The Bellboy
A novella.
In 1932, young Walter Matthews finds life in Battersea with his sneering father and simpering mother close to unbearable. His only solace is his passion for all things Egyptian and his adoration for the manly figure of Howard Carter, whose splendid discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb is constantly in the news. When he starts work as a bellboy in the Maydor Superior Hotel in Central London, Walter’s life brightens, and when he befriends Lady Fergus Mantel-Jefferson, a recluse living on the top floor of the hotel, his life positively blossoms, for by the most wonderful good fortune, Lady F was friends with Mr. Carter in Egypt, and Walter is dizzy with excitement at the chance of knowing more about his hero’s life. Unable to tolerate his father any longer, Walter persuades Lady F to house him in her suite while he looks for a room, which he eventually finds. But, on the morning he tells the old lady his news while admiring an alabaster statuette once belonging to Howard Carter, his world changes abruptly and all that glittered before him, his bright future, his hopes and plans, disappear before his very eyes.
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Rebecca Lloyd
Winning the 2008 Bristol Short Story Prize for her story 'The River', Rebecca Lloyd, a writer and editor from Bristol, UK, was shortlisted in the 2010 Dundee International Book Prize and was a semi-finalist in the Hudson Prize for a short story collection in the same year. Her novel Halfling was published by Walker Books in 2011, and in the following year she was co-editor with Indira Chandrasekhar, of Pangea, an Anthology of Stories from Around the Globe, with Thames River Press. In 2014, her short story collection Whelp and Other Stories was shortlisted in the Paul Bowles Award for Short Fiction, and her collection The View From Endless Street was published by WiDo Publishing.
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