The Air Force was mostly favoured, and a D.F.C. Everything turned on whether the man in question was a good dancer and had a sense of humour. The girls on this floor were not yet experienced in discussing men. The ground floor houses the staff offices, dining room, recreation room and drawing room (the latter freshly papered in depressing shades of sludge-like brown), while the first floor accommodates the youngest members of the club, girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty, recently released from boarding school and used to living in communal dormitories, not unlike the curtained-off cubicles in this part of the building. Set mostly in the summer of 1945, The Girls of Slender Means centres on the May of Teck Club in Kensington, a hostel for the ‘Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years, who are obliged to reside apart from their Families in order to follow an Occupation in London.’Īt an early stage in the novel, Spark maps out the social hierarchy that has developed within this large boarding house (previously a private residence, back in Victorian times). Deceptively light at first sight, there are some genuine elements of darkness lurking just beneath the surface, all of which come together to make it a really interesting read. Luckily for me, it turned out to be a great success. In the hope of building on this positive experience, I recently turned to another of her early books, the wonderfully titled The Girls of Slender Means. Last year I read and really enjoyed Muriel Spark’s 1959 novel Memento Mori, a darkly comic exploration of ageing and mortality.
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