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Hello and welcome back to Band of Haddon podcast with me Pulse and Victoria. So I did take a few weeks off just because I absolutely lost my voice and I wanted to make sure that I was able to read a book and not lose my voice for the next day. So we are gonna continue reading An English Madam The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne by Paul Bailey. Chapter 1. The Wrongful Parent Died Cynthia's father was at sea when the elder of his two daughters was born on december twenty fourth, nineteen thirty two. From the RMS Windsor Castle of Cape Town, Hamilton, Payne wrote to his wife, Betty in England Friday thirtieth of December How is my darling and her little cinders today? You have both been in my thoughts a lot for the last two days. I wish I was home to kiss you both. I wonder what my baby is like. It seems so hard to think that I have a baby, yet not seen her. She is now six days old. She ought to have grown a bit by now, didn't she, B? I pictured you again last night cuddling her up to you how I did wish I was home. Well, this is Sunday, jan first. I drank the old year out with Jack last night, otherwise it's very quiet. How is my darling and her baby today? I hope you are well. I'm longing to hear from you. It should be a nice long letter as you have been convalence for eight days now. Give Cinders a kiss for me. It's one constellation to think when you get this I shall be only two weeks away. Well, bye bye, my sweetest of all. Hamilton Payne saw little of his family during the following ten years. For most of that he was working as a ladies' hairdresser on the South African Union Castle Ocean Liners. He would appear in England every three months or so, bearing costly gifts for his wife and children, with whom he would stay for about a week. It was like a stranger coming into the home, Cynthia recalls. I never really knew him. Their home was a terrace house in a fashionable resort on the southeast coast. It was small, pokey even, but for Hamilton, who had been raised in a dingy back street, it was spacious and grand. He was proud of the fact that he had entered into marriage as a householder, able to provide his young wife with a place of her own. Cynthia's younger sister, Melanie, was conceived during one of Hamilton's brief visits. The women are close in age.

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Melanie is Cynthia's junior by eighteen months, but markedly different in every other aspect.

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Their dissimilarities were pronounced from early childhood. Cynthia was always loud, self-assertive. Melanie demure and reticent. While Melanie was at home playing contentedly with her dolls, Cynthia was roaming the streets with a gang of boys. Mel Melanie observed and observes the social niceties, whereas Cynthia has little patience with them. I like to shock people.

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I like to wake people up. She was jealous from the start.

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Melanie told me. She cut my curls off because everyone said what lovely curls I had and what a beautiful baby. So snip snip. She used to pinch my bottle. It's a shame. Really, we have nothing in common. I've got my friends who are sisters and they do the same sort of things together. They paint and sew and make clothes as I do. It's just temperament, I suppose. There's only one thing in Cynthia's life, and that's sex. But there only ever has been. Cynthia and Melanie are united. However, in their enduring love for their mother, they also share an inability to feel genuine affection for the stranger who fathered them. Cynthia remembers Betty Payne as a very gentle, placid woman, a soft touch. She never wanted much out of life. She didn't want loads of money. As long as she had enough for her two kids, she was happy. She was indifferent, it seems. To the expensive clothes that Hamilton brought for her in America and South Africa. I brought her a fur coat home, he told his elder daughter many years later. Most women would have loved a fur coat in the nineteen forties. Most women would have wanted to put on the coat and go out on the town and show it off. But no, not your mother. She was at the stove when I got it out of its box, cutting chips for you and Melanie. Very nice, she said. Thank you. She just put the coat down and carried on preparing your meal. Most women would have rushed upstairs into the bedroom and preended themselves in front of the mirror, but not my bee. Very nice, thank you. That's all she said. Betty Payne died of cancer of the fro in nineteen forty three, at the age of thirty-eight, only months after Hamilton had returned home for good.

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He was desolated.

