Memoirs of a Dance Hall Romeo Read Free

‘It’s all right for you.’
    ‘If it is, it’s been a long, hard road. Did I ever tell you where I spent the morning of my eighteenth birthday? Drifting around the middle of the English Channel in a life jacket. We hit a mine on my third patrol.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘Nothing very much. It was bloody cold. I thought I was going to die, and I’d never have known what it was like to sleep with a woman. That thought circled endlessly in my brain.’
    ‘One of life’s great experiences missed?’
    ‘Exactly.’ He paused, wiping lather from his face. ‘I remember coming into Falmouth in the lifeboat, wrapped in blankets, with a crowd watching from the quay. It made me feel very satisfyingly like a veteran.’
    ‘And the other business?’ I asked. ‘What about that?’
    ‘Found myself a lady of the town that very night. Two quid down the drain.’ He smiled that slow, gentle, wry smile of his. ‘It was over in a moment, just like you and your Ava. But it changed me, I must confess.’
    ‘In what way?’
    ‘I became convinced that I was going to die. Some sort of delayed anxiety reaction to being blown out of the sea.’
    I found difficulty in taking the remark seriously, and I suppose it showed for he held up his hand and added, ‘I used to lie awake at night waiting for my heart to stop, which seemed a significant waste of the time one spent in bed. You could say I turned to women in desperation.’
    ‘With success?’
    ‘A uniform went over very well in those days.’ He took a dressing gown from behind the door and put it on. ‘Come to think of it, there wasn’t much I turned down. Naafi girls, Wrens—anything in a skirt in a dance hall, usually through an alcoholic haze.’
    ‘But what if you’d caught something?’ I said. ‘Didn’t that ever worry you?’
    ‘But I thought I was going to die, don’t you see?’ he said patiently. ‘That was the whole point. Nothing seemed to matter very much. It’s true what they say, you know. Nothing succeeds like excess. There was a terribly nice W.V.S. lady at one of the canteens, who invited me round to her place for a beetle drive. Turned out she’d got the wrong night.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘I stayed for tea, and more than a little sympathy. Opened up an entirely new field of operations. Then there was a young lieutenant in a certain para-military religious organization, who gave me the most stimulating afternoon of my life in the rest room of a church hall in Plymouth, after she’d closed the canteen.’
    I gazed at him in awe. ‘So what do you do now? You never go out. You’re always at that damn desk studying.’
    ‘I can see you’re missing the point entirely,’ he said. ‘Let’s put it this way. Most men spend a large proportion of their time at the office desk or factory bench thinking loose thoughts about their neighbour’s wife or the girl behind the bar at the local or what-have-you. But not me. I’m a free man. I can keep sex in its place, because I worked through it. In other words, it doesn’t run my life, it’s just another part of it.’
    ‘Thanks to all those willing ladies in Falmouth and Plymouth during the war?’
    ‘Exactly. No psychological hang-ups. No traumas. I even sleep nights.’
    ‘So what am I supposed to do?’
    ‘Lay Ava’s ghost, old sport. Try one of the local dance halls. Try all of them, come to that. Lots of girls on offer there. Every shape and size known to man and they’re all lovely! Just remember every woman’s beautiful in some way or other and you can’t go far wrong.’
    I stared at him, unable to think of any useful comment, and he sighed heavily.
    ‘For God’s sake, Oliver, if you don’t get them out of your system now, you’ll go through the rest of your life spending about ninety per cent of your waking hours brooding over women and the flesh. As for your dreams, I shudder to think what they’ll be like.’ He hauled me to my feet. ‘Now get to hell out of here and let