There have
been innumerable complaints lately about the rudeness of shopkeepers. People say, I think
with truth, that shopkeepers appear to take a sadistic pleasure in telling you that they
dont stock the thing you ask for. To go in search of some really rare object, such
as a comb or a tin of boot polish, is a miserable experience. It means trailing from shop
to shop and getting a series of curt or actually hostile negatives. But even the routine
business of buying the rations and the bread is made as difficult as possible for busy
people. How is a woman to do her household shopping if she is working till six every day
while most of the shops shut at five? She can only do it by fighting round crowded
counters during her lunch hour. But it is the snubs that they get when they ask for some
article which is in short supply that people dread most. Many shopkeepers seem to regard
the customer as a kind of mendicant and to feel that they are conferring a favour on him
by selling him anything. And there are other justified grievances for instance, the
shameless overcharging on uncontrolled goods such as second-hand furniture, and the
irritating trick, now very common, of displaying in the window goods which are not on
sale.
But before blaming the shopkeeper for all this, there are several
things one ought to remember. To begin with, irritability and bad manners are on the
increase everywhere. You have only to observe the behaviour of normally long-suffering
people like bus conductors to realize this. It is a neurosis produced by the war. But, in
addition, many small independent shopkeepers (in my experience you are treated far more
politely in big shops) are people with a well-founded grievance against society. Some of
them are in effect the ill-paid employees of wholesale firms, others are being slowly
crushed by the competition of the chain stores, and they are often treated with the
greatest inconsiderateness by the local authorities. Sometimes a rehousing scheme will rob
a shopkeeper of half his customers at one swoop. In war-time this may happen even more
drastically owing to bombing and the call-up. And war has other special irritations for
the shopkeeper. Rationing puts a great deal of extra work on to grocers, butchers, etc.
and it is very exasperating to be asked all day long for articles which you have not got.
But after all, the main fact is that at normal times both the
shop assistant and the independent shopkeepers are downtrodden. They live to the tune of
the customer is always right. In peace time, in capitalist society, everyone
is trying to sell goods which there is never enough money to buy, whereas in war-time
money is plentiful and goods scarce. Matches, razor blades, torch batteries, alarm clocks
and teats for babies feeding bottles are precious rarities, and the man who
possesses them is a powerful being, to be approached cap in hand. I dont think one
can blame the shopkeeper for getting a bit of his own back, when the situation is
temporarily reversed. But I do agree that the behaviour of some of them is disgusting, and
that when one is treated with more than normal haughtiness it is a duty to the rest of the
public not to go to that shop again.
Examining recently a copy of Old Moores Almanac, I was reminded of the fun
I used to extract in my boyhood from answering advertisements. Increase your height, earn
five pounds a week in your spare time, drink habit conquered in three days, electric
belts, bust-developers and cures for obesity, insomnia, bunions, backache, red noses,
stammering, blushing, piles, bad legs, flat feet and baldness all the old
favourites were there or nearly all. Some of these advertisements have remained totally
unchanged for at least thirty years.
You cannot, I imagine, get much benefit from any of these
nostrums, but you can have a lot of fun by answering the advertisements and then, when you
have drawn them out and made them waste a lot of stamps in sending successive wads of
testimonials, suddenly leaving them cold. Many years ago I answered an advertisement from
Winifred Grace Hartland (the advertisement used to carry a photograph of her a
radiant woman with a sylph-like figure), who undertook to cure obesity. In replying to my
letter she assumed that I was a woman this surprised me at the time, though I
realize now that the dupes of these advertisements are almost all female. She urged me to
come and see her at once. Do come, she wrote, before ordering your
summer frocks, as after taking my course your figure will have altered out of
recognition. She was particularly insistent that I should make a personal visit, and
gave an address somewhere in the London Docks. This went on for a long time, during which
the fee gradually sank from two guineas to half a crown, and then I brought the matter to
an end by writing to say that I had been cured of my obesity by a rival agency.
Years later I came across a copy of the cautionary list which Truth
used to issue from time to time in order to warn the public against swindlers. It revealed
that there was no such person as Winifred Grace Hardand, this swindle being run by two
American crooks named Harry Sweet and Dave Little. It is curious that they should have
been so anxious for a personal visit, and indeed I have since wondered whether Harry Sweet
and Dave Little were actually engaged in shipping consignments of fat women to the harems
of Istanbul.
Everyone has a list of books which he is always meaning to read, and now
and again one gets round to reading one of them. One that I recently crossed off my list
was George Bournes Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer. I was slightly disappointed
with it, because, though it is a true story, Bettesworth, the man it is about, was not
quite an ordinary labourer. He had been a farm worker, but had become a jobbing gardener,
and his relation with George Bourne was that of servant and master. Nevertheless there is
some remarkable detail in it, and it gives a true picture of the cruel, sordid end with
which a lifetime of heavy work on the land is often rewarded. The book was written more
than thirty years ago, but things have not changed fundamentally. Immediately before the
war, in my own village in Hertfordshire, two old men were ending their days in much the
same bare misery as George Bourne describes.
Another book I recently read, or rather re-read, was The
Follies and Frauds of Spiritualism, issued about twenty years ago by the Rationalist
Press Association. This is probably not an easy book to get hold of, but I can equally
recommend Mr Bechhofer-Robertss book on the same subject. An interesting fact that
these and similar books bring out is the number of scientists who have been taken in by
spiritualism. The list includes Sir William
Crookes, Wallace the biologist, Lombroso,
Flammarion the astronomer (he afterwards changed his mind, however), Sir Oliver Lodge, and a whole string of
German and Italian professors. These people are not, perhaps, the top-notchers of the
scientific world, but you do not find, for instance, poets in comparable numbers falling a
prey to the mediums. Elizabeth
Barrett Browning is supposed to have been taken in by the famous medium Home, but Browning himself saw
through him at a glance and wrote a scarifying poem about him (Sludge the
Medium). Significantly, the people who are never converted to spiritualism
are conjurors.