Dancing in the thirties.

Dancing in the 1930s (and the 1920s, though in the 20s it was a new 'craze', rather than the accepted part of the social pattern which it had become in the 30s) meant, for the majority of young Britons, four basic dances (or steps as they were frequently called): the foxtrot, the quickstep, the slow foxtrot and the waltz. Bands, ballrooms and dance halls catered accordingly for the majority. There were occasional tangos and rhumbas but the steps to be learnt, if one was to perform these more exotic innovations without falling, metaphorically at least, flat on one's face, were complicated. All the just average dancers (and that included me) therefore sedulously 'sat out' when the tango or rhumba was announced and watched, with carefully concealed envy, while the whiz-kids who had mastered the rhythms (Spanish/South American) and steps of these, then, comparatively new dances took the limelight. I should stress that tangos and rhumbas were occasional; in a whole evening's dancing there would be not more than two (and very often just one) of each, played, principally, for the benefit of the advanced, more dating minority.

After I had been going to dances for quite a while, i.e. about two months, a girl who was a far better dancer taught me successfully, in just five miraculous minutes, during a break between sets, while the band was getting its wind back, the basic steps of the tango. Thereafter, I danced the tango every time it was played with, as it seemed to me, increasing panache and abandon and developed a quite disproportionate enthusiasm for this suave, slinky and sophisticated Spanish importation. I don't think anyone ever actually had to stop me, more or less forcibly, from tango-ing. But my involvement with the tango (I also tried the rhumba though with markedly less success) is a digression from the norm of foxtrot, quickstep, slow foxtrot and waltz, the standard (and standardised) staple fare of everybody who could claim to be able to dance: of the hundreds of thousands all over the country, particularly in urban areas, who patronised the relatively inexpensive 'Palais de Danse' or attended the far less frequent but much more expensive formal balls.

Palaises des Danses were open to anyone alone or accompanied on payment of the modest admission charge - roughly the same as a goodish seat in the picture house.

As we - I'm referring now to the males of our species and social class in the mid 1930s - grew upwards through the teenage years, there arose, at about the age of 16 or 17, the question of how and where to learn to dance. In my case and that of my then buddy David this question loomed, like an upending iceberg, larger and larger as the time of the first School Ball which we were eligible to attend approached. We called it with some bravado the School Dance but it was most definitely a more formal Ball, with obligatory evening dress, allocated tables and a meal, all for the quite expensive price of the fairly elaborate tickets (gilt lettering etc.) of which we had, of course, to purchase two each. No one, male or female, ever went to these Balls alone: this was not only 'not done' but would have raised considerable practical problems. Nor did anyone take more than one (female) partner, except perhaps a few desperados in their upper teens who thereby, overnight as it were, passed, temporarily, into the school's folklore.

All at once, for most of the younger males who were faced, amongst a host of other adolescent preoccupations, with their first participation in a Ball (or Dance), there was the essential prerequisite of actually learning how to dance. We hadn't given this a thought till now, but it assumed, quite suddenly, a devastating importance, an arcane significance. For many of the age group concerned, and to which I then belonged, it involved, I imagine, the first close more or less adult physical contact with the female of the species (other than sisters of whom neither David nor I had any and who didn't count anyway). For those 16 or 17-year-old males who were lucky enough to have a sister near their own age, there was hardly any problem; they simply got her to teach them the steps. Most girls could dance by the time they were 13 or 14 or even earlier and they were way ahead of the males in many other respects too. They not only seemed to tackle and master the mysterious intricacies of dancing more rapidly, but, in many cases, had been learning the steps for several years. Some girls' schools even taught them: it didn't occur to the boys' schools that such a facility might be provided, as being a more practical preparation for life at least in the near future than Trigonometry'. Some innocent teenage maidens were, terrifyingly, positive virtuosi of the foxtrot etc. owing to ambitious, conscientious, enthusiastic, proud or status-seeking parents having enrolled their daughters, at about the age of four for dancing lessons, and kept them at it, ever since.

