The biggest mountains were in the Food Halls, also on the ground floor, where towering ranges and isolated stacks of the stuff rose high above me, composed of farmhouse Cheddars, Stiltons, foie gras in earthenware pots, tins of biscuits, something like thirty varieties of tea and at Christmas boxes of crackers with wonderful fillings (musical instruments that really worked, for instance), ten-pound puddings made with ale and rum and done up in white cloths, which retailed at £ 1.07½ ($4.17) the month that I was born. Some of these apparently stable massifs were more stable than others and I once saw and heard with indescribable delight a whole display of tins of Scotch shortbread avalanche to the ground, making a most satisfactory noise.
In the great vaulted hall, decorated with medieval scenes of the chase, and with metal racks for hanging the trophies of it, where Harrods’s Fishmongers and Purveyors of Game and the assembled Butchers confronted one another across the central aisle, there were other mountainous displays of crabs, scallops, Aberdeen smokies, turbot and halibut, Surrey fowls and game in season on one side; and on the other, hecatombs of Angus Beef, South Down Lamb and Mutton.
The savannas were on the second floor, in Model Gowns, Model Coats and Model Costumes, endless expanses of carpet with here and there a solitary creation on a stand rising above it, like lone trees in a wilderness.
To me unutterably tedious were the unending, snowy-white wastes of the Linen Hall, coloured bed linen, coloured blankets, even coloured bath towels, except for the ends (headings) which were sometimes decorated with blue or red stripes, being – if not unknown – unthinkable at that time (coloured blankets, usually red, were for ambulances and hospitals). In it articles were on sale that not even my mother was tempted to buy: tablecloths eight yards long to fit tables that could seat two dozen guests, sheets and blankets ten feet wide, specially made to fit the big, old four-poster beds still apparently being slept in by some customers, in their moated granges.
Higher still, on the third floor, were what I regarded as the deserts of the Furniture Departments. It took something like ten minutes to get around these vast, and to me as uninteresting as the Linen Hall, expanses, in which the distances between the individual pieces were measured in yards rather than feet.
This ‘Harrods’s World’ even had
