‘Statistics show that the average is thirty-nine feet,’ I said.
‘Boy,’ said Leopold eagerly, ‘I am glad to meet you. So you really read the series?’
‘The whole hundred-and-twenty-six of them. I had to in the Checking Department. They made me stick them in a book. They were terrible. They made my flesh creep.’
‘So you’re the only living creature who ever read them…. I disliked them so much I used to look at them with my eyes shut. At any rate, they were a flop and this is the pay-off. We’re all going, even Robbie and Johnny.’
‘What about me?’
‘Unless you received a registered letter with your oven-crisp Brekkabitz this morning you’re still here.’
I looked at Robbie and Johnny. They were calm, a little icy and slightly green about the gills, but this may have been due to the Annual Staff Party which had been held the night before. They too were preparing to leave.
‘Why Robbie and Johnny?’ I asked. ‘Why are they packing up? They handle the Bicycle Account. That’s nothing to do with Brekkabitz.’
‘My boy,’ said Leopold, biting a great soggy chunk off his cheroot, ‘when the heads finish rolling in this place it will look like a field full of swedes.’
‘What about Lettice?’
‘Joke,’ said Leopold. ‘Lettice is just a nice girl with a good heart and she types like a dream. They’ll never sack Lettice. I don’t know what she’ll do without me. It’s a pity that this should happen after such a heavenly party,’ he added.
The Annual Staff Party had been held at a rather raffish roadhouse on a by-pass. With its peeling stucco, bulbous thatched minarets and empty jars of liquid soap over the basins in the washroom, it still holds for me, in retrospect, the essential uneasy spirit of the thirties. We arrived at the road-house after a treasure hunt in motor cars to find that the whole place had been reserved for Wurzel’s. People who had driven out for dinner were being turned away.
It had not been a lively evening. Sporadic outbursts of drunkenness were extinguished early. Only Leopold had really enjoyed himself. He had appeared dressed as a waiter in a loathsome greasy suit of tails; the service was so dilatory and the food so bad that he managed to serve the Managing Director with a leg of chicken made of plaster of paris without being detected. Mr McBean had been grateful to find a large helping of smoked salmon on his plate, but this proved to be skilfully fashioned from a rubber bathmat with ‘Welcome’ in white letters on the reverse side.
When the tables were cleared the Managing Director had risen to his feet. He was shiny and palm-beach-suited. In office hours he was disagreeable; now, filled with wary bonhomie, he was unspeakable. He began his speech by referring to us as ‘Boys and Girls’, at which a premonitory and quite audible shudder ran through the assembly. He went on to regret the absence of Mr Wurzel, our Chairman, who had unexpectedly been called away. Although, he said, we had made progress in the last year, we might have to draw in our horns and retrench in the very near future.
After what seemed a lifetime, the Managing Director reached the final peroration: ‘What I always feel,’ he said, ‘is that we’re just one big happy family.’ He then sat down to a round of rather limited applause.
Now, in the grey morning, the party was over and the happy family was breaking up fast. In Layout and Ideas packing was going on with end-of-term abandon. The illusion was heightened by Julian Pringle, an enormous creature dressed in a green jacket of primitive homespun and a flaming tomato tie. He was sitting on his desk chanting ‘No more Latin, no more French’ whilst he tied up a great parcel of Left Book Club editions. This was nothing to him. Ideas men lived the uneasy life of King’s favourites, and if not discharged would very often take themselves off to another agency, sometimes with a client in tow. At nine-thirty this morning Julian had already been in touch with a well-known rival to Wurzel’s, who was glad to have him.
Before Robbie left I asked him why I had not been sacked with the rest of them. Robbie only called you ‘old boy’ in moments of stress. He was reluctant to answer my question. He called me ‘old boy’ now.
‘Well, old boy, they did think about it but they decided that it cost them so little that it didn’t make any difference whether you stayed or not.’
I was furious. The Porter had been wrong and I hadn’t ‘’ad it.’ I was perhaps the only member of the staff who would have actively welcomed the sack. Wurzel’s was a prison to me. All the way home in the Underground I seethed… too unimportant to be sacked…. At Piccadilly the train was full but the guards packed in more and more people. At Knightsbridge two of them tried to force an inoffensive little man into the train by putting their shoulders to the back of his head and shoving. Someone began to Baa loudly and hysterically. There was an embarrassed silence and nobody laughed. We were all too much like real sheep to find it funny.
At Hammersmith, where I emerged sticky and wretched from the train, I found that we had been so closely packed that somebody had taken my handkerchief out of my pocket, used it, and put it back under the impression that it was his own.
I bought an evening paper. It had some very depressing headlines about the breakdown of Runciman’s negotiations at Prague.
The next day I went to Salcombe for my holiday. During that fortnight while swimming in Starehole Bay I dived down and saw beneath me the remains of the four-masted barque Herzogin Cecilie lying broken-backed, half buried in the sand.
On my way back to London there was an hour to wait for the connection at Newton Abbot, and wandering up the hot and empty street in the afternoon sunshine I went into a café and wrote to Gustav Erikson of Mariehamn for a place on one of his grain ships.
I never went back to Wurzel’s.
Young Eric Newby
The sea had always attracted me. I had inherited my enthusiasm from my father, who had once tried to run away to sea and had been brought back from Millwall in a hackney cab. He had not repeated the attempt but ever since, the sound of a ship’s siren or the proximity of a great harbour would unsettle him. He was, and still is, the sort of man who would crush other people’s toes underfoot to look out of a crowded compartment as the train passed Southampton Water, simply to gain a fleeting glimpse of the liners berthed there. Seagulls wheeling over a ploughed field would bring the comment: ‘There must be dirty weather at sea to drive them so far inland.’
My interest in sailing ships was being constantly renewed by my visits to the house of a certain Mr Mountstewart whose daughter had been a great friend of mine ever since I could remember. Although Mr Mountstewart was not old-looking when I first met him at the age of six or seven, he could not have been particularly young even then. He had taken part in the Matabele War, the Jameson Raid and various other skirmishes. Buchan would have loved him. In fact, if he had known Mr Mountstewart he would probably have incorporated him in the Thirty-Nine Steps instead of Hannay, who always seemed to me to be a creature unduly favoured by fortune.
You could not imagine Mr Mountstewart needing luck or coincidence to help him, although he was by no means well off and would probably have welcomed the chance that Buchan gave his heroes to make their piles before returning to ‘The Old Country’. Later, when he lent me Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands, I immediately identified him with Davies, that splendid sailor and enthusiastic