It Ends with Revelations by Dodie Smith

Author:Dodie Smith [Dodie Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780335261
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 2012-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

Snow on a Warm August Afternoon

But could she? Could she even bring herself to try?

He said persuasively, ‘Come on, now. And remember I want to know all about you, as well as about your relationship with Miles. It’s an extraordinary feeling to be so much in love with a woman I know so little about. I’m like those people who say they know nothing about painting but know what they like – only I want to find out why I like.’

‘Perhaps you’ll just find out that you like me less,’ – and remembering her past self she thought this very possible. Well, that might be no bad thing; not that she wanted him to stop being attracted by her, merely to stop wanting to marry her. Anyway, she’d try to be completely honest. ‘I’d better begin with my despised girlhood,’ – despised, certainly, by her and if anyone had not despised it, that fact hadn’t come to her notice.

‘Go back further. What were you like as a child?’

‘Horrible, I should think, and generally miserable. Oh, perhaps not really miserable, just deadly bored and uncomfortable and so often cold. My father was a stage manager, usually on tour; in those days – I mean when I was really small – there were still a good many touring companies. My mother and I trailed round with him. I’ve heard old pros describe theatrical lodgings as cosy but they never struck me that way. And there were the dreary Sunday train calls.’

What she called her camp-following days had ended when she had to go to school – ‘You can’t think how nasty cheap boarding schools can be.’ And even the cheapest cost more than her parents could well afford so that twice, when her father had stage-managed West End shows, she’d been brought home (always theatrical digs) and sent to the nearest day school – ‘Then off they’d go on tour again, and once to Australia, and I’d go back to boarding school – a different one, the one I’d left not being keen on such an impermanent boarder. I doubt if I’m much better educated than gipsy children.’

She had left school for good at sixteen, to work as her father’s assistant and also keep house for him, as her mother had died. ‘I probably didn’t miss her as much as I thought I did. Perhaps I just thought I was entitled to feel forlorn and motherless. And from seeing too little of my father, I then saw too much. He was quite a kind man but short-tempered, also he was an old-fashioned stage manager and thought it necessary to bully people and use foul language. The comic thing was that he could switch the foul language off whenever he was with my mother and me. But once I was in the theatre, working for him, he didn’t think it necessary to. I found it humiliating when he swore at stage hands in front of me – and sometimes at me in front of them.

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