The Songs by Charles Elton

Author:Charles Elton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2017-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

After supper that night, he told his uncle he was going for a walk — an unlikely thing to do, but his uncle just said, “Lock the door when you come back. I don’t want thieves.”

He walked down the track to the lane and headed in the direction Iz had gone the other day. After a mile or so he came to a set of iron gates padlocked together with a thick chain. About a hundred yards away he could see the silhouette of a house with two smaller buildings on either side, maybe barns or cottages. There was light coming through the downstairs windows of the big house. He climbed over the gate and moved cautiously towards it. There was the sound of music. He went as close to the windows as he dared and looked in. He could see a big room, like a hall. The tables had been pushed to one side to create a space in the middle and about fifteen people were dancing clumsily. Maurice could see Iz.

Music was blaring out from a gramophone and then it stopped. An older woman came from the side of the room waving her hands. “No! No! No!” she shouted. “Are you complete dunces? You have feet like blocks of concrete!”

She moved amongst the dancers and rearranged them in a circle. They stood there awkwardly and she sighed in exasperation. She went up to a couple standing next to each other and thrust them together. The others followed suit and took each other’s hands. The woman turned on the gramophone again, and the dancers began to move slowly round in a circle. They got faster as the music speeded up and the woman began clapping her hands in time. “Yes!” she shouted, “that’s more like it. Yes!” Then, as they were still going round, they all moved a few steps forward into the center of the circle, then moved back. Some of them began laughing with pleasure. They were getting into the swing of it.

Maurice was enthralled. These were people with a sense of purpose. They were working to change the world. They deserved to let their hair down sometimes. This was not like Arthur and his friends having a treasure hunt at a middle-class birthday party.

After a while they took a break and came outside. Maurice moved back to the cover of the trees. He stood very still, but he knew that it was too dark for anyone to really see him. They were talking and laughing and he thought he could hear Iz’s voice, but whether it was him or not, what he said was lost on the evening breeze.

When they had gone back in, he turned and walked back to the gate. He suddenly felt very lonely. He wished he could be part of them. But then, as he went down the lane, an idea came into his head. Tomorrow was Saturday. It was his day off, and he would hitchhike into Ashford. He had a plan.

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