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His daughters were both her and bewildered, for they had noticed nothing wrong with their carefree, undemanding mother, apart from the fact that she was occasionally short of breath. They had seldom heard her complain. His daughters were both her and bewildered, for they had noticed nothing wrong with their carefree, undemanding mother, apart from the fact that she was occasionally short of breath. They had seldom heard her complain. With her death a source of warmth vanished from Cynthia's life, and from Melanie's too. The next few years in father's company were to be cold ones indeed. The girls, who had grown accustomed to being kissed and hugged, found their claims for affection rebuffed. Daddy had his shop to run, and had no time for such indulgences. Neither could he afford to placate his discontented children with exotic gifts as he had once done in his ocean liner days. He was a constant presence now, not some strange bringer of clothes and toys who would vanish as suddenly as he had come. Betty Payne's last months were spent in the flat above her husband's hairdressing salon, in order to acquire the business which was situated in the very centre of the seaside town. Hamilton had to sell the house in which she had raised the girls. She wasn't very happy. She wasn't happy in the flat. It didn't seem like a home to her. She missed her garden. Hamilton had assured her that she would have a bigger and better house when he had really established himself, and she had accepted his assurance. At the start he couldn't afford to employ an assistant, which meant that she was required to help him in the shop. She was working alongside him only a week before her death. She had confided in one or two close relatives that she felt bad, but had not told no one else, not even her husband, how ill she was. It was only when she began to feel worse, when she was quite literally in agony that she allowed herself to be taken to hospital. Hamilton's grief was exacerbated by the fact that he had seen so little of his wife during the dozen years of their marriage. When it was no longer possible to work on the ocean liners, he had joined the merchant navy, and his visits home had been rarer and briefer. Now, when he was at last demobilized and free to enjoy being a husband and father, the woman he loved was cruelly taken from him. She had to die to make him more humble. He might have been more arrogant than he was if she'd gone on living. For Hamilton Payne was not a modest man. As his daughters remember sadly, the youngest of five children he had risen from working class origins and attained what he considered respectable status. On the liners he had cut and set the hair of the wealthy and famous, and had been changed by the experience. He had been a nobody when he had first left England. When he came back for good it was as someone who could boast that his work had met with the delighted approval of Gracie Fields, among others. He was, he maintained, to his children, a pillar of sorts in the local community. He was his own man, a professional, and he expected people, particularly Cynthia and Melanie, to look up to him. Melanie was the ideal daughter on the surface, at least for such a man. Even at the age of nine, she was behaving in a distinctly ladylike way. Although she was a chatterbox like her sister, her voice was appropriately measured, and her vocabulary comparatively sophisticated. She was always neatly dressed. Cynthia, who had been permitted by her mother to run loose, was commanded by Hamilton to emulate her sister in speech and appearance. I was a problem child. I was a proper little booger, you know? I used to go with the boys from the housing estate. My sister thought they were common. I didn't have sex, nothing like that, but I loved being with boys, never with girls. The boys were working class and ambitious. Snobbish Hamilton was horrified that Cynthia was harming his reputation in the town by playing with them. She was, in fact, the leader of the gang, its driving force, its most inventive rebel. The kids Dad considered decent were warned by their mothers to stay away from me. Her father assumed the role of Martinet. The more he tried to discipline her though, the more she crossed him. He cautioned her frequently about her obsessive as well as executive use of swear words. Years earlier he had beaten her, when in the Anderson shelter behind the house, she had whispered to Melanie, who whom she was sharing a bunk, that their parents were getting undressed. Let's take a look and see if we can see Daddy's cock was the sentence that precipitated the beating. He pulled me out of the shelter and gave me a bloody good hiding on the backside. My mother, who was always trying to protect me, said, It's nothing, Hamilton, don't hurt her. It's nothing, he said. A girl of eight talking that kind of dirty talk, it's nothing. After recounting that episode, Cynthia observed, I was curious, and then she asked, should a girl of eight be interested in knowing what her daddy's cock looked