Secondhand Daylight

by D. J. Taylor

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Autumn 1933, and for once struggling writer James Ross seems to have fallen on his feet. Not only has the Labour Exchange fixed him up with a day-job collecting rents in Soho, but friendly Mr Samuelson is employing him front-of-house in the Toreador night-club. Even his melancholy love-life is looking up, thanks to a chance encounter with the alluring Gladys, enigmatic inhabitant of the Meard Street second-floor back.

On the other hand, Soho looks an increasingly dangerous place in which to be at large. Not only are Mosley's Blackshirts on the prowl, but somebody is raiding the dirty bookshops and smashing night-club windows in a quest for moral decency. Fetched up in a police-cell in West End Central after an unfortunate incident outside the Toreador, and coerced into undercover work by the mysterious Inspector Haversham, James finds himself infiltrating the Blackshirts' Chelsea HQ , leafleting passers-by in the King's Road and spying on a top-secret dinner party attended by a highly important Royal guest. Meanwhile, the emotional consequences of this deception are set to come as a nasty shock.

Praise for At the Chime of a City Clock:

'Steeped in historical detail, the novel evokes the sleazy side of the Thirties so vividly that you can almost feel the grease and grime on your fingers.' Anthony Gardner, Mail on Sunday

'Engaging, cheerful, opportunist James Ross. You won't forget him or the London he frequents for a long time after closing the book.' Susan Hill, Literary Review

'A watchable, atmospheric black-and-white film in novel form' Sunday Express

'Written with a splendid and captivating assurance' The Scotsman

'Finely drawn ... Artful ... Masterly.' John Sutherland

Release date: March 15, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 224

Sample

‘To be perfectly honest, we don’t get many of your sort in here.’

‘My sort being?’

‘Well … people with some kind of education.’

‘Plenty of public schoolboys on the PAC, surely?’ I said. ‘Newspapers go on about nothing else.’ There was a still a blank-ish look on his face, so I breezed on: ‘When the gates of Eton College closed behind the Hon. Algy Clutterbuck, few could have predicted that the man they called “The Toast of Pont Street” would soon be pawning his top hat for the price of a night’s lodging.’


‘That’s as may be,’ the little bloke said, twiddling a pencil furiously between his fingers. ‘Only they don’t tend to come in here.’

It was one of those dull mornings in early autumn, with the rain clattering against the window like so many tin tacks, and I was sitting in an interview room at the Labour Exchange round the back of Shaftesbury Avenue. Not that you could see the rain, of course – the interview room was one of those daylight-free boxes, painted up in a shade of yellowy brown that reminded me of the Old Lady’s cairn terriers – but the sound of it drummed all the way along the corridor. Quite what I was doing in the interview room I hadn’t yet twigged. They were easy-going at the Shaftesbury Avenue Labour and usually stamped your card like a tallyman presented with a ten-bob note, but on this particular morning one of the chaps had hauled me out of the line, taken me off to his cubby hole, found my name in a box file, offered me a cigarette – they were good cigarettes, too, Sahib Virginia Straight Cut at ninepence the packet – and suggested that we had a little chat. Now, I’ve been suspicious of little chats ever since Sergeant-Major Blatherwaite wanted to know what had become of the Mess Fund Subscription List, but he seemed a decent sort, and in any case it never pays to get on your high horse at the Labour.


‘Mind if I ask you a few questions, Mr Ross?’ He was a timid little black-haired chap, but with an odd look in his eye, like a Methodist elder up from Abertawe for the day walking past the ladies’ underwear displays in Bourne & Hollingsworth’s window.

‘Fire away.’

‘All right then. Age last birthday?’

Well, that wasn’t a proposition from Euclid. ‘Thirty-three,’ I said. ‘Thirty-four this November.’

‘Any military experience?’

‘Postal clerk at Southern Command headquarters, March to November 1918.’ It had been censoring the Flanders mail, you’ll understand, while Corporal Bannister brewed endless cups of strong tea and stared hopelessly out of the grille-window at passing VADs.

‘Married man, are you?’

Now there’d been one or two close shaves, at least with Netta before that time she’d thrown the ring at me in the theatre queue, but there was no need to let on about any of this.

‘Never had the pleasure,’ I said.

‘Last permanent address?’

