Goodbye to Dreams
Authors: Grace Thompson
Grace Thompson
A
S THE LAST
minutes of 1929 slipped away, the music in the dance hall seemed to become more and more frantic. Even when the eight-piece orchestra was playing a waltz, the figures on the floor moved at a rapid pace, jigging up and down in the excitement of the occasion, laughing breathlessly as they gave up trying to keep to the beat of the music. It was unlikely that anyone, even the most accomplished and enthusiastic
ballroom
dancer, could have performed much of a dance: there was no room to move their feet more than a few inches at each step.
Cecily Owen watched the clock on the furthest wall and tried to keep her eye on it until the minute hand jerked and clicked forward, marking the passing of another minute. She was always excited at the prospect of a new year, although she shuddered at the reminder of how her youth was
slipping
away. For a moment the thought took hold of her, isolating her from the hilarity around her. The waltz finished and the band began the lively strains of ‘Oh Johnny’. Around her dancers and watchers began singing and Cecily heard many changing the name to one of their own favourite love. She began to follow the words in her mind, substituting the name for Gareth, in a secret prayer that 1930 would be the year in which Gareth Price-Jones thought of her as more than a dancing partner. She looked around the room for him and saw he was dancing with her sister, Ada. She only caught a glimpse of them through the bobbing and swirling crowd, laughing and talking, their heads thrown back in relaxed abandon. She felt a surge of jealousy and willed him to come back to her for the next dance.
The Owen sisters were alike, although Ada, the younger by two years, was a less vibrant version of her twenty-five-year-old sister. Her hair was brown rather than golden and was inclined to frizz from the permanent waves they both suffered from time to time. Ada’s eyes were grey and Cecily’s were blue but apart from the colouring differences they were very alike and were often mistaken for twins.
The music stopped and the red-faced musicians took out their
handkerchiefs
to wipe their brows. It was like a band of people at a railway station
waving goodbye to friends, Cecily thought, as the white plumes rose in the air and were shaken backwards and forwards in the vicinity of each sweating face. She smiled at the thought.
Even in the uncomfortably hot dance hall, Cecily had no more than an attractive glow in her cheeks. Her blonde hair was set in waves as rigid as the ripples in wet sand on the local beach down each side of her head, ending in kiss-curls which framed her pretty face.
She jumped up and down to see over the heads of the dancers who waited for the Master of Ceremonies to announce the next dance in case a friend she had not yet seen had arrived later. She pretended not to notice Gareth asking one of the other girls in their crowd to dance with him as the conductor raised his baton and the first chord sounded. A young man asked her to dance and she took to the floor, passing her sister, who grabbed her arm and shouted, ‘Make for the windows at five to twelve – we’ve got to be together at New Year!’
‘You bet!’ Cecily shouted back as she was whisked away.
When the dance ended she thanked her partner and, standing on one of the chairs arranged around the edge of the dance floor, searched the crowd. She saw Ada’s neatly waved head and, close to it, very close, Gareth’s dark one. She willed him to look for her and ask for a dance. He was an excellent dancer as well as someone she was beginning to find more and more attractive.
When the Master of Ceremonies announced a foxtrot she crossed her fingers and looked hopefully towards him but he was soon lost from her sight as some struggled to leave the floor and others fought for a place to attempt the dance. The musicians were wearily sorting out their music. She watched and smiled at the efforts of the women to pat their shiny faces with lacy, scent-sprayed handkerchiefs, and the men, running fingers around their collars to ease their hot, sticky necks. The heat didn’t worry Cecily, it was all part of the fun: the heat, the crowd, the noise.
She wondered how many the room held. The ticket sellers had told her there were 250 tickets sold but she felt certain there were more. Extra tickets printed and sold on the side, maybe? It wouldn’t be the first time the printer, Phil Spencer, had earned himself a little extra in that way. She had never trusted Phil Spencer, not since he had been found out in the chicken raffle swindle. She remembered now Phil Spencer’s name had been in the paper accused of printing extra tickets and pocketing the money.
