by Betty Burton
Suddenly, she was inside, had bought a ticket, and was seated at a table ordering ginger ale from a foreign waiter, her heart turning over with apprehension and her skin tingling with excitement. She would not stop long. Just long enough to use her new lighter. Just as long as it took to drink the ginger ale. Ginger ale in a very tall glass chinking with ice. She had no idea what the little bamboo stick with frayed ends was for, so she left it until she noticed a young man twirling one in his own fizzy drink. It was a sophisticated thing to do in such a gleaming, glittering place full of hot foot-tapping music from the sprung floor to the rotating mirror ball. This was such an experience.
There was no clock that she could see, and she didn’t own a watch but, judging from the ice in her drink, she guessed that she had been there for about half an hour, and ought to get back before Ray started worrying.
‘Excuse me, could I ask you for a dance?’ His accent was very top-drawer. His skin was tanned and his fair hair sun-streaked. His teeth were white and perfect. He was tall and long-legged. He was dressed in light fawn trousers, a cream-coloured casual shirt and a coffee-coloured linen jacket. All this Lu took in as his hazel eyes looked at her questioningly.
‘I was about to go.’
‘What a pity. I’m here on my own, and I thought you must be too.’ He smiled. ‘I noticed your feet were tapping. Mine too. Brilliant band.’
‘I love them.’ She desperately wanted to dance.
‘Well then, just one dance? Listen… a tango. Do you?’
Oh yes, Lu tangoed. She had learned from Sonia and later had a marvellous experience at a tango session of being twirled and caught by an olive-skinned naval officer who hadn’t known a word of English, but who danced like a dream.
‘I’ll have to go directly afterwards.’
‘Come on then.’ He held out a hand. ‘David.’
She shook his hand. ‘Louise.’
Although he was much taller than the Latin naval officer, he was just as good a dancer. Lu followed without even a minor fault. The music slid into a slower tempo, and hardly aware that the tango had finished, he drew her closer as he led them into the more leisurely dance. They didn’t speak, but the silence was not awkward. She was aware of her breasts against his thin, unlined jacket. One hand, warm and firm on her back, pressing her close, the other enclosed around hers. It was so romantic, dancing with a handsome stranger. The music stopped, there was a roll on the snare drum indicating an interval, and they stood pressed close for a moment. He looked down at her, pressed his lips to her fingers, and led her back to her table. ‘Thank you. You dance beautifully, put me to shame. Do you really have to go?’
‘Yes, I do. I really do.’ She picked up her purse. ‘Goodnight. It was lovely.’ She hurried out into the evening which had now grown dark, her heart thumping with excitement. Wow! She had never even dreamed of such a romantic adventure. They didn’t even know each other’s names properly, yet he had held her close on the dance floor and kissed her fingers like a lover. He was fast!
Kate loved fast workers; Lu was glad now that Kate was not with her. She would have gone on and on. What about his hair, Lu? Didn’t he have a tan; where do you think he’s been? What did he say… are you going to meet him again? Kate didn’t really know what romance was. She knew about dates and boys, and French kissing, and butterfly kissing, and love-bites and how far to go, but she’d never understand in a hundred years how romantic the quiet men like Duke and David were.
Back at the hotel, Ray was seated in a gathering of about twenty soberly dressed men who were loud with beer. Lu waved to him over their heads and slipped upstairs to her room, where she flung herself on top of the unblemished bed-cover and gave herself up to being totally happy and as much in love with David as she had been with Duke. The Malou French episode was entirely forgotten.
Next morning, although she breakfasted with Ray, he had to be off long before the conference started. ‘Just show your pass and you can come and go as you like. If you get bored, then you can get off down to the beach. I probably won’t get a chance to see you till after the last session, so it’ll be supper-time, I expect.’
‘Dinner.’
Ray smiled. ‘Right. We’ll meet for dinner, then.’
