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  ‘Looking after you, do you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, other people have done things for us—Miss Felton, for instance. So we like to have a chance to do things for other people. And we like you—we’re interested in you.’

  ‘But why should you bother about us? You’re different sort of folk—you’re clever; you’re on the stage. Why should you be interested in—in someone the like of me?’

  ‘My dear Zillah, we are very inexperienced, very out-of-work actresses, and we come from families very much the same as yours, except that ours are townspeople, not country people.’

  ‘But what can we do to thank you? And my dad was so rude to you the other day.’

  ‘The best way you can thank us is by trying to use your gifts to better advantage than going into Woolworth’s—’

  Zillah smiled shyly. ‘I’ve changed my mind now. I want to be just like you three are.’

  ‘I hope you’ll be a great deal more fortunate than we have been lately,’ said Sandra wistfully.

  Next day Miss Felton came over to see them, and the farmer and his wife were full of praises for the three girls.

  ‘You’ve made a conquest here,’ Miss Felton told them.

  ‘A very tricky one,’ commented Lyn. ‘You should have seen our first welcome into the household.’

  ‘Well, how much longer will you be staying here?’ asked Miss Felton, ‘because I can bring you some more clothes and things over, if you like.’

  ‘No, don’t bother,’ said Lyn. ‘We haven’t got much else, have we? And we’re only going to be needed here a couple more days.’

  The invalids kept up a constant demand to be allowed up, but Sandra told them firmly, ‘You can get up the day after tomorrow at tea-time.’

  ‘We’ll give them a gala tea,’ she told the others, and was up early that morning, baking madly and cleaning everything in the kitchen until it shone.

  ‘Gosh,’ grumbled Vicky, as she scrubbed the stone flags, ‘let’s hurry up and get back into rep. It isn’t such hard work.’ As it drew near four o’clock, the time that Sandra had told the patients they might get up, she set out on the table the products of the morning’s baking. Crisp loaves—the first she had ever attempted—two fruit flans, an apple pie—in fact, a tea identical with the one they had had on their first visit to the farm.

  ‘Honestly, we’re not giving the poor beggars a chance,’ laughed Vicky. ‘What with your Bible reading, Lyn, and Sandra’s cooking, they won’t be able to enjoy having a good disapproval of us any more.’

  ‘It’s a jolly good job Sandra can cook,’ said Lyn. ‘Can you imagine the muddle we’d have been in without her?’

  ‘My only talents would hardly help matters along, would they?’ said Vicky pensively, then burst into a fast can-can round the kitchen.

  ‘Stop it,’ hissed Sandra. ‘Here they come.’

  Rather shyly the Pendrays came in. The girls were touched to see that Mr Pendray had on what was obviously his best suit, with a high starched collar and black tie. Mrs Pendray was wearing the same ‘best black’ that she had worn at the previous tea-party, and Zillah wore a hideous velveteen dress, which, however, did nothing to destroy the effect of her startling beauty.

  ‘Now you sit near the fire, and don’t bother about anything, Mrs Pendray, except to get on with your tea,’ said Sandra, picking up the large earthenware teapot. At first there was a little constraint, as sitting round the tea-table like this reminded them all so forcibly of the first time they had all sat there. The Pendrays were obviously afraid that the same subject would be raised, but the girls chatted on about the farm, influenza, the school and even told them the story of how they happened to be with Miss Felton. Zillah listened open-mouthed, laughing occasionally, and then looking doubtfully at her parents to see if they approved. They did approve. Mrs Pendray put in a ‘Well, I never…’ every now and then, and at the end of their story Mr Pendray slapped the table with his open palm, making them all jump.

  ‘Well, good luck to you, say I. Good luck to you…’

  He looked round the room challengingly, as though expecting someone to gainsay him. ‘I don’t hold with this theatre business, but you’re a bunch o’ plucky youngsters, I will say that.’

  Lyn smiled a satisfied smile and changed the subject.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid we must leave you and go back to Miss Felton. Now you do all feel well enough to carry on, don’t you?’

  They assured her of that.

  ‘And Zillah, when will you be back at school?’ Sandra wanted to know.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Zillah promptly.