The solution, for David and me, turned out to be relatively easy. I mean that it was easy to find a pair of girls willing and able to teach, not, necessarily, that it was easy to learn. The pair of girls were, in fact, twins, though not identical twins. Actually they were the most un-identical twins, both in appearance and character, that I've ever encountered. Marianne was a dark-haired, slightly plump, shortish, stocky girl with a face and indeed general appearance that is best described by the somewhat old-fashioned (even then) adjective 'comely'. She was a pleasant girl, inclined to be thoughtful, serious and earnest and, unlike most girls of her age whom I'd come, or been pushed, across, given to reflective silences rather than more or less continual chatter and sudden alarming bouts of coquettishness. She was goalkeeper in her school hockey team. David, who lived almost opposite the twins, had recently formed a very mild liaison with Laura, the other twin; he had taken her twice to a Milk Bar and once to the pictures. I, therefore, was destined to be taught how to dance by Marianne. During the course of the lessons and briefly and intermittently after the lessons, and the Ball, were over, we became good friends. We never at any time, I should perhaps make clear, became in the slightest degree romantically involved.

The business of learning how to dance consisted of an arrangement, approved by the three sets of parents concerned, whereby once or twice a week the four of us, i.e. the twins, David and myself were given the exclusive use of a room, with a gramophone and a pile of records (the last provided by ourselves) and left to get on with it. I can still remember the melodies and in many cases even the words from these frangible shellac discs: Shoe Shine Boy; These Foolish Things; Red Sails in the Sunset; You Are my Lucky Star; On the Beach at Bali-Bali: Moon for Sale... The room was, of course, usually the drawing-room, in one of the three houses concerned. The rooms in the twins' house were inclined to be small and overfurnished, so we kept bumping against sideboards, chairs, cabinets and each other and sometimes scoring near misses on free standing and breakable ornaments. The girls, especially Laura, disconcertingly squealed in alarm when this happened but David and I just trembled with the ornaments. After one or two lessons there we decided, since no one was learning anything much let alone dancing, with these distractions, to move across the road to David's house for a continuation of the lessons, or to be more accurate, to get the lessons off the ground. But, while the drawing-room in David's house was satisfactory with regard to size and shape, this arrangement had its drawbacks, including David's mother, a somewhat morose, house-proud and suspicious woman who was so apprehensive about the effect of these lessons on her best carpet that she used to examine the soles of our shoes before we were allowed to begin. I resented this; particularly as she always seemed especially suspicious of my shoes. As far as I remember, we eventually, at the twins' suggestion, danced without shoes, in our socks.

David's gramophone was elderly, slightly temperamental and notably if not notoriously required an excessive amount of winding up. Sometimes it would begin to run down towards the end of a normal 3 minute 78 r.p.m. record. It was perfectly usual and acceptable to have to wind up these gramophones between records, but to try to learn to dance to a machine that reduced a danceable tune like Cheek to Cheek or It's a Sin to Tell a Lie to a series of grunts and moans during the playing of one record was difficult if not hopeless. David, who knew the machine well, was always the first to detect the imminence of the thing running down and, at critical moments in Laura's exposition of the finer points of the quickstep or the foxtrot, he would abruptly leap from her arms and frantically wind up his gramophone. This, naturally, annoyed Laura, who lost not only physical contact with her pupil but also the thread of her exposition. It didn't help Marianne and myself much either. But (and what's coming now is an example, masterfully, I hope, woven into the texture of this narrative, of the difference in temperament between the twins to which I've already briefly referred) whereas the placid Marianne's reaction to the shortcomings of David's gramophone was a low groan of despair or, at most, a sotto voce 'Oh my God', she was speaking to herself as much as to me and certainly no one else heard her, Laura's reaction became vocally increasingly louder, more explicit and more virulently colourful. She called David some very rude and unladylike names. She was far less patient and far more spirited than her twin and what soon became her wrathful indignation, directed (with considerable justification) at David threatened not only the continuance of the lessons but also the liaison between them. A couple of free milkshakes and being taken to the front stalls to see the latest Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film is not, after all, an irrevocable bond capable of holding firm against even the minor buffetings of life. David's gramophone was, or became, for Laura anyway, more than a minor buffeting.

