Back in the age of cassette tapes and pencil toppers, when pocket money meant just that – ten pence if you were lucky – there were no such luxuries as ten-penny mix-ups. You had to be strategic. Frugal. Devout, even. So how did a young suitor impress his beloved in a world devoid of Haribo feasts and Starbucks bribes? With a sherbet dip, of course. That glorious artefact of childhood alchemy: sour powder, liquorice stick, and enough zing to electrify the tongue and the soul alike.
Dawn, for that was her name – though she was more starlight than sunrise – used to rattle the front gate every morning with priestly punctuality. Just a brief clatter, then her head would appear through the gap, framed like a Renaissance portrait. She knew I’d be waiting. I always was. And we’d set off on our sacred little pilgrimage to school, hand in hand until social propriety and the gathering throng of jeering boys made it necessary to retreat into the illusion of platonic detachment.
She was a skinny wisp of a girl – ethereal, really – with a smile that looked like it had been borrowed from an imp. Not perfect, thank God – no perfect thing has ever inspired love – but crooked in just the right way, like a childhood drawing pinned on a fridge. Her hands were so tiny they made mine feel competent, and she carried the divine aroma of Palmolive and possibility.
If we weren’t clasping hands, we were wielding our sherbet like tiny Victorian chemists – dipping, licking, and fizzing our way through the morning fog. Not a breakfast of champions, but we’d already endured the muesli, that sadistic oat-based penance inflicted by overzealous mothers with delusions of Swiss sainthood.
Our walk wasn’t long, but it felt mythic – imbued with the kind of youthful promise that makes even the greyest North-Eastern sky seem like a Technicolor dream. At the school gates, there was always a kiss. Not the fleshy, Hollywood kind. A whisper of a thing. A kiss made not of lips but of intention. Dizzying. Fragile. Likely still sticky with sherbet dust. Then we’d part – she to her friends, I to mine – hearts pounding, cheeks crimson, stomachs staging their own nativity play.
In the run-up to Christmas, the entire school was subject to the peculiar purgatory of compulsory dance lessons. Yes, the whole school. All ranks and classes flung together in the draughty hall like some democratic barn-raising. The teachers – those petty deities of pairing – threw us into the arms of fate. Some pairings inspired envy, others ridicule. A few – mine included – quiet revelation. For it was through this enforced choreography that Dawn and I became ‘an item.’ An unofficial item, of course. We didn’t call it dating. We didn’t call it anything. But we knew.
By lesson four or five, most had settled into routine couplings. Even Skunk found a partner. Poor lass. Afflicted with a natural bouquet that could fell a strong man at twenty paces, Skunk’s presence was nonetheless endured with the stoicism of a congregation during a particularly damp sermon.
Our dancing commenced immediately after morning assembly – an event always featuring ‘Lord of the Dance,’ sung with such fervour it was often misheard as “I am the Lord of the damp settee…” And who could blame us? The acoustics were awful and the heating even worse.
Then came Dance Day. The Big One. I remember loitering by the window, eyes fixed on the gate. Waiting. Expectant. But it didn’t rattle. No Dawn. Just the cold, a pale sky, and that strange emptiness that smells like snow and disappointment. I trudged to school solo. No sherbet. No kiss.
She wasn’t there. Probably a cold, or a bug. Perhaps her muesli had staged a mutiny. Assembly came and went, and then the hours dragged until the afternoon’s festivities. We’d all brought in toys – symbolic sacrifices to the gods of boredom – and the classrooms became indoor jungles of coloured plastic and sugar-highs.
At last, the dance. The absence of partners due to pre-holiday absences meant a frantic reshuffling of the deck. Fate, ever the jester, partnered me not with Dawn, but with Skunk. And what a dancer she was. Graceful. Precise. Fragrant as ever, of course, but able to chasse and grapevine like a girl possessed.
And so I leapt and swung, heel-toe and spin, with Skunk as my unexpected partner in joy. Love may have been absent that day, but hilarity was not. For in the absence of kisses and sherbet, there was rhythm, movement – and the ever-surprising knowledge that sometimes, the Lord of the damp settee really does have a plan.
Wording 