like? The first school that Cynthia Payne attended was a private one called Inexplicitably Dunheaved. Her report for the term ending at Easter 1938 bears information that her conduct is excellent, that she is making very good progress in English, that her counting and tables are coming on nicely, that her handwork is very good, and that she has a good ear for singing. In the art class, the paragon is very observant and has a good memory. Despite this high praise, Hamilton took her out of Dunheaved when she was seven and placed her in another private school, where she did not do so well. From there she was sent to a covent school, Villa Madalena, from which she was expelled after pulling off a nun's veil and pinning a notice on a teacher's back. The principal, Sister Flavia, went to Hamilton's shop and told him that Cynthia would have to be removed. Is it because of her dirty talk? he asked the nun, who replied that it wasn't. The explosion was necessary because of the effect her waywardness was having on the other pupils. Cynthia's sole interest was in making mischief. When my mother died, I found it difficult to learn. By the time Cynthia was accepted at a council school, her regress as a student was complete. She was joined there by her resentful sister, who was taken out of Villa Madalena by an angry Hamilton who decided he would spend no more money on his daughter's education. Melanie did her best to dissociate herself from Cynthia, who had immediately befriended what Melanie calls the Riffraff. Cynthia's cousin, Winifred, an amiable, tolerant woman, who regrets her unconventional relative with bemusted admiration, cannot remember a time when Cynthia wasn't talking about sex. She was a monkey. She always knew more than anybody else. I was older, but she told me the facts of life. These facts, it transpired, were sometimes wildly inaccurate, the product of an imagination that dwelt continuously on the erotic delights awaiting its owner. While her classmates were studying their textbooks, Cynthia was directing her attention to the stories in teenage magazines, like The Oracle and Miracle. They confused and excited her. The confusion arose from what she detected was a missing element. The hero of the average story would make the beautiful young heroine in his arms and crush his lips against hers. The result of this crushing would become noticeable several months later when their heroine would joyfully inform her hero. Darling, I'm going to have your baby. How? Cynthia wondered. Could a pair of crushing lips produce a child? There was more to conception than that, and she set her mind to discovering what it was. It was the vocal expression she gave this perfectly natural curiosity that embarrassed and offended most of her adult relations, who responded to her frank questioning with disgust, referencing to dirty talk. No one, it appears, made the attempt to explain in words that have not been debased how a man impregnates a woman. Rather than tell her that the parts of the body have proper names, they replied with confident predictions that she would go to bed. Even her beloved aunt Maud, who treated her fondly, announced that Cynthia would give birth to an intelligent child by the time she was fourteen. Maud was wrong, and Cynthia did not go to the bad as surely and swiftly as her family predicted. She continued to swear, though because this was her natural way of speaking, she was still the ringleader of the gang. In defiance of Hamilton's wishes, she even took to stealing her father's cigarettes to give to her mates, who had started smoking. The boys, from whom she had learned her dirty talk, were under no compulsion to refer to their cocks as peniles, or their balls as testicles. They were happily unaware, as indeed Cynthia was, of those precise alternatives. She granted them a glimpse of her fanny, not her vagina, and they returned the favour by undoing their trouser buttons. I showed them mine and they showed me theirs. It was all very innocent. There was no thought of sex. They were more interested in climbing trees or disturbing respectable children. After his wife's death, Hamilton Payne employed a housekeeper to take charge of his daughters. She did not last long. In their different ways, Cynthia and Melanie made her life intolerable. They resent the intruder, who was obviously anxious to marry their father. They were briefly in accord in their antipathy. Another housekeeper was hired. She too was forced to endure Melanie's decorous insults and Cynthia's outspokenness. Like her predecessor, she was hunting for a husband, also the girls assumed. She also left when the situation became unbearable. Affaird was engaged. She was afforded the same treatment. She departed in haste. Hamilton, exacerbated by their behavior, made it clear to Melanie and Cynthia that, young as they were, they would now have to fend for themselves. And that is what they did. After a fashion. Melanie played the role of Hamilton's ideal daughter so well that her Father almost forgot that this was the girl who had cajoled Betty into letting her stay