ACT I
First it was Christmas, and then the summer, and then the next Christmas. What do you think?
Jenny : I don’t know, Ellen. I don’t think anyone knows.
Ellen : It’s dreadful, isn’t it? The war, I mean. I don’t know that I’d thought about it properly till I went to see those war pictures the other week. The fillums, I mean. Fairly upset me, they did. I could hardly sleep for thinking of them, not for nights after. I wanted cook to go . . . because it seemed as if it was something everyone ought to see . . . brings the war home to you, like . . . but cook’s got no taste for horrors, she says. At least, not that kind . . . though she does like the News of the World of a Sunday. But it fairly opened my eyes and set me thinking, it did, indeed. And I just can’t get it out of my head . . . and it isn’t only me, neither, nor you and the mistress, but it’s all of us, isn’t it? I mean, I daresay there isn’t hardly a woman in England what hasn’t got someone out there . . . and wondering if he’s safe.
Jenny : Yes. (A pause.) Thank you, Ellen. That will do.
Ellen : Very good, miss.
[She goes.
Jenny sits alone, looking at the unopened letters. Kitty comes in L., a small, dark, exquisitely pretty woman of a little over thirty.
9
