Climbing the Stairs by Margaret Powell Read Free Book Online

and he must have got used to it. By his age he’d probably brought a number of
girls home to be inspected and rejected.
    I discovered that Lancelot and Tristram had escaped their mother’s clutches, for which I didn’t blame them. One had gone to Canada and one had gone to Australia and they’d both
been gone about ten years. During this time they were writing letters home saying how much they missed their mother or so she said, but neither of them had made the trip back. So I could see by all
this interrogation and all this talk that she was determined not to lose Perce and I suppose you couldn’t really blame her. She’d got no husband and only that one son to keep her, so
life would have been difficult for her without him. Yes, it would have had to have been a very determined girl that would stick to Perce if she’d been got at by his mother every time he took
her home.
    Much to my relief, at about half past six Perce suggested that we go out. Just him and me. We were to have gone to the films but when we got outside he suggested we went to a dance instead.
Well, I wasn’t too keen on going to a dance. I had to be in by ten o’clock which would mean leaving about half past nine, but he said he didn’t want to be late because he’d
got an early shift, so off we went.
    It was a small suburban hall, not a bit like the Palais de Danses that you get now. Just a large bare room with a few fancy shades hanging down and a three- or four-piece band right at the end.
The floor was smothered with some kind of powder stuff. It was the kind of place where they held meetings and socials through the week, not a proper dance hall. It only cost one and three to go in
and although it was still only seven o’clock there were already a lot of people there.
    Most of the girls were dressed up. Some had got knee-length dresses and some had got what were fashionable at that time, dresses hanging down longer at the back than at the front. And they wore
very light flesh-coloured stockings which were all the go too in those days.
    The men hadn’t bothered at all. They were mostly in Oxford bags – trousers about two foot wide at the bottoms. To me they seemed a very weedy-looking lot, but as I’d gone with
a partner I could afford to be critical.
    Of course like all dance halls at the time there were a lot more girls than boys and there were none of these courtly gestures of a boy escorting you back to your seat. No, they just left you
bang in the middle of the floor and went and congregated at one end while you made your own way back to sit and become a wallflower again.
    I couldn’t help thinking how pretty and sophisticated the London girls looked in comparison to those from my home town. Some of them had got Eton crops which were coming into fashion at
that time. My sister used to have an Eton crop but you’ve got to have the right face for it. With my kind of features if I’d had an Eton crop I’d have just looked like a
hard-boiled egg with a top knot.
    After a time Perce went off to get me a cup of coffee, and while he was gone a young man came up and asked me to dance. Well, I thought, here goes. I’m not bound to Perce. After all he
hadn’t bought me body and soul for one and three which was all he’d spent so far. So I got up to dance with this fellow.
    ‘I haven’t seen you here before,’ he said. ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s my first time.’ ‘Are you with anyone?’ he said. ‘Yes, I’ve
come with a boyfriend.’ He turned a bit pale at this. ‘Won’t he mind you dancing with me?’ ‘Why should he mind?’ I said. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that
just shows you’re a stranger here. When you come with a boyfriend you don’t get up and dance with someone else.’ I’d seen quite a few girls dancing with more than one
partner and I said so. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but they all know each other or else they’re related. No complete stranger who comes with a boyfriend ever dances with anyone else.