by Diana Melly
For Gill, Dino, Raymond and in memory of Candy.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
1. Strictly Tea Dance
2. My Double-Decker
3. The Show Goes On and On and On
4. En Suite?
5. Black Eyes and Bandages
6. The Ceilidh
7. A New Teacher
8. The Cruise
9. Care and Control
10. I’m an Angel
11. Dino’s Harem
12. Dress Code Problems
13. Why We Dance
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Introduction
“Crosswords and Sudoku will help but the best way to avoid dementia is to take up ballroom dancing.”
It was in the spring after George died of lung cancer and vascular dementia that I went to a conference organised by the Alzheimer’s Society and one of the lecturers gave that advice. It might be a rather feeble excuse, but I left school when I was fourteen, and although I’ve sometimes read the first crossword clue I’ve never attempted to think of an answer. For a start, I didn’t have the Latin, and nor could I have understood the puns or learnt the tricks, both skills I’ve been told are essential for completing even quite simple crosswords. As for Sudoku, I’d rather waste my time looking at Facebook or Freecycle. But ballroom dancing?
For some reason, I assumed learning to dance would be easy and I signed up for a twelve-week course. When I left school I got a job in Murray’s Cabaret Club as a showgirl and had to shimmy across the small stage in rather skimpy costumes. I thought this would give me a head start. But no. Ballroom dancing is difficult. That is why it is so effective at warding off the ageing process. As a recent study from the Einstein College of Medicine in New York has shown, ballroom demands a particular form of coordination, which rewires the cerebral cortex and the hippocampus. These bits of the brain are remarkably plastic, but they will only become active again if they are properly used. Shimmying isn’t enough.
The course I had signed up for provided a teacher for the class plus a professional partner for every client. Most of the partners were young men in their twenties and came from countries like Romania, Italy or Sri Lanka where, unlike in England, dancing is considered a skill and not necessarily sissy. However, I’d quickly spotted Raymond – both English and a pensioner, he was the only one with a balding head and a bus pass. I’d decided I wouldn’t feel so self-conscious dancing “in hold” with someone closer to my age. I made a good choice; Ray is a former world champion.
We learnt and practised a different dance for three weeks. The list began with the slow foxtrot and the cha-cha-cha and having passed through six more dances, it ended up with the Viennese waltz and the salsa. By the time we got back to the waltz and cha-cha-cha again, what with holidays and each term lasting fifteen weeks, I had forgotten most of what I’d learnt.
Raymond, seeing how dispirited I was, offered to take me to tea dances instead, so I’d have the opportunity to practise all the dances in one session.
I wish that I’d started ballroom and going to tea dances when George was still alive. In the last two years of his life, I was usually stressed, and often angry with him. I would forget all the useful advice I’d been given about how to cope with his condition and I was snappy and spiteful. But here’s what Dr Joseph Coyle says in the New England Journal of Medicine: “Dancing reduces stress and depression.”
It would have been better than Xanax.
Coyle goes on to say that dancing will increase your serotonin levels; it is known as the “happiness hormone” and studies have shown that a lack of it increases irritability, aggressiveness and sleep disorders. He also talks about it exercising our cognitive processes. And then there’s the music. Most of it dates from the first 60 years of the twentieth century: Sinatra, Crosby, Ella, singing songs by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rogers and Hammerstein. Who could ask for anything more?
Some doctors are making very ambitious claims for the Argentine tango and are using it to treat problems ranging from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease to phobias and marital breakdowns. My marriage to George nearly broke up several times; instead of rows and tears perhaps we should have hurried down to the local milonga. There’s one in Hammersmith twice a week. But would it have halted the progression of his illness? In fact, he was lucky in that his lung cancer overtook the dementia and he died while the latter was still in its fairly early stages. But he would have enjoyed the “close embrace” the tango demands.
Even people at a fairly advanced stage of dementia will normally respond to warmth, touch and sound. Once a month I help out at an afternoon event organised by Kensington and Chelsea Age UK. It’s called My Memories Café. The “service users”, in other words the people with dementia, are picked up from their homes and taken to a church where tea, cakes, sausage rolls and grapes are laid out on long tables. There’s always an activity and the most popular ones involve music. At Christmas time we sing carols. A month ago we sang along accompanied by one man playing the keyboard and another with a mic helping us remember the words.
If you were the only girl in the world… “Isn’t that the most beautiful love song ever written?” the keyboard man asked us. We nodded, held hands and swayed to “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time”. When we got to the closing number, “Do the Hokey Cokey”, although not many could stand up and shake it all about, arms were waved and most people joined in and were smiling. One woman told me how she met her husband at the Hammersmith Palais. She said she always watches Strictly and was delighted to hear that, perhaps because of that programme, ballroom and Latin (the other kind) have become very popular.
If, like me, you have type 2 diabetes, your chances of developing Alzheimer’s may be increased. That’s the bad news. The good news is that exercise and weight loss might counteract this. Since I’ve been dancing my cheeks have sunk and I’ve gone down a dress size. Still, what’s much more important is the fun I am having.
