by Diana Melly
Charging me for lessons presented a problem for Dino. I think because of our dog connection and being the same age as his mother, I am now “family” and therefore not allowed to pay for them. We have solved this in a most enjoyable way. I have my lesson, we meet up with Dora and then I take them out to supper. Dino twitches a bit when I get out my credit card, but that’s our arrangement and he has to put up with it. He asserts his authority by checking the bill.
The dinner dance at the Savoy tonight is expensive, £125, but there’s going to be live music and lots to eat and drink.
I hadn’t been to the Savoy since I worked at the cabaret club. Although I never accepted invitations from customers, for some reason I had given my phone number to a rather fat Belgian called Edouard. It might have been because he wasn’t pushy and didn’t rub himself up against me on the tiny dance floor. Or because he’d bought me two boxes of du Maurier cigarettes and a spray of orchids. Both my mother and I smoked so the cigarettes were welcome and the flowers provided a good profit for the club.
When he rang the next day I was still asleep; my mother hadn’t even brought me my breakfast. I never got in before two and she always woke me at midday with tea and toast in bed. She answered the call and told me that a very nice gentleman had invited me to lunch at the Savoy and that she’d accepted for me. I wasn’t as cross with her as I pretended to be – after all, what harm could I come to having lunch in a crowded room? And anyway, I’d never been to a posh hotel and I wanted to.
He met me in the foyer and said we would go to his room first as he had a present for me. This was a bit alarming but I didn’t want to make a fuss so up we went. The present was a beautiful tortoiseshell box engraved in silver with a statue of Diana the huntress.
“Now,” he said, “you can lie on the bed and I will give you a very special kiss. You are very young and still virgin if I am not mistake? You will still be a virgin.” I hadn’t a clue what he meant; I just knew I didn’t want him to kiss me and I began to cry. Edouard stopped going on about the special kiss, told me to wipe my eyes and took me down to the shiny dining room for lunch. He ordered for me: shrimp cocktail and a fancy chicken dish and did his best to help me relax. I hoped the waiters would think he was my grandfather, but remembering my over-made-up face, my pencil skirt and peep-toe shoes, it was rather unlikely. I had three scoops of ice cream, he then put ten five-pound notes in my bag and got the doorman to call a taxi. I’ve still got the tortoiseshell box, and I didn’t remain “virgin” for long.
The Savoy hadn’t changed much but I had. Unable to finish my fillet steak I asked the waiter to put it in a doggy bag for Joey and Bobby. That’s not something I would have had the nerve to do 63 years ago.
Chapter 12
There is an evening dance tonight in Essex which, being an Essex woman, I am keen to go to. Also Heinz, my favourite dance host from the cruise, is staying with Gill and she is going to drive him and his girlfriend down.
The problem is that it’s on the day I’m working in the prison visitors’ centre. Dino and Dora have said they will pick me up but there won’t be time to go home and change and I can’t decide what dress will be suitable for the dance and the prison. Unlike tea dances where some people come in jeans, most of us like the opportunity to dress up for evening events. When I went dancing with Raymond, realising he was a Grace Kelly fan, I used to wear pale-blue floaty chiffon. Dino is 25 years younger and goes more for the Moulin Rouge look, or maybe Liza Minnelli in Cabaret? I have a short, shiny, emerald satin skirt which he likes. Although I don’t quite dress to please men, nor do I dress to displease them.
I turn up at the centre in a longish, very full, bright-yellow skirt and cover the sequinned top I wore at Margate with a long jumper. All my colleagues are slightly surprised by the full make-up and my hair which I’ve carefully ironed with my straighteners; in my haste to get ready I have burnt my neck and have covered up the angry-looking red mark with a plaster.
I am not the only one with a dress code problem. A woman has come to visit her husband; she is showing so much flesh that we don’t think she will be allowed in. Her top pushes up her breasts into a shape that would rival Dolly Parton’s. Also her shorts are so brief that they show a large amount of midriff and her buttocks are only just contained. Peep-toe platform shoes complete the picture.
At work I am considered to be tactful, and due to my age, as having some authority. Also, compared to fellow workers, I sound posh; my manager once told me I sound like Penelope Keith in The Good Life. These dubious attributes mean I am given the task of asking the young woman to find something to cover up some bits of her. It’s a problem. She is perfectly willing to cover up but what with? As it’s a warm day she has come without a coat and I don’t want to lend her my ragged jumper and expose my flimsy top.