  ‘Oh, no. Not as soon as that. But by the beginning of next week I should think you’ll be all right,’ said Sandra. ‘In time for the dress rehearsal of the play—’

  ‘Are you excited about going to Edinburgh, Zillah?’ asked Lynette innocently.

  Zillah looked at her parents and said softly, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘She’ll have to get rid of that cold before she can go, won’t she, Mrs Pendray?’ hazarded Sandra. The mother and father looked at each other.

  ‘Indeed she will,’ thundered Mr Pendray, intent on being dominant to the last. ‘You’ll not set foot on the road for Edinburgh, my girl, unless it’s better.’ And another victory was won.

  But the next morning came the real triumph. They were all ready to depart at mid-morning, and were just having a cup of cocoa, and trying to persuade Mrs Pendray not to do too much on her first day out of bed, when Mr Pendray put on his overcoat and announced his intention of walking down the lane with them.

  ‘Oh, no,’ cried Sandra, ‘there’s a terrible cold wind.’ But he insisted, and after they had said goodbye to Mrs Pendray and Zillah, he escorted them several hundred yards down the lane.

  ‘You think my girl is a likely girl then?’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Very,’ said Lynette.

  He looked hard at her, then stammered, ‘Well—I was wondering, like—if you’d tell me the address of that place, the school place—where you went to…’

  After he had left them, they ran the rest of the way down to the main road, chortling with glee, dancing the snow-flake dance in and out of the muddy ruts of the lane.

  14

  ENCOUNTER

  The girls soon began to feel as though they had lived in the country all their lives.

  ‘Wouldn’t London seem strange after this?’ remarked Sandra, as they walked home along a winding lane one day.

  Lyn sniffed at the fresh scent of the air, with an early mist rising. ‘D’you know what I’d like to smell at the moment?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The smell of Leicester Square Underground Station at rush hour. People—and fog—and smoke—and—’

  ‘Lyn!’ they shouted her down. ‘How disgusting!’

  ‘And I was being so open-air girl…’ said Sandra. ‘How dare you spoil it.’

  But however they felt about it, the country air and wholesome food was doing them a lot of good. They began to get more colour in their cheeks, and Vicky had to make an extra hole in her belt.

  ‘Lenny,’ she told the housekeeper, ‘your cooking is ruining my waist-line. This can’t go on.’ And she started getting up earlier in the morning to do a few limbering up exercises.

  The three shows that the girls were handling soon began to display a marked improvement, and through teaching, the girls found they were learning a lot themselves.

  ‘I see my cast making mistakes and I tick them off about it, only to realize that I do exactly the same things myself very often,’ confessed Lyn.

  ‘And how is your protégée, Sandra?’ inquired Miss Felton.

  ‘Fine. She’s back at school, and quite recovered, more lively than anyone has seen her before. I’ve given her a small speaking part that someone dropped out of, and she’s doing it very nicely.’

  ‘Good,’ said Miss Felton. ‘Yes, you’ve certainly worked wonders in that household.’r />
  ‘We did everything but milk the cows,’ laughed Sandra, ‘and I think Lynette was ready to tackle that.’

  Miss Skate continued to idolize Lyn. She often invited her back to her bungalow for a cup of coffee while she waited for the bus, and there Lyn would sit helpless under the flow of conversation that gushed from the mouth of her hostess. The bungalow was an absolute museum of knick-knacks, each of which had a long history attached. She had three cats called Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, who sat in the best chairs while their mistress and visitor squatted on hard cane stools. Miss Skate had many other hobbies besides amateur theatricals. She made sprays of artificial flowers which were very popular at the parish bazaars, she informed Lyn, and she also decorated screens with cut-out figures of crinoline ladies in flower gardens. There were piles of books on every piece of furniture, and oddments from her various crafts lay about on the floor.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’m very busy,’ she told Lyn. ‘There’s always something to do. Art is a very claiming companion, as you know. If it’s not my flowers it’s my screens, and then there are rehearsals most evenings, and I play the organ in church on Sundays. And then I have to keep up my reading, you know, to keep abreast of the times. And also—this is my guilty secret…’ she giggled coyly, ‘I write a little poetry!’

