Bless ’Em All Read online

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  MAURICE Green was a grey man. Not only his hair but his face, too, and his hands seemed like they had been powdered with grey dust. He gave the impression of a man who was enduring an existence rather than living a life. Every day was a fresh burden to be borne with a resigned boredom. He was fed up with the modern world, with its fads and fancies. Most of the time he was fed up with his family and his wife, too. He was fifty now, and he wasn’t looking forward to the rest of his life or to his retirement.

  Maurice was tall and heavy, with a serious churchwarden’s face. He was a director of a wholesale booksellers. It was an old-established firm, which he controlled with his brother Bernard and his sister Bella. Their father, who had started the business before the turn of the century, bequeathed the firm to them. When old George died the trio found that they had equal shares in the business. Maurice wanted to keep the concern ticking over, Bernard wanted to expand and Bella wanted to sell, a situation that set up a lifelong dispute between the three, as they all had to agree on a course of action before it could be taken.

  Maurice loved the business how it was, the warehouse with its rows of bookshelves, all categorized by subject and author. He looked along the narrow corridors between the shelves with pride and reverence. The books were to be respected. Who knew how many hours had gone into the creation of just one book? There were the bestsellers – The Arches of the Years, The Bridge Over San Luis Ray, Gone With the Wind, Anthony Adverse – the up-and-coming Cronin with his new one, The Citadel, and the latest bleat from Wells and blast from Shaw. There was the entire output of the Everyman Library, which covered every corner of history and knowledge as well as a comprehensive selection of the greatest novels ever written and now approached one thousand noted volumes. There was the religious section – H.V. Morton and Hall Caine – and there were even browning leaves of novels by Marie Corelli, whole sets of Dickens, Hardy and Trollope. Then there were the current detective and crime novels, which were having a vogue – Freeman Wills Croft, Oppenheim, Sydney Horler, Anthony Berkeley, Agatha Christie, John Buchan, ‘Sapper’, with his slapdash tales of Bulldog Drummond and foreign spies and murky plotting, smart-arsed Peter Cheyney with his sardonic private eye Lemmy Caution, Leslie Charteris’s Saint – all bestsellers when they first came out but soon replaced by the next novel by the same writer. Writers seemed to turn out a book every year – Dornford Yates and P.G. Wodehouse might even go faster than that, although Edgar Wallace probably still held the record.

  In the biography section were names associated with politics, sport, maybe, and memoirs of anybody who had ever been a headline in public life. For some reason Maurice thought that he was responsible for the good standing of all these people. There was Freud, Adler and Jung, Marx and Plato. One didn’t have to agree with the views advanced by any of these persuaders, but they had earned their place.

  When war was declared Maurice didn’t think it would last long. The cost of waging war was enormous. England’s economy was hardly stable, and Germany had never recovered from the 1914-18 bash. The war wouldn’t last long for the simple fact that nobody could afford it.

  Green’s had taken on new staff: Jimmy, a sixteen-year-old post boy, and Miss Tcherny, an invoice clerk. The Tchernys – father, mother and daughter – were from Austria. They were Jews who had become frightened at their treatment in their homeland, and had decided to flee well in advance of trouble. News leaking out of Europe showed that their fears had been justified: Jews, if you could believe the reports, were being locked up, persecuted and insulted. Maurice knew that it could be propaganda, maybe to persuade wealthy British Jews to give financial support to the war effort.

  Miss Tcherny was plump and pretty, with dark eyes and slightly frizzy black hair. She wore tight jumpers, crimson lips and blue eye-shadow. Despite the fact that she had lived in Britain since her early teens she still had traces of an accent and could say some disconcerting things – ‘I don’t look very good in a bathing costume, but I look quite good without it’ – that caused young Jimmy to splutter, red-faced, into his tea mug.

