Come Dancing

“Why would you want to go and see a cowboy on stage?”
 
It’s a good question. And as a young man, it had my dad perplexed.
 
“He sings,” said dad’s mate.
 
“You mean like Roy Rodgers?”
 
“He’s NOT a cowboy!”
 
My dad took a drink from his lager tops. We were sitting outside The Beehive pub in the Grassmarket. I’d intended to walk him up to The Bow Bar, but a rock and roll band were playing in the middle of the square. We heard them play the theme from “Peter Gunn” and I knew that all he wanted to do on his 73rd birthday was sit and go back in time. So I suggested a drink and he eagerly agreed.
 
“But Lonnie Donegan sounded like a cowboy NAME,” he explained. “And I’d never even heard of skiffle.”
 
My dad’s friend from school explained who Lonnie Donegan was and so my dad was introduced to skiffle music. Like a lot of lads of his generation, he got hooked. He obviously had to get the Lonnie Donegan haircut too. “All swept forward with a duck’s @rse at the back.” My dad made it sound as if looking like the back end of a duck was a good thing. Who am I to argue? I’m so out of touch with the youth of 1957.
 
“It was the haircut that changed everything,” he said. He made it sound momentous. I need you to understand this. This was a life-changing haircut. And why? Because the girls liked it and it seems it gave him a WHOOSH of confidence. “I was always getting asked to dances, and I couldn’t dance,” he said. “Especially not to rock and roll, I just looked daft. But I used to walk past this dance school every day, so I stopped in and asked. They told me lots of young men went there to learn, so I thought I’d give it a go.”
 
Speaking of dancing, the band in the Grassmarket were proving very popular. A crowd had gathered and little kids were jiving with old folk. It was a great atmosphere and the band were clearly enjoying themselves. “Well,” said dad, “lots of young men my @rse. There were forty women and four men in there, including me.”
 
He smiled. “It was WONDERFUL.”
 
He told his best mate Dave Towers about it. Apparently Dave lived up to his name, and was well over six foot. But Dave was at first unconvinced. “DANCING??” he said. But my dad explained about the women and won Dave over. “There was a lass in there who liked me, but she was far too tall and so she got Dave instead.”
 
Dad learned the samba, the rumba, the fox-trot, the waltz, “And then they brought in the cha-cha. I was good at it, but I didn’t like that as much. I liked the close dancing.” He had a favourite dance partner out of the 40 young ladies. “I’ll never forget her name – Diane Parker. Oooh, she was gorgeous.” She told him she liked the “old-time” dancing, which meant “close”. He was up for that. But only on Saturday nights, because he had his Air Cadets and his job as a cinema projectionist. “I loved that job,” he told me. “I saw all sorts of films I shouldn’t. Certificate X.”
 
“Brigitte Bardot?” I asked.
 
“Ooooh, Brigitte Bardot!” he replied. “I loved showing her films. I remember one time the manager said I didn’t have to come in because I was so busy. But I told him I wanted to anyway.”
 
Foreign beauties aside, the local talent even pursued dad into the projection booth. “The usherette lasses were always coming up offering me hot chocolate. I didn’t realise at the time that it was code. Like ‘something for the weekend, sir’? The young usherettes would sidle up – ‘Do you want hot chocolate Tom?’ I had no idea.”
 
I had no idea EITHER. Not that anyone ever offered ME hot chocolate at age 15.
 
So because of the dancing, the films, and the ATC soon dad was juggling Diane Parker alongside two other girlfriends Roselyn and Irene. “Oooh, Irene – I’ll never forget her. She was gorgeous. My dad said I should have married her.” This lead to the story of the three girls in one night which I recounted in February. Or to stick with the cinema theme – this is where we came in.
 
Sadly, Diane got left behind when my dad went away to study radio signalling at Wireless School. As for Irene, she found out that my dad had started seeing my mum while he was there and that was the end of that. “But I did break up properly with Roselyn. I was a good boy. Sometimes.”
 
It wasn’t plain sailing with my mum though and apparently they decided to take a year off from each other in 1963. “What a year THAT was,” sighed dad and I could tell he was back there as the band in the Grassmarket did their version of “Since I Don’t Have You” by The Platters.
 
