With a very hard 'G'
From Mrs Margaret J. Cornwall Sir: I very much enjoyed Yvonne Brock's 'Margarine with a very hard " G ",' particlarly as I think I must have been her ' Maggy Ann.' I remember very little of the production, and none of the lines. All I do remember was that I loathed the ' pale lemon' dress that my mother insisted I wore; and, like Yvonne, I became typecast — in my case as the fairy. I was also roped in when bitter weeping was called for. This was easy, as all one had to do was to go into paroxysms of giggles and hide one's head in one's hands — the effect was the same!
Incidentally Yvonne was about the only one of my childhood ' friends ' of whom both my mother and I approved. But what aeons away the 'thirties seem. Sometimes one thinks with nostalgia of the ordered severity of that middle-class world as narrow, and now as remote as that of Jane Austen's. It is to be hoped that the unemployment and social injustice of the period when the haves ' ate butter and the have nots ' margarine — if they were lucky — will never be repeated; yet surely it will do no harm to recall some of the more frivolous oddities of the period. Perhaps we could have more.
Margaret J. Cornwall 2 Orchard Close, Copford Green, Colchester, Essex.
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