  When Maurice received an order he took the list along the shelves, picking out the books requested, lifting them out, shaking off the dust, sometimes cleaning up the jacket with an India rubber, making a neat pile for packing and post for Harry the packer. Maurice knew that expansion, particularly the kind that Bernard had in mind, would lead to a downgrading of the business, to mass orders of the latest sensations, such as No Orchids for Miss Blandish and the latest American crime trash. The firm had standards, a position in the trade. Small booksellers in all parts of the country relied on Green’s by-return service. They knew that, however obscure, however out of the way the request, that Green’s would supply. If they hadn’t got it in stock they would send somebody out to the publishers with an order that would be fetched back in a collector’s canvas sack the same day. They knew that Green’s stocked up on books that were going out of print, hoarding them like precious manuscripts. It had taken years to build up the stock. And they knew that Maurice was dedicated to this service.

  It was Bernard who had started to supply dubious bookshops in Soho with the type of book that Maurice thought let the firm down. The ‘Leicester Square Run’ stock had a special flavour: books about prostitution and the ‘white-slave’ trade, The Road to Buenos Aries, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, Brother and Sister, the published books of D.H. Lawrence, soft paperbacks by Paul Renin – translated from the original French – and what Maurice thought were pseudo-scientific volumes about sex by Havelock Ellis, practical help from Marie Stopes and all kinds of horrors about sadism and masochism, along with what were called ‘studies of the photographic art’, which turned out to be photographs of naked women. What would you think of a firm that supplied a book called Psychopathia Sexualis?

  It was a quick turnover, and these books sold in dozens, not ones and twos. It was, as Bernard frequently pointed out, ‘money for jam’, but Maurice was unhappy with the connection. After all, he was still a Sunday-school teacher in the local Baptist church. If the Soho connection was made with his church activities he could soon find himself pilloried in the News of the World or the People.

  Bernard, with his raffish ties and hound’s-tooth jackets, was a constant source of annoyance, but the formidable Bella, with her imposing bosom and countersunk eyes, was a different proposition. While Maurice used gentle and, ultimately, good-humoured persuasion, Bella’s method was scorn: ‘messing about with bits of paper’, she called the order business; ‘fiddling with pennies’ was how she described the small discount the firm got from the publishers to handle their wares. It was true that the margin on orders was of the order of 3 per cent, but it was the volume of business that made it worth while. For Maurice, providing a service – to the publishers, to the authors, to the bookshops and to the pubic – was all the justification he needed.

  It was strange how different from one another the two brothers were. You could see the family resemblance in their faces, but any similarity ended there. Maurice’s dark suit, stiff collar and neatly knotted tie, his expression of resigned disdain, his eyes seeing nothing they liked, enduring the modern world with pain and distaste, contrasted with Bernard’s sly grin and clockwork wink, his eyes full of merriment and anticipation of roguery to come. Bernard was open to everything life had to offer. He loved his canvassing of the bookshops on his Soho patch, swapping stories, leaving a trail of sniggering females in his wake. The war had brought with it a loosening of morals. London was a garrison town, with thousands of servicemen on short-leave passes, trying to grab a weekend of fun before returning to a life of drab meaningless drilling, unnecessary guarding and pointless discipline. There might be a time when they would have to face up to the Germans, when, as likely as not, they would be killed. With that prospect in view, who could blame their desperate search for pleasure?

  There were many for whom the war had opened out new horizons, new positions of authority, new outlets for
previously unrecognized organizational abilities; people who had missed their place in life, who had spent decades looking for the right niche. Maurice’s wife, Clare, had suddenly become a figure of authority in the WVS. She knew that she had been born to boom over lesser creatures. Maurice and Clare lived together but only at a distance. They shared the same house, ate meals together, took holidays in harness, slept in the same bed, but the separation was deep. Clare soon realized that she had married a stick-in-the-mud. She couldn’t bear the adolescent Bernard, but he was, at least, a person with whom you could tangle, whereas Maurice seemed almost removed from the world. He lived with thousands of books, not with her. When he was at home she knew that he would much prefer to be in his warehouse. After the early perfunctory love-making Clare and Maurice tailed off into a comfortable celibacy. It was clear that Maurice couldn’t be bothered, and Clare wasn’t going to beg. So they had not had children, and now it was too late.

  One wintry afternoon, when the warehouse lights had been on all day, Maurice was enjoyably engaged in stocktaking. He turned a corner between the shelves and came across Miss Tcherny reading Rider Haggard’s She.

