Just Williams

‘I always took off my glasses to look cool, so I never ended up with the girl I was aiming at’

Simon finds it’s murder on the dance floor

AT MY PREP SCHOOL we had ‘evening occupations’ – stamp collecting, metalwork etc. I was keen to try rolling my own cigarettes with dried leaves behind the cricket pavilion, but opted for ballroom dancing as a lesser evil. ‘Dancing is the gateway to married harmony, boys.’ In our grey shorts and sandals, we’d be paired up for Victor Silvester’s foxtrot or valeta, the steps called out with paradeground clarity. Being tall meant I didn’t have to be a girl. Phew! Gender-blindness had yet to be invented. I’m reminded of the Lonnie Donegan lyric: ‘Two old ladies sitting in the sand/each one wishing that the other was a man.’ Sometimes the dance floor would become a battlefield. My tango with the runty JM Chadwick* was a disaster – he would not be led, his ‘promenade’ and his ‘outside swivel’ were a disgrace. It ended with me in a half nelson on the parquet floor. Chadwick was surely not destined for married harmony.

At parties in the holidays there was a dance called the Paul Jones in which girls formed a circle facing outward and boys an inward one facing them, then they moved round in opposite directions until the music stopped. You then had to dance with the girl facing you – a cross between speed dating and pass the parcel. It was a device created to help the bashful: boys with acne and sturdy girls in old bridesmaids’ dresses. There’d be violent jockeying to land up with the Sandra Dee lookalike. I always took off my glasses to look cool, so I never ended up with the girl I was aiming at.

The Feathers Club Ball at Christmas was a high point of the year; being a square dance we all wore jeans and cowboy shirts. My brother supervised my training – in bare feet and my hands on the back of a chair, he taught me the Charleston: ‘Yes sir, that’s my baby!’ It’s still locked in my memory bank – forward back, back forward. In front of the bathroom mirror he also showed me the mechanics of French kissing, ‘just in case’. Your tongue had to circle clockwise, apparently. (Brexiteers will obviously be demanding a rethink.) For cheek-to-cheek dancing it was best to stick your bottom out to avoid embarrassing yourself. In 1959 Hayley Mills was my partner at the ball, I was dizzy with excitement and drenched myself in Old Spice from head to toe, and between dances I snuck off to chew peppermints. When they did my This Is Your Life, 35 years later, Hayley told Eamonn Andrews that I behaved ‘like a perfect gentleman’ and I tried not to show my disappointment.

Before you ask, the answer is – no, I would not do Strictly.

*Not your real name, Chadwick, but you know who you are.

Simon plays Justin Elliott in The Archers