Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 10]
-9-
from cigars, struck a revolver from the hand and played the National Anthem by cracking sounds. We sent a note to him, by a smart girl commissionaire in red coat and brass buttons, to say we were in the audience, and she came to conduct us to the back of the stage.
After all these years it was a strange meeting to find my cousin in his dressing room with all the aids of stage make-up. He showed us the revolving stage-mechanism which enables each setting to be prepared and brought to the front just as it is needed. We met several of the artists, among them Lady Forbes Robertson, who was on the bill.
The next day I hostessed a party for my cousin at the Hotel Cecil. A week later that building was taken over by the Air Ministry and now it is what the Air-men facetiously call the "Hot-air" Department, not without justification, for the difficulty of getting correct information has only to be encountered to be believed.
One of my first duties in London was to find the cemetery where Jennings Carmichael was buried, and for whose grave subscribers had sent, through the Agent General, a marble book bearing a spray of wattle and on it inscribed from her own poem:-
"Ah! little flower I loved of old,
Dear little downy heads of gold."
It was a wintry day when, with a kindly guide, I started out for "Forest Gate", and when we reached there in the late afternoon, snow was falling. I could not help contrasting the hot summer's day, when, two years before, we had ordered it. It seemed so strange to find it resting there with so many miles between.
The work had been faithfully carried out. A marble curb surrounded the mound and our little tribute, to her who had loved and suffered, looked appropriate and distinctive.
From now onwards everthing that happened seemed to link up and the world grew smaller and smaller. The next Sunday a chum of Ron's who had been at his Farewell party in