Memoirs of a Dance Hall Romeo (3 page)

I had been to a dance or two during my Army service, but not many, and those mainly mess brawls with too few girls to go round and too much drink.

In spite of that, I was capable of getting round the floor without disgracing myself, thanks to a series of Saturday night hops at the local church hall when I was sixteen. As I remember, it was all as clean as a whistle, mainly boy scouts and girl guides in their Sunday best, with the Vicar behind a trestle table dispensing lemonade at the interval.

And then Wilma turned up.

She was an entirely different proposition from the rest of the females. For one thing, she was twenty and looked older. A real woman, with long blonde hair and a figure to thank God for, or at least that’s how I remember her.

She was too good. Hardly anyone danced with her, they didn’t have the nerve. I only did myself as a dare. They were playing a slow foxtrot number from
Casablanca
with Humphrey Bogart,
As Time Goes By
. To this day, whenever I hear that tune, I feel her arm slide round my neck, her body pressing against me on the turns.

It seemed impossible that such a queen among women could be interested in me, and yet I found myself walking her home through the perfumed darkness, shaking with excitement at the very thought of being with her.

A short cut to her home lay across the school playing fields. We paused in a small wood at the edge, I kissed her clumsily. After a while, we sat on a pile of dead leaves and I attempted further liberties.

She pushed my eager hands away at once and told me not to spoil things. She seemed angry and I thought I’d gone too far. She offered me a cigarette, which I accepted eagerly for they were hard to come by at that stage of the war.

I sat smoking, inhaling deeply, for I had already discovered the pleasures of nicotine. Wilma stayed quiet for a moment, then leaned forward suddenly and unbuttoned my trousers. I reached for her at once and she pushed me away instantly. ‘No,’ she said firmly, then started to play with me with slow, capable fingers.

I lay back against the leaves, inhaling deeply until my head buzzed, alternating between the twin delights of tobacco and sexual pleasure.

This performance became something of a ritual with us, and never varied in the slightest detail except, on occasion, as regards the brand of cigarette. But I was never permitted the slightest intimacy as far as she was concerned.

A strange business. Even stranger was the way it ended, for she simply didn’t turn up to meet me one night. A week later, when I saw her by chance on a tram, she looked through me as if she had never set eyes on me in her life. Perhaps I had served her purpose in some mysterious way.

Of all the dance halls I patronized during that year, the Trocadero was my favourite. A Moorish palace that would not have disgraced a Hollywood film set, thanks to the wild fantasy of the man who had created her, incongruously set down on a main road, three miles out from the city centre in a respectable middle-class suburb.

There was music on the night air that first evening. It drew me like a magnet when I came out of the public bar of The Tall Man, where I had paused to take in two statutory pints of best bitter to fortify me for the fray, and I hurried down the road towards the red neon glow in the darkness beyond the trees.

I was dismayed by the size of the queue stretching out through the main door for it was only eight o’clock, but, as I discovered later, this was usual on a Saturday night, numbers being strictly limited according to some city bylaw or other. I stood in the rain in an agony of impatience, the queue building up behind me, inching forward for fifteen minutes or so until I was finally inside the door.

There were only five or six people between me and the glass window now but, for the moment, no more tickets were being issued. We waited under the inscrutable stares of a posse of four or five commissionaires, burly gentlemen in smart green uniforms, medal ribbons prominently displayed, sergeant majors to the last man, ready to move in at the first sign of trouble, for the Trocadero prided itself on its respectability and good order.

The glass doors at the other side of the foyer swung open, giving a tantalizing glimpse of the crowd inside as the band struck up a quickstep. The manager came through in his pre-war dinner jacket and boiled shirt, leaned down to the ticket window and murmured something to the girl inside. We moved forward with a rush. I shoved my three shillings across and received my ticket, which was immediately taken from me by one of the commissionaires.

There was a chorus of groans as the doors were closed behind me on those unfortunates who still waited in the rain. My luck was good or so it seemed to me then, and I went up the stairs to the cloakroom excitedly.