with her godmother when he was home from sea. In the decade or so that she lived above the salon, Melanie seldom revealed the keen dislike she still harbored for Hamilton, which she had expressed as a child by disappearing from him. When she knew he was due back, she would make arrangements to go off to Little Hampton. She couldn't bear him. During those years in which there was no possibility of escape, she acted with calculated politeness. She rarely argued with the frequently unreasonable Hamilton. She merely acknowledged that he was right, even when he patently wasn't. Melanie was as compliant as her sister was belligerent. She took the line of least reassurance, whereas I always stood up to him. Hamilton was particularly annoyed by Cynthia's indifference to doing housework, an indifference she was pleased to have inherited from her mother. Mum would give the house a quick dust over the day before Dad was expected home. He'd kick up a terrible fuss if he saw so much as a speck. These days, Cynthia has a retinue of slaves to keep Cranmaw neat and tidy. She stands behind Philip with a whip as he scrubs and polishes, and flays his naked flesh if he slackens at his appointed task. She commands the contentedly servile Rodney to mow the lawn and sweep the drive and shrieks at those menials who are honored with bathroom duties. Wash that scum off slave and too high and mighty for the S Bend, are you? We'll soon see about that. But in the late nineteen forties, Cynthia was required to do all those chores she now relegates to her underlings. Hamilton, who considered it natural for a girl to be house proud, could not understand his firstborn's this inclination to set to it with a mop or pick up a duster. Cynthia remembers one occasion when she drove him into a fury. Instead of washing the dishes as she had been instructed, she had stacked them up inside the stove. It was her intention to deal with them the following morning. Hamilton, returning to the fly in the smaller hours, noticed that the plates were missing. He pulled Cynthia out of bed and demanded to know where they were. After much previousing, she told him. He frog marched her into the kitchen, where he stood over her while she washed up. I kept saying I'll do them tomorrow, I'll do them tomorrow. You'll bloody well do them tonight, he said. And I bloody well had to. It is one of the oddities of Hamilton's character that he encouraged neither Cynthia nor Melanie to learn how to cook. We ate out almost every night. It was cheaper, Dad reckoned, than buying meat and vegetables and preparing them at home. Only on Sundays when they visited either pair of grandparents did they sit down to what Cynthia calls proper food in a family atmosphere. We used to live for the weekends. It was on such visits that Cynthia would inform Winifred of her latest findings in the sexual sphere. To please her father, Cynthia agreed to study to become a qualified hairdresser. He enrolled her at a technical school in the west end of London. Hamilton at last felt confident that his rebellious child would have a vocation, a purpose in life, and one, moreover, that might prove beneficial to him. He urged her to take her training seriously, to apply herself. She promised him that she would do her best. It was a promise that she was unable to fulfill, at least to his satisfaction. She found that she couldn't concentrate. Although she took the seven o'clock train to the capital every morning, she arrived at college later and later. The city held too many distractions for her, of the kind an unsettled girl from a small town had difficulty resisting. She stared longingly into the windows of the big department stores, and stopped to admire the well dressed women who passed her in the streets, and at the forefront of her mind there was the yet to be encouraged lover, a lone dunner. A Londoner, perhaps, who would crush his lips against hers. She awaited him eagerly. Her lips remained uncrushed though, and her propensity for daydreaming became more and more noticeable. Her schoolwork, such as it was, deteriorated. On july twenty first, nineteen forty eight, Hamilton Payne received a letter from the principal of the college, a somewhat confused woman, as her communication demonstrates. I feel I must write and tell you that Sylvia is proving very slow in the uptake and is so far below the average student. That we feel that it is a waste of her time and hours for her to continue the training. We are sorry to come to this conclusion as you are in trade and Sylvia has to make such a long journey to get the instruction. But we feel that she shows no sign whatsoever of any likelihood of reaching the prescribed standard for the school certificate by the end of the training. You may therefore like to withdraw her at the end of the term. Please do not blame Sylvia as she has given no trouble and is apparently doing her best. In his hasty dispatch reply to the principal, Hamilton no doubt observed that the subject of her anxiety was called Cymphia. No apology is offered in her next letter, dated July 23rd, which begins We