Jonny soon found that his duties humping guests’ luggage were as nothing to the nuisance of that lift door. It was almost always he who had to go up those stairs and close it. He counted the stairs. To the top there were sixty-seven of them. A guest might arrive with two heavy suitcases and be allotted Room 52. Jonny’s task was to take him and his luggage up in the lift. But nothing happened when he pressed the button. The guest couldn’t be expected to use the stairs, so Jonny would run up them, checking on each landing to see if the lift was there with its door open, and finally perhaps find it on the fourth floor. He would go down in the lift himself, take the guest and his luggage up, come out of the room and find the lift had gone. So down the stairs he would go to find the receptionist taking an angry call from a guest on the second floor who hadn’t been able to summon the lift. Jonny would go up again and find it stuck on the third floor with its inner door open.

He began to understand why he had got the job so easily, not to mention why no porter they had ever had before had stayed more than a month. One day he climbed those stairs forty-seven times in the eight hours he was there and twenty-two of them to the top. But all that was more or less bearable. People forgot to close the door, it was in most cases a simple failure to remember. One guest left that door open deliberately.

He was an American. What a businessman from Chicago who wore a Rolex watch and carried (or rather, Jonny carried) calfskin suitcases was doing in a dump like the Gilmore Hotel, I don’t pretend to know and Jonny certainly didn’t. His name was Tudorlap, Clarence Tudorlap. It’s strange enough to have stuck in my memory, for I noted nothing of Jonny’s story in my diary. In the public places of the hotel he was loud and vociferous in his condemnation of all things British. The United Kingdom was inefficient, old-fashioned, indeed stuck in a time warp, dirty and cold, and it was always raining. The heating didn’t work, the trains didn’t run on time, shop “clerks” were rude and officials ignorant.

Jonny, who I’d never thought of as especially patriotic and probably hadn’t thought of himself like that, suddenly couldn’t stand any more. He’d just run upstairs for the tenth time that day and come down to hear Tudorlap telling the receptionist that the best thing that could happen to this country would be for the United States to “nuke” it accidentally so that it “sank without trace.”

“You shut your fucking mouth,” said Jonny.

There were quite a lot of people standing about listening and a couple of them laughed in a shocked sort of way. A very good-looking girl Jonny described as “lovely, a real lady” said, “I couldn’t agree more. I don’t know why you people come here. We don’t want you.”