Free Climbing the Stairs by Margaret Powell

stem and you gaze into each other’s eyes
over this glass of wine. You can really feel romantic like that. Love and wine go together but love and food don’t.
    Mind you, you never found any young men in those kind of teashops because no unattached males ever went there. You’d find them in Lyons if you wanted to pick up a couple, but never if you
went in those kind of semi-posh places.
    Still we had to give up the chase some time, didn’t we? We couldn’t devote our whole lives to looking for men.
    One particular Sunday we decided that we’d go to the Trocadero. It was a place that we’d only been in once before and we’d found it too expensive for us. It was the height of
luxury. They had very deep carpets and beautiful subdued lights, and there was a band that played sweet and low music.
    One of Gladys’s uncles had just got a job there as a trolley waiter and we thought we might get things a bit cheaper so we decided to chance it.
    It really was marvellous.
    They served tea in silver-plated teapots and instead of knives to cut your cake with you got those little forks with two prongs. I know it’s daft but nevertheless you feel that
you’re really moving with the high-ups when you don’t have a knife to eat your tea with.
    The only thing was that Gladys’s uncle struck a somewhat incongruous note in all these luxurious surroundings. I suppose it was because he was over sixty and he’d got flat feet, a
very red nose and he’d a scraggy neck so his Adam’s apple bobbled up and down in a very peculiar way the whole time he talked.
    Still when he brought the trolley to us I’d never seen such lovely cakes in my life – and he whispered to Gladys, ‘Have two for the price of one.’ And we did this two or
three times.
    The beauty of the Trocadero was that you didn’t have to hurry. In some of the teashops we went in we didn’t like to linger because somebody might be wanting the table. But in there
nobody seemed to bother. It was a sort of afternoon ritual. We sat there nearly two hours.
    And these teapots that they gave you. You could get four cups of tea for each of you if you kept sticking the hot water in. Of course eventually it came out almost like pouring it straight out
of the hot-water jug but that didn’t matter. We got four cups each so we sat there sipping away and listening to the band.
    And the toilets there! They were an absolute revelation. There were three of them and they were lovely ones. The walls stretched right up to the ceiling – not like those where
there’s no top or bottom. There were basins to wash your hands and as many towels as you wanted.
    So we really had a wonderful afternoon at the Trocadero.
    That evening Gladys suggested we went round to see her aunt – the wife of this uncle. They lived just off Ladbroke Grove.
    It was a terrible place. A house with five floors if you included the basement, and there were three families living on every floor. Four rooms on each floor. One family had two rooms and the
other rooms had one family each. The smell when you went in the passage was appalling. It was compounded of stale food, dirt, and the smell of sweaty humanity.
    Mind you, Gladys never turned a hair. It could have been the roses of Picardy for all she knew. Maybe coming from Stepney as she did she was used to it.
    I’ve seen some slummy places in my own home town but nothing to compare with that. You didn’t dare put your hand on the banister – it was coated in filth. Each particular
family was supposed to take turns doing their bits of the stairs down from one floor to another, but with three families on each floor there were quarrels as to whose turn it was and nothing ever
got done.
    Gladys’s aunt lived on the top floor. All they had in the way of water was one small sink on the landing halfway up and that had to do for those two floors. So that there were six families
using one tiny sink and one lavatory.
    The contrast between this and the