I got rid of my greatcoat, moved out on to the balcony, which ran round each side of the dance floor, and leaned on the rail. There were two eight-piece bands, each on its own stand, red tuxedos on one side of the hall, blue on the other. They played alternately, never together, for there was considerable rivalry between them. Just now, the Reds were playing
Tuxedo Junction
, the lights were low and two great glass balls turned slowly in the ceiling, waves of scarlet, blue and green rippling across the heads of the dancers.

The music stopped, the lights were turned up again and the floor started to clear in the hiatus between one band finishing and the other taking up the good work.

It was time. I lit a cigarette, moved to the head of the stairs and paused to check my appearance in the full-length mirror. The uniform really looked very well indeed and the medal ribbon was all that could be desired. I assumed a suitably cynical expression, pulled my hair down across my eyes, for no satisfactory reason, and descended the stairs.

I paused a few steps from the bottom and looked into the crowd, hands in pockets, cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth, a world-weary young veteran home from the wars, an object of pity and admiration to every woman in the room. Or so I fondly imagined.

The truth is that the whole thing was something of an anticlimax. No one took the slightest notice of me. Indeed, why should they? I was just another face in the crowd, and few human beings really look at each other anyway, a lesson I learned painfully over a considerable number of years.

In any event, as they say in Yorkshire, I was spoilt for choice. It was rather like being in some gigantic store with the entire range of the product displayed in all its infinite variety. Fat, thin, blonde or brunette, from the downright ugly to the ravishingly beautiful. You name it, they had it, and in large quantities, for the women far outnumbered the men.

Something else which didn’t help was the fact that I was slightly short-sighted. The only pair of spectacles I possessed were Army issue, round-lensed, steel-framed and of a type favoured by Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the Gestapo, which was hardly the image I was trying to create. I preferred to manage without, which meant that at anything like a distance faces softened slightly, blurred at the edges, especially when the lights were low. Good-looking girls, on closer inspection often proved to be quite plain or worse, and the reverse was equally true.

The first girl I asked to dance was an example of this. I was attracted by the red-gold hair, which turned out to be purely an effect of the light when I was too close to turn away. She was also incredibly fat, something which had not been apparent because of the crush.

They were playing a waltz at the time, and manhandling her round that floor was a task that might well have taxed even Charles Atlas in his prime. She didn’t say a word during the entire proceedings, simply hung on tight, a great bovine grin on her face, apparently oblivious to the sweat which soaked through her blouse in large patches.

At the end of the number, I fled to the balcony café where I revived myself with a cigarette and a cup of tea before returning to the fray. The balcony was, in fact, a good place from which to spy out the land, and if you worked your way round slowly, it was possible to cover every part of the room.

There was a blonde girl standing at the side of the Reds’ bandstand. I couldn’t help noticing her for the crowd seemed to have thinned out at that point and she was quite alone. She wore a green dress, and when I furtively slipped on my spectacles to get an accurate reading, I discovered that she was really very pretty indeed.

I hurried downstairs and pushed my way through the crowd, fearful that she would be gone before I arrived, but I was fortunate for she still stood there by the bandstand, quite alone.

I moved in without hesitation and asked her to dance, and the smile I received was all that could be desired. She fitted her body into mine, every melting curve, and we drifted away onto the floor as the lights faded into a blue mist and the band eased into the smoothest of foxtrots.

A Foggy Day in London Town.
I’ll never forget it, for it still brings back that, first wild feeling of elation at my unbelievable luck, followed immediately by a rapid slide down into a species of living hell. For, within seconds, I was enveloped in a kind of miasma that had to be experienced to be believed.

I had heard of body odour, had experienced it on occasion in both the male and female varieties. But this was something special, worthy of inclusion in any medical textbook.

She had one thing in common with the fat girl and that was a complete absence of conversation. The generous mouth stayed parted in a ready smile and she fastened each available inch of her well-endowed body into mine like a limpet to a rock, without the slightest evidence that she ever intended to let go.

