My American

by Stella Gibbons

  “Miss Lathom,” giving the Headmistress the lovely excited smile that she had given her once before, “thanks most awfully for letting me write in the old exam room.” She paused. A sentence came into her head and she added, without realizing what she was saying, “One day I’ll be the dreamer whose dreams came true, and then you’ll be glad.”

  The door shut.

  Amy flew downstairs to the cloakroom to say good-bye to the special five with whom she had eaten biscuits and giggled for three and a half years. None of them were leaving; they were all staying on until they were sixteen and they were all sorry for Amy but too polite to say so. They knew that she had no parents and hardly any money and had been adopted by a baker’s wife and, nasal little cockney rats though they were, their farewells to her were as delicate as they were full of affection.

  She managed to get her parcel away unopened by saying it contained old copies of the School Mag.: for Mrs. Beeding, who would make paper spills from them with which to light the Beeding gases and fires. A tactful silence greeted this statement, and no more was said about the parcel. When she left Jean, Hilda, Mavis, Iris and Peggy at the corner of Baalbec Road and turned into the Fields alone; she was thinking only of how to get her parcel into the house unopened.

  She managed in the end by taking it unflusteredly to Mrs. Beeding, who was cooking, and telling her that it was school books and asking might she put it for the time being up in the small-top-front? Mrs. Beeding, her mind not on the parcel, said yes, she might, and Amy rushed upstairs and hid it away before Mrs. Beeding could change her mind. She dared not linger and dream in the big-top-front, though it was for the time being empty; old Mrs. Martin had found the stairs too much for her and she and her daughter had left.

  Amy came slowly downstairs again, feeling easier in her mind. For the time being her stories were safe.

  That evening her family helped Mrs. Beeding to write the letter to Mr. Ramage. They all gathered in the Lounge after supper, except Mr. Beeding, who was upstairs snatching an hour or two’s sleep after several quick ones at the Hen and Chickens to nerve him up for the night’s baking, and Artie and Baby (now a fine girl of two and a half), who had been put to bed. The windows were open wide to catch what little freshness there was in Highbury at the end of a summer day, and Mrs. Beeding sat squarely at a small table with a penny bottle of ink, a packet of shiny notepaper and envelopes, a penholder with a new and very fine nib and a sheet of fresh pink blotting paper spread before her.

  She and Amy were the only two people there who did not look as if they had just come back from a holiday. Dora’s long nose was skinned by a cycling holiday in Wales, Mona was brick-red from a fortnight in Camp with the Junior Staff of Fletcher Brothers, Ladies’ Outfitters and General Stores, of Islington, where she now worked; and Maurice was all over freckles like a cheerful orchid, after a week in Southsea with a friend from the motor-cycle shop where he was employed. All three were larger, more self-confident, less afraid of their mother than they had been three years ago. Mona and Maurice’s weekly pay envelopes had done that for them (Mum hasn’t a penny except what Dad gives her, but Maurice and me, we’re earning two pound ten a week between us) and Dora had recently been given a rise of five shillings a week and promoted to taking letters in Spanish, which had considerably increased her ambition and self-respect.

  Maurice looked much the same, only sturdier; but Mona was now a regular vision of love with red nails, cherry lipstick, no eyebrows to speak of, a tight blue jumper and a little black skirt, while the yellow sausages were arranged in a switchback perm which looked exactly like a wig.

  Dora, whose style had grown quieter with the five-shilling rise and the Spanish dictation, and was beginning to run to tailored costumes and plain silk blouses, loudly told her sister that her appearance gave her, Dora, the sick. She often silently handed her a penny, which turned out upon questioning to be intended for an individual vaguely referred to by Dora as The Old Guy, but was known by everybody to be no less a person than Mona herself. Mona was interested in nothing in earth or heaven but boys and their opinion of her looks. If she could get a whistle or a “There’s a bird!” from a boy on her way to work she was happy for the rest of the day.

  Amy sat on the sofa beside Mona, looking young and thin by contrast, and Maurice lay on the floor studying some literature from Littlewood’s.

