Read My Father's Fortune for Free Online

when I was five or six years old, to go shopping at the big stores in Kensington High Street, and I thought she told me that she had worked in at least two of them, Barkers and Pontings. Maybe this was later, though, because in Phyllis’s little memoir she says that Vi started straight out at Harrods. This was certainly several steps up the ladder from the kind of places her father and future father-in-law had begun in, and I guess it must have been Bert, with his pre-war connections in the West End retail trade, who had got her the job, even if he hadn’t managed to do something similar for himself.
    She was in the gowns and costumes showroom, and Phyllis says she did very well there. ‘They often used to take her out of her department to do special modelling for them, preferring her to their “official” models.’ When, in middle age, I began to think about my origins, and about things that had long seemed more or less unthinkable, I realised that I had not one single physical memento of my mother – not so much, at that time, as a blurred snapshot. I asked Phyllis about her, and she told me where I might possibly find a picture. In the 1920s, she said, Vi had modelled Harrods gowns for their advertisements in the society papers. I went out to Colindale, to the newspaper department of what was then the British Museum Library, and searched blindly through the ancient files.
    And suddenly, in an illustrated magazine called The Bystander , dated 18 March 1925, there she was, unidentified but unmistakable. She’s sitting hand on hip, in a long silk jacket and a lace scarf. Her heart-shaped face is framed by a cloche hat, and the long plaits have been reduced to a bob. She’s half-turned away from the camera, and her wide-set eyes are cast demurely down. The advertisement occupies a whole page of the magazine, and under the picture, in tasteful italics, it says:
    INVITATION
    Harrods Exposition of the Fashions for Spring is simply a tribute to the dress-taste and discrimination of the public Harrods serve. Visitors tell us that nowhere else is there to be found a Display so fascinating, so original, so informative. Why not accept Harrods’ invitation to this enchanting spectacle?
    I did, belatedly, accept it as best I could. I had the page from the Bystander photographed and framed, and I have only to lift my eyes an inch or two from the screen of the word processor to see it hanging on the wall. And if I look at some of the other photographs hanging around it, there she is again, in various snapshots that no one in the family had ever thought to give me copies of until I began to ask around for them.
    And there’s that same heart-shaped face, those same wide-seteyes, in the photographs of my daughter Rebecca. Then yet again, in the next photograph, in her daughter’s face. Not everything is lost.
    *
    So Tommy and Vi were now socially and financially rather well-matched. Whether they had by this time already decided to get married, and if so when, I don’t know. The following year, though, in 1920, any plans they had were disrupted, because Tommy’s father died.
    Exactly how much he had been contributing to the household in Devonshire Road in the last years of his life isn’t clear. According to his death certificate he had moved on from the china shop to an ironmonger’s, but he died of cancer of the stomach, which suggests that he hadn’t been working for some time. He had plainly made no provision for his widow, and she was now effectively destitute. Three of the five children, Nellie, George and Daisy, had long since married and moved out, while Mabel, the simple-minded bookfolder, needed quite a lot of support herself. Daisy chipped in with the occasional ten-shilling note, says her son John, but only one of the children was really capable of doing much to help financially, and that was the baby of the family, now nineteen years old: Tommy.
    Standing in for