One of the agencies she signed up with had offered her a three-day stint sewing on buttons in a tailor’s shop in Bloomsbury for £2.85 an hour, which she had accepted wearily. But within two minutes of entering the shop, a festering lint-filled tomb owned by three ageing Portuguese brothers with skin like parchment and hair blackened with boot polish, who looked at her as though she had just burst out of a birthday cake, she had made her excuses (something about sore fingers) and fled. The other agency were waiting to hear from a zip factory in Islington about two days’ zip-sorting, and there’d been talk of a few days on reception at a photographer’s studio in Kentish Town but Betty didn’t hold out much hope for that, given her performance on the typing test they’d given her. She feared there were a dozen pretty girls with winning smiles out there who could type faster than thirty words a minute. Betty was nearing the end of her first week in Soho and she still did not have a job.
