Departures and Arrivals. Eric Newby

I had an appointment to show evening dresses to the model dress-buyer at Harrods, an appointment which I had only been able to make with great difficulty and exertion; but by this time the problem of the basket had begun to exercise such an obsessive fascination over me that any sense of proportion I might have possessed had vanished.

      ‘Pity,’ she said when I telephoned her to tell her what had happened, and could I possibly come tomorrow. ‘I’m finishing up here this morning and going on holiday this afternoon.’

      What I ought to have done was to have taken the dresses to Harrods, and shown them to her. She was in fact fascinated by the dilemma I was in and I would probably have got an order. Once in the store I could have contacted the manager of the Food Hall as an account customer, although a not very important one, and persuaded him to telephone Paris and ask some caterer, such as Fauchon in the Place de la Madeleine, to deliver a hamper of food suitable for infants to the Gare de Lyon. Instead I rashly took it upon myself to see whether I could get a basket of baby food from London to Paris by air.

      It was midday before I got to what was then London’s embryonic airport. At that time it consisted of a number of dreary-looking huts, which gave incoming passengers the sensation of arriving in some beleaguered fortress and those taking off the sensation of leaving one.

      In a hut occupied by ‘Air Freight’ I began to fill in a declaration form, writing ‘Baby Food, etc.’ under Contents. Dire penalties were threatened for any misinformation I might give.

      ‘’Ullo, ’ullo, what’s this – baby food?’ said a gloomy-looking man – almost everyone was gloomy in 1947, the promised land being still just around the corner. ‘Got an Export Licence?’

      ‘Export Licence?’

      ‘Yur, Export Licence. Board of Trade. It’s food. You need an Export Licence for Food. Two kinds of licence, Specific and Bulk. You need a Specific.’

      ‘No one told me. Where can I get one? Can you give me one?’

      ‘Theobald’s Road.’

      ‘Where’s that?’

      ‘In the City.’

      Finally, having cut me down to what he estimated was my appropriate size, he relented and allowed me to fill in Form 91b, relating to ‘Export of Specific Articles of Food to the Scheduled Territories’ I think it was, which he kept up his sleeve he told me, as he became more genial, for just such emergencies as this – that is if any similar emergency could be envisaged.

      Now things began to look up. I fell into the hands of what at that time was still referred to as ‘a good type’, one with a large RAF moustache, and what was more important with a human being behind it. And I began to see that my fortunes or lack of them were developing a kind of rhythm that if expressed graphically would look like one of those wildly fluctuating temperature charts which are suspended over the patients’ beds in funny cartoons about hospitals. First I forgot the basket. Then I got it. Then I missed the train. Then I met a nice stationmaster and so on, and now I was being helped by a nice man with a huge moustache.

      ‘Hm,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a rotten day so far by the sound of it. Let’s see what time the Simplon-Orient leaves the Gare de Lyon. George, ring up Victoria, Continental Enquiries, on that special number, otherwise you’ll never get through, and find out what time the Simplon-Orient leaves the Gare de Lyon tonight, French time … No good at the Gare du Nord, she’s on the Ceinture in a through coach … Leaves the Gare de Lyon at 21.05, French time … Right, I’ll ring Le Bourget’ – and to me: ‘You don’t happen to have the voiture number and the compartment, do you?. Pity … Hallo, Armand … I know … Well, you’ll have to … That’s right, send Alphonse, by motor cycle. He can hand the basket to the Chef de Train personally.’

      ‘One of our best men,’ he said as he put down the receiver, ‘Alphonse. He was a courier in the Resistance up near the Belfort Gap. Unfortunately there’s no plane until this evening and I can’t risk sending it by passenger plane for reasons which I don’t want to bore you with. But don’t worry, he should just make it. Between ourselves if we charged you for all this it would cost you a fortune. As it is, have it with our compliments.’

      When I finally reached Great Marlborough Street, my parents’ London premises, later in the afternoon I was handed a telegram. It had been sent from Dover Harbour and read: ‘Don’t send basket. Wanda.’

      This is what subsequently happened to it. It reached Le Bourget but the plane was late and Alphonse, hero of the Resistance, whirled it to the Gare de Lyon on his motor cycle a bare eight minutes before the Simplon-Orient pulled out. Owing to a clerical error, none of the boards displayed outside the wagons-lits which gave the passengers’ names had Wanda’s name on it and the Chef de Train disclaimed any knowledge of a woman named Newby with a baby, perhaps because she had not joined the train at the Gare de Lyon but had been shunted round the Ceinture in the Istanbul coach. He also refused to take delivery of the basket. In a last desperate attempt to hand it over, Alphonse approached the Stationmaster and begged the use of his public address system. The Stationmaster, like the Chef de Train, was a bureaucratic monster. He refused permission for this, and also the request to hold the train for a few minutes while Alphonse went through the sleeping cars, with the words, ‘It is in this way, at the moment of departure of a great train, that accidents can occur if orders are reversed.’ And the train left without the basket. All this I learned from Bill, my moustachioed friend, the following morning. The news plunged me into unspeakable gloom.

      Three days later I received a letter from Wanda, postmarked Domodossola, at the Italian end of the Simplon Tunnel.

      ‘I am glad I was able to send a telegram telling you not to send the basket,’ she wrote. ‘You remember that silver we bought for Valeria?’ (Valeria was Wanda’s greatest friend. She lived in Fontanellato and was getting married shortly. We had bought her six place settings of cutlery from George Jensen in Bond Street, the most expensive wedding present we ever bought anybody before or since.) ‘This seemed a good time to take it to her,’ she continued, ‘and because of the Customs I put it in the basket under the food. It will have to wait now until next year. There was no need to worry about Sonia. Everyone was very kind. The cook on the ship cooked just the right food for her and let me into his kitchen to see for myself, and on the train from the Gare de Lyon the chef in the ristorante made purée with lots of fresh vegetables. He even had spinach. In a couple of hours we shall be in Milano and there the controllers of our vagone is going to get me more fresh food, which will also be cooked for me.’

      A week or so later Bill, the man with the moustache, telephoned to say that someone on the French side of the Channel with a horrible sense of humour had returned the basket to him full of what was now putrescent baby food.

      ‘I don’t suppose you want it,’ he said. ‘It means you’re coming all the way here and going through Customs, all for a few nappies and feeding bottles.’

      I told him about the silver. There was nothing else to do in the circumstances, and there was just a faint hope that it might be still there.

      ‘Half a mo,’ he said. ‘I’ll just take it outside and turn it out on the concrete.’

      Soon he was back. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You’re having a run of bad luck. There’s nothing but a nasty smell.

      ‘I expect it was Alphonse,’ he went on. ‘I told you he was in the Resistance. He might be soft-hearted about babies but not about anything else.’

       Days and Nights on the Orient Express

      Long before I acquired employers well enough off to enable us to travel in a wagon-lit if we wanted to do so, which was when I became a fashion buyer in the early sixties, the real Orient Express had ceased to be a practicable means of getting to Istanbul.

      The only sensible way of getting to Istanbul