12 
LAINU & WATER 
October iH, 1917. 
Shopping in Eastern Ports 
By William McFee 
Salonika. 
1HA\'l-: not gi\cn up all hope yet. I do believe still 
in that far-ofi, divine event, a letter. Of course I know 
the times are out of joint, but tliat should not entirely 
preclude a scrape of the ix-n. I inyself have had no 
.vritinj,' pajHrr for a week. This is a new writing block just out 
from England. .My mother makes raids on the Stores and 
si>nds me out some at intervals. For a hundred sheets like 
this the camarilla of Port Said want half-a-crown. So I do no 
business with them. 
They are a curious crowd, the retailers of a place like Port 
Said or Salonika in \rar time, and repay study. They are 
retiring. They do not advertise save the world-famous 
Orosdi-Back of Egypt and Macedonia, known to the British 
soldier as No-money Back, which i^ indeed the truth. Orosdi- 
]-5ack descril)es himself as " the W'hiteley of Salonika." No 
doubt. You approach his " Long " as the Chinamen say, 
by diving clown a precipitous back street like a muddy drain. 
He Sells everything, at a price, from bathing costumes to bell- 
shaped mosquito nets, trousers, footballs, hair-clippers, 
fountain-pH>ns, ice-cream machines, fruit essences, fly-traps, 
razor^ and Ford accessories. Perhaps he arrogates to himself 
the title of W'hiteley with some reason ; but for all that the 
British soldier regards him with bitterness and contempt. 
Whiteleyship of the Levant 
I do not deal with the gentleman myself. I cannot get over 
his name. Or rather I cannot place it. At one time I 
imagined it was a phonetic rendering of a North-British 
patronymic. Perish the thought ! Or how do 1 know he 
is not at heart an enemy of my country, this Orosdi-Back ? 
There was Stein's Oriental Stores, also competing for the 
W'hiteleyship of the Levant. For years on and oft' I dealt 
with Stein in Alexandria. Stein's was the only Department 
Stores east of Genoa ! About six months ago Stein's was sold 
in London as an enemy firm and is now Somebody Else's 
Oriental Stores. After two years! No matter. What I 
was going to say was— Stein's used to be cheap. You could 
get a suit of pyjamas (Egyptian cotton) for five shillings. 
But when I was there in the spring Stein's was terribly dear 
and poor in quality. There was not the same ;;'/) about the 
cash-girls and the lift attendants. Stocks were depleted. 
Nobody seemed to care. I was disillusioned. Yet all I had 
to flo was to walk up the street to another shop and do business 
with a competitor. 
But in Port Said or Salonika I can't do that. There are no 
competitors. It reminds me of the small town in the L'nited 
States, where every store is supplied with the same articles 
by the same giant Trusts and where the cowed dummy shop- 
keeper does not care whether you come or go. Of course I 
look at it from the passionate " standpoint of the purchaser. 
I feel all the time I am being robbed. When a pair of grass- 
slii)pers costing 2d. a pair in i)eace time runs up to lod.. I 
cannot find words to express my emotion. When a fountain 
pen costing 12s. 6d. in Alexandria, costs me a sovereign in Port 
Said, I pay because if I don't write I go crazy, but I have 
murder m my heart. But the shop-keeper is not disturbed 
He cares not whether I buy or go away. Pay or do without 
lie says in effect. Wliat is the consequence ? We all have 
everything possible sent out. I reckon that out of the innumer- 
able vessels visiting Port Said in -the year only a fraction per 
cent, of possible business goes to the pirates of Port Said Who 
is going to pay 100 per cent, more than the published price for 
a battered fly-specked cockroach-gnawed copy of a book one 
can ha\'e sent out from London, clean and sweet, for 5s. Who 
would pay 3s. 6d. for cotton abominations which are labelled 
" socks' while there is a single honest hosier's shop open in 
England ? I put this to the Port Said pirate sometimes 
as man to man, but he smokes his eternal cigarettes and is not 
impressed. I put it to the wretch who charged me 6id for 
a small Aqinla de Oro by Bock, a smoke which I used 'to get 
(full size) for SIX cents in Havana. He elevated his shoulders 
and turned away. Ha\e these people by any chance a point 
of view of their own ? They have. 