  ‘You like adventure stories?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Miss Tcherny. ‘I’ve never read any. I thought this was about … a woman.’

  ‘It is,’ said Maurice. ‘It is.’

  He squeezed by Miss Tcherny’s bulging frame. He was close to her, but she was looking away. He could smell the warmth emanating from her body, see her glistening lips close up. Maurice’s face showed no expression of any kind, and yet he was quite moved by the encounter. Miss Tcherny looked undisturbed, as though a man squeezing against her was all in a day’s work. After all, she came to work in the Tube.

  A little later Bernard was packing his bag of samples.

  ‘On your rounds again?’ said Maurice.

  ‘It’s the only thing that keeps this place going,’ replied Bernard belligerently.

  Maurice thought that Bernard’s appearance resembled that of a door-to-door salesman. Green’s had never canvassed for business. Maurice knew that Bernard’s excursions brought in the money, but they could have managed without it. After all, the three of them owned the business outright. There were no shareholders demanding results. The business was free of debt. There were no bank loans to cause sleepless nights.

  ‘You know it wouldn’t do you any harm to come out on my round,’ said Bernard. ‘See how the real world lives. The way business is done.’

  ‘Somebody has to look after the shop,’ said Maurice lightly.

  ‘You mean you want to keep your hands clean. You don’t mind taking the money, as long as you don’t have anything to do with the getting of it. You make me sick.’ This was strong, even for Bernard. Mostly Bernard showed his amiable side, but Maurice was aware of the vicious side beneath. ‘Do you think the troops want to read Shakespeare? Do you?’ Bernard had a nasty glint in his eye. He didn’t mind doing all the footwork, quite enjoyed it in fact, but he didn’t see why he should be looked down upon for doing it. ‘Censorship. That’s what you want. Telling people what they can read and what they can’t.’

  The two brothers had always been at loggerheads. They had been to the same private school, Maurice two forms higher than Bernard. Maurice’s schoolwork had been exemplary, while Bernard’s was dubbed ‘slapdash’. As the elder, Maurice had been favoured by their parents. He always had the knack of looking presentable, while Bernard always looked as it he could do with a good wash and tidy. The situation of the joint ownership had only increased the tension between them.

  Maurice was about to retort to his brother’s challenge when he saw the telltale signs of mouse droppings. The staff at Green’s fought a ceaseless battle with the mice. The little creatures were numerous and destructive, and many a book was found to have holes gnawed through its pages. Just a slight trail of dust could lead to another chewed volume. And the mice always seemed to go for the most expensive books. Maurice had tried to insure against them, but no company would take the risk. He had set traps and brought cats into the premises, although the smell they created had made the exercise counter-productive. This time he actually saw a grey furry ball shoot under a heap of packing paper.

  ‘Under there,’ he shouted, and Bernard grabbed a huge dictionary and stood guard as Maurice raked the paper with a packing stick.

  ‘Come on,’ Bernard called, and soon young Jimmy and Miss Tcherny were lined up with heavy tomes to drop on the mouse as it made its escape. It did, of course, skittering deftly between the crashing books, neatly disappearing under the floorboards.

  ‘Bugger,’ said Bernard, looking crestfallen. Maurice looked at his brother and suddenly felt some compassion. Bernard had carved out a niche for himself. He wasn’t any good in the warehouse. His sloppy methods only caused mistakes and refunds. Maurice knew that Bernard was better employed away from the business as much as possible. In the circumstances, Bernard had done something on his own initiative that suited Maurice fine.

  It may have been the disturbance of the brief encounter with Miss Tcherny, or the feeling of compassion for his brother, or the exhilaration brought on by the mouse hunt. It may have been the situation of the war in which nobody knew what was going to happen. It may have been the realization that he was safely in his middle age and would soon start to go down the other side of the hill. Who knows what groundwork forms a decision that is quite out of character? ‘Come on,’ he said to the astonished Bernard. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  The two brothers left the premises with a light step. Both thought they were on some sort of a spree. Maurice felt unaccountably light-hearted. He was indulging his younger brother in his fantasy. Bernard thought he was going to introduce his staid, bookish brother to a slice of real life.

