The Old Man's Birthday by Richmal Crompton

Author:Richmal Crompton [Crompton, Richmal]
Language: eng
Format: azw, epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2015-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

PIPPA hated being called Pippa. Facetious people, meeting her in the street, said “Pippa Passes,” or asked her if all were right with the world. Occasionally she tried to persuade her acquaintances to call her by her real name, Philippa, but they never did so for longer than a day. She had by now resigned herself to Pippa with that faintly smouldering resentment with which she had resigned herself to most things.

She was sitting in her bedroom, sewing up the hem of her tennis dress, where her heel had caught in it the last time she had worn it. It was a creased and somewhat soiled dress of blue cotton. Pippa had wanted to have it washed this week, but mother had said that it would do to wear another time. “But it’s dirty,” Pippa had protested. “It’s not dirty enough to wash,” mother had replied firmly. “We have a large enough ordinary wash without you putting in extra things like that.” Mother seemed to think it waste of time to wash anything till you could hardly see it for dirt.

Pippa looked at her watch. Twenty minutes past two. More than half an hour before Daphne and Pen would be here. She must iron the dress when she had finished mending the hem, then perhaps it would look better.

On the bed lay her evening dress ready for tonight. She had been stitching on to it the spray of artificial flowers that they had bought this morning in Barrat’s. A sudden wave of anger surged over her. It was so hateful being poor. Pen and Daphne would be wearing smart evening dresses of ankle length, and she would have to wear that old white alpaca that she’d had for her confirmation two years ago. It had long sleeves and only reached a few inches below her knees, though it had been let down as far as it would let down. It pulled across her chest, too, and had that horrible yellow look that white gets when it has been washed over and over again. And, of course, it was badly ironed, the sash pressed into zigzag creases and the front looking as if it had been rough dried. Mother had ironed it. “Here it is,” she said when she’d finished. “It’ll do. . . . I haven’t time to do it any better.”

To Pippa that “It’ll do . . .” was like an irritant applied to an old wound. Since her early childhood she had heard mother saying “It’ll do” like that, whenever she couldn’t be bothered to finish something properly. It summed up in one short phrase the slovenliness, the “anyhowness,” the lack of care and method, that lay like a blight over the whole house. Ever since she could remember, Pippa’s attitude to it had been one of sullen, ineffective resentment. Occasionally she made blundering attempts to fight against it, but generally she surrendered to it without resistance. It was something too strong to be resisted.

At first, of

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