Better Late Than Never

by Len Goodman

  He told us his name was Charlie Coster and introduced his wife, Marlena. The following day they came over to the pub and I gave them a lesson: in fact I gave them a two-hour lesson for the next three days. It was the best accidental investment I've ever made. They explained to me that in Germany things were done very differently. Over there they have dance clubs, which are all run by amateurs, with a head person that is a professional dancer.

  'Ve'd love you both to come over to our club to teach us some more.'

  'That would be very nice, wouldn't it, Cherry?'

  With that, I thought no more of it until a couple of weeks later we got a call from Charlie.

  'Vould you come to Germany for us and teach in our club? Ve can get you eight hours of teaching, for you and for Cherry, that's 16 hours of teaching each day. Ve vould like you to come for three days to Dusseldorf.'

  It was all delivered with Germanic precision. When it came to the fees that was the really amazing part. He was offering four times what we got per hour in Britain, plus they paid our accommodation. All we had to do was get there.

  It was not just the money that made the trip to Germany worthwhile; the people at the club all turned out to be lovely as well. The professional in charge of their club was Gunter Dresen who also had a formation dance team. He asked if we would be prepared to go back to Germany two weeks later to help train them.

  'Sure,' I said.

  The only drawback, as Cherry pointed out as soon as we were out of earshot, was the fact that we'd never done any formation team dancing, let alone training. I had never even watched it. If the formation came on, I went to the bar.

  'Yes, I know, but for 50 quid an hour we can learn,' I reasoned.

  I taught the team for three days and changed some bits around. It was actually quite straightforward. I found different pattern changes, easy steps, and quickly realised that I saw it all in my head as I talked about it. To explain more easily where the dancers needed to be in order to make patterns on the dance floor I used eight penny coins – the big ones, pre-decimalisation. As I moved the coins around the table I'd say. 'Right, you two are going to go up there and you two are going there.' But even I was surprised a month later when we got a telegram saying they'd won the German championships, when previously they had never come better than third.

  For years and years Cherry and I went to Germany for three days every two weeks to train their formation team, take classes and give private lessons. They bought our house and made us a small fortune, all because Cherry had a new practice dress and wanted to show it off. When I was working for the American insurance company they sent me on a course and one of the things a trainer said very definitely applied to this situation. 'Success comes in cans, not in can'ts.'

  Whenever we taught in Germany, Gunther always paid us in cash and after one longer than usual trip involving extra classes, we were heading home with a lot of money, all in 20-mark notes. Cherry didn't like flying so we most often drove. We would go to Dover and take the ferry to Ostend from where it wasn't a bad drive – mostly motorway and autobahn. In the early seventies exchange control was in force, which restricted the amount of money we could take out of Britain. The limit of 50 quid presented us with no problems, as we knew we'd come back with a bundle of cash. On the way back the Customs and Excise stopped us at Dover.

  'Where have you been?' asked the officer.

  'We've been teaching people to ballroom dance.'

  'Oh yeah, really?' He was really sarcastic. 'Would you open the boot?' I got out of the car and opened the boot. 'Have you got any money?'

  'Yeah.' I had nothing to hide; there were no limits on what you could bring into Britain.

  'How much?'

  'I don't know, I haven't counted it. Where is it, Cherry?'

  Cherry reached over to the back seat and produced a carrier bag. Inside were the bundles of cash held together by elastic bands.

  'Miss, I think you better get out of the car too,' said the officer.

  That was their cue to start dismantling the car. The back seat was removed, the tyres were deflated and the inside door panels unscrewed. I don't know what they expected to find. I kept saying, 'But we've shown you the money, why would we be hiding any? I've been teaching people to dance. Look, we'll show you a bit of cha-cha-cha if you want.'

  They weren't having any of it; they were convinced they'd stumbled on Bonnie and Clyde. Having turned the car upside down they naturally found nothing. They just put it all back together and let us go. I'm not sure they even said sorry.