are all very concerned about Cynthia. And continues, she does not seem to grasp the importance of her training. If you wish, we are quite prepared to give her another term in which to mend her ways. Let me give you an instance. As you know, she is losing at least an hour a day on account of her late arrival and early departure. Instead of appreciating that extra effort is necessary to make up for this lost time, she arrived one day about ten o'clock and told her mistress that she did not feel like hurrying, she had just dawdled. She was sent with a register the day other day. She was sent with a register the other day to another part of the building, and she was absent over half an hour and was found wondering about taking no active steps to find where the register was to be deposited. Perhaps you would have a good talk to her and impress her upon that concentration and real interest are necessary. His talk made no impression, he withdrew her from the school. Every morning during her year as a trainee hairdresser, Cynthia had been given two shillings and sixpence by Hamilton to pay for lunch. She saved the money instead, and when she had accumulated enough, she went to C A Mode's in Oxford Street and spent it on clothes. You could buy a really lovely dress for a pound in those days. She had something, therefore, to show for her time in London. A substantially larger wardrobe. She was nearly sixteen and had vague aspirations about becoming a film star. I didn't want to live the restricted life of a girl from a good family. What she wanted desperately was to leave home. She felt constrained there. By her father's censor by her sister's disapproval. Cynthia was delighted when Hamilton told her that he had arranged for her to work for some friends of his in Aldershot. Felicity and Felix were prepared to teach her everything she had failed to learn at the college, and would pay her besides. They also assured Hamilton, though he did not reveal this to his daughter, that they would make the attempt to exercise some control over her and see that she behaved herself. This assurance was the source of his own delight when Cynthia departed. She was happy at first. Felix had a thriving business and employed several assistants, all of them two or three years older than Cynthia. She revealed in their company, and they in hers. She revelled in their company, and they in hers. She listened enraptured as they talked about their boyfriends. She questioned them incentedly. To their considerable amusement, she pestered them for intimate details. Felicity was more alarmed than amused. The mother of two children was outraged by coarseness of Cynthia's language. She wrote to Hamilton to that effect. Was Cynthia's compulsive swearing, she wondered, the result of some mental health disturbance? Auctionalized by the sudden death of her mother? If so, did he not think it was right that she should be examined by a psychiatrist? Hamilton didn't think it was right. Whatever was wrong with Cinders, he reassured, it wasn't that. She was going through a difficult phase, nothing more. Felicity persisted. It was something more. The fact that Cynthia hadn't heeded a single one of the hundreds of warnings she'd received from her family, from her teachers, and most important, from her present employers was proof enough. She thought there was something wrong with me. She had the cheek to send me to Park Pre-Wet, the mental health hospital in Basingstoke. My father was a bit annoyed because he had to pay for the treatment. Oh it was a bloody horrible place. Everyone looking at you as if you were crazy. I didn't know it was a loony bin when she first mentioned that I ought to go there. I thought to myself, I'll make a day out of it. I only went to get out of the shop for a day. Cynthia's strongest memory of the psychiatrist who tried in vain to treat her at Park Priwet is that he smoked Dumurrier cigarettes, a most exclusive brand in the 1940s. Even her father with his posh ambitions didn't rise to those. He paced up and down in front of me smoking a Du Murray cigarette. I'll never forget it. He said, I want you to tell me all the dirty words you know beginning with A. She must have briefed him. I must have said ass or asshole or something. We got to B. I suppose I said bastard bloody. I think of all the filthy words he kept on saying. I just didn't like him. Think of all the dirty words he kept on saying. I just didn't like him. I had a feeling he was getting all sexed up the way he was carrying on. He got to C. I don't know whether I said cunt, I can't remember. I'm sure I didn't. Then all of a sudden, we were at the letter F. Now, I was alright until we got to the letter F. Do you know any words beginning with F? I said no. He said, surely, you must know a word starting with F. I said, I don't. I don't know one. I'll never forget. He was stocking his Dew Maria cigarette and pacing up and down. I mean, he was really annoyed. Then he stopped and said to me, How do you expect me to help you if you're not prepared to help yourself? So I turned round and said, I don't