  Mrs. Beeding glanced across at Dora, who was lying back in her chair wearing nothing but a clean old overall, pink cami-knickers. and flattened red slippers. Mrs. Beeding disapproved of this costume and also of the cigarette that was Dora’s fourth since she had got home, but in spite of cigarette and costume, she looked so thin, serious, and proper that her mother could feel only confidence and pride in her.

  “Dora, do I begin ‘Dear Sir,’ or ‘Dear Mister Ramage?”

  “Oh, Mum, you don’t wanter be so ordinary!” burst in Mona, bouncing up and down on the sofa with the wig shifting in time to her bounces. “You wanter write something with personality in it—something that’ll make him remember your letter, like. You wanter start off with a bang—something like ‘I won’t waste your time if I knew I couldn’t be of use to you’—something snappy like that, see?”

  “Mona, you’re nowt but a silly date. He’d never bother to read to the end of it. He’d think I was soft. ‘Dear sir,’ shall I put then, Dora?”

  “I’d put ‘Dear Mr. Ramage,’ then he’ll see at once you know his name and he’ll look to see who you are—at the end of the letter—and then he’ll remember seeing you at the funeral.”

  “Ay, that’s it.” Mrs. Beeding bent over the paper and slowly wrote.

  “Don’t forget to tell him she’s got long hair,” put in Maurice, not looking up.

  “An’ then what’ll I say, Dora? ‘Please excuse me for troubling you?’”

  “That’ll do. Sounds a bit soapy but anything to get our Aime started as a world’s worker. Remind him that you met at Mr. Lee’s funeral (sounds nice and sociable, I must say), then go on to say does he remember Mr. Lee’s little girl, and—oh, go on, Mum! You can do it all right if everybody stops telling you how.”

  “I bet you he never even bothers to read it,” insisted Mona, earnestly. “Why, joo you know how many letters Fletchers get a week askin’ for jobs in the Junior alone? Two or three hundred. They do, straight. They don’t trouble to read them through; Miss Wallis, she just files them. ’Tisn’t likely anyone’s going to bother reading one letter out of hundreds of them unless it’s got personality.”

  “They don’t worry about personality on The Prize. The Prize was started before personality was thought of,” yawned Dora. “Now shut up everybody, and let Mum get on, do.”

  All this time Amy had sat in silence, wearing a red and white checked cotton frock from a shop in the Holloway Road where dozens more hung outside on a rail, with her thin creamy arms and legs bare and her feet in blue slippers as squashed as Dora’s; staring at a fine geranium that Mrs. Beeding was nursing to perfection in the conservatory—and wondering whether there would be a private place in which she might manage to write if she got a job on The Prize.

  It was too hot for anyone to want to talk much, so after the first burst of advice Mrs. Beeding was allowed to get on by herself and finally produced a letter which said so exactly what she meant it to say that not one word in her clear unaffected hand was crossed out.

  This was the letter that reached the offices of The Prize next morning:

  DEAR MR. RAMAGE,

  Please excuse me for troubling you. We met at Mr. Lee’s funeral two and a half years ago and I am wondering if you have forgotten his little girl Amy, you spoke to her then. She is now nearly sixteen and has just left the Anna Bonner School for Girls, Highbury, where they speak highly of her work. She is a good girl in every way. I am wondering if you might be in need of a tidy quiet hard-working girl in your office to run errands and talk on the telephone. If you are I should be very pleased if you would let me bring Amy to see you one
morning, any time you like.

  Yours truly,

  M. BEEDING.

  Mr. Ramage, advertising manager of The Prize, was attracted by this letter. He read it through twice; then took it downstairs to a door on the floor below, on which he tapped, and was told by a sleepy, irritable male voice to “Come in.”

  In a room which resembled with its cream-painted panelling and faded but rich Turkey carpet the writing room in a women’s club, a large blonde elderly gentleman in an old yet beautiful blue suit was leaning back in a swivel chair before a very large desk and staring crossly out of the window at another window not twelve feet away on the other side of the road. Rosemary Lane by Saint Pauls, where the offices of The Prize have been since its foundation in 1860, is one of the narrowest thoroughfares in the network of streets lying directly about the Cathedral.

  The blonde gentleman looked up as Mr. Ramage came in and gloomily blew his upper lip, which was festooned with a large yellow moustache.

  “Hullo,” he said despondently. “I say, have you heard about this Gossey business? Little beast. Danesford was at me the moment I put my nose round the door this morning.”

