When Skies Have Fallen

by Debbie McGowan

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: January–May, 1954

  Little Eddie was without a doubt his mother’s son. Every Saturday morning, at the children’s ballroom and Latin class, there he would be: seven years old and already in constant demand from the older girls queuing up for him to lead them in the quickstep.

  “Look at him, will you?” Jean said with a resigned sigh as her son danced past, arms high above his head in order to reach his eleven-year-old partner.

  Arty chuckled. “He’s as bad as Jim. Never could refuse a pretty girl.”

  “Very true,” Jean agreed. She rubbed her swollen belly. She wasn’t very far on, yet she was already showing, due to her slender dancer’s form. “I wonder if this little lady will be a dancer too?”

  “Dancer or not, I’m sure he will simply adore all those pink dresses you’ve bought him.”

  Jean glared at Arty and he grinned. He secretly hoped the baby due in four months’ time was, as Jean insisted, a girl. He wasn’t sure why; whatever it was, he would love him or her just the same as he loved Eddie, who was now striding purposefully across the dance floor in Arty’s direction. Jean had gone to change the record.

  “One more dance and that’s all for this week, children,” she forewarned the pupils, who offered a collective grumble of disappointment, although many also came for individual lessons, so they had a few days to wait, at most.

  “Uncle Arty, do your legs work today?”

  “They’re not too bad, Ed.”

  “Please will you dance with Mummy and show Sylvia?”

  It was a request Eddie made often, eager to show off his mother and ‘uncle’—the champions—in his attempts to impress the girls.

  “Leave it with me,” Arty said, “and I’ll see if I can persuade your mum.”

  Eddie dashed off again, calling, “Thanks,” over his shoulder as an afterthought.

  For the first hour of the children’s session, Arty and Jean took half of the room each and taught the boys and girls separately, before providing them all with a glass of milk and a biscuit, and then bringing them together for the second hour, at the end of which they could choose their partners for the last dance. Straight after the children’s class came the teenagers, followed by Saturday afternoon at the Palais. The fashions were changing and, once again, the Americans were to blame.

  Rock ’n’ roll was fast and noisy, and the first time Jim played a record, Arty genuinely thought the stylus needed cleaning, which amused Jim to no end. Since then, Arty had become used to it and, whilst he couldn’t say he liked it much, he could understand how appealing it was to younger people—in particular the dancing it inspired, which seemed to require only the ability to abandon one’s inhibitions. However, for Arty’s generation, and the parents of his and Jean’s dance pupils, it was about far more than the dancing itself. It was about survival and camaraderie, reliving those moments of light in a long and dark period of their lives.

  Jim was delighted that rock ’n’ roll was taking off. It was his kind of music, and when they ventured to the Palais in the evenings, he would dance until he was fit to collapse. Alas, it was far too fast and energetic for Arty: he had built up some stamina during the many hours of teaching and demonstrating, but it still drained him. He alternated between work and rest days, finally able to appreciate the importance of the latter, no longer wracked with guilt about being ‘lazy’ and lounging for hours on the settee, only getting up to make lunch and dinner.

  Competitions were held at Hammersmith Palais every Tuesday afternoon, and so the dance school’s week ran from Wednesday to Monday, with private lessons during the daytime on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. The Beginner and Intermediate sessions were held on Wednesday evenings, the Advanced class on Monday, and then the children came in on a Saturday morning, with the option to attend the Palais in the afternoon. The arrangements were flexible enough to ensure Arty could take his rest days and Jean could be home for Eddie after school. When the baby was born, they’d have to make adjustments, but for the time being it suited everyone, particularly as Jim and Charlie were working six-day weeks just trying to keep on top of the jobs coming in.

  The city was prospering and as a direct consequence so was the workshop. More ordinary people owned cars and bikes, and whilst most owners were able to tackle the day-to-day maintenance, few had the skills or the equipment needed to deal with specialist jobs. There was also government talk of bringing in a test of roadworthiness, and from Jim’s stories about some of the old heaps he’d had to fix up, it was no bad thing, particularly if it brought more business their way. There were now two apprentice mechanics working with Jim and Charlie, which, in spite of six years’ retirement from mechanical work, Arty was still struggling to leave behind. He’d trained so many boys back at Minton, and he missed it more than he cared to admit.

  It was remarkable to think back and realise those boys weren’t much younger than him, and yet in wartime just a couple of years had felt like a lifetime of experience. Eighteen-year-olds manning gun turrets on bombers—what a different breed they were to the eighteen-year-olds they saw at the Palais, all so arrogant and seemingly unaware of the cost of victory. For these boys, the war had been an adventure, an extended holiday out in the countryside. Now they were old enough to understand, and they would soon go off to complete their national service: two years’ conscription in peacetime and they returned believing they knew what it was like to fight a war, to lose friends every day, to survive on meagre rations. To live a lie.

  After the early morning visit from the police in 1949, life went on, albeit more cautiously. The political group disbanded, Molly and Daphne emigrated to Australia, and Arty and Jim moved up to the top floor, whilst Jean, Charlie and Eddie moved to the ground floor. It gave Eddie direct access to the garden, and most days Arty could take the stairs without too much trouble; however, the main reason was to give Arty and Jim a time buffer, should the boys in blue come calling again. And they did.

  For five years, all had been quiet. Of course they knew of the raids and arrests taking place in men’s clubs where most dared not even give their name, never mind take another man home with them. Some of their friends knew of men who were arrested in public toilets, having gone there with the express intention of finding other men like them, or, as the police would have it, ‘engaging in acts of gross indecency’.

  “Why do they refuse to see it?” Jim asked, so angry he almost punched a hole right through the newspaper when he read of the Chief Constable’s pompous intention to ‘rip the covers off all England’s filth spots’. “What the hell’s a man supposed to do? How can it be more moral to send in cops as agents provocateurs who expose and play with themselves, than it is for guys to get so lonely they’re forced to go there in the first place?”

  Then came a high-profile case involving a peer and a well-respected journalist. What hurt Arty and Jim the most was that the men who turned Queen’s evidence against them were RAF airmen, but they all knew the drill. If the police hauled them in, they’d be interrogated until they cracked and confessed to whatever was necessary to avoid imprisonment. Judges claimed leniency when they didn’t dole out a life sentence for ‘buggery’, or agreed to a suspended sentence if the ‘offender’ underwent treatment—aversion therapy, electric shocks, female hormones—to rid men of the desire to act on something the Chief Constable believed was ‘made’. His evidence: an increase in the number of arrests since the war, indicating that British soldiers had ‘picked up the disease and brought it home with them’, as opposed to the truth. It was a witch hunt of homosexuals, and the Chief Constable was the Witch Finder General.

  “If he’s a queer, then why haven’t I caught it then, eh?” Charlie spat bitterly after the police officers who marched Arty away from Dalton Place. Eddie was screaming in his mother’s arms, Jean was crying, and Jim had flown back to West Virginia the day before, with Joshua. Their father was dead.