When she arrived at the Winter Gardens, there were a number of other people with visitors’ passes being directed to part of a balcony reserved for them. As part of her WEA courses, she had attended a full meeting of Portsmouth council, but this conference was different. Nobody here had any gold chains or fancy robes, nor was there any fancy language. The man who was speaking when she took her seat was talking about toll bridges; then a woman went to the platform and spoke for about five minutes about the need for a plan to give old people free tickets on public transport.
From where she was seated, the delegates looked tiny, so she had to count the rows and seats to distinguish which was Ray. He was there. He must have seen her before she saw him because he was looking up at her smiling. She waved two fingers at him.
A man on the platform pulled a microphone stand towards him. ‘Right then, comrades, shall we move on to Item Four?’ She at once recognized the voice that came through the loudspeaker system as Mr Anderson’s. She would have loved to tell somebody that she knew him, and that he had been at sea with her father since they were boys.
The balcony opposite was filled with people who kept coming and going, talking to one another, exchanging bits of paper, passing messages, and generally seeming to take very little notice of what was going on, except for certain short spells when they gave the speaker their full attention.
It was just dawning on her that they might be from the newspapers, when Malou French made her way down the steps to the front row. Lu slunk down until she was well hidden behind a broad man and a broad woman who kept their heads close as they commented on everybody and everything. She was quite shielded now, but as there wasn’t much going on that seemed of interest, she decided to slip out at the first opportunity.
When she looked up from checking the agenda, and peered between her shields to check on Malou French, her heart missed a beat; more than one, perhaps, for brushing the journalist’s cheek with his lips was the man the scent of whose spicy shaving soap had stayed on her cheek all night. Her tango man with the top-drawer accent and soft voice. A dreadful vision arose of the reporter looking across, recognizing Lu, pointing her out and telling him her version of the factory-girl-on-the-train story.
The best thing Lu could do was to get out of here, go back to her room, fetch her book and swimming costume and sit on the sands until supper-time. The next time Lu looked across, her dancing partner was loping up the steps two at a time towards the exit, making little signs of acknowledgement to several people as he went. She left the Winter Gardens cautiously, and was glad that she did so because from within the foyer she glimpsed him, David, the man she now wanted to avoid, tossing a canvas bag into the back of a small green open tourer and driving off.
As she lay on the pale sandy beach, which was much more seductive than the shingle shoreline at home, her mind constantly wandering from her reading, she came to the conclusion that the episode in the dance hall would have its place in a modern novel. Strangers meet by chance and part without either knowing the other’s full name… perhaps one day they would meet again, when they were married to other people. They would remember that brief romantic experience that only they shared… they might fall deeply, passionately in love, a mature true love that would destroy two families but was too strong to resist.
That evening, Lu and Ray were invited by Mr Anderson to have dinner with some of the official guests. Ray was buoyed up with his whole experience of this weekend, and kept apologizing as if she might think that he was neglecting her.
‘Ray, I should hate it if I had to drag around on your coat-tails.’
‘Fancy you meeting Sid like that. Of course I knew his name, but I never put two and two together, and there was never a hint in his letters about wh
at he was doing. I mean, it wouldn’t occur to anybody that Sid, the sailor who was Dad’s pal, was one and the same as Sidney Anderson who was chairing a transport conference. He’s asked me if I’d like to serve on a couple of local committees, and to write a report. Have you got something to wear to dinner?’
‘I’ve got that dress I went out in last night.’
‘Good, that’s just right. Sir Walter Citrine, Lu. Did you ever imagine eating your dinner with a Sir?’ Or imagine entering a dance hall alone, or falling in love with a stranger in a single dance?
Sir Walter Citrine was a quiet, white-haired man. Lu wouldn’t have picked him out as a Sir, but then her mind was humming ‘Jealousy’, her legs still dancing the tango, her back held by a warm hand, her breasts conscious of being pressed in the slow waltz, smelling the shaving cream from her partner’s cheek pressed close, hearing his soft voice: ‘Thank you. Do you really have to go?’