  They walked down Ludgate Hill, passing Cassell’s publishing office in La Belle Sauvage Yard, crossed the circus into Fleet Street, where intricate courts and uneven paved-stone lanes snaked behind the imposing buildings of Fleet Street. These housed a number of small publishing houses: Foulshams, with their famous Old Moore’s Almanack; Watts, with their vest-pocket-sized Thinker’s Library, each book a classic of speculative theories, Logical Positivism or economic propositions, all under the umbrella of the Rationalist Press. Just up Farringdon Road was Mills and Boon, with their shop-girl romances, and on the left, behind New Bridge Street, was the home of the Collins empire and its Crime Club imprint, with at least a dozen top crime writers on the books. In among these thin winding courts was Whittaker’s, the Almanac people, and several other small concerns with specialist stocks.

  The two brothers debated whether to hail a taxi but decided that, as it was dry and bright, to continue their stroll to the Strand. Fleet Street wasn’t very long. As soon as you passed the stern grandeur of the Telegraph and the ebony-and-glass box of the Daily Express – christened by some wag as ‘King Kong’s lavatory’ because of the huge rolls of newsprint often seen being unloaded into the print-shop bay – you were at Chancery Lane and up to the Law Courts. At this point Bernard was able to signal to a taxi from the Bush House rank. He muttered something to the driver that the driver seemed to recognize, and they set off along the Strand. At Trafalgar Square the taxi went around into Charing Cross Road. The two brothers got out at Cambridge Circus and started walking up the side of the Palace Theatre into Soho.

  It was a district that Maurice had scarcely visited. He knew its reputation: the haunt of prostitutes and queers, foreign restaurants – Chinese, Italian, Jewish – raffish pubs with their Bohemian clientele, the catering-trade wholesalers, Wardour Street, home of the film industry. On the outskirts – bordered by Leicester Square and Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street – there were scruffy but enticing bookshops with a furtive air that gave the impression that there was more inside than could be seen in the window.

  As they visited shop after shop Maurice felt that he had made the wrong decision in accompanying Bernard. There was
something rather sordid about the whole business. The people who ran these shops were not bookish types. Many of them were plainly foreigners who communicated by gestures and flashing eyes. Bernard seemed to understand them. They were sharp salesmen, but often women, who looked as though they had never read a book in their lives. Books, to these people, were a commodity to be turned over as quickly as possible. They didn’t know or care anything about writing, about literature. It was a wonder that they didn’t weigh the books on a scale and sell them by the pound.

  Bernard laid out the new titles like a conjuror producing grubby deformed rabbits from a hat. He wasn’t aware that he was being devalued by even mixing with these people. The women, brass- or copper-haired and fur-coated, smelling of whisky and foreign cigarettes, were the worst. After a particularly unsavoury encounter Maurice felt that he had seen enough. This was Bernard’s world and he was welcome to it.

  ‘I think I’d better get back,’ he said.

  ‘Nearly finished,’ said Bernard. ‘Tell you what. Let’s go for a drink, and then we’ll call it a day.’

  Maurice was aware that the pubs closed at two o’clock and didn’t officially open again until six, so he thought that Bernard was suggesting tea or coffee.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Where shall we go?’

  They weren’t far from Lyons’ Corner House in Coventry Street. Maurice liked the atmosphere in these places, the smart interiors, like Eastern palaces, the courteous service, but Bernard went deeper into the heart of Soho and found a house at the end of an alley that didn’t look like a café or anything resembling one.

  ‘We’ll go in here,’ he said.

  Maurice accepted that Bernard must know his way around his patch and, despite the unlikeness of the exterior, accepted that this must be some kind of small hotel or guest-house that Bernard had got to know. Inside, there was a small vestibule for coats, from which a bored middle-aged woman in a black dress and lots of hanging jewellery was issuing cloakroom tickets. Somewhere in the background a pianist was playing softly, and there was the swish of drum brushes. Bernard made for the door and indicated that Maurice should follow.