“Snogging music,” I said and dad agreed heartily. “Funnily enough, I remember going to a dance on April the 30th 1963,” he recalled. “It was my 19th birthday – I was young and free and had a good job as radio officer in the merchant navy. I went there with a mate who had a car. There was a band - it was The Animals before they were 'The Animals' - there was Eric Burdon and Alan Price. They were really good and because I played the guitar I begged them to let me play with them."

"They gave me the castanets," he said. "It was still great fun though."

Apparently dad's prowess on the castanets drew some attention. "We met two lasses – I’ll never forget their names – Marian and Miriam. One of them – let’s say it was Marian – asked me to buy her a drink and I said it was my birthday and she had to buy ME one. So she did. Then someone spilled a drink on – let’s say it was Marian – on her leg. So I was a gentleman and dried her ankle with my handkerchief. Then I went up her calf and her knee and up to her thigh.”
 
Gents, I hope you are taking notes.
 
“You’ve got lovely legs,” he told her. And she offered to use them to dance with him. “And then her mate got jealous so I danced with her as well. I left – let’s say it was Marian – with my mate. I liked her better, but he had the car. But she seemed sad so I ended writing to both of them. We wrote for ages.”
 
It must have been the dancing. As you know, my dad is not tall and he didn’t have a car and he didn’t have rich parents. His mate – another ship’s officer – had all of that “AND he was the son of a bishop!” explained dad. When they docked in Newcastle, they met the pilot who guided all the ships into harbour and the captain invited him and his family on board. The pilot’s wife – and his teenage daughter….
 
“Oooh, his daughter! I’ll never forget her,” said dad. “Vivian. She was gorgeous!”
 
“Me and the other officer were asked to show them around the ship and down to the engine rooms. Well, there’s nothing much to see down there. It’s just hot and there’s the noise, and the smell of oil, and the huge bloody engines. But to get up and down there’s these massive ladders – because the other officer was a gentleman he went up first. But I went up behind Vivian,” he grinned.
 
“You’ve got lovely legs,” he told her.
 
Clearly, once dad found a chat-up line that worked, he stuck with it. But then he added his finesse.
 
“I can see your knickers.”
 
“Go ahead and look if you like. They’re clean,” Vivian replied.
 
Good lord. Is this really how our elders behaved back in the day? They certainly seemed to have a lot more fun than we did. Appropriately enough, the band were now playing “Great Balls of Fire.”
 
“Well it was between me and the other officer and no-one thought I had a chance,” said dad. “He was tall and blonde, and the son of a bishop. But it was me she started writing to. He was sick about it.” 

Dad and Vivian spent a few days together – she was at teacher’s training college – and he would sneak in there to warning cries of “Man in the Building! Man in the Building!” from Vivian so her mates would know not to wander around in their knickers. Not that dad would have minded, I expect.
 
Vivian wrote to him the whole time he was at sea – over to East Africa, Australia and back via Durban. “When I got back, she called me. It must have been February 29th 1964 – a leap year. She said, ‘You know what day it is?’ and I told her yes, and she said, ‘Well, I’m allowed to ask you to marry me’. I said ‘Don’t be daft, we’ve only known each other a year – and out of that year we’ve only spent a week together. Besides you’re not a Catholic.’ So she said, ‘Well, since you’ve said no you have to buy me a dress’ and I told her to get stuffed.”
 
There’s something about that part of the story I find very sweet. Not the being told to get stuffed part. I don’t know. Perhaps it is patronising of me to say it, but the pair of them – Vivian and dad – sound like a couple of kids just playing at being properly grown up. There’s part of me that wants things to work out for them, although from a rather selfish perspective, I’m heartily glad it didn’t.
 
Fortunately for me, my mum was back on the scene by this time. A year had passed and dad had been welcomed back by her family who’d missed him. My grandfather really liked taking the mick - literally.
 
“Ah bejaysus ‘tis yerself!” he’d say in a silly Oirish accent by way of a greeting. “Tell me, does yer fay-ther work on the roads?”
 
“Don’t be daft,” dad would reply. “He just leans on a shovel.”
 
And it seems my mum was won over too and soon dad and mum were getting serious about each other. But Vivian was not a woman to give up. She kept writing and sent dad a picture of herself, “leaning back in a bikini”. My dad illustrated by leaning back and pouting with one arm behind his head. The effect was not quite the same, but I got the idea.
 
