This will be my last post before Christmas – so best wishes one and all, and here’s hoping you and yours enjoy health, wealth and happiness this season. It’s been a truly horrendous/peculiar/just plain weird year, and for many people it’s been hard to keep smiling and to carry on. Let’s hope for better things in 2021. So a big thank you to all the nice people out there – those who help others and who care. Thanks also to all the wonderful people who have supported me in my writing this year, and previous years. Let’s pray that 2021 is kind and plague-free.

When I was writing The Spy Within: Dottie Manderson mysteries book 6 earlier this year, it very quickly became apparent that I had way too much material, and I had to cut some of my favourite scenes just to make the book a slightly more sensible length. I had to remove a couple of subplots too.

So here are a couple of bits from the ‘cutting room floor’, so to speak.

If you haven’t read the book, this might not make too much sense, but I’m hoping there’ll be enough that you can waste five minutes in a pleasurable way.

To begin with, in my rough drafts I gave Gervase Parfitt yet another illegitimate child, a nineteen-year-old boy called Gerry, who would infiltrate the Manderson family and report back to Gervase. I also took the reader behind the scenes to spend a bit more time with the Mandersons’ staff – it’s not only the wealthy who create history, and I love to read in books about the lives of the below-stairs people, that’s where my ancestors came from. So here are the ‘out-takes’ or deleted scenes:

Sally Butler was queuing in the post office. There was quite a long queue ahead of her and she had only just joined it, but being young, she was already bored.

You never minded a queue in other shops, she thought, but in the boring old post office or the butchers, there was nothing to look at, it was as dull as dull. Still, what couldn’t be enjoyed had to be endured, as her mother always said.

Not that it really mattered. There was nothing much to do back at the Mandersons’ and she was getting paid for her time. At least she was inside in the warm, not waiting at a bus-stop or something. She was looking forward to her afternoon out. She’d got to do a few things first, of course, then have her lunch, then do all the dishes after lunch, but then she had four hours of freedom to do whatever she liked.

Not that she had any plans. Although now that fair-haired young fellow outside lounging against the door had caught her eye a couple of times and given her a grin and a wink, she began to think she might have plans after all.

He was smoking and reading a paper. Not that he looked old enough for either, she thought. He didn’t even look old enough to shave. He looked almost young enough to still be at school. Yet he had to be eighteen or so—her own age—as he was tall and his shoulders were quite broad. He looked strong, and he was all-right looking. More than all right, really. Though she expected that he knew that and expected that he already had far too good an opinion of himself like most of them did. She looked away, just to give him something to think about.

But she couldn’t help turning back, and caught his eye again. She grinned back, not meaning to, it just happened. He was really quite good-looking. His clothes looked half-decent, neither cheap nor expensive. He wore boots, admittedly, but from where she was, they looked to be sound, and were well-polished. His hat was clearly a bit too big for him, he’d had to push it back a few times when it slipped forward.

She pretended to consult her list, but really she was watching him. He was gentlemanly, she decided. He helped a lady down the pavement with a heavily laden pram: shopping hanging off the handle and on the rack underneath, and a large baby at one end inside of the pram with a toddler on reins perched on top at the end nearest the mother. The woman smiled and said something to him, and he tipped his hat to her.

Sally smiled. He seemed sweet. He had nice manners, and she liked him all the more for it. He seemed like the sort you could take home to your mum. She was eager to finish in the post office and get outside to see what might happen.

Her imagination dwelt pleasurably on the possibilities of a trip to the cinema, and she wondered if he was a good kisser. The last one had been as slobbery as her aunt’s Labrador. Into this daydream came the demanding voice of the postmaster.

‘I said, next!’

Sally suddenly remembered why she was standing in the post office queue.

*

‘All I’m saying,’ said Cook, ‘is that he’s asking a lot of questions, and you need to remember to be careful what you tell him. What if he’s a burglar or summat? ‘Casing the joint’, don’t they say? And in my experience, with young men, you just never knows.’

‘Oh but he’s ever so sweet!’ Sally protested. ‘And I’m sure he’s just being very nice, interested in what I do and all that. There’s nothing dodgy about him. I know I’ve only seen him three times, but I’m telling you, he’s a nice boy.’

‘Hmm,’ said Cook, which was always the last word on any subject.

But half an hour later, she said to Sally, ‘Perhaps you’d like to invite him back here to afternoon tea when you have your next afternoon out? He might like to see the inside of the place, meet us all, if he’s really that interested. I’m sure Mrs Manderson wouldn’t mind.’

‘That would be lovely,’ Sally said with a big grin. She added, ‘An’ it might even set your mind at rest once you’ve met him yourself.’

‘Here young lady, you’re that sharp, one day you’ll cut yourself,’ Cook laughed. Sally took the tea things through to the scullery and began to wash them up. Cook settled into her chair and pulled her account book towards her. She shook her head, a little worried. Not that Sally wasn’t a pretty girl. She was. Just like her older sister Janet. In fact the whole family were good-looking. But Cook was uneasy at just how quickly things were moving with this new young fellow. For Sally’s sake, she hoped the chap was every bit as good as he seemed, or before too long there’d be a broken heart in the house. If not worse.