The orchestra started up again and the babble of chattering lessened. Gareth pushed his way through the crowd that was pairing off for the next dance and Cecily managed to avoid the man approaching her, obviously intent on asking her to partner him. She smiled at Gareth and slipped into his arms.
His straight brown hair fell wetly over his forehead now, and his rather prominent ears were shiny and red. It was when he smiled that his
attraction
was revealed. His full mouth opened slightly and his even white teeth glistened. Eyes which were really a nondescript light brown sparkled when he smiled and his whole face lit up and made Cecily feel wonderful for being the cause of the transformation. How could she have once thought him unattractive?
They began to dance, but the crush of people who were becoming more and more giggly and foolish as midnight approached defeated any attempt to follow the correct steps or even the rhythm so determinedly adhered to by the metronomic arms of the conductor. They settled for just moving to the music and enjoying the excitement of the hour.
‘We’d better try to get near the windows,’ Cecily said. ‘Ada will be there and I don’t want to be on the other side of the room when midnight strikes.’
‘Get behind me and I’ll push us a path through. We’ll tread on a few toes but no one will care.’ Gareth took her hand and wove his way through the dancers, pulling her behind him.
Reaching the window, he didn’t let go of her hand and she smiled at him. He really was rather nice, and clearly interested in her as more than a dance partner. If only his mam would leave him alone, she sighed inwardly, then he would surely invite her out.
Her musings on Gareth, and Mrs Price-Jones, his possessive mother, were cut short by the musicians playing a loud chord. The drummer began a roll which increased in volume until everyone was standing silently, waiting for the announcement to come.
The Master of Ceremonies stepped up beside the conductor and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I know you will forgive my interruption of the dancing a little before time when I tell you about the surprise we have arranged for you. In exactly four minutes we will be tuning the wireless to 2LO to hear the broadcast sound of Big Ben, in London, chiming in the new year.’ He held up his hand to quell the applause and the burst of excited chatter. ‘So, if you open the windows and join us to the millions doing the same, we will listen to the new year begin. Ladies and gentlemen, 1930 is about to be welcomed in and may it hold nothing but good fortune for us all!’
Gareth pulled Cecily closer. ‘He isn’t expecting to hear Big Ben through the window, is he?’ he joked. ‘South Wales we are, not the great
metropolis
!’ Cecily laughed and they were both hushed. A few people in the closely packed revellers moved closer to their special friends and lovers and Cecily felt Ada’s arms touch hers as she pressed close to her sister and whispered, ‘May it be a good one for us both, eh?’
‘Yes. With our dad leaving us alone to get on with running the shop the way we want to run it!’ Cecily whispered back. ‘That’s one wish for the new year.’ She looked up at Gareth but kept that other more fervent wish to herself.
Through the loudspeaker set up on the far wall, peals of bells came loud, adding to the excitement in the room. Cecily felt a lump swell in her throat. New Year was one of the many occasions that made her want to weep although she would be hard pushed to explain why. She felt Gareth’s hand touch hers and their fingers joined. On her other side, Ada’s hand reached for hers and she hoped that the three of them would be together a year’s hence but with Gareth more than a dancing partner. She was unaware that her sister was looking at Gareth and wishing the same.
The bells ceased and others could be heard, this time through the open windows. A silence followed when everyone seemed to be holding their breath. Then the sound of Big Ben was heard reverberating around them, chiming out the beginning of the new and sending the old year on its way. Forget the past, the chimes seemed to say, this is a new year, a new decade and a new beginning.
It had been a bad decade for many in the small, Welsh seaside town where employment was at a low ebb and hundreds queued for even a single day’s work at the factories and timber yards and docks. Women helped family finances by accepting poorly paid, menial tasks. Some found seasonal work serving teas on the beach, carrying trays to families of summer visitors and thankful for the few shillings the tiring work brought them. Men stood on street corners beside boarded up shops. The lacklustre of their defeated spirits showing in their eyes and in the slouched shoulders.