Chapter 1
“I said I’d dance with you, not for you” said Raymond.
But this is my first tea dance and I am nervous, very nervous. Although it’s only a waltz, at which I am not too bad, I am leaning on him and gripping his hand.
We are in Shoreditch Town Hall, a grade two imposing building near Liverpool Street. A statue of Progress sits on the front and inside there are stained-glass windows, Doric columns and an ornate balcony. From a high-coved ceiling hang chandeliers. At one end of the large rectangular ballroom is a big stage with a massive sound system that rather dwarfs our compère, Malcolm (professional name, Mr Wonderful). Malcolm is a smallish, round, cheerful man from Goa, India. His partner, Janet, is a former senior champion.
All around the room are tables and chairs. We sit down after our waltz and Raymond tells me, and not for the first time, that I must find my own balance and relax a bit.
“Nobody is watching you,” he says.
This isn’t strictly true. The entrance fee is a modest £5 and some of the ladies have just come for the tea and cakes and to watch the dancers. They must be wondering why Raymond is dancing with me. Being an ex-champion, he is of course a brilliant dancer.
Mr Wonderful announces the next dance. It’s a paso doble which I haven’t learnt. Anna, a fantastic, young, slim, dancer has spotted Raymond and comes over.
“Do you mind?” she says to me, as Raymond enthusiastically jumps to his feet.
“Oh, please,” I reply. I realise I am quite enjoying myself. I don’t mind sitting on my own; the atmosphere is friendly and the music is the dance music of the 40s and 50s that I grew up with.
The next dance is a “snowball”.
It starts with just one couple on the floor, then Mr Wonderful says “change partners” and they separate and each chooses a new partner. We change partners every few minutes and soon the floor is crowded with about 50 couples. Most of us change partners about five times. I always say I’m a beginner but some of the men are even more of a beginner than I am. The “snowball” is quite chatty; you change partners so often you don’t have time to perform complicated steps. It’s more of a shuffle and an exchange of names.
“George,” says one man when I ask him.
“Same as my late husband,” I reply, and as I have just stepped on his toe I add swankily and placatingly, “He was the jazz singer, George Melly.”
He can’t have been as impressed as he appeared to be as he came up to me later and asked me to repeat George’s last name. But Mr Wonderful is impressed. Raymond has introduced me to him as the widow of, etc.
“Great,” says Mr Wonderful. “I must play lots of jive music for you.”
In fact, I’ve noticed that Raymond never stands up for a jive. I don’t think he likes to get too hot – well, he is 65 – and over tea and chocolate cake – Raymond eats my bit too – I learn that he is a great-grandfather. His eldest daughter, Rita, had daughter Cyd at eighteen and she in turn at seventeen has just had a son, little Leo.
Raymond has now finished all the cake, we’ve sorted our families and rubbished David Cameron, so it’s time to tango.
A very friendly dance, as Raymond puts it. To get into position I have to push my “centre”, which is halfway between my flat chest and my not-so-flat stomach into Raymond’s centre. Then I have to flex my knees so that I am almost sitting on one half of his lap. The hold is different too. My left hand is pushed up into his armpit with my thumb in front and my fingers stuck out at a right angle to his back.
Raymond tells me that the Argentine tango is even more friendly, with the lady reaching her left hand round her partner’s back to rest on his left shoulder, or even on the back of his neck. Sounds to me more like hugging than dancing.
Even with our “centres” up close, all this proximity isn’t sexual at all, but it’s warm and cosy, rather like having one of my dogs curled up on my lap.
It’s the last waltz and I’m thrilled because I haven’t fallen over or made a fool of myself. Even when I messed up a slow foxtrot it didn’t seem to matter.
Raymond walks me to Liverpool Street, taking my arm as we go down the stairs. “Call me old-fashioned” is something he often says, and although I am quite capable of putting on my own coat, I don’t mind being helped.
It’s eight years since George died and I thought that my family, friends and dogs were all I needed to feel sane and whole. I now realise that music and dancing help too.
Chapter 2
Someone once told me that she had enough friends to fill a double-decker bus and she hadn’t room for any more. She was only in her thirties when she said that. I remembered this remark the other day and I thought, she’s now in her late seventies, the same as me. The likelihood is that some of them have got off the bus because of a quarrel, or a move to Australia, or they have fallen off the bus: Aids, cancer or a heart attack. Well, if she has lost as many friends as I have, she might well consider going to tea dances and finding some new ones, which is what I’ve done. This happens when Ray doesn’t come with me and I have to go on my own.
Pam is one of my new friends. She had been at George’s last concert, a charity event in aid of Dementia UK. I had been pushing him in his wheelchair, so Pam recognised me and came over to chat.
Pam is tall, elegant, a great dancer, and looks to be in her early sixties. But as she has a great-grandchild and assuming she didn’t get married at fourteen, she must be in her seventies. One thing seems to be true about the women who go dancing: they all look much younger than their years. Last month at Battersea Town Hall the compère announced that the woman dancing a speedy quickstep was celebrating her 100th birthday.
