Free All That Glitters by Catrin Collier Page B

these forms.’ He held up a sheaf of papers. ‘If you’re still interested, hand them to me on your way out.’
    Jane put up her hand again. ‘What about the interview, sir?’
    ‘We’ll get in touch with those we want to see again.’
    ‘But …’ In touch! All she could think of was her lack of address. She could hardly write ‘Female Ward, Workhouse, Graig’, any more than she could ‘The most sheltered shop doorway in town.’ ‘... I thought we’d know today.’
    ‘Today?’ he sneered, ‘I’ve more important things on my plate to see to today than appointing an usherette. A new show is opening tonight.’
    She took the form and pencil he handed her and bent her head. Name – that was easy enough, so was age, but when it came to address she bit down hard on the pencil. Graig Avenue? She’d told the lie once today; it had to be Graig Avenue, she had no other option. Taking the form she walked over to the orchestra pit to use the wooden divide to press on. She wrote, ‘care of Miss Phyllis Harry, Graig Avenue, Graig, Pontypridd’. Education – she wrote down the name of her schools and the date of her labour certificate; she’d come close to the top of her class but Homes children were always taken out of school at fourteen. The parish couldn’t be expected to foot the bill for grammar school uniforms, not even for those who won scholarships. Previous jobs – she toyed briefly with the idea of inventing something, then remembered that stories could, and in a place like this, would probably be checked out. There was no point in writing out her life the way she would like it to have been, but she couldn’t risk putting down the truth. If the workhouse staff had been alerted to her absence, and the assistant manager contacted them, they’d track her down in five minutes and return her to the dosshouse or the ward. And after only an hour of wearing ordinary clothes she couldn’t bear the thought of returning to either.
    She chewed the end of the pencil to a soggy pulp while she deliberated. The only real option was a slightly revised version of the truth. Cleaning – and mindful of the comment about mending costumes – sewing work in homes. ‘Homes’ could mean many things. She didn’t have to say ‘Children’s Homes’ or ‘Central Homes’. They might even take them to be private. But the sentence she’d written didn’t fill one-tenth of the space they’d allowed for ‘previous jobs’.
    She glanced slyly over the shoulder of a girl standing next to her to see what she’d written. ‘Shop work, serving customers, taking money’ – she’d be doing all of that as an usherette, but no one had ever as much as shown her a penny in any of the homes she’d lived in, let alone allowed her to touch one. She licked the end of her pencil thoughtfully and looked around. None of these girls could want or need this job as much as her. Keeping her head low so no one could see what she was putting down, she began to write. A cacophony of sound blasted into the auditorium, causing the few girls who still lingered to jump.
    ‘Five minutes to start up!’ Norman Ashe shouted to the orchestra as he swept majestically through a side door. ‘Boy,’ he snapped his fingers at the youngest stagehand and shouted to him in a voice designed to carry over the loudest music, ‘run go the dressing rooms. Tell them I’m ready to rehearse the opening scene, though heaven only knows how we’re going to manage with the flats dangling all over the stage like this. It’s absolute bloody chaos.’
    ‘All forms to be handed to me,’ Joe Evans cried anxiously. Theatrical people were notoriously temperamental, and the manager wouldn’t thank him for upsetting the director of a show on opening night. ‘We’ll let the successful applicants know who they are as soon as we’ve made a decision. All forms to me, thank you. All forms …’
    Jane hung back, wanting to be the last to leave, and hopefully make an