‘It’s quite easy really, Mr Eric,’ said Miss Webb, the stockkeeper 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.’
The stockroom was very hot. It was mid-September and the autumn orders were in full production. It was my job to cut off the lengths of material according to the dockets which had been written by the Department Manager and by Mr Wilkins, the Traveller, who was principally interested in the Coat Department. Together with the appropriate trimmings they would be collected by the tailors when they called on Fridays to deliver work that had been given out previously and also to collect their money.
I took up the first docket from a thick sheaf. It was for a single garment – a wool georgette, edge-to-edge coat which Mr Wilkins had christened inappropriately ‘Desire’. It was a special order from a store in Leeds for a customer called Mrs Bangle. Completely untutored as I was it was obvious to me on reading the details of the order that Mrs Bangle was something extra special.
‘Hips 62˝. Bust 58˝. Waist 55˝. Neck to Waist Back 14˝. Upper Arm 19˝. Leave Good Turnings,’ Mr Wilkins had written.
This seemed to make Mrs Bangle a dwarf, 1½´ thick. Even Mr Wilkins had boggled at estimating the quantity of material necessary to construct a coat for such a phenomenon. ‘Wool Georgette GB. 14XX44/7. Blush Pink.’ These were the only details he had given. Funking the calculations, he had simply inserted a question mark and a couple of plus signs in the section marked quantity. The docket was intended for a tailor called Grunbaum and was marked ‘Urgent – Wedding – Seven Days’.
I asked Miss Webb how much extra material I should allow. ‘She’s a fantastic size,’ I said. ‘How did she get like that in wartime?’
‘Bless you, Mr Eric, that’s nothing,’ said Miss Webb, ‘We have much worse than that. It’s something to do with armaments. You’d better ring up Mr Grunbaum and ask him how much he needs. It’ll be good practice.’
She gave me Mr Grunbaum’s number. I dialled it.
‘’ULLO!’ said an unhelpful voice.
‘I want Mr Grunbaum.’
‘Which Mr Grunbaum?’
Miss Webb had vanished. I asked the voice to hold on and went in search of her. Eventually I ran her to earth in the cellar where I found her wrestling with a new consignment of cloth. She said I wanted Mr Harry.
‘I should have told you,’ she said. ‘There’s Mr Sidney, Mr Joe, Mr Harry and Mr Lance – and Mrs Grunbaum. Mr Harry’s the most helpful. Mr Lance is still in the Army.’ Lucky Mr Lance I thought.
‘Mr Harry! Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’ said the voice, ‘’OLD ON!’
The sounds coming over the line from Grunbaum’s were like something from the Dawn of the Industrial Revolution. There were whirring noises of machinery, a clattering of endless belts and sudden gusts of dance music that presumably were encouraging the workers to even greater efforts. After a considerable interval Mr Harry came to the telephone. I read the docket to him.
‘Listen,’ he said, not altogether ungraciously, when I had finished, ‘what do you think I am? That Mrs Whatsername; she don’t need a tailor. What she needs is a operation. Listen, I’m telling you, I’m a busy man. Send her to one of those surgical shops. I can make six coats in the time I make that coat. I haven’t got the labour. What do you think you can pay me to make a coat like that? You haven’t got enough money. I’m telling you there isn’t enough money in the whole of the West End to make it worth my while.’
Happily he enlarged on this theme for some minutes. I was glad when Miss Webb emerged from the cellar. Without a word she took the receiver from me. Until this moment I had regarded Miss Webb, who was round and comfortable, as a kindly, almost feudal figure.
‘Hallo, Harry,’ she said. ‘Yes, very well, thank you.’ Without bothering to ask how he was. ‘Your man brought in twenty-two Floras this morning. You know what you’ve done. You’ve shone the linings. I’m sending the whole lot back.’
Having put the ball, as it were, in Mr Grunbaum’s court, she simply stood there without listening while the instrument emitted a series of squawking noises.
‘How much more material do you need for that special?’ she said finally when he had exhausted himself.
‘A yard and a quarter. That seems a hell of a lot. All right, send for it this afternoon.’
Miss Webb thumped down the receiver triumphantly. ‘He can do what he likes with the others but this is Lane and Newby.’
For me it was an exhausting day. Most of the rolls of cloth I needed were in the cellar together with the Morning Posts, the Observers and the last six dozen of my father’s port, wines with resounding names such as Fonseca and Tuke Holdsworth, prudently locked away behind an iron grille. I made many journeys up and down narrow staircases, like a sherpa on the North Col. By the time five-thirty came I had run my shears through many dozens of pieces. Except when writing I was still left-handed. The shears were right-handed. The results of trying to use them upside down were deplorable; the cut edges resembled the temperature chart of a sufferer from undulant fever.
‘I’m putting you on buttons tomorrow and you can do the carrying,’ said Miss Webb. ‘I don’t know what Mr Newby would say if he saw what you’ve done to all that stuff. He’d have a fit.’
Extract from Something Wholesale
Eric Newby © 1962
Hello, I am finding much delight with our Eric Newby. I thoroughly enjoyed his parlaying with Mr. Grunbaum: ‘In the Mantles’It is a tale of a haute couturier’s life with fitting folks, tailoring to their needs. I much enjoyed it, and thank you for sharing.