‘Actually,’ I said, lifting my voice up a tone or two, ‘I’ve been staying at my mother’s residence in Kent.’ It’s my experience that ‘residence’ is a better word to use than ‘house’, and sure enough the little bloke’s eyes virtually gleamed. You could just see that he thought I’d been at some moated grange, rather than the Old Lady’s bungalow at Tenterden with the cairn terriers moulting all over the drugget and both bars on.


‘Any recent work experience?’

The noise of the rain was diminishing now, and the smell of the Sahib Virginia Straight Cut rose invitingly on the air, but the interview room still looked like the kind of place where someone had recently hung himself. Over the past few years I’d ‘pursued a variety of occupations’, as the Old Lady invariably put it in letters to relatives – I’d taught fretwork in a boys’ school, sold carpet-cleaning lotion door-to-door and even officiated as secretary to the president of the Kensington Flat Earth Society – but somehow I knew none of these would cut much ice.


‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’m a writer.’

‘Oh yes?’ I couldn’t work out if the little chap with the black hair didn’t believe me or was simply disapproving. ‘What sort of thing do you write?’

‘Poems. Short stories.’

‘Ever get anything published?’

‘Just last week,’ I said brightly, ‘I had a piece printed in the Blue Bugloss.’ The Blue Bugloss was super-refined, by the way, and had a list of words you weren’t supposed to use in case the subscribers complained. ‘Bugger’ was one of them, and possibly ‘balls’.


‘I’m more of a John O’London’s man myself,’ the black-haired chap said. ‘Never could get on with some of that poetry. John Drinkwater, now that’s my kind of poet. But the fact is a chap like you ought to be able to walk into a job, especially if he’s not fussy.’


‘Well, I’m not fussy,’ I said. It was the truth as well. No one who’s tried selling carpet-cleaning lotion door-to-door in Kensal Green on a wet Friday afternoon could ever be accused of being over-fastidious.

‘How about this then?’ he said, flicking a jellygraphed sheet of paper over the desk, where, I couldn’t help noticing, someone had carved the words ‘GRETA GARBO’ with a penknife. There wasn’t much more than a paragraph, saying that Mr Harold Samuelson of Dean Street W1 wanted a reliable, honest and hard-working young man of superior education to assist him in certain commercial undertakings on a part-time basis, remuneration and prospects excellent, accommodation thrown in.


‘Sounds all right to me,’ I said. ‘What are “certain commercial undertakings”?’


‘Rent collecting, isn’t it?’ the bloke said. ‘Don’t ask me why, but it’s a tricky one to fill. We’ve sent half-a-dozen chaps down there since Christmas and none of them have suited. Make a go of this and you’ll be doing me no end of a favour, I can tell you.’

‘Don’t mind trying,’ I said. That’s the thing about me: I’ve never minded trying.

‘Who’s this Mr Samuelson when he’s at home?’

‘Owns some sort of nightclub in Dean Street. Jewish, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh well,’ I said, getting up from my chair, and noticing that the sole of one of my shoes was about to part company with the upper. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’

‘Well, good luck then.’

‘Thanks’ I said.

 

Outside the rain had all but stopped, and there were smeary streaks running down the corridor windows. There was a square of mirror on the wall next to a notice about men being wanted to build a municipal park bandstand up in Colindale and for some reason I stopped and took a squint. Half an inch under six feet, not bad-looking, with one of those honest, open faces that women think they can confide things to. A few too many things on occasion. And Sir Edward Marsh, —— him, had once said that a poem I’d had published in Public School Verse had showed ‘enormous promise’. No doubt about it, I ought to have been able to stroll into any job worth the taking. Back in the main hall three serpentine queues of blokes in mackintoshes and flat caps with Mirrors under their arms trailed back from the grilles, and a man in a tam o’shanter and trousers that ended halfway down his calves was being quietly sick into a waste-paper basket. The little bloke with the black hair had been bang right: they didn’t get many of my sort at the Shaftesbury Avenue Labour.





1

Soho girls in Wardour Street Don’t have time to chat Late at night go home to Ealing, Mothers, and the cat.