Finally the lessons were transferred to my parents' house. This was so obviously the best arrangement that I don't know why we didn't try it first, instead of last. Our drawing room was at least as large as David's and was, relatively, unencumbered by furniture, much of which we were allowed, if not actually encouraged, to push back against the walls anyway. We never even thought of rolling up the carpets, in any of the three houses: this would not have been permitted, certainly not for teenagers' informal dancing lessons. Rolling back carpets, then, implied, at least, adult parties organised by the more advanced and sophisticated hostesses (of whom there were not many in the circles I moved in) and, at the worst, orgies, a word of which I hardly knew the meaning. Best of all, however, was the fact that, alone of the three houses, ours possessed a radiogramophone, or radiogram as they were colloquially called. This, in the mid-thirties, was so recent a development (technically), so novel an innovation that it had the prestige of a status-symbol, though nobody talked about 'status-symbols' then: the term had not yet been invented.

Let me veer back towards the main theme by explaining as crisply as possible and without any sociological, historical or autobiographical parentheses that a radiogram was able to play records electrically i.e. you plugged it into an electrical socket: you did not have to keep winding it up and the volume of sound could be quite accurately controlled by turning a knob. (There was no really effective way of regulating the volume of the then more common wind-up, non electrical gramophones. We used to mute them by stuffing socks or dusters into the part where the sound emerged which was neither wholly satisfactory nor, technically, sophisticated.) The electrical reproduction and amplification of records was, in the 1930s, a startlingly new thing, a far bigger change than, for example, the later displacement of mono by stereo. And this jump from mechanical wind-up gramophones to electrically operated radiograms seemed to happen almost overnight. Separate record players (another term not invented till much later) were, strangely, not then and did not appear till much later on the market. If you made the jump, for whatever reason, it had to be to a radiogram i.e. a gramophone and wireless combined in one cabinet and the cabinets were pieces of furniture in their own right. I can't remember any radiogram of the 30s that was smaller than a moderately sized chest of drawers or dressing table.

My father, who was fascinated by the new phenomenon of radiograms, was one of the first handful in our street who had recently purchased one. Even so, the change of venue for our dancing lessons from David's to :my house would not have occurred so soon, or so suddenly, had it not been precipitated by Laura's impatience and spiritedness. One evening, at David's house, when she was working hard on instilling into him the intricacies of the slow foxtrot, his gramophone was particularly temperamental. His mother too that evening had looked into the drawing-room, to check on the wear and tear on her carpet, even more than usual. Shortly after one of these irritating parental interruptions and immediately after David's gramophone had run down, for about the fifth time, before the end of a record (the tune I remember was a long forgotten number called Stars over Devon) Laura abruptly lost her temper. She called him, as I remember, 'a stingy baboon' and other even ruder and more unladylike names and asked him, when the hell he was going to get a gramophone and give that thing to the museum or the rubbish dump. 'It's bad enough trying to teach you apart from your damned gramophone breaking down all the time', she shouted, 'You've got three left feet anyway. Where's my coat; I'm going home.' And she went. From this you will gather that Laura was a girl with some spirit.

Somehow, during the next few days, David must have sweated himself through some kind of reconciliation, for the next time I saw them together, it was evident that liaison had been re-established, though it appeared, on renegotiated terms. David, for a few weeks anyway, was much more the submissive male. Meantime I had obtained parental agreement to the use of both our drawing-room and radiogram for all future lessons and, with the change of venue and the marvels of the radiogram, a more purposeful and at least a progressive phase began and a less turbulent atmosphere prevailed, as far as Laura and David were concerned. My platonic relationship with Marianne was disturbed only marginally and vicariously by all these set backs, including Laura's cyclonic outburst.

I haven't got round to a description of Laura's outward appearance, except, negatively, by describing Marianne and saying that they were extremely unidentical twins. That may have indirectly, conveyed some impression of Laura, as she was at the age of 16 or so, but, (you'll probably be horrified to know), I feel that a somewhat fuller, direct portrait, or at least sketch, seems necessary.

