Susan Scarlett

"The Marchioness's face changed. ... She turned to Ann. "What is your name, dear?" "Ann." "Would you mind being Sally for this one afternoon?" When her boss succumbs to influenza on the day of a high society wedding, perky young Ann Lane, assistant cosmetician at the elegant Maison Pertinax, is urgently called to a Sussex castle to make up the bride, the kind and understanding Lady Mona. Then a bridesmaid falls ill too and threatens the visual effects...

This one week's holiday was all that most of the audience could get, they were free for one week from food queues, housework and even, for many hours a day, the care of their children. It was a week of absolute rest, but everybody in the audience knew that outside the camp lay the hard, difficult world of 1946. The Corners and the Binns are show business families on the verge of dire straits due to lack of jobs in the postwar economy. But crisis is...

"It is not fun being the plain one of the family. But being the plain one of twins is a wretched position. That's why parables about grains of mustard seed, which grew up and startled everybody by their magnificence, did Pauline good. Petronella and Pauline Lane are 17-year-old twins, but not identical. "Peter", kind but utterly self-absorbed, is ravishingly beautiful while "Paul" - practical, sensitive, and loved by all - tends to slip through the...

"Lovely Beth Carson is just out of school and beginning her first job at Babbacombe's department store. She is pure as the driven snow, and knows her "place", but she can hardly be blamed for tripping over a charming young man's dog, can she? And how could she help being trapped in an elevator with the same man a few days later, and giving him a piece of her mind before learning that he just happens to be David Babbacombe, the ne'er-do-well son of...

"Judy sat staring out of the railway carriage window. Of course there was a war on, but could any train that was trying at all really dawdle the way this one was doing? On the way to her new munitions work in the village of Pinlock, Judy Rest meets handsome, dynamic Nick Parsons, who turns out (after the two engage in some extremely careless talk) to be engaged in top secret work at the same factory. Nick warns her about suspicious goings-on at her...

"'Dancing is not, as with some of the other arts, a matter of short inspiration and quick effects; dancing is a vocation. A girl whom I choose to star as much gives her life to dancing as a novice entering a nunnery gives her life to religion.' So says the demanding Madame Tania as she offers a long-awaited starring role to young Judith Nell, who has strived her whole life for success in the ballet. But her big break arrives just as she's falling...