Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints Read Online Free PDF

excitement. My sister and I pogoed up and down appreciatively and as quietly as possible.
    From this day forth, Teddy’s birthday became the ultimate panacea.
    It’s freezing and there’s no heat and we all have double pneumonia— It’s Teddy’s birthday!!
    It’s been raining all weekend and we can’t go outside because we’ve all got cardboard in our shoes— It’s Teddy’s birthday!!
    Teddy’s head fell off— It’s Teddy’s birthday!!
    Teddy’s birthday never seemed to lose its sizzle. There was no limit to the number of days in a row we could celebrate this occasion with the required levels of verve and hysteria.
    One Saturday, Betty had an epiphany, or possibly an attack of cabin fever. Or maybe she had finally OD’d on Teddy’s birthday.
    “It’s time you kids saw the World!” she announced, grabbing her purse and throwing on her favorite garment, a white, flared mohair steamer coat with three-quarter-length sleeves.
    Betty’s new concept was inventive, bold, yet incredibly simple. We would go to the local bus station and take a round-trip ride to a neighboring town in the Thames Valley. Which town? Any town. What could be simpler? What could be more fun? The scenery was not much to look at, but with Betty’s unstoppable showbiz enthusiasm, how could it fail to be anything other than grippingly scintillating?
    And yet it wasn’t.
    It was completely and utterly horrible.
    Confined in our seats, all we could do was stare out the window. And at what? England, merry England, whizzing by in all its rain-soaked wretchedness. The vista was both boring and incredibly sad. Not even Betty, with her glass-half-full, manic optimism, could put a spin on the montage of monochromatic misery which confronted us. It is forever etched in my memory.
    So many appalling tableaux spring to mind! I distinctly remember seeing a middle-aged woman in plastic rain hat standing on a street corner looking as if she were about to burst into tears. Nearby a young mother, probably unmarried, is pushing a pram through dog poop while cursing at her mewling brat. I remember a group of little boys staring at something horrible squashed on the pavement, and groups of little girls trekking across a bomb site and looking furtively behind them as if a beast of some description were following them.
    “What the hell is wrong with these bloody English people?” said Belfast-born Betty, who lost no opportunity to contrast the joie de vivre of the Irish with the unmitigated dreariness of the English.
    Betty pointed out a red-faced man in Tyrolean hat. We all perked up a bit. Then we saw that he was sitting next to a homeless senior citizen who was cooling her gums with an ice lolly shaped like a rocket.
    England, merry England.
    The bus stopped every now and then. On one occasion, a bunch of unruly kids piled on. I recognized them from the orphanage. They stood on the seats with their muddy feet and screamed at each other.
    “Why can’t we do that?” I asked sincerely.
    “Because we are different,” replied Betty with queenly emphasis.
    The bus continued its journey through Kafka country. The view was dominated by factories, smokestacks, and municipal buildings. There were no rosy-cheeked milkmaids or herds of brown cows with silky lashes.
    The soot-blackened industrial sprawl was depressing enough, but worse still were the residential areas where the citizens of England lived out their short, untwinkly lives.
    The streets were so small that, even from the vantage point of our bus, we could see comfortably into the living rooms and bedrooms of the passing houses. I observed a worn-out, prematurely aged mother scrubbing the steps of her tension-racked row house. Inside a man was swatting large flies on his window with a rolled-up newspaper. Upstairsa demure lady wearing a twinset and pearls clutched a letter which obviously contained bad news.
    Next door a lonely secretary was eating beans on toast at six o’clock, illuminated by the