Read To Be Someone for Free Online Page B

how to flip beer mats from the edge of the pockmarked tables, revolving the wheel on the jukebox to make the selections clunk laboriously around. Sometimes Mr. Grant gave me 10p to put a record on, and I always chose “I Get the Sweetest Feeling” by Jackie Wilson, because it was just such a happy song. I loved the plink, plink, plink, plink … hmmmm of the introduction, and the fat, deeply satisfying brassy noises going on in the background. To this day, it’s one of my favorite records.
    The jukebox was only one of the gadgets that made the Prince of Wales an Aladdin’s cave of technological wizardry. We didn’t even have a black-and-white television at home until I was eight; the Grants had two color sets, one in the bar, stuck high up to the wall with a bracket, and one upstairs in their sitting room. They had the first microwave oven I’d ever seen, and pinball and slot machines (which we weren’t allowed to touch). Sam even had one of those kiddie synthesizers with the colored piano keys, as well as a record player and a radio. I was so envious.
    During business hours we were not allowed to set foot in the bar, and so we played upstairs in the residential part. The Prince of Wales was a very old building, a public house since its inception in the eighteenth century, and was full of appealing little features. As a child I failed to appreciate them, but in retrospect I remember the sloping floors and ceilings, wood-paneled walls, odd cupboards everywhere, and narrow hallways interspersed every few yards with two or three crooked steps up to another level and around a new corner.
    These passageways were the venue for one of our favorite games: the Great Continental Quilt Bob-Sleigh Race. Continental quilts, as they were called in those days, were in themselves a total novelty. I had never seen one before, and begged and begged my mother to buy me one, explaining at great length how labor-saving they were—no more constant bed-making or sheet-ironing. Unfortunately, she regarded anything Continental as being French and therefore somehow sweaty and unhygienic, and it was a few more years before she capitulated and bought duvets for “ toute la famille. ” My fascination was such that I would drag Sam’s quilt off her bed and into the sitting room—initially, I suppose, so we could both lie on it and watch TV. Then one day it became a method of transport.
    “I know,” I said. “I’m Cinderella going to the ball in my carriage. You be my horse, and pull me.” I plumped down in the middle and gathered up the edges around me, leaving the two front corners for Sam to pick up. She neighed obligingly, bared her teeth, shook her mane, and hauled me with difficulty out of the sitting room and down the long hall back to the bedroom doorway. I remember catching sight of myself in a hall mirror and noticing with pleasure the regal air about my demeanor, the queenly tilt to my chin, and my gentle poise as Sam bumped me slowly forward to meet my prince. I was visualizing the adoration of all the lords and ladies at the ball, not just the prince, but everyone. That was the first time I was aware of craving the spotlight.
    Sam dragged me back again, faster this time, so I could drop my glass slipper on the way home. That, however, was done less gracefully: I fiddled with the strap of my scuffed blue T-bar Clark’s sandal, pulling it off with a jerk, which made me lose my balance and lurch over backward. I then lobbed the shoe over my shoulder, and it hit the wall with a jingle of its buckle, leaving a dirty mark.
    “If that was real glass, you’d have broken it,” Sam told me disapprovingly. I did a quick role switch from princess to prince, retracing my steps down the corridor to tenderly retrieve the bulky-soled sandal, holding it to my chest and then my lips, looking wistfully back toward the bedroom door for my princess. The drama was lost on Sam; she was too busy trying to rub the scuff mark off the wallpaper by