12 
LAND & WATER October i8, 1917 
Shopping in Eastern Ports 
By William McFee 
Salonika. 
IHWF. not ?iven up all hope vet. l do believe still 
in that far-off'; divine event, u letter. Of course I know 
the times are out of joint, b<it that should not entirely 
preclude a scrape of the pen. I myself have had no 
writing paper for a week. This is a new writmg block ] ust out 
from England. Mv mother makes raids on the Stores ami 
sends 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. ii d f 
They are a curious crowd, the retailers of a place like Fort 
Said or Salonika in war time, and repay study. They are 
retiring. They do not advertise save the world-famous 
Orosdi-Rack of Eg>-pt and Macedonia, known to the British 
soldier as No-monev Back, which is indeed the truth. Orosdi- 
Back describes himself as " the Whiteley of Salonika. ^o 
doubt. You approach his " Long " as the Chinamen say, 
by diving down 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-pens, ice-cream machines, fruit essences, fly-traps 
razors and Ford accessories. Perhaps he arrogates to himself 
the title of Wliiteley 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 I know he 
is not at heart an enemy of my country, this Orosdi-Back ? 
There was Stein's Oriental Stores, also competing for the 
Whiteleyship 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 (Eg>'ptian cotton) for five shillings. 
But when I was there in the spring Stein's was terribly dear 
and pQor in quality. There was not the same zip about the 
cash-girls and the lift attendants. Stocks were depleted. 
Nobody seemed to care. I was disillusioned. Yet all I had 
to do 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 United 
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- 
slippers costing 2d. a pair in peace time runs up to lod., I 
cannot find words to express my emotion. When a fountain 
pen costing I2s. 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 in my heart. But the shop-keeper is not disturbed. 
He cares not whether I buj' or go away. Pay or do without, 
he 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 loo per cent, more than the published price for 
a battered fly-specked cockroach-gnawed copy of a book one 
can have sent out from London, clean and sweet, for 5s. Who 
would pay .',s. 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 Aquila de (Jro by Bock, a smoke which I used to get 
(full size) for six cents in Havana. He elevated his shoulders 
and turned away. Have 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 " they " include Greeks, 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 have authentic information," I was 
apprised of the truly colossal demands made upon the importer. 
I do not pretend to know the ins and outs of fiscal matters. 
and 1 may summarise it by telling you tliat when the cosmo- 
politan merchant in Eg>'pt has -paid all the insurance 
premia, and excess profits taxes and import duties and the 
terrifving .freight which a patriotic British shipowner levies 
on the hapless creature, he must 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 mat? 
and embroidery (sonie of which I 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- 
calla 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 see an abstracted expression 
on many of their faces. Things are going on. Money is 
spent like water in the cafe-chlantfints round the corner from 
the Continental, and the Eastern Exchange. Mvsterious 
money ! Gentlemen with ridiculously small salaries fare 
sumptuously every day. They huy Aquila de Oroa by the box I 
And in every war, from Phara,oli's time down to the present 
day, it has been 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. A soldier the 
other day showed me a piece of shrapnel which had come 
down near hiuT 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 i^ by the charge, it is an im- 
pressive figure. I remain . indpor^ for I am not of the stuff 
of which heroes are made. I' suppose it is because I was born 
a civilian and will probably die in that persuasion, but I 
would 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 restless 
at night about submarines, "Dammit, I want to live. I want 
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 me 
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 Moli.ere'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 Nfirthern 
tang, like his speech. We call him Tommy. He and I are 
old friends. We were shipmates on the Miimbo-Jumbo in the 
old days. He came out to us overland together with the rest 
of the "fresh crowd. 1 don't suppose he will ever make a noise 
in the world, but to my mind he is a very gallant young 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 tj'pe, 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, busy, undermanned works and 
then gone straight to sea. Tommy has had that entrancing 
experience. W hile serving his time he could never be sure of 
an evening or a Saturday afternoon. And his employers 
belonged to the old Mancunian breed, the breed that reckon 
they can pay a lad for his immortal youth at so much an hour 
overtime, 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 sport, no comprehension. 
He had been apprenticed not to life, but to engineering. And 
he went to sea. ,1 
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 
