Learning The Steps

This observant short story by Lucy Chester is about a young girl growing up in the 1960s.

Like other mothers in Eleanor’s circle, she no longer did paid work. She enjoyed running the house, and had daily help to assist her.

In the afternoons she visited friends and followed her interests.

The house behind Eleanor was early Victorian and grand, white painted with wide and deep sash windows. The stone steps led to a carved oak front door.

Inside the house were big reception rooms with high ceilings.

A baby grand piano stood in a wide bay window and carefully arranged flowers rested on antique furniture.

It was cold inside as the radiators never rose above lukewarm. A coal fire was laid for the evening.

Eleanor peered down through the wrought-iron railings to the basement window.

There, inside, was the electric train set belonging to her brother James.

It was laid out on a large table, complete with sidings, working signals, passenger trains and goods trains.

James prized it still, but played with it less often. Nowadays he was more interested in his turntable and long-playing records.

The winds of change were blowing across from America.

Eleanor had heard Elvis sing on James’s LP, and had watched him perform “Hound Dog” on the black and white television in the little room at the back of the house.

She was fascinated by him, by his energy and movement.

He looked so different, so casual in his jeans, with his black hair over his ears and collar.

All the men in Eleanor’s life, even the young ones, wore suits and sports jackets most of the time, with their hair cut short at the back and sides.

Eleanor’s mother had carefully waved hair. She wore dresses with small waists and full patterned skirts, or straight skirts with matching jumper and cardigan.

Eleanor still liked to play in the stream behind the house, and ride horses at the weekends.

But for going out, she was dressed in clothes like her mother.

****

The future for Eleanor and James was clearly mapped out.

Boys went away to public school at thirteen, and in preparation for this James was a weekly boarder at a nearby prep school.

Eleanor and her friends went to private day schools. It was expected that girls would go to work, but only for a while.

The real aim still, for girls like her, as in generations past, was for them to make a “good” marriage.

So Eleanor had elocution and music lessons.

She was taught how to write formal invitations, and how to lay a table with the whole range of knives and forks, soup spoons and dessert spoons.

For this way of life, boys and girls both needed to learn ballroom dancing. Eleanor had seen her parents twirl gracefully around the dance floor.

“Dancing was how we courted,” her mother had told her. “You have to be good at it.”

So, at James’s prep school, for the boys in the final year, ballroom dancing lessons were held.

Sisters and friends were asked to go along and be their partners.

“You’re my sister, so I can’t dance with you,” James had told her firmly.

On the first evening, Eleanor sat anxiously on the hard benches at the side of the school hall, waiting for the boys to come in.

Would anyone pick her to dance? Or would she be a sad wallflower? Eleanor knew, from books she’d read, that girls like her, in the centuries behind her, had gone through just such agonies.

But those girls had mostly been older – they had chaperones with them, wore pretty dresses and had carefully styled hair.

Eleanor was just in her everyday skirt and blouse, and wore plimsolls.

The boys rushed in after their high tea. A faint institutional smell hung around their clothes.

Eleanor stared in fright, but she was in luck. A handsome red-haired boy came up to her and said what all the boys had been carefully taught.

“May I have the pleasure of the next dance?”

“Ooh, yes, please!” Eleanor hadn’t been taught the correct reply.

She bounced up from the bench.

“What’s your name?” the boy asked. Eleanor told him.

“And that’s my brother over there.”

“Oh, yes. He’s in my year – I don’t know him well, though. I’m Rory.”

Together they began to learn the dance steps, with many mistakes and – still being children – lots of laughing and messing about.

A pianist bashed out the dance tunes enthusiastically on the slightly out-of-tune piano, and sometimes the teacher played records.

Eleanor and Rory giggled with confusion over the samba, the rumba and the cha-cha-cha.

They romped, laughing with all the others, through the Dashing White Sergeant and the Gay Gordons. But they did better in the waltz.

“This is much easier!” Eleanor gasped.

