Dolly's Mixture by Dorothy Scannell Page B

container through the passage into the garden, burning his arms and hands, and had then gone back to attack the burning shelves. To look at the damage it was impossible to believe that one man could have stemmed the blaze. The shop remained closed for the day because of the thick smoke which hung like a pall everywhere.
    I said to my hero, ‘What did you beat the flames out with?’ ‘Anything I could find,’ he said, ‘and luckily my new overcoat was still downstairs.’ (I had forgotten to take this upstairs after collecting it from the tailor’s the night before.) ‘Fancy using a lovely new overcoat,’ I moaned. ‘What’s the bleeding good of a lovely new overcoat if I’d been burned to death?’ shouted an angry Chas. ‘I’ve often thought what silly things you say at times, but your behaviour during this crisis has been sheer stupidity and even I would not have believed you capable of such idiocy.’ He never forgave me for assuming he would play a practical joke by calling ‘Fire,’ and once, when guests were complimenting me on something or other, Chas said, ‘What would you think of a woman who, when warned of fire on the floor below her, shouts an insulting remark at the warning and slams the door to safety?’ ‘Oh,’ said one of the guests, ‘she was probably simple.’ Chas never looked at me or gave me away. He is hoping that one day I will at last admit I can at times behave with crass stupidity. Until now I never have.
    To take my mind off the depressing results of the fire Ade suggested we go to a bingo session. She was collecting her weekly order from us. ‘Bingo! Surely that’s a bit boring, no brain power needed there.’ ‘Hark at Lady Einstein,’ said Ade. ‘What do you want after a hard day in the shop, someone to set you big mathematical problems?’ I had never even thought about going to this type of social affair but when Ade remarked that the top prize was one thousand pounds I began to dream of what I would do with such a sum, for I was sure I would win. Ade and Ben had been invited to an evening bingo session by their new neighbours, a middle-aged childless couple, ‘very refaned,’ said Ade.
    Apparently these neighbours had always been extremely lucky at this game of chance and, being such refined folks, had really fallen for Benny and his snooty way of talking. Since he was difficult to approach they were endeavouring to get to him through Ade, the ‘hail fellow, well met’. The new neighbours amused Ade, for she was sure they assumed that Benny had come down in the world through his marriage to her, the aristocratic son falling for the housemaid. They had been most impressed, when inviting Ade and Benny to the Bingo session, to discover that Benny and Johnny were going to the Proms. Benny had tried to introduce Ade to the more serious side of music but she had found it ‘bloody boring’. He had started off by taking the whole family to La Bohème  , but Mimi had been, according to Ade, a ‘typical scrubber’ with enormous arms, so that when ‘Your tiny hand is frozen’ was sung the twins were in hysterics. Ade and the twins opted out. ‘I don’t mind a nice brass band,’ said Ade.
    â€˜We will pick up Mrs S. in our car,’ said Ade’s new lady neighbour, and at seven o’clock one winter’s evening the limousine purred to a stop outside our shop. At first sight I thought it was the car/van from the gown factory down the road, for it was square, black and very high up in the air but there were bits of material hanging across the windows, so apparently it was an ordinary car. Ade was sitting in state in the back, her eyes twinkling. As though I was a younger sister, she knew in advance, somehow, my innermost thoughts. Suddenly I realised that, to anyone who liked large women, Ade would have been beautiful. Her