I have total contempt for adultery. I regard it as destructive and degrading, on the strength of how my childhood was affected by events that tore my mother's family apart. I would have said with no hesitation that I would not lower myself, or debase a woman to that extent. Yet, here I was, about to jump into bed with a married woman, and I felt no guilt whatsoever, only a sense of long-awaited fulfilment. Hypocritical? Yes, I suppose so. It is a demonstration of the crashing truism that circumstances alter cases. Let me tell you about it...
I
There should have been four of us in the office. Mr Atkins, the senior, was a genial man with a whimsical sense of humour when he was in good health, but, sadly, he had been gassed with mustard gas at third Ypres and his rotting lung tissue made him a martyr to bronchitis. This winter, 1938-9 had been very bad for him, and we had little expectation of seeing him back at work before the Spring. We all liked and respected him very much, and all of us had visited him at different times, but although we tried to entertain us, we could see how the effort knocked the stuffing out of him.
Next in seniority was May Kidger. As May Macmillan she had worked in the Treasurer's department since the end of the 1890's, when she entered as a fourteen-year-old. She was then what was known as a "Lady typewriter", having learned Pitman's shorthand and typing in the local secretarial college. She later passed her clerical exams and settled in for the long haul. Then, a few years ago, in her fifties, she had married Joe Kidger, her childhood sweetheart, now a widower with grown-up children.
I liked May, she was a sweet lady, still unable to quite believe her good luck. She doted on Joe, and I have to say that I really hated the way the older men mocked her behind her back as a rather ridiculous old maid. I just hope that when my time comes I find someone to love the way she loves her Joe.
May is a big woman and gets short of breath. When she was asked to move into our office on the top floor, she was reluctant. That is where Cecil Atkins showed his true mettle.
"If I can go up and down on the lift, May, then you should be able to. Leave it to me; I'll see what I can do."
Using the lift was a privilege jealously guarded by the senior officers. Letting a mere APT 3 like Mr Atkins use it was a concession to his war service and the disability it had brought him. Allowing a woman, and a mere clerical grade to use it, struck at the very heart of the hierarchical system. He took it to the union, Nalgo, and shamed them into supporting him. Finally, it was agreed, and May agreed to join our little company in the attics.
A couple of years older than myself and that much senior, came Dorothy Richards, a pale, rather anaemic-looking girl with bangs and long straight hair held in a velvet Alice band, in imitation of Tenniel's Alice, although, apart from lacking the vivacity and the glorious singing voice, she more closely resembled her namesake in
The Wizard of Oz.
She took part in the banter that goes around the office, and she was friendly with me, as with the other young men and women on our corridor, but at a sort of distance. I assumed that this was because she was engaged to Gordon, only son of Colonel Sir Pierce Venables MC. OBE. etc..., the big noise in the Territorial Regiment of the London Rifles, and Chairman of Venables Ideal Canned Delicacies.
Gordon was a lieutenant in his father's enterprises, both martial and commercial, but his real life began and ended on the rugby field, where he was a formidable scrum half for the East London RFC. and the life and soul of the boozy sing-songs in the bar. Rumour had it that his initiative, creativity and conscientiousness were more or less limited to the rugby field and the creation of dirty jokes. Anyway, I liked Dorothy and wished her well.
Last, and probably least came yours truly, Richard Phillpots, usually known as Phil. Dad was a railway ticket office clerk, mum was a sewing machinist who worked from home with a Jones electric sewing machine always on the go. She sewed men's shirts, which was clean work with meticulous quality control, highly paid in the context of what was usually sweated labour.
I was the only son, with one sister seven years older, who married at sixteen. I got to Stratford Grammar School on a scholarship but was not one of the top stream who were groomed for Oxbridge. My maths were good, my English slightly above average, but I was hopeless at sciences and worse at Latin and French. Greek was cruel and unusual punishment (to steal an Americanism), and I was allowed to drop it after two years. At sixteen I applied for a job in the County Borough Treasurer's Department, and I was lucky enough to get it. That's how I joined the Internal Audit department and fetched up auditing the petty cash books of local board schools.
Anyway, I was telling you how we ended up with just Dorothy and me in the office for at least half the day. It was like this. The winter of 1938-9 was a very cold, wet one. May Kidger's husband Joe took a heavy cold and catarrh, and in January he stood for an hour waiting for an early morning worker's bus to Silvertown where he worked, and before his shift ended he was sent home with pleurisy in both lungs. May had to get extended unpaid leave to take care of him, and it as clearly going to be a long job. Joe's sister was about as much good as a sick headache, and the whole job fell on May. So our little office was left short-handed for the foreseeable.
They did their best., Mr. Warris, who oversaw the schools supplies office agreed to take a watching brief over us, and a lady who worked in the rates office, Miss Ainley, agreed to work out of our office pro tem for the sake of the decencies. The whole fuss about less senior staff (she was an A.P.T.1) came up again but she had them over a barrel.
It was like something out of Alley Sloper's Half Holiday. Miss Ainley would linger downstairs until the middle of the morning, and then we would hear the lift start up and in she waltzed. She disappeared at dinner time, and in the afternoon, the acute observer would see her downstairs, perched on a stool in a corner of the telephonists' cubby hole, half hidden by the switchboard.
Dorothy and I got on all right, but as I say, there was a bit of distance between us, and I assumed that it was because she felt she was moving up in the world. Turned out I was wrong.
The Town Hall is a florid, over-ornate building, the endowment of the American Steel Magnate Andrew Carnegie. If you asked anyone walking past Stratford Town Hall or Manor Park branch library who was Andrew Carnegie, they would have speculated that either he was a somewhat unbalanced architect, or that he had a brickyard that made terra cotta architectural details in a range of over elaborate shapes, along with slip-cast stoneware busts of Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott and a baker's dozen of lesser literary talents.
Inside, the whole pomp and ceremony of local government descends upon the visitor. The staircases are a three-dimensional model of the social hierarchy.
Coming in through the majestic front doors, you saw ahead of you a double staircase, in an ogee shape, leading to the two ends of a balcony that extended the width of the building. This main staircase was built of a pinkish marble, the pink of swithland granite, with huge balusters almost the size of elephants' legs. The stairs were carpeted in red Axminster, complete with polished brass stair-rods. Ascend to the first floor and you would find in front of you the Council Chamber, the committee rooms and the offices of the two heads of state, the County Borough Clerk and the Treasurer.
This ground floor is all grandiosity; marble balustrade, polished mahogany doors, polished brass plates, Venetian windows in heraldic stained glass; all designed to flatter the elite and humble the visitor. In either corner, there was a smaller, less impressive staircase leading up to the floor where the main offices can be found.
Here the scale is smaller, more workaday. The visitor is assumed to have a purpose to serve. Submit a planning application, deliver a tender to supply work or goods, pay rates or rents, appeal against a decision or a placement; perhaps meet with an official. The doors are oak, with small lights so that visitors can peep into a room and see the worker bees at their toil. Here there are no Axminster carpets, but the floor is covered with a long runner in beige drugget.
Once again traverse the corridor between the two rows of office doors, and you will find a pair of staircases leading up to the second floor. In a country house, you would now be behind the green baize doors, firmly in the territory of the servants.