The simple three-in-a-bar time, coming through so clearly in the music and matching the simple footwork, meant they could move easily together.

Sometimes, once they’d got into their stride, they could do a turn without tripping.

After the first week Rory came straight over to her at the start of every dance class. Knowing he’d do this, and then stay as her partner all evening, gave Eleanor a warm, safe feeling.

She found herself looking forward to the classes.

At the end of the last lesson, the teacher had taken a record from its sleeve.

“This is ‘Moon River’,” she announced. “It’s a song from the film ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’.

“It’s a waltz time – so off you go!”

Eleanor and Rory danced rhythmically around the room, sure now of their

She felt, for the first time, the early stirrings of romance

steps, to the dreamy, haunting music.

Though young, Eleanor was aware of Rory’s strength and closeness, and she felt, for the first time, the early stirrings of romance.

Both of their lives were about to change. Eleanor had taken – and hopefully passed – her eleven-plus exam. Rory, thirteen like James, was about to go to public school.

Eleanor was slowly realising that not everyone lived like her. She was curious to see outside her protected circle.

She wanted to go to the grammar school, to meet a new and, in her parents’ eyes, possibly dangerous set of people.

“Can I go there, if I pass?” she pleaded.

“No, we know what’s best for you both.”

“I don’t want to board so far away from home,” James confided privately.

But like many other young people in those times, they weren’t given a choice.

****

It was growing cold on the step. Eleanor looked down at her envelope and gasped as she tore it open.

She drew out a card with a large pink heart on the front. Inside was a question mark and a kiss, and a little

drawing of two stick people dancing.

It was February 14, the day young girls come both to dread and long for.

She smiled in delight and held close her first ever Valentine card.

She treasured it always. Afterwards, whenever she heard “Moon River” played, Rory came into her mind.

He left the prep school at the end of that year, and they went their separate ways and lost touch.

“Two drifters off to see the world, There’s such a lot of world to see . . .”

****

Fifteen years later Eleanor was back visiting her parents.

The reality of her life had been a million miles away from the world of dances and dinner parties her parents had planned for her.

She’d been to university in the late Sixties and been swept along with the thrilling but confusing ideas of the times – the music,

Maggie Ingall. the fashions, the new freedoms.

All the certainties and formalities she’d grown up with had been hurled aside.

In her last year, at an outdoor folk event with a group of friends, she’d encountered a glamorous stranger.

Eleanor, in her hippy clothes with flowers in her hair, got carried away – as much by the feeling of freedom and the music as the cider she was drinking. She wondered if this was love.

But the stranger completely disappeared at the end of the weekend, leaving her shocked, and as she soon found out, pregnant.

Over the next two years, reality hit hard.

Her horrified parents, clinging to a vanished world, sent her packing for the birth to a second cousin, Cynthia, whom Eleanor barely knew.

Cynthia lived in countryside on the Welsh border, distant in miles as well as in relationship. She coldly made Eleanor aware, every day, of the shame of baby Davy, born out of wedlock.

With her future so uncertain, Eleanor was forced, with dread, to consider the possibility of having her child adopted.

Then, wonderfully, help came from her brother.

“My flatmate can leave,” James said on the phone. “You and Davy can have his room.”

“But you’ll lose his rent!” “I’ll manage.”

Eleanor joyfully accepted, relieved beyond words to be rid of her greatest fear and to be back in a familiar place.

James gave up much of his after-work socialising to help her.

“All this staying in means at least I’m saving lots of money,” he said a touch ruefully.

“It’s marvellous to have you in my corner, James. Honestly, I’ll never forget it.”

“Mother is implacable,” James told her. “You know how she can be.

“But Father is quietly sending a little money every month to help me, and therefore you. Though he’s too Edwardian in his views to contact you directly.”

It was something.

Eleanor struggled through this time. She knew she was lucky to have James’s help, but was determined not to lean too much on him.

She discovered a new strength in herself, and found a way to qualify as a teacher while being a new mother.