  “Yes, I heard last night, he caught me just as I was going out,” said Mr. Ramage soothingly. “It’s a confounded nuisance.”

  “It’s all the worse because for three months he’s seemed all right,” cried the blonde gentleman bitterly. “Whenever I was in here I used to watch him like Hawkshaw himself, Ramage, I assure you I did. I can’t make out how the little monstrosity managed to get his piece of rubbish written, he must have locked himself in the lavatory for hours on end, I simply can’t explain it in any other way, and neither can Danesford.”

  “What’s it called?” inquired Mr. Ramage.

  “The Horror at Marsh Grange,” retorted Lord Welwoodham. “What else would it be called?”

  Mr. Ramage nodded.

  “Can’t we keep him on until after the Double Number?” he suggested. “Poor Grace was grumbling to me last night about having all the stuff to collect for that and find a new office-boy at the same time.”

  Lord Welwoodham shook his head.

  “Out of the question now. I blew him up and packed him off this morning as soon as I got here.”

  “Did he weep?”

  “Not he, the little scut. He told me the paper was going to pot for lack of new blood. It happens to be true, but none of us can help if it Henty, Ballantyne, Weyman, Haggard and Herbert Strang are most of them dead and haven’t dropped their mantles on anyone else, can we? And I will see every contributor to this paper in the hot place, Ramage, and all the readers too, before I will lower the standard of boys’ fiction which we have maintained since 1860. If I can’t get the right sort of new blood I will go on printing copies of the old. What I will not do,” declared Lord Welwoodham, getting up and staring at the waste-paper basket, “is to print work by writers who think that because a boy is a boy he must necessarily be an ass who will swallow any rubbish they care to sling at him because they need money to feed themselves while they are writing masterpieces for adults. … Do you want to see me Ramage? I shan’t be in again this week.”

  “Well, this comes in rather pat,” said Mr. Ramage, handing him Mrs. Beeding’s letter, “in the circumstances.”

  Lord Welwoodham read it frowning and blowing on the moustache.

  “A girl, eh?” he said, putting it down on his desk. “Well, heaven knows she couldn’t be worse than the boys. Lee’s daughter. What’s she like? Like him at all?”

  “Oh, not in the least,” said Mr. Ramage decidedly. “Small and dark, very neat and polite. None of that rather … no, she isn’t at all like he was.”

  “This woman writes a good hand. Good letter, too. Who is she?”

  “She’s the baker’s wife who adopted the little girl, Lord Welwoodham. I told you at the time, I think.”

  “Oh, yes, of course, I recall it perfectly; you thought she seemed a very capable sort. Managed everything, including dragging little whats-her-name along to the funeral; of course, I remember now. Well …” he glanced irritably at his large bowler hat which lay with a glossy yellow silver-knobbed walking stick on a table in a corner, “have her down and let Danesford see her and if he and Grace think she’ll do, we’ll have her. Doesn’t giggle, won’t stink us out with scent, will she? D’you think she’s grown into a dangerous beauty in three years?”

  Mr. Ramage laughed and told Lord Welwoodham that he should be very surprised indeed if she had; he remembered her as being not unpleasing to look at, but anything rather than striking.

  “Good, good,” said the owner and editor absently, pulling on his dirty gloves of beautiful tough hogskin. “All right, have her down to-morrow if you like. Just tell Danesford and Grace about it, will you, there’s a dear good fellow, I must run. Shan’t be in again this week, I’m going into the country.” He nodded to Mr. Ramage; and walked loosely away down the corridor, shooting out his long legs in front of him in the striking walk that the pre-war cartoonists had enjoyed, and swinging his stick.

  Mr. Ramage went through another door in the editor’s room into the general office, where Miss Grace, the editor’s secretary, and Mr. Danesford, the sub-editor, sat at their respective desks, and explained the situation to them, making it plain beyond any possible doubt that it was expressly at Lord Welwoodham’s wish that Amy Lee was coming down to the office for an interview. For Mr. Danesford and Miss Grace were more than a little set in their ways and inclined to be suspicious of a new idea, and an office girl, instead of an office boy, on The Prize was a very new idea indeed.