James Ross, Soho Eclogues


The sign on the wall just inside the door read marital aids, but in fact there were none of these on display. Instead the shop sold secondhand copies of Marie Stopes’s Married Love and Professor Silas Hergesheimer’s Man the Sexual Being. There were also some packets of postcards and a cork-board on which artists’ models offered their services at ten shillings an hour. Outside it was raining and there was a strong smell of tar. Mr Slattery, the establishment’s proprietor, sat on a high stool by the cash register addressing one of his customers. Choosing his words with a certain amount of deliberation, he said:


‘It’s a good old life. You’d be surprised. I sometimes think I ought to give it up, take one of those cottages down on the coast everyone always talks about, Winchelsea way or Rye, but then I ask myself: what would I do there? If you’re bound to a trade, you don’t want to leave it. It stands to reason.’

There was no one else in the shop, which had a high, cavernous roof with a lime-green stain at its epicentre that informed judges sometimes said reminded them of the map of Greece. The smell of the tar, which came from some repairs to the pavement that had been completed earlier that morning, blended with the smoke from Mr Slattery’s Camel cigarette and a surprisingly sinister reek of damp. Some of the artists’ models came as cheap as eight shillings. Mr Slattery said:


‘You get all sorts. I don’t know a trade that doesn’t. I’ve got customers who don’t come in here from one month to the next, but they know where to find me when they do. People tell me I ought to advertise more, make a show of it, but that’s not the way. Start making a song and dance and you only get a lot of riff-raff through the door. That’s what I always say.’

The repairs to the pavement had not been extensive, but a small area of the newly gleaming tarmacadam had been closed off and a series of ropes strung between trestles. From the top of the near-most trestle a workman’s lamp winked intermittently. Towards the back of the shop the goods were more miscellaneous, almost extending to bric-a-brac. Here there were such items as antique Coronation mugs, a jigsaw of HMS Hood in dry dock and a cuckoo clock with a defective spring. Mr Slattery said:


‘Of course the police come by now and again. I don’t mind. They’ve got a job to do just like anyone else. Besides, they’re very friendly. It’s not like the old days. Why, when Lord Byng was commissioner they’d be in here every day to look at the books. There was one constable read a copy of The Plumed Serpent from cover to cover. I had to make him a cup of tea while he did it. We used to make a joke of it. It’s not like that now.’


Outside the rain had become to come down harder. A hearse went by, drawn by horses whose manes had been dyed so many times they seemed almost purple. Mr Slattery took an orange out of the till, where it lurked between a couple of five-pound notes and a roll of elastic bands, and began desultorily to peel it. He said:


‘I’m not saying Soho doesn’t need to have an eye kept on it. No indeed. There’s some people think we’re all libertines and demireps. It’s not true. Why, when I heard Mrs Meyrick was dead I said to Dulcie that does for me: “If people knew the harm that woman had done they wouldn’t be so sentimental about her and saying she was taken before her time.”’


It was a very pungent orange, and Mr Slattery was careful to hold it away from his face as he peeled it. The hearse had gone by now, although the sound of the horses’ hoofs could still be heard further down the street. In its wake trailed a small collection of mourners: girls with shawls over their heads; ancient women, their faces apparently lined with the dust of centuries, in dark costumes; squat, mustachioed men with olive-eyed children riding on their arms. Mr Slattery looked suddenly lugubrious, ground down, as if he wanted to rush out into the street, throw himself at the mourners’ feet and rend the air with his cries. But the mood passed. He said:

‘Those Italians always make a fuss of their funerals. I can’t say I understand why. Whenever I’ve buried anyone I always wanted to get it over as quick as possible. The fondest farewells are the briefest. That’s what I’ve always said.’


Mr Slattery looked up. The shop was empty and the orange was gone. He rolled the fragments of peel into a little ball and swept them into the waste-paper basket with the flat of his hand. Queer how often that happened. But it couldn’t be helped. There was a copy of Priestley’s Angel Pavement lying in the alcove at the back, next to the balls of darning wool and the John McCormack Songbook. He could read a couple of chapters before he went and got his lunch. Outside the rain was easing and the funeral procession had turned the corner into Noel Street. Mr Slattery, who had once in his youth been on some unimaginable journey to the countryside beyond Turin, had a sudden memory of olive groves, a basket piled high with corks, prosciutto lying curled up on a plate.


