AustLit

'That there was an outside world of prostitutes and sex was brought to me mainly I suppose by people like Alastair. Ali and the other boarders had this air of sophistication – un-provincial I would call it now, but then there was no other world but the provincial to envisage. Ali told stories of an existence different from mine, but it never amounted to a whole way of life I could ever have imagined myself in. I didn’t doubt that existence, I could picture it, with Ali’s information, vividly. But it was a world I couldn’t see myself walking through. It was Ali’s world peopled by characters and mapped by landmarks with which he was wholly familiar and which I had never encountered and which I felt I never would.'  (Introduction)

A musical look back at the 1930s, Bon-bons and Roses for Dolly is set in the Crystal Palace movie theatre, now a left-over dream factory, where for almost all of her life Dolly has sought consolation from the world at the sleazy alter of Hollywood. Dolly's life has also seen her surrounded by several symbolic female figures: Mary Corker, the strong intellectual grandmother who represents emotional sterility; Dolly's mother, Maddy, the older victim-dreamer without province; and Ollie Pullett, described by Hewett in her 1979 Hecate article as both the 'indomitable survivor and the final apotheosis of lower middle class suburbia... the voice of commonsense gone berserk' ('Creating Heroines' p77). When Dolly's dream world finally crumbles she finds herself middle aged, searching desperately in the blackened mirror of the old suburban fleapit for the ghost of the girl she once was. The reality is too much for her and she shoots herself during a re-run of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.