Seventy years ago The Third Man was released with zither action. I read that in The Oldie but it reminded me that my sister worked for Shirley Abicair, famous for plucking the zither.
May I digress? She had been employed at Asprey where she could have charmed the clientele. Management got it wrong. She was asked to water the window boxes and, employed in this activity apparently suited to one without much education, on the first floor, she was distracted and poured more water over customers entering below than on the plants. So far as her prospects at Asprey went, it was a career defining moment. Shirley Abicair took her on as a secretary.
When you are a secretary for somebody famous there is a lot of fan mail to answer. Shirley would ask Angela how she should reply. Angela was in her element; “thank you so much for writing and I’m so very glad you enjoyed … “ At first Shirley would repeat this and Angela would, rather slowly and not always accurately, type it. Miss Abicair realised this was inefficient. Miss Abicair was a trained typist. So Angela dictated the correspondence to her employer until it struck Miss Abicair that this was absurd and A got the heave-ho again.
Previously she had been an au pair to a French family whose son, Guillaume, is my age. Former holders of the post had found the boy rather difficult. Angela, used to me, dealt with him with aplomb and they became great friends. Recently Angela went with one of her daughters to Paris and dined with Guillaume and his wife. A return match in Co Meath is planned.
Yr two accounts of employment failure are heavenly.
I have plunged into John Buchan as a relief from my awed researches into Edith Stein. “The Island of Sheep” was unknown to me: its early-on rural East Anglia marsh scenes are amongst the best “pastoral” writing I have come across. They are purple and yet a great antidote to the modern literary style of “memory, identity and loss” in which the wild becomes a text. And all that stuff about Empire and the white man: so barmy but much more properly peculiar than we are now supposed to enjoy.