The Town in Bloom Read Online Free PDF

of the village. (Frobisher was a music student, the other two were out- of-work actresses. Of course I eventually met them face to face but I always knew them better by their voices than their faces.) Lilian, seeing me through her open door and across her breakfast tray, asked me to notice if there were any finished-with trays already put out on the landing from which I could glean any unwanted pieces of toast. She said hers were unusually thin. I found three pieces and brought them back to her. She was looking very decorative in a blue chiffon bed-jacket.
    ‘One piece for me, one for Molly and one for you,’ she said, giving me her sudden, wide smile that was almost a grin. That smile did a lot for Lilian.
    When I took Molly her piece I found her wrapped in a fleecy white shawl. That was when I first saw her as an enormous baby.
    Soon after I got back to bed Charlotte brought my breakfast. She was a tall, boney Cockney to whose angular features the Club mobcap was most unbecoming. Though always very kind to me, her real devotion was reserved for Molly, who treated her with bullying affection and usually called her either ‘my faithful serf’ or ‘darling Charlotte the Harlot’, both of which names appeared to give great pleasure.
    Breakfast trays came up on a service lift but had to be carried some distance. I don’t recall feeling guilty that mine was carried by a woman about three times my age. And I feel sure Charlotte did not mind, though she didn’t get the sixpence charged by the Club for the service. Neither did she get tips; giving them was against Club rules. I fear mostof us took the almost invariable kindness of Club servants completely for granted.
    After breakfast I was initiated into the never-ending Battle of the Bathroom Door. There were plenty of ‘cold bathrooms’ where there was hot and cold water in the wash basin but only a cold tap for the bath. Access to cold bathrooms was free, but one could only get into a ‘hot bathroom’ by putting tuppence into a slot-machine on the door. Molly believed cleanliness should be free, always left bathroom doors open, and took advantage of any she found open. Lilian, while admitting the Club’s right to charge, objected to paying for baths which often turned out to be tepid. She went in for complicated mental bookkeeping and could be heard saying, ‘The bathroom door owes me three tuppences from last week,’ and so on. This might have indicated acute honesty on her part had she ever failed to take a free bath if she could get one. I adopted Molly’s system and never closed a bathroom door behind me – any more than, throughout my life, I have ever deliberately closed the door on leaving a pay-lavatory.
    My bath that day was certainly tepid, but even had it been hot I should have spent little time in it as I had plans for the morning. While reading the Stage , the previous evening, I had discovered that a new play was being cast at the Crossway Theatre. I intended to hurry there and present my introduction.
    It had been given to me by my aunt not long before her death. Some five years earlier, when Rex Crossway had brought his company to Manchester, she had met him at a lunch given in aid of some charity and made such an impression that he had driven out to our suburb to havetea with her. (She was an unusually pretty woman.) When I got back from school – late, after a music lesson – he had just left, and I well remember taking deep sniffs of the air he had so recently breathed and patting the back of the chair where, my aunt assured me, his head had rested. She looked very bright eyed when she told me how interested he had been in her amateur acting; he had said she must come and see him if ever she went on the professional stage. I think she might have been tempted to, had not her heart trouble already begun though I did not know this until much later.
    When she handed me the letter of introduction she said, ‘I think I can, without flattering