Their point of view is that they are losing money ' I admit 
It sounds incredible, for " thev " include (keeks Maltese 
Armenians, Italo-Arabians, German-Jews (nationalised Of 
course) Franco-Albanians and straight Hindoos. The world 
IS indeed in its last cataclysm if these gentry are losing money 
But in conversation with a gentleman, as the newspapers 
say, ' in a position to ha\e authentic information " I was 
apprised of the truly colossal demands made upon the importer 
1 do not pretend to know the ins and outs of fiscal matters 
and I may summarise it by telling you that when the cosmo- 
politan merchant in I'-gypt has paid all the insurance 
premia, und excess profits ta.xes and import duties and the 
terrifying freight which a patriotic British shipowner levies 
on the hapless creature, he musi levy an extortionate price in 
retail. Add to this he is expected to contribute to the support 
of refugees, of canteens and institutes. He is also expected to 
smile when those same refugees start making carpets and mats 
and embroidery (some of which J am sending you) and so 
undercutting him scandalously in trade! You see, there is 
always a point of view, if you only look at it. But do not 
imagine Messrs. Greekopoulos and Co. or Sandberg and Ras- 
catla or So-and-So's Levantine Stores are losing money. They 
are not built that way. And in war time there are more ways 
of making money than merely selling gimcracks over a counter. 
I imagine all sorts of things. I sec an abstracted expression 
on many of their faces. Things arc going on. , Money is 
spent like water in the cale-chantants round the corner from 
the Continental, and the Eastern Mxchange. Mysterious 
money ! Gentlemen with ridiculously small salaries fare 
sumptuously every day. They buy Aqnila dc O^os by the box '. 
And in every war. from Pharaoh's time down to the present 
day, it has l)een the same. 
i am writing this on watch before breakfast, for I am going 
ashore presentiy, writing with' all the noise of discharging 
going on, machines working, winches rattling, stewards pester- 
ing, and an air-raid up above, crowning all as you may say. I 
no longer stand gazing into the empyrean blue. \ soldier the 
other day showed me a piece of shrapnel which had come 
down near him I have worked out, allowing for air-friction, 
the exact speed at which that fragment, falling from a height 
of ten thousand feet, would strike my head. Even neglecting 
the explosive energy imparted to it by the charge, it is an im- 
pressive figure. I remain indoors, for I am not of the stuff 
of which heroes are made, f suppose it is because I was born 
a civilian and will probably die in that persuasion, but I 
woukl not run a ha'porth of that sort of risk for all the ribbons 
on the tunic of a commander-in-chief. I don't care a snap for 
Sir Oliver Lodge's astonishing discoveries about the spirit 
world. This, in the vernacular of the day, is the life. .• As ..a 
shipmate of mine said when I chaffed him for being restfes 
at night about submarines, "Dammit, I want to live. I \vant 
to see the end of the war." My sentiments exactly, so, as 
I said, I stop indoors during air-raids. 
That, however, is by the way. If you wish to think of mc 
as a hero, pray do. I am " writing under fire," as the news- 
papers say of some particularly bad minor poet who is at 
the front, and whose wife spends her time pestering editors 
to boost him now and again. Yes, I am writing under fire. 
Boom go the bombs ; Bang reply the guns all round. I am 
beginning to think that, like Moliere's immortal character, I 
have been behaving like a hero all my life and did not 
know it. 
Tommy 
But let me introduce you to my shipmate the engineer 
on night-duty. Never mind his name : it has a hard Northern 
tang, like his speech. We call him Tommy. Re and I are 
o d friends. We were shipmates on the Mmnbo-Jnmbo in the 
old days. He came out to us overland together with the rest 
of the fresh crowd. I don't suppose he will ever make a noise 
in the world, but to my mind he is a very gallant voung gentle- 
man. It was rather amusing to hear Tommy trying to put 
into words his impressions of his five days in Paris waiting 
to be forwarded. Imagine it ! But you "cannot, for you do 
not know his type. 
It IS a type of which the public in England is almost entirely 
Ignorant— I mean of a young mechanic from a comfortable 
middle-class home, often of yeoman ancestry, who has served 
his apprenticeship in a big, busv', undermanned works and 
then gone straight to sea. Tommy has had that entrancing 
experience. \\ hile serving his time he could never be sure of 
an evening or a Saturday afternoon. And his employers 
lielonged to the old Mancunian breed, the breed that reckon 
they can pay a lad for his immortal youth at so much an hour 
overtinie, the breed that recognise no duty to the young be- 
yond the factory-inspector's demand. The result" was that 
when he went to sea he had had no real youth-time at all. 
only work. He had no social life, no spoit. no ccmpiehension. 
Hp had been apprenticed not to life, but to engineering And 
he went to sea. b ^ -^ 
Now going to sea is all very fine in its way. but it is not 
conducive to broadening a youth's culture if it consists 