Starting at the top, then. her hair was the colour of darkish straw. Cut short, it straggled down the back of her head, round her ears and the sides of her face and, frequently, into her eyes, because owing to some obscure perversity of fashion, she had elected to let her hair grow long only front centre in an enormous fringe. If her hair had been curled, this might have bestowed on her a certain poodle-like attractiveness, but she wore it dead straight. I preferred Marianne's dark, more abundant but always well groomed mop which did have waves; her hair indeed was perhaps her best and most attractive physical feature. Only a lover or a poet could have been deluded into thinking of Laura as blonde. Even then I knew the difference between straw haired girls and 'real' blondes. The skimpy meagreness of Laura's hair was characteristic of the rest of her physical appearance. Her face was thin and, it seemed to me, too narrow, with, sometimes, a rather pinched aspect, though, generally, her expression was lively and alert, rather like a bird. Her features were not unattractive and she smiled, laughed and talked vivaciously, in distinct contrast to the almost bovine stolidity of her twin. Laura's ready mobile smile and her vivacity could make her look pretty, and attractive, but never beautiful. From shoulders to hips Laura was flatly rectangular and her legs, while not exactly spindly, were rather thin and too symmetrically cylindrical. She was then about 6 inches taller than Marianne. This is an injustice to Laura, because taken together the sum or overall impression was more attractive than the sum of, the parts as I have, in too bizarre a manner, described them. She was, after all, just a normal school girl who hadn't yet developed, or filled out fully in some physical respects. In these respects (and again in contrast to her twin) Marianne had developed and filled out a little too much and too quickly for her age and for my entire peace of mind.

The girls' attire during our lessons was simply their school uniforms i.e. what, I think, were (and still are) called gym slips or tunics of navy blue worn over white blouses and navy blue skirts which were then worn at knee length or a few inches below the knee. Stockings were, I think, black. Sometimes, if a tuition session took place at the weekend they would appear in what were probably their second or third best dresses. The hazards of teaching David and me how to dance no doubt precluded the wearing of their best dresses.

I have cleared away more than sufficient under and over-growth and can, very belatedly, give some account of the dancing lessons as such. 'Lessons', I've been uneasily aware all along is, however, altogether too formal a word to describe what actually went on. While the business of learning to dance was both a necessary and serious matter, we spent only about half of each session on actual tuition; for the rest of the time we talked, drank lemonade, listened, without trying to dance, to the gramophone or the wireless. For all of us, notwithstanding the tenuous David-Laura liaison, this was the first time (since childhood) that we'd come in such close and prolonged contact with the opposite sex.

I shall have to leave my account of the lessons and the great day of the Ball itself until a later opportunity. So I'll sign off meantime leaving you with the picture of four adolescents sitting in a suburban drawing-room in Edinburgh: finding out, quite innocuously, more about each other: tentatively groping towards something they could not have named, but which was somehow vaguely symbolised by the approaching Ball; talking about mostly trivial events and topics: recent films and radio programmes, rugby and hockey matches, the eccentricities of various school teachers. We also discussed other girls and boys in the neighbourhood: the relative merits of the dance bands such as Lew Stone and Ambrose (often while one of these bands was actually on the air live); the subjects we hated most at school; occasionally, very occasionally, what we were going to do when we left school. We did not talk about certain things: love, engagements, marriage for example. And we did not even think about Hitler and Nazi Germany.

A little over two years later Britain was at war with Germany and half the rest of the world was joining in. And these four adolescents (together with thousands of others) were uprooted from their rituals and well known scenes and familiar pastimes and cast into a vastly different way of life. We did not know it then on that evening in 1937, but the careless, carefree era we had lived through and indeed grown up in was rapidly moving towards twilight, darkness and extinction and many of the things we did and accepted as normal and permanent were shortly to disappear, never to return.

R. L. Cook is Scottish. His poems have appeared in a wide variety of magazines and periodicals in Britain, the U.S.A. and elsewhere over the past five decades, including Contemporary Review. Seven collections of his poetry have been published in Britain. He has also been a (spare-time) editor and publisher of poetry.