  ‘Really? How interesting. I should love to hear—’

  But before Lynette could finish the sentence the sheaf of scrawled verses had appeared and Miss Skate was reading them aloud in her flutelike voice. They were terrible, and Lyn had to struggle to keep a straight face, but she liked Miss Skate and did not wish to offend her, so when they were finished she said, ‘Oh, very interesting. All of them. Most interesting.’

  Miss Skate was delighted. ‘Oh, you dear creature! You say just the right encouraging word. Other people might say they were beautiful—or pretty—and things like that—but that is not what I’m aiming at. Interesting—that’s what I like to hear.’

  Lyn returned home in a sober frame of mind.

  ‘Preserve me,’ she thought, ‘from ever becoming an old fossil like that. But there—I suppose she’s happy—happier than most.’

  About this time, Miss Skate thought fit to get up a concert in her village, and was very anxious for the three girls to each do a turn.

  ‘It’ll probably be agony, but we might as well do our party pieces,’ said Lyn to the others.

  ‘I think it will be fun,’ said Vicky. ‘It’s ages since we’ve done anything like that. I shall dance, of course, but what?’

  ‘Something that’s easy to dress,’ Sandra reminded her, ‘as we haven’t got any costumes here.’

  ‘What on earth shall I do?’ Lyn wanted to know.

  ‘Recite, I suppose. When people recite at concerts, everyone knows it’s because they can’t sing or dance.’

  ‘I shall sing something light, and then something religious,’ Sandra announced. Finally she decided on a little French song, and Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’.

  ‘But what shall I wear?’ she groaned.

  ‘It’s a choice of slacks or tweed skirts,’ laughed Lyn.

  ‘If only…’ began Vicky, who was about to say, ‘If only we were at home,’ when she remembered that even had they been at home, their entire wardrobes were in the grubby hands of Mrs Mintey.

  ‘Oh, what shall I dance—’ groaned Vicky.

  ‘What was that you were doing in the kitchen at the farm? It looked rather fun.’

  ‘That? Oh, a sort of can-can—yes, I could do it to the cancan from Orpheus in the Underworld.’ She hummed it under her breath, indicating the dance steps with her fingers. ‘But I couldn’t possibly dress it…’ Her eyes wandered thoughtfully round the room, and came to rest on a flame-coloured silk lampshade that hung on a standard lamp. It was of beautiful material, and had a gold fringe around the bottom.

  ‘I say,’ she cried. ‘I wonder if Miss Felton would lend me that?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ cried Sandra. ‘With white crêpe paper bodice, and petticoats, and long black stockings, and some feathery sort of head-dress, you’d be a real can-can girl.’

  Miss Felton was as generous as ever when it came to lending the very lampshade from her lounge. She also lent Sandra a beautiful black evening dress which made her look extremely tall and grown-up.

  ‘Clothes… How lovely they are!’ she sighed, sweeping round the room in it, glorying in the feel of a long rustling skirt after weeks of slacks or tweeds.

  ‘But what is Lyn wearing?’ asked Miss Felton, turning to where Lyn was sprawled on the floor over a volume of Shakespeare, looking for speeches suitable for recitation.

  ‘Oh, any old thing,’ said Lyn. ‘Listen, I think I’ll do the sleepwalking scene of Lady Macbeth’s, and—and a bit of Portia, perhaps—’

  ‘But you can’t do it in slacks,’ urged Sandra.

  ‘No,’ said Lyn vaguely, ‘I want some sort of draperies—’

  ‘You shall have them,’ promised Miss Felton, and marched out of the room. A second later she was back, carrying a large oyster-coloured velvet curtain that they recognized as belonging to her bedroom.

  ‘The very thing,’ cried Sandra and soon the three of them were clustered round Lynette, pinning and draping as though she were a model in a shop window.

  ‘And when I do the Lady Macbeth, I’ll put this bit over my head, like this…’

  On the night of the concert, they were busy dressing in the tiny little dressing-room of the British Legion hall, when there was a knock at the door. It was Zillah.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ said Sandra.

