Postscript . .
By CYRIL RAY have my secret discovered: I had just been eye- ing the expensive automatic self-winders in the Bond Street windows. It was only a matter of time before I would consider that the exertion evaded justified the expense incurred., , But we don't always act in character, and I turned as well to investigating the claims of one of those Health Clubs for Men that advertise 'Dietless Slimming, Body Building, Figure Con- touring, Spot Reducing, Muscle Toning and General Conditioning.' I knew very well that
any slimming advertised as 'dietless' must be diabolically energetic, but anything for a story, as we devil-may-care reporters used to say when we swung recklessly on to a tram to cover a bishop opening a bazaar, for the Manchester page of the Guardian. The only thing I minded was that they didn't ask whether I'd come for Muscle Toning or Body Building: the man at the desk took one look, reached for the Pro- gress Chart for new members, and wrote 'Reduce Mid-Section' in the 'remarks' column.
It is proper that the Health Club should be in the eastern reaches of Oxford Street, that Appian Way of 'with it' and 'in,' among the shoe shops that advertise 'Slick Styling,' and the tailors showing off 'The Italian Box'—a coat designed to make a man's shoulders look like an elephant's behind. For inside the club were figures, naked to the waist, with the proportions to match—Rickey, the young instructor, a dark smiling Greek, had a waist so trim and so tight that it made his chest more of a bosom. And it was the new rich, ready to pay twenty- five guineas for a suit in these parts, where their fathers had once paid fifty shillings (Sackville Street suits have gone up three times since before the war, Oxford Street suits ten), whom I found inside, swinging the chromium-plated barbells. Attracted there, the manager told me, by adver- tisements in magazines twice the price of this and infinitely more glossy. New rich, indeed: it costs £30 a year to belong to the club, which is precisely the same, as White's, but that's only an introductory offer, says the manager, which I doubt somehow whether the secretary of White's ever says to a pew member. 'It'll be more than that when we get all our fifty-two English clubs opened.' It's an American firm that's opening them, though the manager who was telling me all this is English, and used to be a policeman, and when I asked whether he too. like Rickey, was a PT instructor he said no, it was more a matter of salesmanship, being the manager, and was I thinking of joining?
I said' what Bernard Shaw said to the sides- .man. 'Press,' I said; the manager shrugged 1115 shoulders; and Rickey handed me a twenty-two- pound chromium-plated dumb-bell and told nle to do fifteen side-bends; laid me on a sort of ironing-board and told me to do sit-ups; laid me on another, inclined at a different angle, and told me to raise my legs; gave me a thirty-seven- pound barbell and made me swing it behind my neck; exercised my arms on one machine and my back on another; expanded my ,chest with a weight-lifting device until I •felt like' MISS Mansfield; talked me into riding a stationary bicycle and then, with my thigh muscles still twitching, had me lying on my back and lifting chromium-plated weights with my insteps.
Twenty years or so ago, from what I remenl-
ber of the school gym and of football-club changing rooms, a place like this would have reeked of sweat. Now, though, in spite of 'more dirty feet than l'd expected, it's just an occasional Whiff of the more expensive deodorants. The in- strumtnts of torture--`all imported from the States,' said the manager, `but they put the chromium on here—gleamed and glittered in the mirrors that lined the room. All around me the devotees swung their barbells, or lay like fakirs on their ironing-boards, raising one muscular limb after the other. All silently, too: I was the only one to grunt. They all know their routine, and once they have been put into the way of truth, I gather, they resent interference. 'Leave me alone, Rickey,' said a' figure who might have been hacked from the laocoon : 'got to get me del- toids up.'
Fm sure the exercise did me good--1 had stomach-ache 'for twenty-four hours----bill I don't know that I'd make a habit of it. It's not so much that all physical exercise is tiring as that all physical exercise is boring. I'd just as soon mow a lawn as go through all that again, and I know what I'm talking about : I once did mow it lawn. Half of one, anyway, before I flung down the handle of the mower and said Ed just as soon clean the ear. What rd just as soon do 'as that' •I .couldn't rightly say: I never hate cleaned the car. But I can just imagine.
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