To Set My Feet A-Dancing

By Allie Sommerville

‘To Set My Feet A-Dancing’ is a glimpse into childhood during the late 1950s/early 1960s. ‘The Baby Boomers’ were born into a Britain just beginning a fortuitous era. A war had been won, food rationing was ending, conscription into the armed forces would be abolished before they were of age, the National Health Service was invented and there was a new young Queen on the throne. Life was full of hope.
Times were simple and children could safely play in the street or stay in the park until dark. People were dependent on public transport because the car was not yet king.
This was the generation that would become teenagers in the Swinging Sixties and enjoy the coming of the age of “white-hot technology”.
This was a charmed generation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allie Sommerville
• Release date: Jan 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311318558

Allie Sommerville

I love France, Italy and Switzerland, but not travelling round them so much in a campervan! I like home comforts... Uneasy Rider - Confessions of a Reluctant Traveller tells of our escapades round Europe. When I'm not travelling, I take classes in ballet and tap, sing with a choir and WRITE! My favourite books are those about Art History, Architecture, and real-life. Bill Bryson is my hero, as is Laurie Lee.

Book preview

Chapter One

Bulls, Halls and Mirrored Walls

Miss Joan spun round to face us. Two seconds before she’d been grinning like a particularly toothy Cheshire Cat, but now those bright red lips were distorted with rage.

What a bloody shambles! she screamed.

A small girl in the line-up at the front of the stage, not appreciating the onslaught, immediately did a satisfyingly theatrical projectile vomit at our dancing teacher’s feet. Even at a tender age, I began to realise that life treading the boards was full of highs and lows. The glamour of showbiz, with its veneer of glitz and smiles, was as shallow as the pan stick we slapped on our faces. We must have all failed to live up to the exacting standards of our impresario that performance, but in true show-biz tradition Miss Joan Rodney- Deane saved her savage mauling till the 'tabs' had closed.

Like most people in that decade after world war two, Mum and Dad had little money to spare for luxuries, but at least twice a week my older sister Helen and I attended classes in ballet, tap and ‘modern’ (then known as musical comedy). We were pupils at the grandly titled ‘Rodney-Deane Academy of Dance’, abbreviated I suspect not entirely by chance to the ‘RAD’, acronym of that august body, The Royal Academy of Dancing. Classes were held in a large detached Edwardian house known as ‘Rodeana’, situated in Prince Road, off of Selhurst Road, Croydon.

Rodeana was fronted by a grandiose, sweeping gravel drive. The garden surrounding the property was hived off at one side by high chain-link fencing, behind which several large Doberman dogs, Miss Joan’s pets, paced like caged tigers. Making our way to the studio entrance at the rear of the house became like a trial of nerves in preparation for life on the stage. We steeled ourselves to run the gauntlet past these terrifying giants that seemingly took pleasure at flinging themselves against the flimsy wire. With their enormous slathering jaws and wolf-like howls, they were truly the stuff of nightmares to a child like me with a vivid imagination. The Hound of the Baskervilles was not fictional, and its address was number 1 Prince Road, Selhurst.

Our teacher, the aforementioned Joan Rodney-Deane, with her mad dogs and wild eyes, seemed eccentric even in my young mind. A fully paid-up member of that post-war era when glamour and variety ruled show-biz, I could never guess her age, and with hair peroxide blond, presumably the Diana Dors look so popular at the time, was her inspiration.

Miss Joan seemed to belong to some sort of 'club' for owners of this breed of dog, I think it was actually called The Doberman Club, and every year she provided the cabaret for their annual dinner with her dance troupe, the high-kicking 'Dansettes', specially formed from the older girls in the school. With the Tiller Girls all the rage at the time, Miss Joan was never one to miss a trend. Helen and I must have been deemed good enough to be included in these professional extravaganzas and travelled up to London to take part in them. For me, the Dansettes were the epitome of beauty and fashion, and longed also to be the dizzy age of 16, which seemed as distant and as unachievable as flying to the moon. Well of course, man did get to the moon, but for me, the age of 16 came and went, and I was never a Dansette. But there was a small upside to not being of an age to join this glamorous line-up. During rehearsals in the Rodeana studio, Miss Joan, forever forthright, made a threat.

