the dance on the dark floorboards in my bedroom, with Sybil the only onlooker, my attempts were feeble. Too much physical exertion was required. Too quickly I ran out of puff. I’d failed again.
However, when we returned to school after each Easter holiday, we’d find that our primary school had placed a maypole on the asphalt quadrangle. Multi-coloured ribbons hung limply from its central pole. We grade six girls were sent out to learn a maypole dance to perform on Empire Day in May. We worked together on our dance. We wore peasant skirts and white blouses and those parents who saw our dance, applauded. That reaction from the adults pleased me. I had found a sense of achievement from my participation in dance. It came from the teamwork.
But I didn’t dance again until I was fourteen and a half and had met a boy my age. We travelled together to our schools and hung around talking for an hour on my street corner, every afternoon after school, even though I was chastised by my mother for doing so. We just liked being together.
Before long he, a Methodist, invited me to join a youth group at his church. There Mr and Mrs Stokes taught folk dancing. I loved the music and the Scottish and English dances. In fact, when we later went to ballroom dances, I realized that I preferred the folk dancing we had learnt first.
At sixteen I went with friends to Miss Katy Lascelles’ Dance Academy, on Friday evenings, in term time and my boyfriend soon followed. The students treated the learning of dance steps in a very casual manner, on the whole. Most came from single sex schools, so they relished the opportunity to get to know the opposite sex. We did learn some dance steps. Quick-step was the easiest by far.
Then we were able to put our dancing theory into practice. We travelled with my boyfriend’s parents and two sisters to Masonic Lodge dances where we found it fun to buy a crêpe paper lei to place around my neck. If we were lucky, we’d bought one that won a small prize. Or perhaps we’d find ourselves, just the two of us, in a spotlight. We’d win a prize for that, too.
Once I was invited to a New Year’s Eve party by a friend whom I’d known since I was six and she was four and a half. As we were growing up, we rode our two-wheeler Malvern Stars for miles, enjoying whole days of freedom together. We’d picnic in Frankston, Ferntree Gully or out along High Street Road through orchard country.
She’d been invited to a New Year’s Eve party in a large house in Dandenong Road, Malvern. She warned me that the family were Catholic. That was fine. Well, it seemed fine. `Which school do you go to?’ the boys asked. Now we were goners. You didn’t go to our school if you were Catholic. Jewish or Chinese, yes – but not Catholic. They were Xavier boys and they had a reputation, sometimes well deserved, I thought. I shrivelled inside now that they knew we were Protestants.
I was dancing with one of these Xavier boys when suddenly the lights went out, but I could see a boy moving around the dark room, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. I watched with dread as I realised that he was keeping pace with me as he moved. I asked my girlfriend, `When’s your dad coming to pick us up?’ `He isn’t’, she said and I grew more fearful as she said, `I told you’. But she hadn’t! She just liked one of the boys but she’d soon learned that her father didn’t want any Catholic telephoning her or hanging around his house! ‘Prodies’ and ‘Micks’ were enemies. I’d known that forever.
After the party a few boys walked with us for several miles as we headed towards our High Street homes. We’d expected to take a taxi from the Glenferrie Road depot but it being New Year’s Eve, all taxis were out on call. Eventually, with a screech of brakes, my girlfriend’s father pulled up in his car, opened the door and told us to get in. When we saw that he had two other adults as passengers, neighbours of ours, I felt humiliated. At home, I walked into my parents’ bedroom at 3am and burst into tears. I was not chastised for causing them to worry, for which I was very grateful.
After that I went out only with my boyfriend. Sometimes we’d walk half a mile to a dance at St Michael’s Church of England on Warrigal Road. There, the dance music blared from a gramophone. Later, we began travelling by tram to Ormond Hall, where we danced to Dennis Farrington’s Big Band music. They often played Glenn Miller tunes and always ended the evening with the slow-moving, smoochy tune – I’m in the Mood for Love. That was the cue for dancing cheek-to-cheek with my boyfriend. I always danced with him unless it was a Barn Dance.
In 1948 my school held its first dance, at The Gables in East Malvern. On such special occasions my boyfriend would pin a corsage of one or even two gardenias to the white, fake fur bolero that Mother had bought for me. I’ve loved gardenias ever since, as they remind me of these perfumed gifts from my teenage years. Mother had made me a puffed sleeve, blue, moiré taffeta dress from material that had been a gift when I was fourteen. Accompanying this unexpected present had been a light blue corduroy evening bag with a gold chain handle. An English lady, the wife of a Manchester senior executive of my father’s firm, gave me these presents. Mother said she had wanted to adopt me. Could she have been serious? I was fourteen at that time and didn’t accept her invitation to visit their Elizabeth Bay, Sydney, flat. I was concerned she’d keep me there.
At eighteen I began my nursing career. At nineteen my boyfriend asked my father for permission to become engaged to me. Father’s reply was `You’re too young. Wait until you are twenty-one, when you will be adults.’ However, by then my boyfriend was a chartered accountant and I was a nursing sister who found him rather dull, I’m afraid. Besides, I had an unresolved desire to see the world, which meant Europe to me. Our parting consisted of a slow drifting apart. I thought I’d lost a limb at the time.
In Edinburgh I tried Scottish Country Dancing. Too strenuous an effort for this twenty-three-year-old. Earlier, in Seville, I had wandered through the Feria, passing small stages where Spaniards danced flamenco and guitarists accompanied them. A man came out to us, two young women from Melbourne, entranced by the music and dancing, so unfamiliar to us. `No, no’, I said, for he was obviously urging me to dance in front of a large group of clapping onlookers. I wore my mother’s dressmaking efforts for my travels; that day a very slim fitting, navy shantung dress, bereft of the necessary flounces of the flamenco dancer’s bright red dress. Everything was unsuitable. I could do only one thing: wave my two hands above my head. Forget the stamping foot movements. It lasted an eternity that `dance’. People laughed and applauded throughout and I was gone, as swiftly as I could run with my dumbstruck friend.
The next time I danced in Spain was six decades later. The Moorish pavilion was lit by brilliantly coloured walls, blue and orange, pink and purple. Guests crowded the floor, where I danced for two minutes. My new silver shoes were killing me.
Decades before, during teacher training, when I was between the ages of thirty-eight and forty-two, I’d even tried creative dance. I loved the freedom I felt as I created my own movements. Those around me were doing the same, each of us isolated in our own cocoons, moving to the carefully chosen music. I loved this freedom.
Dance punctuated my adolescence and some of my adult life. Sometimes I’ve lost myself in it, so that I’ve forgotten concerns, fears and worries. It’s accompanied me when I’ve been establishing loving relationships, it’s challenged me sometimes. I haven’t really valued it in the past, but now I see it for the joy it has brought me and I’m thankful.
WHAT REALLY MATTERS Elizabeth Pittman
My friend Fran has been in a wheelchair since she was eighteen years old. She retired as a social worker when she was seventy. Since then she has worked as a voluntary teacher’s aid at the local primary school. A couple of years ago Matthew was one of her students. Nine-year-old Matthew was big for his age, not good at reading and not very communicative.
At the end of the year Matthew’s mother came to see Fran. The mother said how much more talkative her son had become. He now told her about his lessons
