Free The Passing Bells by Phillip Rock

starched white apron and a white cap and all for very little money. He wanted all these shops to look exactly alike so that people would recognize them instantly. He thought up the idea of painting the exteriors a glossy white, and the first of all the subsequent hundreds of White Manor tea shops opened its doors on the northwest corner of Ludgate Circus on June 3, 1883, the shop at Holborn and Gray’s Inn Road opening two weeks later.
    â€œMen must eat, you see—that’s only nature. A man can go years on the same pair o’ boots, a woman can wear the same coat from one year’s end to the other, or ’ave the same ’ousehold furnishin’ for a lifetime, but they must eat, three squares a day and a cuppa char every few hours or so. That’s the natural thing about it . . . that’s why you can’t ’elp but make a bit o’ money at it, caterin’ to that natural fact, you see. Can’t ’elp it. . . . And the only trick to it is in givin’ just ordinary people decent grub at a fair price, because those are the people you want to sell, the people who’ve got to watch their pennies, see. . . . Because there’s a lot more of them kind of people than there are rich people, who don’t give a damn ’ow much they spend for a meal. I don’t care if they come into a White Manor or not—that is of no concern to me at all . . . not one bit . . . no. I built the White Manors with some bloke who clerks in an office in mind, with a shopgirl in mind. Yes. Only, of course, it grew a bit from that, you see. Got a bit more posh, you might say. Yes. There are White Manors where a navvy can hop in for his tea and two slices, and there’s the White Manors that got a ruddy six-piece orchestra and a duke couldn’t find fault with the Dover sole. But the price stays fair, you see. . . . That’s the whole bleedin’ trick—the price stays fair.”
    â€œIs my father about?” Lydia asked the pretty young receptionist.
    â€œHe went below, Miss Foxe,” the woman said. “But I can ring down and I’m sure we can locate him for you.”
    â€œOh, that’s all right. I’ll just wait in his office. But if you hear from him, tell him I’m in there or I’ll be waiting forever!”
    â€œOf course, Miss Foxe. And may I compliment you on your frock? It’s very lovely.”
    â€œThank you.”
    â€œMost becoming. Not English, surely.”
    â€œNo. A Paris design.”
    â€œOh, yes. It does show, doesn’t it?”
    Lydia could see the envy in the woman’s eyes. She was pretty, but her clothing was drab. A girl who worked in an office and lived with other girls who worked in offices in some crowded rooming house in Holborn. It was quite pathetic.
    She liked her father’s office. It was what she imagined a judge’s chambers would be like, or the study of a dean at Oxford. The walls lined with oak, the flooring oak as well, polished to a satin luster with a fine old Oriental carpet to add the proper touch of color and warmth to the room. Comfortable leather chairs. The grand old Wellington desk. A few pictures on the walls. A landscape by Constable. Two modern paintings of London by Walter Sickert. And there were photographs in silver frames, on the walls and on the desk. Photographs of herself, her mother, George Robey—a music hall comedian of whom her father was very fond—Herbert Asquith, and David Lloyd George. (Archie Foxe’s nearly bottomless bankbook had been of great help to the Liberal party in the general elections of 1906, and the prime minister and his chancellor of the exchequer would never forget it.)
    The framed enthusiastically inscribed photographs of the prime minister and Lloyd George made Lydia smile. She wondered what Lord Stanmore would do if he were in her shoes, standing alone with the images of those men confronting