All That Glitters Read Online Free PDF Page A

Four years on she could still recite the sequence of acts off by heart. Gyto the juggling clown, Pooples the performing dog, the flying …
    ‘I have to call in a café. We’re out of bread,’ the woman announced.
    ‘I thought you were going to send the girl.’
    ‘How could I when she knew we intended to take her back? She would have run off with the money.’
    They walked on past the New Inn and the deserted entrance to Market Square.
    ‘Girl!’
    Tearing herself away from Gwilym Evans’s window display of ladies’ summer fashions, Jane caught up with them at the other end of Market Square. A little further on she saw a café set behind an ornate fountain; to the right were two massive doors, one sporting a poster headed TOWN HALL. Jane stared at the lettering. So that’s where she’d seen the circus? The woman disappeared into the café, the man inched towards her. Afraid he’d touch her, she walked into the café and stood behind his wife.
    ‘Mrs Bletchett, how are you today?’ A dark young man with a foreign accent leaned over the counter.
    ‘Fair to middling. I’ll have four large loaves if you can spare them.’
    ‘Business must be good,’ he said cheerfully as he heaped the loaves in front of her.
    ‘Full house, thanks to the pits reopening and people flocking in from all over the country looking for work.’
    ‘Anything else?’ The man, taller and better-looking than any of the porters in the Graig, winked at Jane as he flashed a wicked, insincere smile at Mrs Bletchett. Jane lowered her eyes. She’d seen and heard enough reactions and comments as they’d walked through the town to know that her workhouse dress stuck out like a sore thumb. Still, now she was in work she’d earn money. More to add to the shilling and eleven pence concealed beneath her dress. She’d be able to buy herself something pretty like the blue cotton the woman who’d shouted at her had worn.
    She turned to avoid the man’s eye. On the back of the café door was a poster advertising a revue in the Town Hall: All London Girls .
    She studied the sketch of three striking blondes wearing nothing but beautifully arranged curls and ostrich feather fans that concealed what her housemother in the Homes would have called ‘the naughty bits’. Jane was wondering just how London girls differed from Welsh ones when she saw another notice. Small, handwritten, it was pinned below the poster.
    VACANCY.
    USHERETTE/CONFECTIONERY SALES ASSISTANT. APPLY ASSISTANT MANAGER, TOWN HALL, 10.00 AM PROMPT, MONDAY.
    Monday – tomorrow – there was a chance of getting a job in a theatre; the same theatre she’d sat and watched the circus in.
    A woman wearing a hat trimmed with blue feathers strolled past the open doorway arm-in-arm with a younger woman dressed in the uniform of a waitress.
    ‘I can’t see any decent girl crossing the threshold of the Town Hall again, let alone applying for that vacancy,’ she snorted in a loud voice. ‘Not with the type of show the Council has allowed the management to bring into the town. I don’t know what they think they’re doing, turning Pontypridd into Sodom and Gomorrah.’
    It was then Jane noticed the small print below the word REVUE.
    All nudes straight from London stage success. Compere, and singer, Pontypridd’s own Haydn Powell. Fresh from a stormingly successful spring season in Torquay.
    Nudes – naked girls on stage? Jane continued to stare at the poster in bewilderment.
    ‘That’s the bread bought.’ The brown paper and string carrier bag was dumped in Jane’s arms. ‘And you can stop gawping when you like,’ Mrs Bletchett admonished when she saw what Jane was looking at. ‘In my experience girls like you have enough ideas along those lines, without getting any more from the theatre.’
    Red-faced, Jane whirled around. The handsome counter hand caught her eye, gave her a smile and another wink. She tossed her head high in the air, for once forgetting her cropped,