want you to help me. I'm not here of my own free will. I don't want you to help me. He looked at me. He was speechless. I wouldn't tell him the word fuck. That's what he wanted to hear. I was determined I wasn't going to say fuck. She visited the hospital four more times. The psychiatrist wrote to Hamilton that something had happened in Cynthia's adolescence. But he couldn't ascertain what. My father got fed up with having to pay. He said to Felicity he didn't agree with her sending me up there. He didn't think I could be that bad, otherwise the psychiatrist would have said so. She was furious. Felicity was. She always thought the worst of me. It was while she was living with Felix and Felicity that Cynthia met Keith, with whom she had her first rudimentary sexual experience. I'd been going out with him for two or three weeks and nothing had happened. If he'd been more forceful, we might have done something. I'd have let him. We went to see a film with Betty Hutton. I remember it because of the song. It had to be you. I was sitting up in the gods with Keith's arm round me. He was a shy bloke. It took him bloody eternity to get his arm round me. Anyway, the next thing was his hand was on my bust. He was feeling my tits, and I just burst out crying. I suppose I was emotional. I don't know. I do know I thought, oh, I like that. I really like that. But I was a bit ashamed for liking it so much. It was a very odd feeling. I talked about sex, all the dirty talk, on and on and on. Yet when it happened, I shed tears. I cried and cried. He asked me what was wrong, and I said I didn't know. Then he stopped what he was doing. They went out together for several weeks. The prospect of tears deterred Keith from making further overtures. Cynthia ached with frustration, as Keith presumably, but was unable to take his hand and put them where she wanted them. It was up to the man to make the first move. We've laughed about it since, Christ, he said. I didn't want to start you sobbing all over again. Out of sheer devilment, perhaps, Cynthia staged a scene inspired by her copious reading of the oracle. She used Dolores, the nursemaid to Felicity and Felix's children, as her startled informant. She managed to get Dolores alone. I've something to tell you, she whispered, conspirally. She made her features appropriately distraught before she announced that she was going to have a baby. I love him very, very much. I want to have his child. Oh Dolores, Dolores, please understand, Dolores, that I would travel to the ends of the earth for him. I would suffer any shame just so long as I could keep his love. The gullible Dolores was moved by Cynthia's outpourings. She promised to help the unfortunate girl. She advised her to calm down. The boy might turn out to be responsible. The idea of being a father often brought faultless young men to their senses. All would be for the best in the long run. I hope so, Dolores. My heart yearns for him. I don't think I could go on living if he deserted me now. Cynthia was so carried away by her own acting powers that she forgot to tell Dolores the precious information she had imparted with such dramatic emphasis was for Dolores' ears only. The necessary cliche, let this be our secret, did not come to her recently crushed lips. Dolores immediately told Felix's assistants that little Cindy was pregnant. They were instantly attentive to her. Like Dolores, they promised to help. They would rally round her if the boy let her down. She was not to worry. They hooked and kissed her and assured her of their genuine concern. Cynthia's happiness, the happiness of being the object of sympathy and disinterested affection, was short-lived. The following day, she was called into Felicity's presence. Felicity never rose before ten in the morning, and was in the habit of receiving people in her bedroom. Yuda thought she was the lady of the manor, the way she behaved.

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She put on airs something shocking.

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It comes as no surprise to me to learn that you are going to have a baby. I have known from when you were a child that you would end up this way. It wasn't until Felicity said, Cindy, I have no alternative but to send you back home. That Cynthia terminated her performance and returned to reality. She spoke the truth. I'm not pregnant, I was play acting. I was having a bit of fun. I'm afraid I don't believe you. Spurred on Felicity's disbelief, Cynthia stated, with a typical lack of finesse, that since she hadn't been fucked, it was impossible for her to be having a baby. He was too shy to fuck me, she elaborated, to Felicity's horror. He only felt my tits, that's all he did. All he did was feel my tits in the pictures. Felix and I can't afford to wait and find out if you are being honest. She pleaded with Felicity not to send her back to her father. She begged her not to do that. She told the lady whose presence she had been called into that she really and truly had not been fucked. She was ordered out the bedroom. I was very happy.

