Mrs Wheeler
Hilda's widowed friend in West Bletchley: a small grey woman with bitter views about men and an unlimited appetite for anything free. Not the Mrs Wheeler who kept the sweet-shop in Lower Binfield.
To get things for nothing. Her proudest achievement, after a day's hard fighting round the counters at a remnant sale, is to come out without having bought anything.
The book
At a glance
- Hilda's friend in West Bletchley
- A widow; Bowling never learns what became of the husband beyond Hilda's remark
- Theosophy, faith-healing, food cranks, spiritualism, the Left Book Club
- It doesn't matter whether she wants the thing, only whether it is free
- Part II, chapter 10; Parts III and IV, mostly by report
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMrs Wheeler is a widow and the leading spirit of the three-woman circle Hilda Bowling belongs to. Bowling describes her as a faded little woman who gives the curious impression of being the same colour all over, a kind of greyish dust-colour, and who is nevertheless full of energy. He can feel her quivering with disapproval when he comes into a room. He gathers she has very bitter ideas about the male sex, and later learns she had a husband just like him.
Her particular version of thrift is the belief that you can have a good time without paying for it, and Bowling says she has dragged the other two into every idiocy going, provided it was cheap: theosophy, cat's-cradle, a food-crank book called Radiant Energy that proved you should live on lettuce, faith-healing, hay-box cookery, and a home-made drink called bee wine which they abandoned after reading that it gave you cancer. Her greatest find is the Left Book Club, whose books cost half a crown instead of seven and sixpence, and whose meetings are indoors and free.
She is not a bystander in the plot. It is Mrs Wheeler who tells Hilda in advance that her husband is up to something that week, something seemed to tell her, she says, and Mrs Wheeler whose idea it is to write to the Birmingham hotel and check.
How the book draws them
- How she is drawnFaded, small, and the same greyish dust-colour all over, with far more energy than the look of her suggests. Bowling can feel her disapproving of him from across a room.
- The seance for eighteenpenceShe found a medium so desperate he would sit for one and six. Bowling saw him once at the house: a seedy old devil visibly in terror of delirium tremens, who had a spasm taking his coat off in the hall and dropped a hank of butter-muslin out of his trouser-leg. Bowling shoved it back to him before the women saw.
- ArithmeticThe three of them nearly joined a women's club that ran conducted tours of factories, until Mrs Wheeler worked out that the free teas the factories gave you did not quite equal the subscription.
- The Left Book ClubBowling believes that at the beginning she thought it had something to do with books left behind in railway carriages and sold off cheap. The three of them sit through the meetings like lumps of pudding, not knowing what the meeting is about and not caring.
- The letterShe warns Hilda before the trip that her husband is up to something, and then supplies the method: write to the hotel and ask whether he has arrived. Hilda tells him afterwards that Mrs Wheeler knows all about him.