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First published in Great Britain by Harper 2015
Copyright © Angela Woolfe writing as Lucy Holliday 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover design and illustration by Jane Harwood
Lucy Holliday asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007582242
Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780007582259
Version: 2015-04-11
Thereâs no way on earth Iâm going to get this part.
For starters, the show is called The Sound of âMusicâ, and Iâm about as musical as a rusty tin opener. Seriously, I can barely hold a tune. If the director and casting agent suddenly have a drastic change of heart, and decide instead to start auditioning the hundred-odd kids gathered here this afternoon for a brand-new musical called The Sound of Rusty Tin Openers ⦠well, then Iâll be a shoo-in. Until then, though, Iâd estimate my chances of winning the role of Louisa Von Trapp at roughly zero.
Oh, and for another thing, all the other girls here at the New Wimbledon Theatre with the label âLOUISAâ stuck to their chests are petite, blonde, and cute-as-a-button pretty.
Whereas Iâm a bit gangly, my hair is the colour of double espresso, and even though I donât think I should be walking about with a paper bag on my head, cute-as-a-button prettiness isnât really my thing.
In fact, surely the director and casting agent are going to seriously question why Iâm here at all.
Itâs a question with a pretty straightforward answer, though: my mother.
And here she is now, bustling back over towards me and my sister Cass, fresh from five minutes of wrangling with the casting directorâs assistant.
âDid it!â Mum practically yells, with the sort of triumphant fist-clutch Tim Henman is always doing on Wimbledonâs Centre Court, just a mile down the road from here, shortly before heâs knocked out of the tournament for another year.
âMum! Canât you be a bit quieter?â
I mean, itâs embarrassing enough that she forced me and Cass to come to the auditions in matching, egg-yolk yellow dirndls (though actually Cass, a cute eight-year-old, looks rather fetching in hers, whereas I, an awkward thirteen-year-old, look like a badly stuffed rag doll, in a much smaller rag dollâs dress, after eating an entire deep-pan pizza); but now sheâs drawing even more attention to the three of us.
âTheyâve agreed to move your audition half an hour earlier, Cass,â Mum is going on, ignoring me, âbecause of the family emergency we have to get to.â
âWhat family emergency?â asks Cass.
âYou know. The important one,â Mum fibs. âAnyway,â she adds, lowering her voice so that only Cass and I can hear her, âthe point is that itâll get you in to audition ahead of the youngest Walker girl, so Iâd be perfectly happy to say your grandparents were on fire if it did the trick.â
âThe youngest Walker girlâis Mum and Cassâs nemesis: a triple-threat nine-year-old (acting, singing and dancing) from an apparently unending line of showbiz Walkers. She has pipped Cass to the post for three big roles lately: Annie in the Aylesbury Waterside production of Annie, Cosette in a production of Les Mis at the Secombe Theatre in Sutton, and, most gallingly of all, Tevyeâs youngest daughter Bielke in a nationwide-touring revival of Fiddler on the Roof. In fact, sheâs over in the far corner of the lobby right now, practising some stunning-sounding arpeggios, and occasionally, for no terribly good reason at all, sinking into an impressive splits. (I donât know if the splits are required in The Sound of Music, I donât actually remember any in the Julie Andrews movie version, but itâs certainly doing a good job of psyching out all the other prospective Brigittas.) The last display of the splits caused three of them to burst into simultaneous tears and flee the auditions before their names were even called. Though it did earn the youngest Walker girl a pretty fierce telling-off from her older sister, another of the showbiz Walkers, whoâs evidently here for the part of Louisa, and looking almost as unenthusiastic about it as I am.