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Mm.

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Uh no. I was very, very unhappy. The last thing I wanted was to go home. I hated it there. In her distress, Cynthia decided that the only way she could make Felicity feels sorry for her was to pretend to commit suicide. She took a bottle of weed killer from the garden shed and wrote a farewell note. I was always dramatic to Felix and Felicity. In it she declared that she was going to end it all in the downstairs bathroom by drinking poison. She would rather die than return to her father. She placed a note in a prominent position in the hall and duly locked herself in the bathroom. She listened eagerly for Felix to come in from the salon. She heard him rush up the stairs shouting for his wife Where's Cindy? Is she with you? Have you seen Cindy? No, she hadn't seen her. Why on earth was he in such a panic? Cynthia waited a moment or two before opening the bathroom door, upon which Felix was clamoring frantically. I'd gone to all that trouble, but I hadn't done anything. I hadn't even unscrewed the top of the bottle of weed killer. He was relieved to find me alive. But he was bloody angry too. She was called into the presence for the last time. Why did you think of killing yourself? Because I don't want to go back to him. Felicity explained that suicide was a dreadful sin, a crime. We were all on put on this earth to do something. You must do what you are here to do until your proper span is ended. I am sorry, but I am still sending you home. And home she went, to a dismayed and disgusted Hamilton, who said that he was going to have her examined by a gynecologist. We'll soon discover if you're telling lies. She insisted that she was innocent. Her godmother, in whom she confined in a few days later, believed her, when she described what had and hadn't happened with Keefe. I told her it was just for fun. It was just to shock. There was no examination. Cynthia's godmother, who was also Melanie's, had written to Hamilton three years earlier. I think you will find Cindy will be okay. When she grows a little older, of course she is, at an awkward age now. She is a child one minute, grown up the next, a sort of mixture all the time. I think, too, she misses her mother, not outwardedly, but inwardedly, which makes her feel at sixes and sevens with everything and everyone at times. I shouldn't worry, that will all pass. I agree she is a child that won't be driven but led and often to appeal to her better nature would work wonders. He lost interest in me. You do what you want, he said. She had no idea what she wanted to do. I tried for his sake to be a hairdresser, but I wasn't any good. After all the training at the school and months I spent working for Felix, I could just about manage a shampoo properly. I used to love talking to the customers and making them laugh. I used to enjoy that, talking to the customers and making them roll up. She had a succession of different jobs. Whether as shop assistants or waitresses, her principal concern was in diverting the customers. She was unemployed for long periods, her father accused her of being the one and only lazy member of the Payne family. Hamilton did not appeal to Cynthia's better nature. He lost interest in his daughter's welfare to such an extent that he abnegated any claim to parental responsibility. He was simply concerned with his own good nature when Cymphia embarked on the first of her disastrous relationships with a man in his early forties. His efforts to extradite her from the liaison were of a crudy dictorial kind. He allowed himself nothing more than the expression of outrage. He was incapable then, and for many years afterwards of displaying any sign of tenderness to his children. Who he remained in agreement that to use Cymphia's phase, the wrong parent died. Alrighty, so that was chapter one. It was quite a long chapter. I hope everybody enjoyed that episode. And if you did enjoy it, then please leave a review. And if you have any suggestions of any other books or any topics you would like me to discuss, then please do. Right now I am actually running Zoom events every month and also reduce sessions in person and online called Confidence and Guidance, which are aimed to help mainly men with their confidence in speaking to women and understanding not just their body but also women's bodies. And you will be able to find those through my own channels. When you go on the Behind the Battle podcast links, you'll be able to find my details. Or just look up Porcelain Victoria and you should be able to find me. Right, that should be all for today. Bye!