In my childhood I played endlessly with the ‘Dancette’. I remember that little grey record player, with its cream plastic arm that clunked and clicked its way onto Mums collection of 45s. I would always want to prance about in her high heels; she would pop her head around the door and say "Get those heels off madam, you’ll break ‘em any minute!"
A black and white snapshot. My Mother sits prettily on the Carnival Queen float, waving demurely from underneath her crown. Local boys would call for her, one knocking at the front door, one at the back. They still say "Best looking woman in town your Mother. I wanted to marry her."
Mum would spend a whole months wages on silk stockings or shoes. She lived for the pictures, going three times a week, every week. From a tiny village in Cornwall in the early fifties she would soak up her idols in glorious Technicolor. All those cinemascope dreams of a more glamorous existence kept her going. Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Lana Turner, Alan Ladd, Frank Sinatra and Gregory Peck were her favourites.
And she would go on to have a love affair worthy of any Douglas Sirk melodrama. At 18 she became my Dads secretary. She loved him instantly. He was blond, blue eyed and in his mid 30’s. He was also eighteen years her senior and married with three daughters. His marriage was tempestuous, unhappy, and ultimately doomed but she had no idea of this. It was the fifties; marital disharmony was seen as a threat to good order. He was also on the Board of Directors and had no intention of being the subject of office tittle-tattle.
The bond between them grew, but the way ahead did not look clear. My Mum married someone else. That didn’t help. She moved away twice but Dad would write to her or turn up out of the blue. So she moved back to Cornwall and continued to see him discreetly. They had a place where they would meet, if she could borrow a car. She was an Avon Lady out of hours and would supply him with a bundle of Avon printed envelopes so that he could write love letters to her safely. Eventually they braved it out when she was 30. A sorry mess of job loss, hurt children and bitter divorce followed. But love endures. And I was born.
"When I was 21, it was a very good year. It was a very good year for city girls who lived up the stair... with all that perfumed hair... and it came undone..." Sinatra would croon out from that little ‘Dancette’ for all my childhood. How I longed to be one of those city girls who lived up the stair. I would have to wait until I was 24 to finally become one.
The record player, the glamour, the love affair that burned and burned and decimated everything in its wake until things were how they were meant to be, all swirl around my head when I hear that song. I wonder what happened to the Dancette.