Showing posts with label Inoculation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Inoculation. Show all posts

Monday 17 January 2022

What Call Would a Woman with THAT Strength in Her Have to Die of INFLUENZA?







MRS. EYNSFORD HILL
I’m sure I hope it won’t turn cold. 
There’s so much Influenza about. 
It runs right through 
our whole family regularly 
every spring.

LIZA 
[darkly
My Aunt Died of Influenza : 
so they said.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL 
[clicks her tongue sympathetically]!!!

LIZA 
[in the same tragic tone
But it’s my belief they 
done the old woman in.

MRS. HIGGINS 
[puzzled
Done her in?

LIZA
Y-e-e-e-es, Lord love you! 
Why should she die of Influenza
She come through diphtheria 
right enough the year before. 

I saw her with my own eyes. 
Fairly blue with it, she was. 

They all thought she was dead
but my father 
he kept ladling gin 
down her throat 
til she came to 
so sudden 
that she bit the bowl 
off the spoon.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL 
[startled
Dear me!

LIZA 
[piling up the indictment
What call would a woman 
with that strength in her 
have to die of Influenza
What become of her new straw hat 
that should have come to me

Somebody pinched it
and what I say is, 
them as pinched it 
done her in.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL
What does ‘doing her in’ mean?

HIGGINS 
[hastily
Oh, that’s the new small talk. 
To do a person in 
means to kill them.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL 
[to Eliza, horrified
You surely don’t believe 
that Your Aunt was killed?

LIZA
Do I not! Them she lived with 
would have killed her for
 a hat-pin, let alone a hat.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL
But it can’t have been right 
for your father to pour spirits 
down her throat like that. 
It might have killed her.

LIZA
Not her. Gin was mother’s milk to her. 
Besides, he’d poured so much down his own throat that he knew the good of it.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL
Do you mean that he drank?

LIZA
Drank! My word! 
Something chronic.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL
How dreadful for you!

LIZA
Not a bit. It never did him 
no harm what I could see.
 
But then he did not keep it up regular
[Cheerfully
On the burst, as you might say, 
from time to time
 
And always more agreeable 
when he had a drop in. 
 
When he was out of work, 
my mother used to give him fourpence 
and tell him to go out 
and not come back until 
he’d drunk himself cheerful 
and loving-like. 

There’s lots of women 
has to make their husbands drunk 
to make them fit to live with

[Now quite at her ease
 
You see, it’s like this. 
If A Man has a bit of A Conscience
it always takes him when he’s sober; 
and then it makes him low-spirited

A drop of booze just takes that off 
and makes him happy. 
 
[To Freddy, who is in convulsions of suppressed laughter] 
Here! what are you sniggering at?

FREDDY
The new small talk. 
You do it so awfully well.

LIZA. 
If I was doing it proper, 
what was you laughing at? 
[To Higgins
Have I said anything I oughtn’t?

MRS. HIGGINS 
[interposing
Not at all, Miss Doolittle.

LIZA
Well, that’s a mercy, anyhow. 
[Expansively
 
What I Always Say is —

HIGGINS 
[rising and looking at his watch
Ahem!

LIZA 
[looking round at him; taking the hint; and rising
Well: I must go. 
[They all rise.  Freddy goes to The Door]
So pleased to have met you. Good-bye. 
[She shakes hands with Mrs. Higgins].

MRS. HIGGINS. 
Good-bye.

LIZA. 
Good-bye, Colonel Pickering.

PICKERING
Good-bye, Miss Doolittle. 
 
[They shake hands].

LIZA
 [nodding to the others
Good-bye, all.

FREDDY 
[opening the door for her
Are you walking across The Park, 
Miss Doolittle? If so—


LIZA
Walk! Not bloody likely

[Sensation]. 
 


I am going in a taxi. 
 
[She goes out].

Pickering gasps and sits down. Freddy goes out on the balcony to catch another glimpse of Eliza.