Pack Up Your Troubles. Pam Weaver

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       Five

      It didn’t take long for Saturday evenings at the dance hall to become a routine. Connie joined up with Jane Jackson, Sally Burndell and a couple of other girls to go to the Assembly Hall in Worthing. Their dresses were all homemade. There was so little material to be had but Connie was good with a needle. She was wearing a pretty blue and white dress with a full skirt and a scooped neck with a trail of white muslin draped attractively across the shoulders. She’d found the material in another form in a jumble sale. The dress was far too big so she was able to take it to pieces and start again.

      The dance was up some steps in the next road to the New Town Hall. The place was packed although as time went by, there were fewer men in uniform. Demob suits were very much in evidence. The Assembly Hall was a beautiful building. They entered a large foyer, bought their tickets and went to the cloakroom to hang up their coats. Connie loved the Art Deco reliefs, the star-shaped light fittings and the proscenium arch which was flanked by seahorses. It spoke of an age long since gone and yet somehow the building seemed as fresh and exciting as it must have done when it was built in the 1930s.

      The band was already playing as they walked in and a small glass orb glittered from the ceiling. Connie and her friends found a table and sat down. The dances were done in threes. It might be a foxtrot or a rumba or a waltz when the lights were dimmed right down. As the band struck up, the men circled the seated area looking for a partner. Jane was always popular but Connie and Sally had to wait a little while before someone asked them to dance.

      It had taken Connie a while before she’d got to know the other girls. At sixteen, Sally’s secretarial course was due to start towards the end of September. She may have been a lot younger than the rest of them, but she fitted into the group well. Jane was the joker. Having heard of Sally’s ambition to be a private secretary rather than ending up in the typing pool, Connie had asked Jane about her ambitions. Jane had looked thoughtful and then said, ‘I think I’ll marry a man with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana skin,’ and they’d all laughed.

      ‘How’s your boyfriend in the army?’ said Connie making small talk while they waited.

      Sally had just refused to dance with a tall, lanky man with buck teeth. ‘Terry? Fine,’ she nodded. She picked up her handbag and rummaged inside. ‘He’s still in Germany. He says he’ll be stuck there until he’s demobbed next year.’

      ‘What rotten luck,’ said Connie. ‘A year is a long time.’

      ‘I’ll wait for him,’ said Sally, pulling out a dog-eared photograph. ‘That’s my Terry.’ He looked about twenty and was tall with round-rimmed glasses.

      ‘He doesn’t mind you coming to dances?’

      ‘Well, he can’t expect me to live like a hermit,’ Sally retorted, ‘but I shall always be faithful to him.’

      A good looking man with slicked-down hair came up to the table and gave the girls a short bow. ‘May I?’

      ‘And what the eye doesn’t see …’ said Sally, taking his hand.

      Connie went back to the gypsy camp whenever she had a spare minute. Kez was a willing pupil even though some of her relatives teased her when they saw what she was doing. She had been right about the books. Kez had loved the Stories from the Arabian Nights and who could blame her. All those handsome, dark-eyed men fighting for the women they loved and looking at the girls in their pretty Eastern dress made enjoyable reading.

      ‘The way you two sit like that,’ Reuben remarked one day, ‘you could be sisters.’

      Connie smiled. She would have liked to have had a sister like Kez. Simeon was a nice man too. He sat close to his wife and a couple of times, as Connie traced the words with her finger on the page, she caught СКАЧАТЬ