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freelance journalist, mostly for the BBC, and my first wife also had a job
there. As I was free in the mornings I did all the household shopping. Our
greengrocer in St John’s Wood High Street was a fat old Italian woman, Mrs
Salamone. She spoke perfect Cockney without a trace of foreign accent, but
preferred to talk, shout and quarrel with her innumerable children and
grandchildren in her native Italian. We, the customers, queued up patiently to
ask for, say, a cabbage. “Ninepence,” she would declare. A bit stiff for a
cabbage all the English customers would think secretly, but they — and myself —
would nevertheless pay up without murmur, and were, indeed, grateful to Mrs
Salamone for selling us a cabbage at all. The only exception was another
Italian lady Signora T.
    “How much is this — ‘cabbage’?” she
would ask aggressively, her tone suggesting that the real word for the
vegetable was “garbage”.
    “Ninepence.”
    Signora T would laugh ironically as
if she had heard a really amusing joke.
    “You don’t mean this half-rotten,
miserable, soft cabbage, hardly suitable for pigs?”
    Mrs Salamone would indicate gloomily
that she did mean that very cabbage. Signora T would go on: “Ninepence? Sheer
highway robbery. It’s criminal. It’s profiteering. Sixpence.”
    Mrs Salamone, obviously much too
dignified to answer, would turn to the next customer.
    “Sixpence ha’penny,” said Signora T
as a last offer. Mrs Salamone still refused even to look at her and Signora T
would flounce away... only to return three minutes later with an offer of
sevenpence. After a long and loud session of bargaining and quarrelling,
Signora T would have her cabbage for eightpence.
    For a long time I wondered why Mrs
Salamone bothered to waste her time with the Signora at all. She had plenty of
customers who gave her no trouble. Slowly it dawned on me — the evidence for it
became clear — that Signora T was Mrs Salamone’s favourite customer, the only
one whom she respected. Signora T was the only person who did her shopping in
the way Mrs Salamone had been taught to do hers. She felt contempt for the
sheeplike English whom even she, an uneducated Italian peasant, could twist
around her little finger. Far from not bothering with Signora T, Mrs Salamone
considered her visits the highlights of her day. Bargaining was no chore to
either woman, but a game, a pastime, a battle of wits and great fun. The aim of
the exercise was not to gain a few pennies; the aim of bargaining was the pleasure
of bargaining.
    (Mrs Salamone is a cherished, an
unforgettable person in my memory. One day, during the darkest part of the war,
there were reports in the newspapers that a consignment of oranges had arrived
and that people with green ration books — i.e. people with children — could buy
one pound of oranges per green book. W e had not seen an orange for a year, but
as we had no children yet, I did not even ask Mrs Salamone about the oranges.
When I finished my daily shopping for cabbages, turnips and sour apples, she
turned to me and asked me quite casually: “Would you like four pounds of
oranges?” My heart nearly stopped beating and I remarked timidly: “I thought
oranges were for babies.” Her eyes flashed and she shouted in a stentorian
voice: “Bugger the babies!” And gave me five pounds of oranges. Mutatis
mutandis, “Bugger the babies” has become the national slogan of Britain.)
    Back to bargaining. It is not only a
game, and fun; it is also a disease. Some people fight desperately for a little
glory; they need victories of some sort. A friend of mine, who lives in Australia, once described a scene to me with great vividness. He went on a cruise, visiting
Fiji, Tahiti, Tonga and other islands in the South Pacific. When passengers
went ashore in Tonga, a large number of small traders were waiting to offer
them their wares — mostly baskets and various bric-à-brac. People who go on
South Pacific cruises are, as a