Something Wholesale. Eric Newby
is being done to ensure an equitable distribution of warm clothing and other comforts among you all.’
It was useless to remind him that the clothes I wanted were already in my wardrobe and that there was no need to buy anything. He himself was the possessor of a vast and comprehensive wardrobe. Early privations had left him with an ever-present fear that he might one day find himself penniless and in rags. To counteract this possibility he became a hoarder on a grand scale. He bought leather bootlaces by the score for the heavy boots he got from Lobb. ‘I had these boots made,’ he told me once, ‘in case I ever have to take a job as a navvy,’ displaying a pair that would have been far more at home at a shooting party in some ducal household. Whenever he was in Paris for a week or so he used to order shirts, not as most people are accustomed to order them, in threes and fours, but in dozens. From these, and other forms of expensive haberdashery, ties, fine suits of underwear and silk socks, on his return he used to select one or two examples for present use. The rest were filed away in their original cardboard boxes in which, embalmed in moth-balls, they would over a period of twenty years or so undergo a gradual process of dissolution.
In this matter of sending me supplies my mother was in despair. She used sometimes to send me a parcel clandestinely but more often than not its existence was detected by my father before she was able to send it off – as a result it never left the country at all. Only in the case of the shaving brush was my mother adamant. ‘The boy must be able to shave,’ she said.
My father grumbled a lot, but in the end rooted among his possessions until he found a shaving brush of the rather primitive sort that professional barbers use, with the handle dipped in pitch and wrapped round with string. He added a suit of silk and wool underwear for good measure that he had bought in Paris in 1904.
I received this parcel in the wilds of Bohemia in the Spring of 1943. The shaving brush was much admired by my companions but unfortunately it disintegrated the first time it was put into water; the underwear even failed to survive the routine check which the Germans carried out in order to satisfy themselves that nothing illicit was being sent us. As the Feldwebel held up the fully-fashioned silk and wool long underpants with the Original label Edouard et Butler, Place Vendôme, still on them they disintegrated before my eyes and fell to nothing in a fine powder.
‘It’s quite easy really, Mr Eric,’ said Miss Webb, the stock-keeper of the Coat Department when I reported to her after the interview with my father. ‘All you have to do is look at the docket. It gives you the number of the piece and the colour. You either have to get it down from there,’ she pointed to the shelves above our heads on which rolls of material, done up in brown paper, lay one on top of one another like giant chrysalids, ‘Or else it’s on the floor.’ We were standing together in a sea of material and torn paper. ‘If it’s not in the fixtures or on the floor then it may be in the cellar. If it’s not in the cellar then it hasn’t been delivered and it may not even be made.’
I thought of the vanmen who had been making such a business of unloading a few pieces into the cellar when I arrived, and shuddered.
‘All you have to do,’ she went on, ‘is to measure off the quantity that’s written on the docket, and mark it off on the ticket, then cut it. You can either use a yardstick for measuring, or these.’ She showed me three inadequate-looking brass pins stuck in the dining-room table that was used for ‘cutting off’ ‘I’ll look after the trimmings, the buttons and the canvas and the linings, if you do the material.’
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