By Jerry Tallmer
She is a London charwoman in her 60s — quiet, self-effacing Mrs. Dowey — and throughout all these months of World War I, the war to end all wars, she has been sending letters to a son in the trenches, the way all the other old bags, her gabby fellow charwomen, have been doing.
Only he isn’t her son, and they aren’t letters, they’re envelopes filled with blank sheets of paper.
Now, suddenly, here he is, back in blighty, i.e. England, on five days’ leave — Pvt. Kenneth Dowey, no relation, “a great rough chunk of Scotland…in his Black Watch uniform, all caked with mud…scowling at the old lady” — the playwright tells us — “daring her to raise her head.”
WWW Downtown Express