Hell on earth would be a less-than-adequate description and I drifted round the floor in a kind of daze, holding onto my sanity with everything I had. When the first number came to an end, I mumbled some clumsy and improbable excuse and fled, leaving her there on the floor.

I made it to the other side of the stairs where I could breathe clean air, and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. It occurred to me then that the evening was fast disintegrating, and that would never do. I glanced about me wildly and grabbed the nearest unattached female by the arm, a small, neat, redhead.

Perhaps I was too rough, or, what is even more probable, some hint of my previous partner still clung to me. The girl in question held me at arm’s length, her face averted, while we circled the floor three or four times. The moment the music came to an end, she left me to make my own way to the edge of the floor. It was enough. I went to the foyer, obtained a pass out and rushed coatless through the rain to the sanctuary of The Tall Man.

The bar, as was to be expected at that time on a Saturday night, was crowded. I finally managed to order a pint and retreated to a corner by the window, beside a group of six or seven young men of my own age, all wearing the blazer of the local rugby club.

One of them turned to stub out a cigarette and jogged my elbow. I recognized him at once as an old schoolfellow, if not friend. I remembered him as a boy of infinite vulgarity, a pest on the field and off, whose main delight had been a preoccupation with grabbing at one’s balls in the showers after a match. As I recalled, he had possessed only one talent, an ability to break wind at will, a rather infantile pastime, but a source of considerable pleasure to him, particularly when lady teachers were taking the form. He had been known quite simply as Dirty George. I could not even recall his surname.

From the way he acted it would have been reasonable to suppose that I was his oldest and dearest friend, encountered by chance at a distance of years, but I had never much cared for the rugby crowd. I declined his offer of a drink and got out of there as fast as I could.

Presumably my confidence must have been shaken for, as I recall, the next few hours were a complete disaster. When I returned to the Trocadero, I moved aimlessly through the crowd, apparently incapable of summoning up the courage to ask any girl to dance again.

Suddenly it was five past eleven and the place closed at eleven-thirty. I stood at the bottom of the stairs, down to my last two cigarettes, the evening in ruins, and became aware that Dirty George was standing beside me.

‘Hello, old man,’ he said. ‘Wondered where you’d got to. Having any luck?’ I shook my head glumly. He nodded sympathetically, his eyes wandering around the floor, and suddenly, an alert expression appeared on his face. He touched my arm. ‘Now there’s a dead cert if you like.’

He nodded towards the Blues’ bandstand and I saw a girl leaning against a pillar. She was perhaps eighteen and had very dark hair cut close to her head. The skirt of her blue dress was only knee-length and she wore platform shoes with ankle straps, the whole combining with a rather sullen orange mouth, to remind me excitingly of Ava.

‘Are you certain?’ I said.

‘You can’t go wrong, old man,’ he assured me solemnly.

I ploughed through the crowd at once and touched her elbow. ‘Care to dance?’

She examined me briefly then nodded. ‘If you like,’ she said casually.

I knew I was on to a good thing the moment I took hold of her. It was not just the bodily contact, although there was plenty of that, my knee moving between her thighs on each turn in the quickstep. The big thing was that she had a faint air of corruption about her. A suggestion of that fantasy figure that features in most men’s dreams at one time or another—the tart who will do anything she’s told to do.

Good old Dirty George.
As the number came to an end I said brightly, ‘Who’s taking you home?’

Her brows lifted fractionally and there was a new look in her eyes. ‘You don’t waste any time, do you?’

‘Never could see the point,’ I told her and slipped a cigarette into the corner of my mouth, Bogart to the life. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Gloria,’ she said. ‘I’ll get my coat now and beat the rush. See you at the main door.’

She faded into the crowd and I moved towards the stairs, where Dirty George was standing with one of his green-blazered rugby pals. They were laughing hugely together at some private joke.