Free Climbing the Stairs by Margaret Powell Page A

Trocadero!
    I said to Gladys, ‘Surely your uncle can afford a better place than this?’ She said that he probably could if he stuck a job but he drank a lot, which accounted for his red nose.
Apparently he was always drinking and losing his job and I suppose that was what they were reduced to. It was a terrible hole! I didn’t know how anyone had the spirit to keep clean there.
    Gladys’s aunt had been in domestic service and she bitterly regretted ever leaving it. She’d loved the place where she worked. And she was delighted to have an audience of two who
themselves were in service. She was on about Sir and Madam and Master Gerald and Miss Sarah. I thought it was absolutely stupid. After all those years still calling the people you worked for Sir
and Madam and Master and Miss. It just shows you, doesn’t it – there is a type of person who likes domestic service? They feel there’s a certain prestige attached to serving the
high and mighty.
    While I was there she got out some newspaper cuttings about this Miss Sarah who was in the suffragette movement and I was interested in this.
    This Miss Sarah wasn’t one of the more militant ones – not like the Pankhurst woman. She didn’t go around setting fire to churches, slashing valuable paintings or putting
lighted paper through people’s letter boxes. But there were a couple of newspaper photos of her. In one of them she’d got a policeman’s helmet stuck on her head and in the other
she was there with a lot of other women debagging a policeman.
    I must say I was surprised because I hadn’t realized that these suffragettes came from well-to-do homes. I couldn’t think that people who’d got a comfortable home and
didn’t have to work could really feel there was anything they ought to fight for.
    My mother was a very strong-minded woman – what you would call a militant woman – but she never bothered about the rights of women. So long as she’d got the vote in her home
– and, believe me, she had – she couldn’t care less about the political vote.
    Some Sunday evenings Gladys and I used to go to Lyons Corner House which was a very lively place. The only snag was that we had to leave by half past nine and really it was only beginning to
warm up then. We used to get there about eight o’clock. We’d choose the cheapest thing on the menu – egg on toast or sometimes beans on toast. And then we’d perhaps have a
glass of shandy or if we were very daring and we weren’t too hard up we’d have a glass of wine.
    There used to be two women who went there regularly. We saw them every time we went. They were about thirty – very sophisticated type of women – hair cut very short. They used
mascara, lipstick, and a dead-white powder. I suppose in a way they looked like clowns, but we didn’t think so.
    The most daring thing was that they used to smoke cigarettes. All right, Gladys used to have a puff now and then up in the bedroom that we shared. I’d keep cave and we’d open the
window and flap a towel about if we thought anyone was coming. But to smoke in a public room – and not only that, they used long holders too, like Pola Negri on the pictures – we
thought was the height of sophistication.
    We used to try to get a seat near the band if we could because it gave a sort of cachet. Everyone tried to get there. It was an eight-piece outfit.
    After we’d been going there about half a dozen times we got to know some of the players and we thought they were marvellous. They had a kind of uniform of black, very tight-fitting
trousers with a red stripe down the side and red jackets with black facings. And we found them very attractive-looking indeed. And of course we were flattered that they took any notice of us.
    Two of them in particular we had our eyes on. Fortunately we didn’t each have our eyes on the same one. Gladys was keen on the one who played the drums, and the one who played the piano I
thought would do all right for me.