Each week Edna needs to be helped from the car to the wheelchair in which she sits out the hours at the day centre. The carer doesn’t strap up her feet, and so they drag along the ground because she has long elegant but fortunately unfeeling legs.
Placed to one side in the large sitting room, she is unresponsive until the music and movement therapist comes and sets up her mp3 player. The down-lighters in the ceiling catch her eye just as the music begins, and mentally she looks herself over, stretches tall, and counts herself in.
She smiles, because it has been drummed into her (“Smile girls, smile! I must have all my girls smiling.”), and joins number 5 high-kicking her way across to the centre-stage turntable. Edna is once more a Tiller Girl and tonight is Sunday Night at The London Palladium.
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