Something Wholesale by Eric Newby Read Free Book Online

1939. Fifteen years were to elapse before he was able to put his plan into operation.

CHAPTER FOUR

Old Mr Newby
    If I have dealt at what may seem unnecessary length with my father’s addiction to rowing it is because, seeing his life in retrospect, I realise that it meant more to him than any other part of it.
    My father was a complex man. With his love of active sport and the pleasure he derived from the good things of life there was coupled a deep, Victorian sense of guilt that he never succeeded in throwing off. It partly sprang from a deep-rooted conviction that no one should enjoy life as much as he did and partly from a feeling that he was not cultivating his garden with the same assiduity as some of his fellows; those now elderly men who before 1914 had fled from the pogroms of Eastern Europe and set themselves up as tailors in the East End of London.
    Working sixteen hours a day, knowing only a minimal amount of English, the most forceful of these refugees had succeeded in setting their sons and daughters on the road to a way of life which to them, working in their sweat shops, must have seemed a crazy dream. In the Thirties their children and grandchildren were beginning to reap the harvest which they themselves had sown with toil and tears – the showroom in Margaret Street, the family house in Cricklewood, the weekends at Cliftonville and Hove, thegrandchildren down for Westminster and St Paul’s. It was these men who had trodden the muddy streets of Lvov, Kovel and Voronezh often in fear and trembling who laid the foundations on which the British Rag Trade was raised.
    My father was on excellent terms with these old men, many of whom he had employed as outside tailors at the time of the Siege of Sidney Street. A lesser man might have permitted himself a slight feeling of jealousy. If he did experience such feelings he never betrayed them. They too, in their own way, were extremely fond of him. Many of them had suffered fearful indignities and for this reason were at times slightly incredulous at his attitude (to someone who has been unsuccessfully sabred by a Cossack a display of tolerance is often equated with feeble-mindedness). Because he was so English and intolerant in many ways it was one of the last things that one might have expected of him. It was a contradiction in his character that he was only half-aware of, but one that gave him considerable pleasure. In a world that was becoming increasingly racially conscious, among the people with whom he did business his name was a by-word, a sort of laisser-passer.
    He never, however, lost his inborn ferocity. There was an occasion when he picked up a man who was behaving in an objectionable fashion on his premises and threw him headlong into the street. The victim brought an action against my father for assault and battery. My father was put in the box and cross-examined by his opponent’s lawyer – an extremely didactic individual.
    ‘Tell the Court what you actually did to my client, Mr Newby.’
    ‘I ejected him from my premises,’ my father said.
    ‘Oh, you ejected him did you? Perhaps you would be good enough to give an ocular demonstration of what you actually did to my client?’
    ‘I did this,’ said my father. He leant forward and gave the lawyer a violent shove in the chest so that he sat down on the floor.
    At this there was a great uproar. The lawyer, his client forgotten, rose to his feet himself claiming assault and battery.
    ‘Well, Mr Smallbones,’ said the Judge looking down from his eminence. ‘You can hardly complain. You asked for an ocular demonstration – and you got it. The whole thing is absurd. The case is dismissed.’
    My father was much disturbed by the political state of the country and by the decline in religious observance. He had a deep-rooted regard for the established order of a religion which he never publicly practised. He never entered a church except as a tourist to look at some family vault.
    Yet he would