Joyce Grenfell was born Joyce Phipps, daughter of the youngest of the beautiful American Langhorne sisters, of whom the most celebrated was Nancy, Lady Astor. Her girlhood, spent on the fringes of the famous Cliveden set among such men as George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward, spanned the twenties, but it was not until 1938, at a dinner party, that she gave an impromptu imitation of a Women's Institute speaker and discovered her genius for dramatic monologue. This book is the first part of her autobiography and takes the story from her childhood through the war, to the moment in 1954 when her own show, Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure, opened in London.