  In addition to our regular trips to Germany we were incredibly busy in the UK demonstrating all over the place. Our first demonstration as professionals was for Doris Lavell in her Soho studio; it was a lot less lucrative than Germany – she paid us three quid. It was another one of those lucky breaks because Phyllis Hayler saw us at Doris Lavell's and asked us if we would do a demonstration for her Mardi club she ran in Hammersmith every Tuesday night. Phyllis (though we were still calling her Miss Hayler) was a brilliant ballroom teacher. However, while her club was impeccable it did have one drawback – the floor was very slippery. To counter this I used one of the oldest tricks in a dancer's repertoire – three-in-one oil on the soles of both Cherry's and my dance shoes. I did it right before we went on, but on one occasion I must have overdone it somewhat because as we came out on to her immaculate maple floor all you could see were our footprints: you could practically trace all the steps of our routine. While Phyllis must have noticed she was very nice and didn't say a word about it. When it came time to go she gave me an envelope in which I assumed was the fee. 'Thank you, Len, very much, a very lovely demonstration. Cherry, you're beautiful and so was your dancing.'

  The first thing I noticed was how fat the envelope was and I thought, blimey, she must have really loved it and given us a bit extra. When we got in the car I opened it up and it was full of foreign stamps. I nearly chucked them out of the window, but luckily I didn't. The next day she telephoned.

  'Len, I think I gave you the wrong envelope – that was for my nephew who lives in Hong Kong and collects stamps.' She sent us our three quid by post.

  We were asked by Bob Burgess, another former world champion and a leading coach to demonstrate at his studio in Dulwich on the first Saturday in each month. The format was slightly different to some of the others, as he liked us to do our dem after which Cherry and I had to judge his pupils in a fun competition. It was no easy task as the couples were far from good and there was little to choose between them. One particular week the competition was a waltz; both Cherry and I were pretty stumped as to who to choose as the winner from among the dozen or so couples. Once they finished I quietly said to Cherry, 'I'll just pick one at random.' I stood up and gave a little speech, while looking around the room thinking, who am I going pick?

  'Well, I must say how very impressed Cherry and I were with the standard of your dancing. We thought you all danced very nicely. We all know that one of the key elements that we look for in the waltz is rise and fall. I thought it was epitomised tonight by you, sir, and your partner.' I pointed to a gentleman; up he stood, followed by his partner. As they walked towards me to collect their prize I was horrified to see that he had a gammy leg and limped, so it was impossible for there to be any rise and fall when he danced.

  Another chap I did a show for was a lovely man called Derek Brown who has a dance studio in Peterborough. As usual I was giving it all my usual patter; by this time it had become a right little routine. I had a little joke about each dance; I would say how the rumba is a dance of love, so you have to think of Romeo and Juliet or Anthony and Cleopatra, or in our case it was George and Mildred, who were very popular on the TV at the time.

  'It's a very exciting night tonight because it is 15 years since Cherry won her first championship.' Everyone clapped and Cherry smiled.

  'Yes, it was at Crufts.'

  Derek was paying us the unheard-of sum of £30 and while it had to cover our petrol it was
still a great earner. I learnt a lot about running classes from Derek, in particular how to advertise correctly. He also got me a plum job with the IDTA, the International Dance Teachers Association. This organisation's head office is in Brighton and at the time a vast number of their members were in the North of England. Derek was on their committee so Cherry and I were asked to demonstrate at their congress in Blackpool. It was a dinner, dance and cabaret; this one dance set Cherry and myself up for years to come. Work came flooding in from all over the North and the Midlands; the phone wouldn't stop ringing, as we were booked sometimes for a double header. We'd go to Dewsbury at eight and then be up the road in Leeds for 10 p.m; we must have got 50 jobs through 1971 and '72.

  A man named Ken Rainer who had a studio in Blackpool booked us for four shows over a single weekend: one on a Friday, two on Saturday, one in the afternoon for the kids, one in the evening for the adults, and another show on the Sunday. However, after the Saturday evening show my confidence took a real knock. I had changed out of my dance clothes and popped into the toilet. I was standing at the urinal when a punter came in and stood next to me. 'I didn't think much of that show, did you?' said he without taking his eyes off the wall in front of him.

