Slinky Splendours
LES GIRLS. By Constance Tomkinson. (Michael Joseph, 15s.) CONSTANCE TOMKINSON came to London from Canada before the war to be an actress. So as not to starve she became a chorus girl instead, graduating from a touring troupe of hoofers called The Millerettes, via the Folies Bergere, to the slinky splendours of the Basil Beautifuls. Concerning her adventures as a show girl she has writ/ten an extremely funny book. Though of intellectual tastes she is never condescending, and as ruefully eyes herself studying French history in the intervals at the Folies Bergere as she cheerfully observes the antics of The Millerettes travelling for days from Gothenburg to Paris wearing white trousers, fox furs and picture hats. She writes wittily and with a gaiety which all these show girls seem to have shared. They were always broke,
always on the edge of a crisis, and even when their amoroui gentlemen friends—whose national characteristics she so haPPil pinpoints and whose pidgin English she invariably copied so not to hurt their feelings—showered them with gold cigar° cases and crocodile bags, they never had any cigarettes or moilt) to put in them.
Her descriptions are vivid, of crazy rehearsals in Munich, °I the rigours of the can-can, of Roman suitors with 'large botid°I; eyes,' of experiences in Holland where the diamond merchalli she was urged to cultivate proved to be concerned only °Is industrial diamonds, of French 'digs' where the coffee 0,6 'sprinkled with little white handkerchiefs of boiled milk.' Dev°,I„ of sentimentality or nostalgia, Miss Tomkinson looks back yd" her ostrich-feathered past in a way which is both ironic 0 kindly, and her book makes Niery stimulating reading. It enchantingly illustrated by David Knight. Margaret Lang—Fashion Buyer is also a career story, one 010.1 series edited by Mary Dunn to aid the young in choosing a It is, unfortunately, written in the form of a novel, or to strictly truthful, a very talkative, homely, 'Don't decide in a lass' novelette. To a grown-up this book is remarkably unap10; ing, but presumably it was written for , the adolescent, embedded in the yards of jolly chat about Dad and Mums Tony and the puppy the skilful teenager will perhaps be abled, needle out what it is like to work in a store and what she in the way of stamina, tact and intelligence to Proceed i110,,,
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