  ‘We’ve come over for the concert,’ she smiled. ‘When Dad heard that you three were in it, there was no stopping him.’

  ‘How nice of him,’ said Lyn. ‘Well, I hope he’ll like it.’ She looked round the dressing-room.

  ‘Oh, dear…’ she said suddenly. Sandra, in the black dress, looked the picture of propriety, but Vicky, who was just suspending her black stockings under her brief frilly skirt, reminded her of Mr Pendray’s strict views.

  ‘Vicky!’ she cried ‘Mr Pendray!’

  Vicky looked in the glass. ‘Gosh, yes,’ she said, ‘I look like a painted hussy, don’t I? Whatever shall I do?’ She wiped off a little make-up, but that didn’t seem to help.

  ‘And that dance—oh, Vicky, you can’t—it’ll just finish off Mr Pendray.’

  ‘I’ll tone it down,’ declared Vicky.

  Zillah looked at her. ‘Dad won’t like that get-up, I’ll warrant.’

  They looked at one another in despair. It was almost time for the curtain, and Vicky was the second to appear. It seemed ridiculous to alter her dance just for one member of the audience, but…

  ‘Oh, Vicky…’ moaned Sandra. ‘And after all the hard work we’ve put in on Mr Pendray…’

  At that moment there was a knock on the door, and one of the helpers came in with a tray of cups of tea.

  ‘Just to encourage the performers,’ she smiled. Vicky looked at her as though she was a heavenly apparition. The lady helper was wearing a rather antiquated waitress’s garb, with a little starched cap.

  ‘Take off your dress,’ rapped out Vicky. The astounded lady was stripped of her grey dress and white collar, cap, cuffs and apron before she could argue.

  ‘Now, Zillah, run out to the accompanist and tell her she is to play my number three times as slowly as we rehearsed it.’

  The audience were charmed by the demure little dance of a red-headed Quaker girl, to a strange slow little tune that no-one connected with anything so frivolous as a can-can.

  Mr Pendray clapped and nodded his approval, while a rather bewildered lady helper in a frilly skirt and long black stockings prepared to serve tea.

  After Miss Skate’s successful concert, the children and grownups with plays to perform for the festival set to work in earnest. Lyn, Sandra and Vicky worked hard and long, coaching and encouraging.

  As the contest drew nearer, the excitement among the four companies w
as unbounded. Apart from all thought of the actual competition, the idea of the long journey to Edinburgh was thrilling them. Most of the children had never been more than a few miles out of their native villages, and thought of Scotland as almost a different continent.

  Their school teachers took advantage of the situation and taught them Scottish history and geography while their interest was so great. The grown-ups were hardly less excited, and discussed how much luggage they would need for their two days’ stay, and what their employers had said when they asked for the time off. The Blue Doors almost wished that they would be able to go up as well, but they knew that this was impossible as they could not afford it. Each week they sent the boys the bulk of the salary that Miss Felton paid them, receiving in return lengthy screeds from the boys, written in Nick’s Caff. As there was no news, the letters contained long descriptions of the restaurant and its customers, until the girls could smell the greasy odour of the place, almost hear the clang of the door-bell and the sound of the taxis outside.

  ‘I feel so sorry for them,’ said Vicky one day. ‘They’re trying so hard and getting nowhere.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Sandra optimistically. ‘Things seem to be going on like this for ages, but something will happen suddenly—out of the blue—you’ll see.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ said Lyn. ‘I wish I could think so.’

  As the end of their stay with Miss Felton approached, they began to feel almost frightened. Tumbling straight into a job as they had done made them dislike the thought of trekking off again begging for work. But the search must still be financed, for time was slipping by. It was early Spring now, and the snow-drops that they passed on their journeys had given way to crocuses and the very first primroses. The days of the Blue Door Theatre seemed very far behind them. And then came the final dress rehearsals—chaotic—all of them. Two school children went down with influenza on the eve of the great day, and their parts had to be cut; and at the rehearsal of the adult murder play, a blank cartridge from a pistol exploded too near the leading lady’s face, frightening her considerably and singeing her eyelashes.