Postscript . .
THE news that the and Navy Stores 1.'! making a bid to take Ow Gorringe's seemed souf how much more porter, tous than the gobbling" of Harrods by that 111311.r millionaire whom I ways confuse with Dttl Roy Thomson. OIL,A, know that Harrods is 01" established and all that but it seems positivei' here-today-gone-tomorrow compared with elttPtri of the two Pimlico emporia. The Army and T' Stores and Gorringe's are both so much,of same sort, generically; so different, individual"; and the differences are so deep-rooted, that ,.,1' is as though Eton were making a take-over r for Winchester. There could hardly be shakier analogies tt1311 those betWeen shops and schools (though to there is an inescapable Stowe-ishness 3°1; Harrods), but I chose my schools, in this instaw . to suggest a worldliness in the one and a 1011,, iness in the other that the respective cliente,itvit will recognise, I am sure, as extending to std stock, and advertisements. Both shops show 1, their appointments to the ladies of the O Family, living and late : to the late Queen Mai the Stores were appointed 'suppliers of houselwr and fancy goods,' whereas Gorringe's were 'silk mercers.' Which reminds me that Gorriuge windows in Buckingham Palace Road still son:, mon passers-by to their Corset Department (0; almost looked to see the word `stays'); in trr Stores the name of the appropriate Mao, ment is omitted from the 'Store Guide' by lot lifts, though at the entrance to, the departure, on the first floor there is a discreet 'Corsetr) a rather slicker word than 'Corsets,' somehow.; The very name 'the Stores' has an air abatec4 on the moustached lips of those men in t"' suits and bowler hats who patronise the g,it departmerlt and charge boxes of cigars to 0.1 accounts: where I come from, when we tall'` fi about 'the Stores' it was to show that we too genteel to refer to `th' co-op.' Shoppers fd guns and cigars come to mind, for the Army 3111,0 Navy Stores is as much a masculine as a fern° THE race, rce, !Ike 11 anot distance Ateh arid m it the a Node ° Po ken; n an their et Custom !lot 0 has a (111.in Now clue is Y a the .100k 44/Jeri traits, hands aware hunting ground; .Gorringc's is a woman's The two shops, by the way, are not much tan a stone's throw apart; of other shops, her district, one might have said spitting- !.
he Stores' restaurant the menu is a la carte, my a single dish is half as much again full table d'hôte at Gorringe's, which is 'st five shillings. Not that the elderly ladies itronise Gorringe's are either poor or par- )us, but they seem to come from a genera- d a class (a sub-section of a class, rather- tildren may well marry those of the Stores' ers) that considers it rather flashy to spend n food, and what goes with it. The Stores vine department that is highly spoken of; ge's has no wine department at all.
' that I come to think of it, perhaps the generation rather than class or sex: w hat .e hearing in the board room at Gorringe's Younger generation knocking at the door at all those spritely Army and Navy sements, and the pretty printing. Down- in the departments, customers and counter- have been growing old together, patiently of one another's foibles. There are ageing
gentlewomen in the Chilterns who will go to Gorringe's when they die; their contemporaries on the other side of the counter will go, of course, to the Chilterns.
My colleague Katharine Whitehorn recently wrote about the sorry state of ladies' lavatories and among the letters she received-saying such things as 'You should see our bus station!' -was one from the woman who wrote the article in the Times that set Miss Whitehorn off. It came from the writer's home address: St. Lao Man- sions, Flood Walk.
* I hope that the French Government's drive against alcoholism will not scare modest drinkers here into supposing that half a bottle of claret or a glass of brandy is a milestone on the road to Zola-esque ruin. What worries the French are those many thousands who drink their three bottles of strong, rough wine a day, have a nip of brandy on their way to work in the morning, and distil their own a/cool at home as well.
In the same way, it would be wrong to suppose
-.because of the flavour of ants common to both, and the family connection-that the Pernod of our own time is the same as the absinthe that a previous French government banned in 1914. (Though absinthe was drunk at Oxford by young George Saintsbury and his fellow-undergraduate, Creighton: the one became a professor and the other a bishop.) Pernod is strong, true, which is why it attr: . a high rate of duty and so costs 63s. a litre to this country, but it is innocent of wormwood, and is a perfectly wholesome aperitif. I have been recalling it lately because of the threat to reduce the number of Paris cafés : nothing--- not even Gauloise cigarettes-is more evocative of Paris than the sight, smell and taste of Pernod, taken ice-cold at a café table. There arc leaflets explaining how to make cocktails of Pernod--one part each of Pernod, fresh cream and er?me de cacao gives me the shakes even to think of--but to my mind there is only one way: one of Pernod to three or so of water, with a lump of ice in it. Taken like that, it is a pick-me-up after a hard day and a sort of pre-digestive before a good dinner: hard days cannot always be avoided, and good dinners never should be.
CYRIL RAY
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