“I know this lass likes you,” said his cousin Mardi, “but it’s Val you really miss when you’re away isn’t it?” He had to admit he did. But still he was torn, especially when another letter came from Vivian, saying she still loved him and wanted to get married and was willing to become a Catholic. He kept that letter and read it over and over. It was still on him the next time he visited my mum, which was a mistake because it “fell out of his pocket” according to my nan who read it and shared the contents with my mum.
 
“Fell out of me pocket. A likely bloody story,” said dad, but there was hell to pay.
 
As a result, he was unsure where his future lay. Bridlington with my mum or Newcastle with Vivian. In the end, fate decided.
 
“I was at York station,” he explained. He stood on the platform, not knowing which girl he was going to see. “I decided that if the Newcastle train arrived first, I would go to Vivian. And if the Hull train arrived first…”
 
He didn’t need to finish the story. The fact I was sitting there listening to “Shakin’ All Over” was testament to the fact that the Newcastle train was tardy.
 
My mum and dad got married on December 18th 1965. He’s got a picture on his sideboard of him in his uniform holding on to my mum as they cut the cake together. He looks happy and handsome and dapper, but you can’t REALLY tell why all these women were all over him. I knew well enough. We’d been sitting in the Beehive for an hour and he’d already got chatting with a foreign couple and an old bloke, even while regaling me with his tales. He’s endlessly charming, and great with the craic. If you were to look up the term, “Loveable Rascal” in an encyclopaedia, you’d find a picture of my dad, smiling and raising a glass to you.
 
Dad was due to go back to sea shortly after the wedding, and mum went to visit him when his ship was docked at the Isle of Grain. However, because of delays, she literally only had 24 hours with him.
 
“That’s a shame,” said the kindly captain. “Why don’t you become a supernumerary?” In other words, she could become a nominal crew-member with no actual duties for a quid’s pay a year. A lot of the wives did it. So my mum quit her job that very day, sending a letter of resignation to the bank that employed her and kind-of joining the crew.
 
“Well, she went to my berth and what did she see?” said dad, pulling a face. “The picture of Vivian in her bikini.” He sighed.
 
“THAT’S got to go!” she said.
 
So dad gave the picture to the gentleman officer who’d been his rival for her affections. “Coo! I’ve always wanted that!” he said. Let us not dwell on why.
 
So mum was supposed to go around the world with dad, but shortly afterwards started feeling sick all the time. “I think it’s the smell of oil,” she said.
 
“We were so daft, we didn’t even think,” explained dad.
 
The doctor broke it to mum that she was pregnant with my sister. Again, it was my dad’s birthday – April the 30th – and sure enough my sister turned up 9 months later at the end of January 1967. “It’s a good thing she was conceived at the Isle of Grain and not the Isle of Dogs or we’d have had to christen her ‘Fido’,” said dad.
 
He laughed at the memories, but I could tell he wished he still had that picture of Vivian. Just to remember. “But we didn’t have a lot of pictures in those days, it was too expensive,” he explained. “I do have one of Irene though.”
 
Remember Irene? She was part of the Diane-Roselyn-Irene triangle? As it turned out my dad’s sister was good mates with Irene, and found a picture of her which she gave to my dad for his birthday 3 years ago. He has it still. He doesn’t have one of Diane Parker, but he found out years later that she won “Miss Bradford” shortly after he left. “Well, she WAS gorgeous,” he explained.
 
As for my dad, he doesn’t dance these days although he still gets offers. “They’re always asking me,” he told me. “There’s not many men who can dance and women love it.” He’s got a friend called Julie who wants him to go dancing with her, but she’s married to a “real nice man” and dad doesn’t want to be doing things behind his back.
 
“Behind his back?” I asked. “But it’s only dancing and you’ll tell him the two of you are going, surely?”
 
A couple of hours had passed and the band were packing up. My dad finished his lager tops.
 
“Oh yes, of course,” said dad. “But I couldn’t snog her,” he explained. “And you can’t go dancing without snogging. It’s not proper dancing otherwise.”
 
47 years old, and I’m still learning lessons from my dad. The best dancer I’ll ever meet.

Parsones