If I see anyone with hair under their arms, I’ll shave it off myself…

Well at least Helen and I didn’t need to worry about that.

The venues for these swish occasions were West End hotels. To us ordinary kids from the suburbs, these were places of high sophistication. Where else would they have had a ’buttery’ anyway? I had no idea what this was – somewhere to eat butter presumably. I long even now to stay in somewhere which has one, but suspect that such places no longer exist. What the paying guests must have thought about this gaggle of noisy girls roaming the hotel corridors, I shudder to think, and a pang of guilt connected to a prank into which we were coerced by one of the more adventurous pupils still remains with me.

It was the custom in those days, and may still be in any surviving high class hostelries, to place shoes requiring cleaning outside the room, in the corridor. The idea to swap these shoes around to different doors was something really daring. What the outcome of our efforts was that night we may never know. I just hope none of the staff were sacked for their neglect, and to surviving occupants of those rooms, I apologise. Recently, on seeing this self same stunt in an old black and white film, it was clear that the idea was obviously not as original, or hilarious, as I'd thought.

Miss Joan had taken a young and aspiring entertainer under her wing. This was Roy Hudd. At the time he lived with his Gran at the rear of the baker's opposite our own Grandparents house in Gloucester Road, a short distance from Rodeana. Miss Joan was teaching him to dance, and I remember first seeing Roy in the studio, a slim and pleasant young man with big glasses and a big smile, very much resembling another immerging young TV entertainer at the time, Roy Castle. It occurs to me now that when Helen and I were chosen to perform a number on stage with our teacher's new protégée in the annual show, we became the envy of the rest of the school: or more likely in true show-biz manner, the objects of hate. But it wasn’t our fault we were cute with long blonde hair.

Singer Tommy Steel was popular around this time, and like many before and since, had decided to extend his shelf life by branching out into acting. More importantly to me, he was the object of my first real crush. At six years old my idol was not one of those teen favourites like Elvis Presley or Cliff Richard, with their slicked back greasy hair, curling upper lips and moody demeanour. No, my object of affection was a tousle-haired blonde with a huge toothy grin. Tommy had recently appeared in a film called Tommy the Toreador - very un-PC nowadays, but no qualms then about blood-sports. Mum had taken us to see the film, and I'd really fallen in love with it and him. Now we were to sing and dance the Little White Bull song from the film in the next school show with another equally charming young man. What a dream come true, and the next best thing to actually performing the piece with Tommy Steele himself. It is all just a blur now, but I have the image of myself on stage under the spotlight at the Civic Hall, Croydon, with my sister and our Tommy substitute, Roy Hudd.

We sit on a bench centre stage, to either side of our hero.

Roy sings,

"Once upon a time there was a little white bull"

Helen and I echo,

"Little white bull!"

Roy,

"Very sad because he was, a little white bull"

Us,

"Little white bull!"

Roy,

"All the black bulls called him a coward just 'cos he was white.

Only black bulls go to the bull ring

Only black bulls fight.

When he asked his mama if a little white bull"

Us,

"Little white bull!"

Roy,

"Ever had the chance of turning black…" etc

It’s no mystery why Tommy the Toreador and that song has sunk almost without trace, bull-fighting not enjoying much popularity these days. For two ordinary little Croydon girls though, this episode would remain firm in their memories as their one moment in the spotlight.

Roy later went on to marry one of our senior dancers, and we could never have guessed when we first saw that young man hoofing in Miss Joan’s Rodeana studio that his career would soon take off. He had his own TV sitcom and a long-running topical radio comedy series, The Hudd-Lines. With appearances in numerous plays on stage, radio and television, and even parts in Coronation Street and Call the Midwife, I often wondered if he remembered his dancing teacher and