A remark made during the evening, ‘We’ll be all right tomorrow, the harpies and vultures are away back to Fleet Street’, told Lu that she could go to the final session and hear Mr Anderson’s speech without fear of meeting Malou French. In a jovial goodnight to brother and sister, of whom he felt proud without any good reason for doing so, Sid said, ‘I’ll not keep you long about with my speechifying, and I’ll not have a deal to say about high-speed roads and public ownership, but I’d be honoured if you’d be there.’
It was true, he was not long about.
‘If a thing is wrong, then it is wrong. No good saying otherwise. Wringing our hands is no good. Bitterness is no good. Cynicism is worst of all. It’s up to people to stand up and say, No! And if nobody listens we have to get out in t’streets and shout, No, this is wrong! If a thing is wrong, it is wrong!
‘Not one of us is let off the responsibility for what goes on in the world.’
His words, when Lu came to record them in her journal, seemed uninspiring, until she recollected his voice and accent. His manner of delivery had been so impressive, and his idea of the future so visionary, that Lu, at the impressionable age of seventeen, was not likely to forget easily. What it all had to do with the future of public transport, she had no idea.
* * *
With three single people bringing home wage-packets, 110 Lampeter Street began to look up. Since Lu started earning they had bought a settee, and four kitchen chairs, front curtains, and a mirror over the mantelpiece. Not all at once: they paid weekly into a club; then there was the Co-op dividend which came in useful for new linoleum and a few frivolous items – a clock for the mantelpiece, a picture in a gilt frame and a silk bedspread for Lu’s bed. They got on pretty well together, except when they got on to politics, in which they differed in means to ends, but not the end. Since the Bournemouth conference, Ray had been wrapped up in committees and sub-committees. Kenny had emerged from the Labour League of Youth – which he had joined for its football team – and become a full member of the Labour Party. What with Ray and his union and Ken with his politics, there was sometimes a bit of table-thumping.
Lu had been in the Labour Club and the NUR meeting hall. What sort of people were they who enjoyed such places? Deadly dull places that she would never have entered but for those occasions when a visit formed part of Mr Matthews’ course. Even their social evenings seemed to Lu as tedious as a Good Friday church service compared to the glamour of the dance halls or the modern cinemas with beautiful soft pink lights and gold-sprayed walls. Lu closed her ears and looked at Picturegoer or the instructions on a dressmaking pattern.
By the time he reached his early twenties, Kenny’s life outside Lampeter Street seemed never to leave him enough time to throw out his shaving water, or help with clearing out the fireplace or riding his bike to take the washing to the bag-wash. Lu did the ironing when it came back from the bag-wash, but she hated it. As she hated all housework. But then, she had been brought up to do it, and who else was there, now that her mother was gone? Ray and Ken might think that stripping beds and scrubbing out the lavatory wasn’t man’s work, but they slept, didn’t they? And they peed, didn’t they?
Lu did a lot of angry crashing and banging about on Sunday mornings when most of the cleaning was done. It was true Ken always brought in something hot at Sunday lunch, but Lu suspected that was only because he didn’t like bread and cheese. She absolutely refused to cook a meal, though, when she had just put the gas stove back together after soaking off the grease in hot soda-water.
Ken had finished his years as a junior, and now wore a black coat and acted as one of the pall-bearers at funerals. Lu thought he looked good in his pall-bearer’s clothes. He had grown tall, lean, like Duke, and handsome. Large brown eyes fringed with long lashes; a mild expression that, when not set in his professional mould, smiled readily.
Girls liked him. The general opinion of the Wilmotts was, like father like son. Not that he had much chance of a fling on his home ground, because for one thing he didn’t like girls to know what he did for a living, and for another the sight of a pall-bearer flinging himself around a dance floor wouldn’t be good for trade. So he went to Southampton for the gay life. If they wanted to know, he told the girls there that he worked at the Co-op. Where at one time he had spent his weekends on earnest rambles with the League of Youth, he now found the big Saturday dances and modem bars of Southampton more his style.
