“It was gorgeous, Mummy, but of course it was made gorgeous by Lalla. I do like her. I hope her Aunt Claudia will let me go to tea. Lalla’s afraid she won’t, and she’s certain she won’t let her come to tea with us.”
“You never know. Nana says she has her days, and she’s going to try telling her about you on one of her good days.”
Harriet said nothing for a moment. She was thinking about Lalla, Nana and Aunt Claudia, and mixed up with thinking of them was thinking about telling her father, Alec, Toby and Edward about them. Suddenly she stood still.
“Mummy, mustn’t it be simply awful to be Lalla? Imagine going home every day with no one to talk to except Nana, and she knows what’s happened because she was there all the time. Don’t you think that to be the only one, like Lalla, is the most awful thing that could happen to anybody?”
Olivia thought of the three cars and the chauffeur, and Lalla’s lovely clothes, and of the queer food the Johnsons had to eat at home and the shop that never paid. Then she thought of George and the boys, and the fun of hearing about Alec’s first day on the paper round, and how everybody would want to know about Harriet’s afternoon at the rink. Perhaps it was nicer to laugh till you were almost sick over the shop-leavings you had to eat than to have the grandest dinner in the world served in lonely state to two people in a nursery. She squeezed Harriet’s hand.
“Awful. Poor Lalla, we must make a vow, Harriet. Aunt Claudia or no Aunt Claudia, let’s make friends with Lalla.”
NOEL STREATFEILD was born on Christmas Eve 1895. From an early age she was drawn to the stage. After studying at the Academy of Dramatic Art, Noel spent most of the 1920s traveling with various acting troupes throughout Great Britain, South Africa, and Australia. In the 1930s she turned her attention to writing for adults and children, starting with Ballet Shoes. Many of her books were inspired by her devotion to the performing arts. She died in 1986 at the age of ninety.
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Dancing Shoes Page 20
