…[T]here was an annual visit from an ad-hoc Italian Operatic Company. The Italian community in Glasgow supported this in a big way. Indeed, it could be said that there was as much enjoyment to be got out of the audience as the performance. Not for them the respectful attitude of opera-goers who are shocked if anyone applauds precipitately. Before a tenor’s final top note, they were already clapping and shouting. They even demanded encores before the opera was allowed to proceed. I was interested to note that one of their singers was not Italian, but Polish. She called herself Kyra Vayne and I first saw her when she appeared in a Metropole pantomime, Bonnie Prince Charlie, early in the war days. She had succeeded in escaping from Poland before the country was overrun by the Nazis and had arrived in Glasgow because it was a Polish centre. Miss Vayne played the principal boy and had probably the finest voice ever heard in the Metropole. << less