Shirley appeared to be shy to the point of appearing struck dumb whenever you challenged her with such mind-bending questions as ‘Isn’t it a nice day?’ or ‘How are you?’. Her mother said she just did not have conversational skills, or perhaps nothing in common with grown ups — girls were like that at her age. What you took to be shyness, or even downright rudeness, was often just plain disinterest: possibly a listless disregard of fellow human beings and their sufferings. Anyway, Shirley made up for the gaps in dialogue with her beauty. She was striking: tall and slim with fine bones and long fair hair, which she wore rolled under, like Anne Todd, as fashion dictated. She had not won a scholarship for the grammar school and so had gone to the secondary modern where she distinguished hersel
