Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes Page B

disappointments of her own existence. For the boys this meant good schools, shooting and proper universities, but from early on she was determined to launch her daughter with a dizzying season that would result in a dazzling marriage. Grandchildren would then follow, who would do her Royal stalking by proxy. So did Mrs Waddilove plan the future of the wretched Georgina, condemned to live her mother's life and not her own from more or less the moment the child could walk. Which may explain the parent's blindness to a simple truth, so clear to the rest of the world, that Georgina was hopelessly unsuited to the role expected of her. Good-looking and poised as Anne Waddilove was, she had not anticipated that nature would play a joke on her in giving her a daughter who was as plain as a pikestaff, fat as a barrel and gauche to boot. To make matters worse, Georgina's shy nervousness invariably gave a (false) first impression of stupidity, nor was she at all, by choice, gregarious. Since she wasn't in line for a major inheritance - the presence of two boys in a family generally knocks that on the head - the match Mrs Waddilove had dreamed of seemed what can only be described as highly unlikely by the time Georgina had completed her first few weeks as a debutante.
    I have to say that when I got to know her I liked Georgina Waddilove and, while I cannot pretend to a romantic interest in her at any point, I was always happy to sit next to her at dinner. She was knowledgeable about films, one of my interests, so we had plenty to talk about. But there was no escaping the fact that she did not appear destined for success in the harsh and competitive arena her mother had chosen. There was something almost grotesque in watching her lumpen frame wandering, sad and alone, through ballroom after ballroom, decked out in the girlish fashions of the day, her hair sewn with flowers, her frock made of lace, when all the time she resembled nothing so much as a talking chimp in an advertisement for PG Tips tea. I'm sorry to say that she became, if anything, a comic figure among our crowd and, older as I am now and less impervious to others' suffering, I very much regret this. It must have caused her great pain, which she concealed, and the concealment can only have made it sharper.
    Was it an instinct for this that took Damian straight to her side, when shining beauties of high rank stood about Peter's drawing room, laughing and chatting and sipping their drinks? Was it as a fox might scent a wounded bird that Damian surveyed the crowd, locating the ugliest, most awkward girl there, and made for her like a missile? If so, his tactic was completely successful and a few days later he dropped by my rooms to show that the morning's post had brought his first stiffy, a thick white card bearing the proud, engraved name of 'Mrs Norman Waddilove, At Home,' who was inviting him to attend a cocktail party 'for Georgina,' on the seventh of June, by the Dodgem Track at Battersea Fun Fair. 'How can she be "at home" by the Dodgems?' he said.
    Battersea Park has altered its position in London in the decades since the war. It has not moved physically, of course, but it is an entirely different place today from the scene of so many childhood memories of half a century ago. Built by the Victorians as a pleasure ground for the local bourgeoisie , with sculpted rocks and fountains and gentle paths by swan-stocked lakes, the park had cheerfully run to seed by the 1950s and had become instead important to a whole generation of children as the site of London's only permanent fun fair. Erected in 1951, as part of that icon of lost innocence, the Festival of Britain, the fair flourished into the Sixties, when newer forms of entertainment began to steal its thunder. A tragic accident on the Big Dipper in 1972 hastened the inevitable and two years later came closure. The dear, old fun fair, grey and grubby and downright dangerous as it had become, was swept away without a