  But the wishes of Lord Welwoodham, that shabby, grumbling, ageing man whose dignity could be suddenly as natural and impressive as that of a hundred-year-old tree, were law to Miss Grace and Mr. Danesford; and that same afternoon Miss Grace wrote the briefest possible note saying that Mr. Danesford the sub-editor would see Miss Lee at eleven o’clock (Miss Grace disdained to add “sharp”) on the following morning.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE ARRIVAL OF this letter by the last post on Tuesday night threw everyone in the household at Highbury into a state of great excitement, with the exception of Baby, who was cutting her final tooth, and Amy herself, who was looking forward to seeing Saint Paul’s Cathedral, which she had never visited, but was otherwise unmoved.

  When the doors of Barclay’s bank on the corner opened on Wednesday morning the first person to march in was Mrs. Beeding accompanied by Amy, and she drew out three pounds.

  “Ay, it seems an awful lot o’ money, Amy,” she observed, putting the notes safely in her bag, “but if ye’re going after a job ye’ve got to look decent. Yer heard what Dora said, an’ that silly kite Mona too; nothin’ puts a boss off like a dirty untidy girl.” Here Mrs. Beeding leaped upon a passing bus, dragging Amy with her, and booked two pennies to Jones Bros. of Holloway.

  Exactly at a quarter-past ten they emerged from Jones Bros. of Holloway with Amy transformed, and set out on their journey to Saint Paul’s Underground Station which, so Dora had instructed them, was exactly opposite Rosemary Lane. “And mind you don’t miss the lane, because it’s only about as big as a bee’s knee and you might easily, if Aime got star-gazing and you were trying to dodge traffic,” concluded Dora.

  But when they came out of Saint Paul’s Station, blinking in the brilliant sunlight with Amy holding rather tightly on to Mrs. Beeding’s plump arm, they looked across the road as they stood on the edge of the pavement and saw Rosemary Lane at once. It was the narrowest little passageway imaginable, whose old houses seemed to be leaning slightly towards one another because they were so close together, their windows like dusty old eyes “playing owls” as children do, and a ray of sunlight striking dramatically aslant their walls. A flower-shop stood just under a beam of sunlight and a long sheaf of flowers outside looked exactly as though it were made of blue stained glass. And far above the little lane, soaring in the sunlight, was a tall white tower; and even farther above that—like a colos
sal dark blue mussel shell that hid half of heaven and dwarfed the hurrying people and the red ’buses and the shaking lorries and dusty vans—loomed the mighty dome of the Cathedral, its golden cross shining against the pale blue sky of summer.

  “There it is,” remarked Mrs. Beeding, pointing across at Rosemary Lane. “Old-fashioned sort of a place.”

  Amy said nothing. She so seldom went anywhere away from Highbury except Up Highgate, that she found the roar and confusion of Cheapside terrifying. She had learned in the past three years not to mind the Highbury trams and ’buses and crowds, but this crowd and traffic was quite different. None of the people here carried shopping baskets or pushed perambulators full of grubby woolly babies, as they slowly glanced in shop windows; all these people were hurrying forward with their chins a little stuck out and their arms swinging smartly. They were like the Hurrying People in the dream she sometimes had, who could not see her even when she stood in front of them screaming out her name. She shut her eyes, holding tightly to Mrs. Beeding’s arm.

  “All right, are yer, luv?” asked Mrs. Beeding, glancing down at her a little anxiously. She looked right smart, to-day, Aime did, a real little business girl, and Mrs. Beeding did hope that she was not going to spoil her chances by being sick.

  “Yes, thank you, Mrs. Beeding,” in a very low voice.

  “Come on, then, luv!”

  A policeman was now holding up the lorries, vans and cars, and Mrs. Beeding and Amy hurried across the road with all the people.

  Once they were walking down Rosemary Lane, Amy felt much better. It was so narrow and small, and the noise of Cheapside seemed abruptly shut off and far away, as though a curtain had been drawn. Suddenly a sweet tinkling noise broke on the air, with a delicious sensation of coolness in that stuffy little alley, and Amy squeezed Mrs. Beeding’s arm and pointed to a shop window filled with Hindu bracelets, slippers from Japan, tiny carved ivory figures and lengths of closely-embroidered purple and crimson silk.