The Valley by Richard Benson Read Free Book Online Page A

to get off dancing. Up until now she has put it off. Winnie prefers going to the pictures, attracted by the cinema’s lush, warm, exotic interior, the way you don’t have to worry too much about how you look, and the cheapness. Most of all she likes Rudolph, who seems to her the acme of modern manhood. All the women like him, Winnie, Miss Marjorie and the girls at work – and they have a song they sing, which feels a bit risqué.
     
    In Blood and Sand
    he’s simply grand.
    In the Sheik
    he’s simply great
    He is a hero –
    Rudolph Valentino!
     
    Winnie has seen all of Rudolph’s films. She even saw The Son of the Sheik during the lockout, when she was supposed to be giving all her spare money to her mother. His bashfulness and nobility set the tone for Winnie’s thoughts about romance, and when he died unexpectedly in August 1926 she felt bereft, as if a world without Rudolph was one in which she could love no man at all.
    The following year, however, her sister Millie announced her engagement to Danny Lunness, a miner and bantam-weight boxer from Goldthorpe. Millie is a year or so younger than Winnie, and Winnie knows that eldest daughters have to be careful because when the younger ones marry quickly, they end up stuck at home looking after their mams and dads. This is why the next time Miss Marjorie brought up the subject of dancing, Winnie said, ‘Would you show me how to do that make-up again?’
    *
    Millie, who likes dances, suggested the one at the Miners’ Welfare Hall because she was on the bill. She performs with a young amateur singer-comedian from Bolton-upon-Dearne known as the Juggler, and he had asked her to do a couple of songs with him and the band. ‘You’ll have to come and meet him!’ she told Winnie. ‘He’s a good sport, but he’s as daft as a brush.’
    Winnie preferred thoughtful and intelligent men to ones who are daft as brushes, but perhaps you have to put up with that at dances, she thought. She had said she would go, and now here she is, walking with Mabel past the long rows of houses with their crimson bricks and grey net curtains and open doors where the women stand talking, to the hall. Even from a hundred yards away they can hear the bassy sounds of the music. Winnie shudders.
    ‘It’s loud in’t it?’ says Mabel.
    ‘Isn’t it just?’
    ‘I’m not keen on that music.’
    Winnie isn’t sure herself. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘We might as well have a look now we’re here.’
    They walk up the path to the pillared front of the Welfare Hall and into the foyer where they pay a man at a booth. Winnie can already smell the sweat, candlewaxed floor and cigarette smoke from inside the hall. She suggests that they hang their coats in the cloakroom and go to the Ladies Room to put on more powder before they go in, and Mabel agrees. They both take their time.
    When they push through the heavy swing doors into the hall, the music and the faintly sickly smell hit them like a wall. The men are wearing gangster suits and pointed shoes and some of the younger ones have an almost sinister look with centre-parted slicked-down hair and eyes emphasised by the deliberate leaving on of coal dust on the rims. The younger women have bobbed hair and deep red lips, low-waist dresses and bare legs. The band is playing jazz dance music and in the middle of the dancers some people are performing strange moves and waving their arms. Winnie once read a magazine article about Rudolph Valentino and his wife holding a Charleston contest at a party at their house in Hollywood; the article had shown you how to do it, and made it seem glamorous. This dancing does not look much like Rudolph Valentino’s party though. It looks ridiculous.
    Some people stand watching the dancers, while others do a sort of jog-cum-foxtrot around the edge of the dance floor. Winnie looks at the band, her eyes searching for Millie. When she sees her sister is not yet on stage, she and Mabel sit down at the side. The singer