Not that she had much experience of that sort of thing to draw on. She’d been married and widowed in the first year of the Great War, and no other man had ever come into her life after her Walter. So she wasn’t as used to the ways of youngsters when they took a liking to each other as she might have once been. But she couldn’t get over it, how quickly it had all happened, and how perfect it all sounded. Too perfect by half. Something about all this felt off. This was what she couldn’t seem to make Sally understand. Sally was like all girls—too trusting, too romantic, her head full of all the stuff that went on in the films. Real life wasn’t like that.

She sighed then opened her book at that week’s page. But her attention wasn’t on her accounts, and soon she was looking through the window to the area steps outside. It was getting dark. The glass in the door became the cinematic screen of her young life.

Her and Walter at Southend pier in February 1914. It had been so grey and cold on the seafront, but she hadn’t minded. He’d bought her some chips and then later, some whelks. They’d walked the length of the pier then back. They’d spent some time looking in those wonky mirrors that made you look all out of shape. How they’d laughed.

He was a star turn, that Walter, always making her laugh. Always chatting nineteen to the dozen, and wanting to hold her hand. She’d let him kiss her the second time he’d taken her out. She smiled to remember the embarrassed giggling and blushing that followed, and the warm happy glow that filled her.

Her father had caught her once, ‘saying goodnight’ to Walter in the front porch. Pa had hit the roof. But right then and there, Walter had said, bold as anything, ‘I love May, and I wouldn’t never take advantage of her. I think the world of her and I want to spend my whole life with her. So if you’d be so kind, would you please let me have her hand in marriage?’

Tears started in Cook’s eyes. She sighed and shook her head again. She concentrated on her book and adding up her figures, though the page kept blurring. How could it have been twenty years ago yet still feel like yesterday?

*

‘These scones are delicious, Mrs Harrison. The best I’ve ever tasted. And my grandmother’s were very good, I never thought I’d see a better scone than what she could make.’

He passed his plate across for another. Cook added a slab of Victoria Sponge to the plate too, carefully using the tongs to budge the scone up a bit to make room for the cake. She beamed at him. Anyone who knew her would have noticed that her smile was not reflected in her eyes.

‘Well now, it’s a pleasure to feed up such a fine appetite as yours, Gerry, I’m sure. Another cup of tea?’

Before he could answer, she’d said to Sally, ‘Sally, just pop the kettle on again, there’s a good girl.’

There was a sound on the area steps outside, and the door opened, bringing with it a gust of sharp February wind and two or three leaves left over from the autumn.

‘Just in time, Margie,’ Sally called to her. ‘Tea? Or coffee?’ She knew Margie enjoyed coffee, mainly because the actors she admired on the silver screen also enjoyed a coffee at seemingly almost every opportunity.

‘Coffee, please.’ Margie was getting out of her coat and spilling raindrops everywhere. Cook scolded her for that, and Margie hurried to the back lobby to hang up her coat and hat, sending a laughing look at Gerry, Sally’s new friend.

Sally came out to fetch the milk from the scullery, and the two girls had a rapid, whispered conversation.

‘He’s a bit of all right!’ Margie began with another grin.

‘Oh he’s gorgeous, I know. Far too handsome for me.’

‘Rubbish. You’re a catch, you are!’

Margie noticed Sally’s flushed face and dancing eyes.

‘Lor,’ she said, ‘you’ve got it bad. You’ve only known him for a week.’

‘Don’t you believe in love at first sight? I do!’ Sally laughed and hurried back to the kitchen. Margie ran to use the you-know-what, as she always called it, then came back to sit at the long kitchen table, opposite Gerry.

She took her coffee and a thin piece of cake, murmuring something about her figure. Gerry was appraising her figure very frankly as she spoke to Cook. She noticed that Gerry was very polite and respectful when he spoke to cook, and gently teasing and flirty with Sally, but under the table his long leg was stretched out and pressed against Margie’s. She sent him a bold look under her eyelashes from behind her cup. He winked at her when the others weren’t looking.

Later, after he’d left, and Sally had gone upstairs to see to the fires, Margie said to Cook, ‘You were right, he’s not as nice as he pretends.’ She told Cook what had happened. Cook pursed her lips.

‘Hmm. Did you notice he doesn’t talk like us?’

‘What? ‘Course he does.’

‘No, Margie love, he talks like a posh boy I once knew as tried to pass himself off as a commoner. For a bet, like. I’m telling you, our Sally’s in for a bad time with him. I’d put my last shilling on that.’

‘Lor!’ said Margie. ‘Poor Sally.’ She took a knife from Cook, plunged it into the hot soapy water, and gave it a good scrub. ‘He’s too good to be true.’

‘Yes me duck, and that’s usually how you can tell.’

After Gerry left the Mandersons’, he walked as far as the end of the road, reminding himself to turn back every ten steps or so to wave to the besotted young woman still standing at the top of the area steps, waving and watching.

Stupid little cow, he thought. Once he was clear of the corner, he hailed a cab to take him the rest of the way.

Ten minutes later he ran up the steps of the members’ only gentlemen’s club, signed in as a guest and was conducted to the lounge, where a man set down his newspaper and looked at him.

‘Well?’ said Gervase Parfitt.

 

Thanks for reading. Happy Christmas.

***