There was a snick as the door of the shop sprang open and a customer came in: a little man in a trilby with the corner of his coat pulled up to his face. Mr Slattery took no notice of him. Instead he said, ‘Good morning. Please feel free to browse. All the magazines are for sale. Specialist items towards to the back.’ The boom of his voice – he had sung tenor in a Methodist church choir as a young man – echoed off the cavernous ceiling and he fell silent. The little man ignored this invitation, but picked out a copy of The Young Man’s Guide to Marriage and started leafing through it. Mr Slattery liked customers who looked you in the eye and returned a greeting. Civility, in fact. He had the copy of Angel Pavement open next to the till now, so that one or two fragments of orange pulp threatened to despoil its royal blue covers.


Miss Matfield had gone to Hays Wharf to take down some letters for Mr Golspie as he sat in the saloon of the Lemmala, awaiting transfer to the Baltic. London was really marvellous, and the wonder of it rushed up in her mind and burst there like a rocket, scattering a multi-coloured host of vague but rich associations, a glittering jumble of history and nonsense and poetry, Dick Whittington and galleons, Muscovy and Cathay, East Indiamen, the doldrums far away, and the Pool of London, lapping here only a stone’s throw from the shops and offices and buses. Good old London, thought Mr Slattery, who was fifty-seven, with a bottle nose and two chins, and as unromantic a figure as it was possible to conceive; now there was a subject. There was another snick at the door and a second man came into the shop: taller than the first, and not so seedy-looking, but apparently having some connection with him as the two of them went and conferred over the display copies of Beauty, Health and Nature which the police had taken such an interest in on their last visit.


Olive groves basking in the sun. J. B. Priestley. The Pool of London. Beauty, Health and Nature. Mr Slattery thought that he needed cheering up. Worse, the gramophone shop next door was having one of its demonstrations, and he could hear music coming through the wall.


Tonight I’m alone, broken-hearted


To mother I’ve murmured ‘Goodbye-ee’


From the home of my youth I’ve departed


With a tear in my bonny blue eye.


There was another smell leaching into the air to add to the compound of tar, damp, orange peel and cigarette. Mr Slattery thought it was burning and wondered where it was coming from. The two men had their heads bent together at the corner of the display in such a way that it partly obscured the rest of their bodies, and Mr Slattery thought he ought to go and see what they were doing. It was definitely the smell of burning, he thought. Nellie Wallace’s voice – high, cracked, confiding – continued to buzz through the wall:

Forget all my troubles I can’t, tho’ I’ve tried


There’s only one thing left for me – sui-ci-hi-hide


I don’t like my mother’s pie-crust


Eat it? No! I’d sooner die fust!


A part of him was still with Miss Matfield as she got out of the taxi in Tooley Street, negotiated the labyrinth of winding lanes and came at last to the ship, sequestered and romantic, on which Mr Golspie sat hatching his ineffable schemes. ‘May I help you, gentlemen?’ he heard himself asking vaguely. He discovered that the charring smell came from some copies of the Naturists’ Gazette to which the taller of the two men was calmly holding his cigarette lighter. Fascinated despite himself, Mr Slattery watched them burn. The little man in the trilby hat, he noticed – and somehow the noticing was an effort, much less interesting than the smouldering pages of the Naturists’ Gazette – was making his way to the till. Nellie Wallace’s voice seemed to be coming from a long way off, like the voice of an Arctic explorer cut off by the sudden, pulverizing descent of snow:


I’ve tied it round me neck, and tomorrow I shall be –


Down at the bottom of the deep blue sea.


‘Hi there!’ Mr Slattery said. ‘You can’t …’ But the other man had reached out and sent a shelf-full of books bustling into movement. Like a row of dominoes they rippled back on top of each other and then tumbled, one after another, onto the threadbare carpet. There was beauty in it, Mr Slattery thought distractedly, strong, terrible beauty. When the little man’s hand went into the till, his first thought was for the other orange he had hidden there next to the elastic bands, and the hank of cotton wool for whenever his ear ached. Somewhere – a long way off, it seemed – a window broke. Mr Slattery lay on the carpet, where it was cooler and the smell of burning – a whole case of magazines was on fire now – seemed less oppressive. Nellie Wallace had fallen silent. They left the shop laughing, passers-by scattering in their wake, feet careening through the fresh tar.





2

Sergeant Snooks on Meard Street corner S. . .