Love, Let Me Not Hunger Read Online Free PDF Page B

functions were likewise as things detached. She washed it as best she could, standing before sinks disgusting with the grime of former occupants. For she herself had a passion and a craving for cleanliness even though in her environment she had never had the opportunity wholly to achieve it. She had never been in a proper bathroom to luxuriate in a hot tub with scented soap, nor had she ever viewed her own body naked in a full-length mirror, which was perhaps yet another reason why she was so much a stranger to it, why what happened to it did not seem to matter greatly one way or another. She ate, she worked, she slept, and was starved of everything else: love, affection, beauty, daintiness. She could pick up a stray cat, cuddle it in her arms, kiss it, squeeze it, but not keep it. She had no home.
    Thus, from her seventeenth to her twenty-first year she passed through the factory towns of the Midlands and their grim, grey, smoke-begrimed rooming-houses, acquiring more toughness, more gutter wisdom, and hardening the defensive crust she had grown.
    Yet she neither despaired nor pitied herself, nor made judgements, nor nurtured hates. She was too busy looking for jobs where she could work without being expected to whore for her wages with the boss on the side.
    One night she found herself in Warrington, seventeen miles from Liverpool, down and out. She had lost a job dish-washing in a cafe for refusing to join the Greek and his wife who owned it in a bed party. Her money was used up; she had no further credit with her landlady and had been turned out. She carried her belongings in a cardboard suitcase; she had had no supper; it was after eleven o’clock. She had been walking the streets hoping to come across a sign in some shop or restaurant: GIRL WANTED or CHAR WANTED . She thought she would go to the railway station and sit. She often did that when she had no place else to go. One could stay there as though waiting for a train or meeting someone and doze through a night.
    She passed the darkened entrance and façade of the Regent Palace Theatre, a variety house which a half-hour before had disgorged its patrons. The street light illuminated the billboard outside the theatre showing a comic-looking tramp in tattered garments and clown make-up, with a huge red bulb for a nose, blubbery lips, a red wig and, beneath arching, painted, red eyebrows, eyes that seemed to be both surprised and amused as he looked up at a black bird perched impertinently upon his shoulder. The poster said: JACKDAW WILLIAMS AND RAFFLES. THE ONE AND ONLY. HERE THIS WEEK .
    The grotesqueness of the picture brought a momentary smile to the corners of her mouth, and then she passed onwards along the street that was now empty and deserted.
    A man stepped out from a dimly lighted alleyway that led to the stage door of the theatre. Wrapped in a heavy overcoat, his collar turned up, a felt hat perched upon his head, he loomed enormously over the girl, who almost ran into him. He stood there for a moment, and she did not even notice the bird sitting on his shoulder.
    He exclaimed, “Oop—sorry,” in a matter-of-fact tone. But then his voice changed and he said, “Hello, luv.”
    Rose tried to dodge around him but he blocked her path and said, “Hey now, don’t be in such a hurry. How much?”
    She replied evenly and without offence taken, “I’m not selling it.”
    In the rays from the light shining over the stage door she saw a tall middle-aged man with a large nose, somewhat pendulous lips, and curious eyes with the lids drawn down at the corners.
    The man said, “Well now,” but made no further attempt either to dispute or challenge her statement. However, he did continue to stand in her way while he inspected her. He took note, then, of the thin, shabby coat, the beret pulled down over her hair, the worn shoes and the cheap suitcase, but above all the droop of the shoulders. “Lost your job?” he enquired.
    “What if I have?” The voice was