My Dancing Grandmother plus other award winning short stories

By Elizabeth Pulford

The nine stories are:

My Dancing Grandmother **
A teenage girl’s mother is getting married and she romanticizes about weddings and her grandmother.

‘My mother told me she was eighteen when she got married. It's hard to believe sometimes she was ever that young. I wonder about things like that. And what I'll be like when I'm old, if I've got glasses already and I'm not exactly slim or pretty.’

The Girl in the Red Stockings **
An old lady remembers her first love and how it felt.

‘The girl in the red stockings. Like wind through the trees, passes through my life. A mere sigh.’

The Doubling Bike
A teenage girl tries to learn a bike so she can accept a date.

‘My father used to ride a bike. When he first met my mother, before the war, he would double her everywhere. I like to imagine that. Both of them together and laughing. Her long brown hair all let loose from its usual steel pins, lovely and flowing. And him, his legs outstretched sideways as they flew down the hill from our house with him singing, ‘Off we go. Off we go like the billy-o’.’

Along the Home Road
Family roots and a summer in Greece are two skins worn by this woman.

‘Yiorgos was a waiter at a local tavern in a small bay just beyond Piraeus. I would go there in the early evenings and sit and drink a glass of Retsina and wait for him. The white light, passionate blue sea and heat breathed a life into me I had never known before. It was there I first danced with my feet bare.’

Shuttered Summer **
A steamy affair in Italy one summer long ago.

‘And the flies in the room at the top of the building in Rome where the sun shone and where I made love behind the shuttered door and windows.’

Tea at the Dunedin Savoy – 1950 **
Three children are taken for a treat at the plush hotel.

‘At home our kitchen table is covered with a plastic cloth and our Christmas fairy has hardly any hair and her wand is bent in the middle. My mother gave the fairy to Katy last year to hold while we were decorating the tree but Katy played with it instead. That's how it got ruined.’

Waihola
After the death of her mother the daughter is remember the tragedy at the lake.

‘Sitting here beside you now, I am listening to the silence. I am hearing the deep of you in the black earth. I am calling out to your colours, a soft gentle grey on your good days, a purple red and fraidy-cat-rust on your bad ones.’

First Kiss **
After a dance a girl experiences her first kiss.

‘Last week I had a dream about Ralph Weedle. We were dancing. His face was close to mine. He was going to kiss me. Then my mother opened my bedroom door and bellowed at me to get up.’

Summer of the Albatross
Three women from the same family, three different generations, spend a day together. One remembers a heartbreaking family tragedy at the beach.

‘Aunty Rita looks up from her book when I scrunch down beside her. She is sitting under the umbrella, her white legs dazzling in the sun. "Nice swim, love?" She is wearing a green striped frock. Wide straps sit over her shoulders, big white buttons go down her front and I try not to look at her bosoms as they come and go in and out of the top of her frock. She has on a pair of mysterious dark glasses and smokes a cigarette.’

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elizabeth Pulford
• Release date: Apr 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476321998

Elizabeth Pulford

Before I became a writer I was a traveller, a typist, a cleaner and an ice-cream girl in a cinema.Now I live in New Zealand in a small southern seaside town with one extra nice husband who is a king of-all-trades.We have two children and two grandchildren.Every morning I go to my little writing room to make up stories. From this room I look out into a small garden, where I can hear the birds squabbling.Writing has long been a passion and sometimes even a curse!I have had over sixty children's books published from the very young to YA with regular publishers. Plus my adult short stories have been lucky enough to win many short story competitions.I love being creative, be it baking bread or chasing after new characters.Photograph by: Liz Cadogan - http://www.facebook.com/LizCadoganphotos

Book preview

My Dancing Grandmother

plus

other award winning short stories

Elizabeth Pulford

Smashwords Edition,

Copyright 2012 Elizabeth Pulford

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All these short stories are works of fiction. No resemblance to any persons or situations is intended.