From time to time he would meet a girl off the train at Portsmouth station and bring her home for tea, take her to the pictures and see her off again on the last train. There was a whole series of different girls. Usually they were about twenty and, although older than Lu, it was from these modern young women, who all seemed to work in hairdresser’s or fashion departments (Southampton being a greatly sophisticated city compared to Portsmouth), that Lu began to be interested in the very latest fashions and beauty styles.
Sonia – the girl who had taught Lu to tango and had cut her lively locks so that the line of her hair swirled from ear to ear, curling under and dipping to the top of her spine, bouncing as she moved – lasted longer than most. Ken was quite proud of Sonia and her glamorous work, but when she and Lu became absorbed in hair and clothes he got ratty that he was not the focus of her attention. ‘Come on, Sonia, or we won’t make first house.’ Sonia took no notice, but continued to comb and snip Lu’s hair until she was satisfied. ‘You need some earrings. Here, try these.’ She gave Lu her own large, imitation pearl blobs. Lu felt transformed. ‘Keep them as a present for the nice tea you made. Any time you want to come shopping in town, let me know. You can ring me at the shop. I love buying clothes and things.’ This infiltration into the family was not what Kenny had intended; next time he would not be so hasty to bring a girl home.
But it was Sonia who had catapulted an eager seventeen-year-old Lu into a more glamorous world than she had hitherto inhabited. Lu and Sonia were shopping and dancing companions long after she and Ken had broken up. Lu developed a passion for fashionable clothes and, whilst she was good at turning out good copies on her mother’s old treadle sewing machine, she loved the whole mystique of buying from a proper gown shop: the groomed and snobbish saleswomen, the curtain changing rooms, the flattering approval of the manageress, the tissue paper and the exit with the smart box which discreetly indicated that it held something from a very posh shop. This desire to go out with Sonia, both dressed to the nines, drove her on at work to keep topping her own piecework figures.
At times when she was working, day in day out at the same task, doing dozen after dozen, she could work up a speed. It was very hard work, with no time even to look up; she kept her head down and her rhythm going hour after hour. The same thing again and again until she felt herself to be an extension of the machine, of the fan-belt, of the driving wheel, of the boiler turning the wheel, and the wheel running the band, and the band powering the machine and so on, round and round with Lu’s skilled hands pushing hundreds and hundreds of seams under the needle-foot. The only part of the entire operation that could not be done
by a machine. Ezzard’s needed her. Her runner and button girl were kept going. Every so often, a pile of her work went to Nellie for checking for flaws which she never found. Lu’s estimate of herself was right: she was a good, skilled machine operator.
In all her years, Nellie could remember no one able to keep up the speed at which Lu Wilmott worked. Girls would sometimes go flat for a week if they were going to buy their wedding dress, or if the ‘bums’ were coming round to settle a debt, but not just to keep pushing up weekly wages. On one occasion, memorable to every woman working in the same machine room as Lu, the girls had a lottery on her tally for one day, with Lu trying to beat her own record.
A Tuesday was chosen because her machine would still be clean after the Saturday dismantling, and nicely run in from the Monday. It was several weeks since the burn to her arm, so that had healed and was no longer a handicap. The lottery was to guess how many pieces Lu would produce on this Tuesday. They paid a few pence for each guess, which was written on a sheet divided into numbered squares. The winner would be the one whose guess was nearest to Lu’s tally for the day. Sixpence was usually more than anyone could afford to lay out on a bit of fun, but a kind of fever seemed to build around the idea, particularly as it would have to be done under the eye of George Ezzard. By the time it was all set up, there was over seven pounds in the kitty: half would go to Lu and half to the winner. A lot of money, more than a second week’s wages for an average pieceworker.
Although the place seemed to crackle with excitement when they clocked on, once the treadles and fly-wheels started moving, the machine shops settled down to their usual noise. The idea of fast machining was catching, so that in the entire room there was little movement except to grab scissors and start off on another pile of seaming pieces and tapes. When Mr George walked through the shops, he felt uneasy. Something was up. He tried to pump the security man, but he shook his head and said he couldn’t see what Mr George meant: things looked all right to him. The security man had had two goes on the lottery.
