fault that I heard Martha and Henderson together. I should have gone out. I should have walked round in the cold and rain. Oh, I'm dying for a cuppa! I have been living in this London bedsitter for over a month now. At first it had seemed such a come-down from my home in christchurch, New Zealand. We Campbells are a proud family, used to lots of space and clean fresh air. In fact, my Mum didn't want me to come to London. —It's not for the likes of my young boy, she'd said. All them brazen women running around with nothing on! You just listen to me, George Campbell. Get away from there as soon as you can and go up to Scotland. Bring a nice Highland lass home with you! Ah, my Mum. Alas, how the Campbells have fallen! For here I am in this small room which my Mum would scream in despair for to see! One small bed in an L-shaped room, a small stove and dingy wall-paper, a toilet down the hall and bathroom up three flights … Mum would have a fit! And that is why, when I write home every week (a letter a week, George, a letter a week for your Mum), I always refer to the bedsitter as my ‘flat’. My Mum worries so much about me—are you taking your hay fever tablets, wrap yourself up well, watch out for the smog, don't talk to strangers, watch your pennies—that I haven't the heart to feed her anxieties by telling her I live in one room. If I did, I know I'd get an urgent missive from her asking me how can I possibly breathe, and get up to Scotland or come home right this minute! My Mum loves me, but I wish she would let me be. I'm a big boy now. I've even got a girlfriend to prove it. But one thing anyway, is that my ‘flat’ doesn't cost me much in rent. Another is that apart from myself, there are no mice. When I'd first arrived in London, it had put the fear of God into me to read the small white placards displayed in flat-letting agencies, to wit: Highgate: b/s kitch. fac., lin. supp., 2 min. from Tube, sleep one, visitors no ob., 5 pds p.w., NO MICE. I had therefore approached any prospective accommodation with trepidation. Even now that I have a ‘flat’ and even though I know there are no mice here, I sometimes think I can see the little beasties cavorting in the moonlight in the middle of the floor. At home, my Mum and our cat pounced on any mouse quick and smart. Here, I tremble and quake in bed and yet my mice are only imaginary … But all this is getting away from Martha. From the first meeting it was love at first sight. Marth seemed so like my Mum. Martha is the cleaning woman who is employed by Mr Halcombe, the landlord, to keep this four-storey house in running order. She arrives every day right on the dot of eleven to hoover the hall carpet, polish the banisters, scrub the front doorstep, clean out the two bathrooms and ensure that there is always a supply of pink toiletpaper in the four ‘conveniences’. She does all this with an air of quiet efficiency and sad martyrdom and every day I hear her whispering to herself:—I'ave to live, 'aven' I? Her efficiency isn't all that efficient. Every-thing she does is in fits and starts. She polishes one side of the brass but not the other. She hoovers the hall carpet in squares, one square hoovered, the other dusty. In this respect and also in her garrulous conversation, she is a far cry from my Mum. But as soon as I saw that broad beam of hers moving back and forth across the outside steps as she scrubbed, I knew that she would be my guardian angel. I was prepared to accept her faults. Martha also supplies clean sheets, linen, tea and bath towels every Friday afternoon. As well, she is supposed to make the beds and clean out the rooms of the tenants, but she has never needed to do this for me. I was brought up the proper way. —If you sleep in a bed, Mum used to say, you make it yourself. If you have a room, you keep it tidy, George. Cleanliness is next to godliness, George. It is referred to in the Bible—the King James' version. However, it seems that there is one tenant in particular, a certain Mr Henderson, who insists that Martha clean his room and make his bed. And she is always complaining