Cover © iStockphoto.com\enviromantic

Http://www.elizabethpulford.co.nz

All stories have been published in either anthologies, on the radio, or literary magazines

The stories marked with an ** have either won or been placed in the top three of national short story competitions in New Zealand

The Stories

My Dancing Grandmother **

The Girl in the Red Stockings **

The Doubling Bike

Along the Home Road

Shuttered Summer **

Tea at the Dunedin Savoy – 1950 **

Waihola

First Kiss **

Summer of the Albatross

My Dancing Grandmother

My grandmother loved to dance. Or so my mother said. She said it was her passion. Said she would have danced to the moon and back, if she'd had the chance. ‘Apparently at her own wedding she never sat down for a moment’.

I am standing on the kitchen table listening to all this, having the hem taken up of the frock my mother has made especially for me, for her wedding. It is 1955 and my mother is getting married to Gerald Muir. My father died in the war when I was two. Now I'm fourteen.

Of course, she goes on, nobody approved. No. They didn't approve one bit. She pauses, stands back, squints at the hem. My mother never uses a tape measure or the latest black puff thing that makes white marks to make the hem even. Sometimes the hems of my frocks looked like waves coming in on a beach.

She rabbits on again. Everyone thought it a disgrace, the bride dancing with all the men. And more than once with Charles Toomey.

Who was he?

Some friend of your grandfather's. She plucks out a pin from the little cushion that is held by elastic around her wrist and plunges it into the trembling material. I think.

I didn't know my grandfather at all. My mother told me he drowned at sea long before I was born. Last year my grandmother died of cancer.

Turn.

I shuffle a step or two on the square wooden table. The kitchen is small, hot and yellow.

Why can't I wear black? I ask.

Don't be silly, my mother says with ever patience. It's a wedding, not a funeral.

Leonie's got a black sheath skirt.

How unsuitable.

Leonie is my best friend. She lives over the road. Her mother is a dressmaker. So she always gets the latest clothes to wear.

My frock for the wedding is made of stuff like a net curtain, pale pink, stubby sleeves, with a row of pink buttons down the front. It has a thin belt and comes to way below my knees. For the grand occasion I am allowed to wear stockings instead of my white school socks.

Can I wear a pair of earrings or some lipstick then? I am desperate to look grown-up and glamorous.

Glasses are not glamorous. Mine are brown and round. When I started high school it was discovered that unless I sat right up against the blackboard I couldn't read what was written on it. And as well, my hair is fierce looking, cut by my mother to keep it off my school collar. At the technical college, where I am learning to be a shorthand typist (I hate shorthand, I can never read back all the wild scribbles I've taken down) they are very severe about girls whose hair so much as looks as thought it's going to touch their collar.

My mother sighs. Why can't you be like your sister? She's not complaining. Always wanting this and that.

My sister, Anna, is two years younger than me, small and pretty, with bouncy hair. For the wedding she's wearing a brand new A-line frock. Blue, with a fancy collar and elbow length sleeves.

She's spoilt.

My mother doesn't comment. She stands back from me, squeezes her eyes into a narrow line while studying the hem. That's about it. Down you hop.

I climb down from the table, pins needling my legs.

Even some new shoes, I go on, thinking about me wearing my Bible class dark blue shoes with rubber soles and no heels to the wedding with the pink frock.

My mother's patience snaps. Didn't you beg for a typewriter three months ago? And didn't you tell me if you got one, you'd never ask for another thing?

I'm silent. I undo the buttons of the frock, let it slip to my ankles, step out of it and hand it to my mother.

Why does she have to remember everything I say?

-

Later that day, I'm lying on Leonie's bed. I spend a lot of time lying on her bed, gazing out of the window, down to the blue harbour that stretches like a ribbon between the hills. She's got three brothers and one other sister. They're Catholics. The house is huge and is beside the zigzag that goes down to the town.

My grandmother used to dance, I say.

What on the stage? Leonie