The Slow Set
The Slow Set.
My first dance with a chap was overseen by a nun with a meg in the rooms over the Parish Hall.
Oh, I had danced with chaps before, and had made myself sick with excitement at various christmas parties as a child when there were boys present and had to be led from the throng with my fringe plastered to my head from "acting the maggot".
Coming from an all girls school, we just weren'...t used to the opposite sex. I also come from an era when the cinema usherette would give you "down the banks" if you were caught courting some young fella in the double seats.
"Assume your proper positions please" says she sharply shining the torch into our startled red faces while we tried to pull up or down jumpers in a lather of embarassment and frustration.
As my Mother had been a "Child of Mary" in the Legion of same, I too was shunted out the door for first mass on a Sunday to sell leaflets, prayer books, rosary beads and miraculous medals in the wooden hut outside Bride St Church. I will draw a veil, if you'll pardon the pun, about some of my more outlandish pursuits in aforementioned hut, but suffice to say it was indeed miraculous that they trusted childer to run the gaff.
It was in the spirit of reward that the powers that be held a Christmas Party for the "volunteers" and invited the craythurs of boarders down from the college to be our dance partners.
We sat mournfully around the table of curled up egg and onion sandwiches and USA Assorted biscuits sipping club orange from a bottle with a straw, as the boarders fell on the food in a clatter of elbows and crumbs. Never before in the field of human conflict has so much been eaten by so few so fast.
"And now for the dancing" says the octogenarian nun putting an LP onto the needle while we pushed the chairs back against the wall.
After much blushing and huffing a chap comes over to me.
"Will ye dance" says he belting his trenchcoat.
"I will" says I belting out to the "floor" - (2ft x 2 ft of space) where he manfully moved me from side to side in his arms like someone trying to gauge the heft of a sack of spuds.
The song the nun played was neither religious OR Irish. It was "Goodbye Stranger"by Supertramp. I can never hear the opening bars now without being transported back to that tiny room, the girls, the nun, the boys, the smell of their damp coats and heads, the reek of the onions in the heat from the gas fire where the steam rose from the priests soutane as he chaperoned. The boy was called Shane and was from Riverchapel and he stole out the window of the school a month later to walk straight into my Da as he was attempting to throw a valentines card into our letter box.
God bless him and all belong to him. For all I know he could be a Grandfather now, and as bald as an egg, but he is frozen forever as a teenage boy when the music comes on.
I wonder does he remember too.
My first dance with a chap was overseen by a nun with a meg in the rooms over the Parish Hall.
Oh, I had danced with chaps before, and had made myself sick with excitement at various christmas parties as a child when there were boys present and had to be led from the throng with my fringe plastered to my head from "acting the maggot".
Coming from an all girls school, we just weren'...t used to the opposite sex. I also come from an era when the cinema usherette would give you "down the banks" if you were caught courting some young fella in the double seats.
"Assume your proper positions please" says she sharply shining the torch into our startled red faces while we tried to pull up or down jumpers in a lather of embarassment and frustration.
As my Mother had been a "Child of Mary" in the Legion of same, I too was shunted out the door for first mass on a Sunday to sell leaflets, prayer books, rosary beads and miraculous medals in the wooden hut outside Bride St Church. I will draw a veil, if you'll pardon the pun, about some of my more outlandish pursuits in aforementioned hut, but suffice to say it was indeed miraculous that they trusted childer to run the gaff.
It was in the spirit of reward that the powers that be held a Christmas Party for the "volunteers" and invited the craythurs of boarders down from the college to be our dance partners.
We sat mournfully around the table of curled up egg and onion sandwiches and USA Assorted biscuits sipping club orange from a bottle with a straw, as the boarders fell on the food in a clatter of elbows and crumbs. Never before in the field of human conflict has so much been eaten by so few so fast.
"And now for the dancing" says the octogenarian nun putting an LP onto the needle while we pushed the chairs back against the wall.
After much blushing and huffing a chap comes over to me.
"Will ye dance" says he belting his trenchcoat.
"I will" says I belting out to the "floor" - (2ft x 2 ft of space) where he manfully moved me from side to side in his arms like someone trying to gauge the heft of a sack of spuds.
The song the nun played was neither religious OR Irish. It was "Goodbye Stranger"by Supertramp. I can never hear the opening bars now without being transported back to that tiny room, the girls, the nun, the boys, the smell of their damp coats and heads, the reek of the onions in the heat from the gas fire where the steam rose from the priests soutane as he chaperoned. The boy was called Shane and was from Riverchapel and he stole out the window of the school a month later to walk straight into my Da as he was attempting to throw a valentines card into our letter box.
God bless him and all belong to him. For all I know he could be a Grandfather now, and as bald as an egg, but he is frozen forever as a teenage boy when the music comes on.
I wonder does he remember too.
Comments
Post a Comment