  'Nay lad, me neither.' I'm not sure if my imitation northern accent fooled him.

  Shortly before we opened the Dartford school I went and spent a couple of days with Derek learning all the little things that help make a dance school successful. Like most things in life it's attention to detail that makes things work; invariably success follows along behind.

  In the early seventies we were doing over two hundred shows a year. We might not have been the best demonstrators but we must have been the busiest. We drove thousands of miles and this was way before there was a half-decent motorway network. We were lucky in that Pauline took care of things back at the dance school, which allowed us to do what we did. Sometimes we did a double demonstration – a ballroom and a Latin. It would be Cherry and I doing the Latin show with another couple doing a ballroom show. One time we did a show at a car manufacturer's social club with the great Bill and Bobbie Irvine, the couple I'd first watched as a reluctant teenager when they gave a demonstration. At the time Cherry had a chihuahua called Cha Cha; I'm none too keen on dogs, and to make matters worse, Cherry took hers to demos. Bobbie loved dogs as well and she had two pugs, although they were not with her on this occasion. Bobbie came into our dressing room and made a real fuss of Cha Cha, when it was time for us both to go off and do our dances she insisted that the chihuahua was placed on her mink stole so it wouldn't get cold or lonely. When we got back there was an awful smell in the dressing room because the dog had done a poo on Bobbie's stole. I started calling her Miss Irvine again for a while after that.

  The day I told Dad that Cherry and I were getting married he told me another of his little homilies.

  'Len, imagine that inside of you are maybe ten metronomes that tick. You've got a hobby metronome that takes care of your interests outside of work; there might be gardening one, a country walks metronome or maybe even a poetry metronome.' As my dad is telling me this I'm thinking, bloody hell, where's this going.

  'Of course, Len, you've also got a sex metronome. Now, the ideal partner is one whose metronome ticks in time with yours. You love going out to dinner, she loves going out to dinner. When you make love it's beautiful, she loves it, you love it. You love going down to the seaside spending time together just strolling along the beach, and so does she. It's simple: your ideal partner is one where all ten metronomes tick in time. Now imagine you're with someone who is virtually perfect, except that you love poetry and she doesn't; so your little poetry metronome is still there, but it's unfulfilled – in fact it's hardly ticking. Everyday you go to work on the train and most days you're reading a poetry book. One day it just so happens that a woman gets on the train and sits opposite you and takes out a book of Robert Browning's poems. You tell her how much you love poetry and especially Browning and suddenly you're in conversation with the woman. You start seeing her on the train regularly and the talk is all poetry and that one metronome, the one that's been starved for so long, is ticking off the scale. Next thing you leave your wife because this metronome has been starved for so long. You end up leaving a wife who is perfect in every other way. The fact is Len, it's just one metronome out of the ten. Be careful not to get things out of kilter.'

  Cherry and I got married on 27 April 1972, two days after my twenty-eighth birthday. With the clarity of hindsight I realise that life sometimes fires warning shots across your bow. I'm probably no different to most people in that I've resisted all the tell-tale signs designed to make you stop and think. It was now a case of carry on regardless. Two weeks to the day before our wedding my father was feeling unwell. He had pains in his chest. Luckily, and probably stupidly in some ways, he drove to his doctor's surgery as soon as he felt them. As he sat in the waiting room hoping to see the doctor, he had a massive heart attack. It saved his life. The doctor later said that if he hadn't been there he would definitely have died. The doctor came straight out of his room and attended to Dad, and within no time he was rushed to hospital. Ten days before the wedding Dad had a quadruple bypass, and two days later he was on the road to recovery, but still in hospital. I should have taken this as warning number one: postpone the wedding.

  But things were too far gone with all the preparations and I felt pressure from Cherry and her mum, and who can blame them? On Monday 24 April we all went to the church for a dress rehearsal, and everything seemed to go off without a hitch until the vicar dropped his bombshell, not that he intended to.