Then there’s Gill. Aged 58, looks 35 and comes from the valleys. It’s important as you get older to make some younger friends to fill up the bus. Grandchildren aren’t always to hand or willing, and some of us need help with modern technology. Nor do we wish to sound like that old judge who asked “What exactly is a beetle?”
Gill has taken me under her wing. Men flock to lead her onto the dance floor and when they politely return her to our table she says, “Now my friend would like to dance.” I refuse to be embarrassed and I’m suitably grateful. I’m reminded of that Patrick Hamilton novel in which two men spot a couple of girls they want to pick up and the dominant male says, “I’ll have the blonde, you can have the other one.”
Sometimes after a tea dance we collect my dogs from home and go for a walk in the park. We discuss, rather disrespectfully, the various men who’ve been in our lives. Gill’s last boyfriend used to dress up in her underwear. Gill is tiny; the boyfriend was six foot with a big stomach. Having swapped a few juicy tales, we move on to our jobs. Gill works as a volunteer for a children’s charity. I work in the visitors’ centre at a local prison.
We quite often sit at a table with Scotty. He’s been given that nickname because after being bombed three times during the Blitz he was evacuated from the East End to Scotland. The explosions also made him deaf and sometimes he struggles with Gill’s Welsh accent, but then so do I. Scottie doesn’t do much ballroom – he’s more of a Latin man, although jiving is his speciality. Like many people, he makes the wrong assumption that as George was a jazz singer, I must be a fabulous jiver. I’m not. In his later years George only sang at concerts – no prospect of jiving there. And in those wonderful early days when he sang in small scruffy jazz clubs, he preferred me to stand at the foot of the stage and gaze up at him admiringly. All the girlfriends and wives did the same.
Clearly the women who come to tea dances, some of them in their eighties, weren’t hampered by such partners. They’re so skilful at “American spins” and “chicken walks” that I think they must have been just the right age to have learnt their steps from American GIs during and after the war. But Scotty often pulls me to my feet if the compère is playing a slow jive like “Hit the Road Jack”, and so far I’ve managed not to fall over. I like talking to him too. In common with a lot of deaf people (and men in general), he’s better at storytelling than listening. I have learnt that he was once a taxi driver and has a daughter who lost both legs in the July 7th bombings. She was a winner in the Paralympics and has just had a baby.
Raymond is on the front of the bus with my other best friends. Ray is an accomplished flirt and does a very sexy rumba. In spite of these attributes, we have a purely platonic relationship. There are advantages in getting older – somehow it’s easier to have a heterosexual male friend when sex is not an issue, and anyway, in many respects Ray is like my gay friends. He will discuss clothes, make-up and hairstyles, the best boiler and other domestic issues.
For many people getting old is awful. I’m quite aware that I’m lucky. I have enough money and my bus is full of great friends.
Chapter 3
Raymond and I have come to Blackpool to watch the Latin and Ballroom National Dance Championships. He is very excited about it. “You won’t see much better dancing than this.”
And ever the optimist, he has also expressed the hope that it might improve my technique. I have come because I was brought up in the olden days when women were taught to please the opposite sex and to agree enthusiastically to any plan. Also I like a jaunt away from home.
In the foyer of the Winter Gardens, a beautiful art deco building, we meet up with John and Christine, friends who like me are learning to dance; in a reversal from the usual it’s John who is keen and Christine who goes along with it. She tells me that while John is learning the leader’s steps, her attention wanders and, sitting on the windowsill, she stares out until called to attention by her understandably annoyed teacher. It’s good having Chris to gossip with; we criticise the dresses while Ray and John
assess the dancing.
“Dresses” doesn’t adequately describe what they are wearing. For the ballroom, the women wear long floating chiffon garments with fishing line threaded through the hems to make the skirts stand out and undulate. Sometimes the sleeves have streamers attached to them – not a good look – or wide floating bits of material. These are meant to make the arms appear graceful, but quite often the material floats up and stretches across the face of the dancers, temporarily blinding them, and making them more likely to crash into other couples. They remind me of Magritte paintings.
When Magritte was thirteen his mother committed suicide. He saw her carried into the house on a stretcher; she had been fished out of a canal and her dress had blown over her face. This image obsessed him, and he used it frequently. In one of his paintings that George used to own (he sold it to buy a stretch of river), a pair of lovers, their faces concealed with material, are unable to kiss or make contact. In another, one couple are gracefully dancing, but another have tumbled to the floor. Magritte named this painting The Clumsy Dancer.
Chris and I have gone to the ladies, our main purpose being to mingle with the competitors. The Latins are in there getting ready for their next dance; beautiful young women are touching up their spray tan, fixing inch-long eyelashes and gluing diamond-like stones to their faces. While the foxtrotters’ and waltzers’ dresses are soft and flowing, the Latin dancers’ outfits resemble birds of paradise: they glitter and are sexy and sharp, with bright shining colours.
We stay till the results of the Amateurs are announced and the cups presented. It’s time to go back to our hotel and I’m beginning to dread tomorrow. We don’t get to bed till two and there are lectures scheduled for ten in the morning. Lectures about ballroom dancing?
