Donny’s was luxury.

Across the road were small, dingy houses with drab curtains and blackened chimney pots. Two doors away was a newsagent’s shop with a window which hadn’t been changed for years, and dust lay thick on the old dummy cigarette cartons. On the nearest corner was a fish and chip shop, with a huge sign reading: FRYING TONIGHT. To the right and the left and all about this district there was the poverty of parts of the East End, and the roughness of most of the rest. No one knew better than Rollison the quality and the oddness of many of the people, or that the squalor remained only in patches; but there was little polish on the East End of London.

Except at Donny’s.

Not far away were London’s docks. Along this very street came lascars and sailors from the four corners of the earth, some drunk, some perverts, some broke, some with money spilling out of their pockets. From the thousands of little houses which rose like mushrooms made of bricks, the stevedores left for their daily work, rough, hardy men whose labour made them dirty and whose wives were often hard put to keep their homes and their families clean. Their only sight of luxury was through a television set and visits to the pictures—except at Donny’s.

It was like stepping out of a coaling barge into a first class liner.

Coming out of a doorway on the right was a little woman with a flushed face, her flowered cotton frock obviously Sunday best, high heeled brown shoes which needed mending, and the look of a poor man’s wife. Her greying hair was a mass of lustrous curls, and a glow in her eyes told of a woman who had realised a dream. She went to a small office with two windows, like a cinema’s cash desk. There a young woman with auburn hair and wearing a pale pink smock sat like a queen.