  'Have the banns been seen to?'

  Always the joker I was back as quick as a flash. 'We don't want a band thank you very much, an organ will do nicely.'

  The vicar had a look on his face that said, 'very funny, but not very original'. 'Yes, so I assume the banns have been read for the past six weeks. The reading of the banns is a legal requirement for a church wedding, they must be read out for three successive Sundays before the wedding.'

  'Well, no, err, I guess not.'

  'Well, I'm afraid the ceremony cannot go ahead,' said the vicar.

  At this point everyone – Cherry, her mum, Pete Dawson my best man and the bridesmaids – all turned to look at me as if to say, why didn't you get the bloody banns read?

  'I've never heard about banns, it's not my fault I've never been married before!' With that I turned to the vicar. 'Surely I can do something, who can I pay?'

  'It's not that simple. There's only one thing you can do. You need to go to Canterbury and get a special licence from the Archbishop.'

  With three days to go before the big day it was a pressure I didn't need. I spent most of my twenty-eighth birthday on the phone talking to what seemed like everyone in the Church of England at Canterbury trying to get this special licence. They said I could go to Canterbury the following day to collect it. As I put down the phone to the Church of England man it rang again. It was the Black Prince Hotel in Bexley where we were holding the reception.

  'I'm sorry, Mr Goodman, but I'm afraid our kitchen has caught fire and we're going to have to move your reception. But don't worry, we've arranged for it to be held at Bigley Manor in Bromley.'

  Now apart from the fact that this was ten miles away I'd heard that it was a nice place so that was no big deal. But, it was another one of those warning shots.

  Finally the big day arrived and after all the upset, rushing around and generally hectic time I guess it was inevitable that I had a hangover. My stag party was not one of those affairs that seem more common today where we jet off to some Eastern European city or another; I had to content myself with Costa Alota – a Greek taverna in Welling High Street. There were just the four of us: myself, Pete Dawson, Muzzletoff Mike, a Jewish friend who was always saying mazel tov, and 'Dollar' Dixon. Dollar's dad had a chain of furniture shops and was pretty well off. His dad was always giving him money so when we were in our teens
and were skint we'd ask Dollar to lend us two bob, and he'd always say the same thing. 'There you go, have a dollar.' This dates from the time when there used to be four American dollars to the pound and so a dollar was five shillings.

  Before heading for Costa Alota we went to the pub for a couple of pints of Watney's Red Barrel. The restaurant had recently changed from an Italian to Greek, but had retained its name. The first thing on the table, even before the menus, was a jug of Ouzo.

  'That's not enough, we need one of those each.' We drank directly from the jugs so things quickly got out of hand. It was another of those skirmishes with foreign food – the kind my nan would never have cooked. My problem was I was so hungry by now that I could have chased a horse and eaten the jockey as well. Various plates of starter type dishes began to arrive. Muzzletoff had been going on about the fact that it was customary to smash the plates in a Greek taverna. Dollar got so fed up with this that he picked one up off the table and smashed it over Muzzle's head. The owner was over in a flash standing next to Muzzletoff who had minced beef and olives in his hair.

  'No smashing the plates, please, not until later.' Come the end of the meal the 'special' plates for smashing arrived and we found we were all pretty good at it.

  Pete came around at ten o'clock on my wedding day and we drove down to Plumstead and spent the morning in the Turkish baths. We had a massage and a shave, you get a lovely close shave in the heat, and by 12.30 we left the baths feeling a lot better than when we went in. On the way to the church we went via Joyce Green Hospital to visit Dad.

  'Are you sure you're making the right decision getting married, Len?'

  Another warning.

  'Yes,' I said, but really I was thinking I don't know. The trouble with dancing marriages is that you don't get an opportunity to meet other people of the opposite sex. Cherry and I had lived in each other's pockets. She was fed up with living at home and was pushing for months about setting up together. It was definitely too late to turn back now.