Henrietta Sees It Through Read Online Free Page B

only one arm Mrs Simpkins would cook yours.’
    â€˜I might be left a widower one day. Who knows?’ said Colonel Simpkins.
    â€˜What did you say, Alexander?’ said little Mrs Simpkins, sitting up, her cheeks very pink.
    â€˜Life is very uncertain, my love,’ mumbled the Colonel, for whom, I must say, my heart was bleeding.
    â€˜Well, if I were left a widow I know what I’d do,’ said little Mrs Simpkins, clearly and unexpectedly. ‘I’d move into a
much
smaller house, and I’d sell your roll-top desk.’
    After that there was an awkward silence, broken at last by Faith, who was home for the weekend and who issometimes tactful more by mistake than good management.

    â€˜I really cannot see,’ she said, ‘why legs shoul be considered less valuable than the Admiral’s!’
    She was standing beside the Admiral, and she put one leg forward and pulled her skirt up well above the knee. ‘I really cannot see,’ she said, ‘why my legs should be considered less valuable than the Admiral’s.’
    There was another silence - an awed one this time, because, of course, Faith’s legs are famous all over the West Country. I often wonder where she gets her silk stockings. Personally, I think that people with legs like hers ought to have them provided by the Government because they do so much for morale. After that, everybody cheered up. Lady B kissed Colonel Simpkins and said she hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings, and Colonel Simpkins said that if Lady B lost an arm he would come and do her cooking himself, and Mrs Simpkins said, ‘Come along home, you old Flirt.’
    Afterwards, when Lady B and I were getting the lunch - for Charles was out with the Home Guard, and I had taken down my sausage roll to heat in Lady B’s oven - I said to her, ‘It’s a good thing they’ve taken all the railings away, or you’d have been chained to them by now, shouting for Equal Compensation.’ Lady B, who was making somemustard in a cup, chuckled. Then she looked up at me very seriously. ‘No, I wouldn’t, Henrietta,’ she said. ‘You can’t do that sort of thing in wartime. That, of course, is where they score.’
    â€˜But there’s nothing to stop you making a fuss after the war,’ I said, ‘and having processions with injured women wheeled in chairs.’
    â€˜Ah!’ said Lady B. ‘The poor souls!’
    Always your affectionate Childhood’s Friend,
    H ENRIETTA

 
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    July 1, 1942
    M Y D EAR R OBERT
    On Tuesday I went to an orchestra practice. They are learning a piece which wants three little tiny Pings on the triangle, and I was chosen to deliver them.
    â€˜Your performance on the Nightingale during the Toy Symphony did nothing to justify my confidence in you as a triangle player,’ said the Conductor unkindly, ‘but I can’t think of anybody else who can spare the time.’
    â€˜As a matter of fact, I can’t spare the time myself,
actually
,’ I said, but the Conductor ignored this remark.
    I have often longed to attend a practice of what is known in this place as the Ork. Once or twice I have met the Conductor staggering away from the hall with a white face, followed by the flushed and twittering members of his orchestra, whose shaking legs can hardly carry them to the bun shop for cups of reviving coffee which will enable them to face the hill home.
    At their yearly concert all is forgiven and forgotten, of course, and the Conductor, beaming with good nature, always waves the Ork to its feet to share in the applause. Afterwards they present him with a little speech of thanks and a fountain pen, which he loses before the next concert. This saves them the trouble of thinking up some other idea. At the last concert, fountain pens being off the market, they gave him six new-laid eggs. One of the second violins told me that when he thanked them there