Service Without A Smile

Service Without a SmileOn the morning of my 16th Birthday, in London between the two world wars, my mother, who was a snob, decided that her beer man was no longer giving satisfactory service and fired him. He had begun his week's work every Monday morning by delivering several gallons of light beer that was used exclusively to wash our polished-wood floors, thus bringing up their color and grain. On that particular morning, she had caught him in her drawing room drinking the beer from the pail...