Allotments flourished and it was there that many spent the days, digging, hoeing and coaxing a crop from the earth, or standing in groups leaning on their spades and discussing other, more buoyant times and the good years that would surely come. They would return home burnt by the sun on their faces and necks down as far as the respectable collars they wore. The sun was never allowed to touch their skin lower than that most uncomfortable garment, making their heads and upper neck look
incongruously
contrasted with their pale bodies when shirt and collar finally came off in the privacy of their darkened bedrooms. Winter or summer, respectability was worn like a jewel.
Cecily and Ada were protected from the worst of the poverty by their shop. That, and the work their father found on the docks where cargo ships were unloaded and reloaded with goods as varied as Welsh coal and awkward pig iron to the carefully handled bananas. Old bones, collected hundreds of miles away in some distant desert, arrived to be ground down
to make bone-meal to feed those essential fields and allotments. Another ship might bring undreamed-of luxuries like furs and silks for the backs of the very rich.
Cecily wanted to be rich. She had talked of her dreams to their mother frequently until the day she had left them to start a new life with a man who offered her more than Owen Owen and his small shop.
Cecily missed her mother dreadfully and frustration grew as month after month their father persistently refused to allow them to run the shop as they wanted. He was deaf to their entreaties to increase stock to encourage more customers. Most weeks the takings hardly did more than cover their expenses. She and Ada frequently talked long into the night about their dream of complete ownership. But what chance was there of that?
On this New Year, she closed her eyes and wished for some change of their fortune that would bring about the chance she and Ada needed. Some change of heart on their father’s part to allow them to manage the shop in their own way. She opened her eyes and saw Gareth smiling at her.
‘What are you wishing for, then?’
‘Never you mind, Gareth Price-Jones,’ she teased, ‘but a kiss will do for a start.’
‘Bold you are, Cecily Owen.’ He kissed her briefly, in an embarrassed way, hoping no one would notice and report back to his mam – she did go on, so.
Through the windows, where people leaned out as if to join the rest of the world in their celebrating, the chorus of ships’ hooters continued, some deep and some shrill, in a crazy symphony. Steam engines whistled, car horns sounded and sirens wailed into the night. As the cacophony faded, the band began to play Auld Lang Syne and the dancers organized
themselves
into two concentric circles, linked arms and sang with gusto.
The music stopped and all around them couples were kissing, changing partners and kissing again. Shyness and inhibitions were lost as the
excitement
of the hour bewitched them all. Cecily turned first to hug her sister then to Gareth. Before the orchestra could begin to play again, Gareth put an arm around both sisters and began to perform a polka, shouting the tunes unmelodiously. Seeing them, others did the same. This time, the band, instead of being the instigator of the dance, followed them, joining in
gradually
to the despair of the conductor.
In a corner of the hall, hidden by the few people not joining in the impromptu polka and by the shadow of the balcony above him, a man stood watching the crowd. He stepped back sometimes and to the keen observer it would have been plain that he wanted to watch someone without being seen himself. His dark eyes never left Cecily.
He was tall but stood stooped, perhaps as a disguise against recognition. His black hair curled around his face and helped him to fade into the shadows and it was only his eyes catching the light that made some aware of his silent, non-participating presence. He looked foreign or maybe a gypsy; there was even an earring in one ear to add to that impression. Dark, dark eyes and a skin bronzed, even now in the middle of winter, made others look pale and sickly beside him, although few noticed him enough to comment, except for a young prostitute looking for someone to take home for the night.
He had paid for a ticket but had not once stepped out to dance. Two shillings wasted really, he thought, but he knew this was the one place where he could be certain of seeing Cecily. His teeth clenched as he watched her hugging Gareth and showering others with hand-blown kisses with a few real ones for some of the young men who showed eagerness to be so saluted.
‘Tart!’ he muttered angrily.
He had seen enough. Leaving the crowded room where the last hour of dancing was well underway, he moved through the doors and made for the exit into the cold night.