Free Around the World With Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis Page B

“Thank God for a little relief from this heat,” Auntie Mame said. I agreed with her wholeheartedly, but I noticed that quite a few people began casting nervous glances toward the heavens.
    Still the line moved on. But now the breeze became a wind. The long filmy skirts of the women’s dresses fluttered nervously, and more than one picture hat was sent skimming across the lawn.
    â€œOh, dear,” Lady Gravell-Pitt began, “I do hope that it’s not going to . . .” Her words were drowned out by a terrible clap of thunder. The wind mounted to gale velocity and I could feel the tails of my coat flapping out behind me. Lady Gravell-Pitt’s dowdy flowered georgette skirts were caught in a gust that sent them flying up to her waist, thus affording all of smart London a grisly view of the largest feet and the thinnest shanks in the whole British Empire.
    Then the rains came. Gently at first, in big, splattering drops, and then more wildly, whipped into a foam by the wind. Several men who had had the foresight to bring umbrellas chivalrously put them up to protect their ladies, but those that didn’t turn inside out instantly were wrenched free of their owners’ hands to go bouncing and bumping across the grass. The marquee above their Britannic Majesties flapped wildly and there was a definite feeling of exodus among the guests.
    A procession of shrill debutantes ran shrieking past us, hair plastered to their skulls, their white lawn dresses clinging to them like winding sheets. The lawn was now a morass of hats and umbrellas with people dashing every which way, stumbling, slipping, falling, and bumping into one another. I let go of my own hat just long enough to have a minor monsoon sweep it into the air. It landed just under the foot of a bishop who was hell-bent on getting to shelter.
    Then it happened. There was a long, low rumble, a flash, a crash, and a blinding something that hit the earth nearby with the force of a blockbuster. I heard somebody shout, “Oh, my God, it got Sir Hubert!” And then the crowd dispersed in real earnest. No British reserve about it. It was every man for himself and devil take the hindmost.
    Hermione bolted like a steer. I called out, “Auntie Mame!” and reached forward to take her arm, but I was knocked flat by the Dowager Marchioness Somebody. I was joined on the ground by a woman in blue who assured me that this sort of thing never happened in Capetown. We wallowed helplessly in the muddy grass for a moment, and by the time we were back on our feet there was no sign of Auntie Mame. It was raining so hard that it was almost impossible to see anybody.
    Auntie Mame’s rakish Rolls-Royce town car usually stood out in any crowd, with its sleek black paint job, its polished rivets and silver wire wheels, the jaunty angles of its squared-away corners. But at a Royal Garden Party it was just one among hundreds of big black cars. The chauffeurs weren’t having any too easy a time of it, either. Engines, thoroughly inundated from the cloudburst, refused to start; sodden
grandes dames
in soggy finery screamed like fishwives for their cars, but to little avail. The few cars that were operating sloshed and skidded on the pavement, sending up huge sprays of water. The collapse of the Axis was only narrowly averted when the German embassy’s big Mercedes-Benz locked bumpers with the Italian embassy’s Isotta-Frascini.
    It simply was not Ito’s element. In fact, Ito was nowhere to be seen. Lightning struck again, somewhere on the Palace grounds, and the panic reached a fever pitch. At that point I decided to trust to luck and public transportation. I raced out into the road and jumped onto the first bus that came along. It had gone several miles before I realized that it was headed straight for Putney.
    SOME TWO HOUR SLATER I ARRIVED AT AUNTIE Mame’s house via bus, tube, and taxicab. Although the rain had finally stopped, Grosvenor