Luckily it’s a biometrics day. On these days the visitors are required to queue three times. Once to show me or a colleague their IDs, then to have their fingerprints done and finally to cross the courtyard that separates the visitors’ centre from the main prison building and have their IDs checked yet again. We are assured that once the biometric system is established, the whole process of getting in to see “loved ones” will be speeded up. Meanwhile, people start queuing at one o’clock and are lucky to get in by three o’clock. Visiting stops at four but if anyone complains they are told that the allotted time is only half an hour, so anything more is a bonus.
The only advantage to this lengthy process is that it gives the compliant half-naked visitor time to go home and do a quick change.
She isn’t the only one to take advantage of the wait. Two families have come with insufficient IDs. Like most normal people, they assumed that passports would be enough to prove their identity. They are at most prisons but not the one I’m working in. This one requires proof of address as well. People must bring a bill dated within the last three months, but not a mobile phone bill. Not only do some people have little access to utility bills or bank statements, they are often not told of this requirement. Telling people who might have travelled far and have taken the day off work that they won’t be allowed in is a deeply unpleasant job. Assuming that it’s up to me to allow the visit, they will plead with me to let them in just this once. I explain that if it was up to me I would happily let them in and usually I apologise for the inefficiency of our system.
It’s good news that the two families have bank accounts. They are going to take the bus to the nearest branch of their bank and get them to print them a statement.
It’s my lunch break so I’m going to paint my nails and ring Dora to tell her that my manager has said I can go a bit early.
I tell Dora about the naked lady. She is a free spirit and doesn’t see why the visitor has to cover herself up. I think many of the rules are stupid but this one is OK. Not all the prisoners are fortunate enough to have a Dolly Parton lookalike visiting them.
Dora also has a dress problem. This year she is competing in “Stars of the Future”, an important competition in Brentwood. She is dancing the foxtrot and the waltz and needs a ball gown. They don’t come cheap – £1000 new and there’s no fairy godmother. If she buys second-hand from eBay she won’t be able to try it on. But at the dance tonight she is hoping to meet a designer who said she is willing to let her have one of her seconds.
On the way there Dino gets an urgent message from the organiser. There’s no sound from the speakers or the mic. Dino is reluctant to let me drive; he says I ride the clutch. He pulls over and parks on a lay by while he thinks about the problem.
“You’re probably using too many extension leads,” he tells Myrtle, the organiser.
I had quite forgotten that the dance has been advertised as a “spring theme ball”. It doesn’t seem to matter; although Myrtle and her equally glamorous sister are dressed as Venus and Flora from the Primavera, no one else has bothered.
Thanks to Dino the sound system is working. The music is a version of “I love Paris in the Spring Time
” and the hall looks beautiful. There are tulips on every table and we are given the best one. Myrtle has made a knock-out drink – Sparkling Spring Punch. Heinz wants to know what’s in it. Prosecco, Maraschino liqueur and tangerine juice, she tells us. We were all quite jolly anyway. As he’s the driver, Dino isn’t drinking but he’s happy, having gathered some new additions to his harem, some of whom aren’t wearing enough to be allowed in to visit a “loved one” in a prison. Gill isn’t drinking either she never does but she is proudly showing us some photographs of her new grandchild. Dora has made contact with the woman who will let her have a fabulous ball gown very cheaply. And me? Apparently my posture has improved. Also the punch is delicious.
Chapter 13
Words and music and dancing – I think the last two are the most evocative and perhaps the oldest forms of expression.
Ancient man and woman danced, just as some birds do; not just swans and birds of paradise – many parrots do too. The dung beetle dances to orientate himself. Once he’s got the dung into a ball he rolls it away from the dung pile in a straight path. This guarantees he won’t be competing with the other beetles around the pile. Before rolling his ball he climbs on top of it and dances.
The male peacock spider, whose beautiful rainbow-coloured body outshines not only the peacock but also the costumes of the Latin dancers I saw competing at Blackpool, dances, sings and vibrates to attract the female. If he isn’t any good, she eats him.
Apart from Asian elephants, who dance to Bach played on the violin (see remarkable YouTube video), I can’t think of any other animals that do. I don’t count dogs who are trained to dance with treats or bears who are tortured to do so. The dung beetle dances to protect his food; the spider and the birds dance to attract a mate, while humans dance for a variety of reasons.
To take his mind off his troubles a friend from Shoreditch has become obsessed with the Argentine tango. His daughter is bipolar and refuses to speak to him. From the little I know of him it’s hard to understand why. We often talk about it when Mr Wonderful is playing anything other than the Argentine as that is the only dance he gets up for. He seems to me to be kind and clever and I can see how hurt he is by the breakdown of this relationship. How can you mend something if there isn’t any communication? All he can do is forget about it for a few hours a week while he is dancing. And Gill, when her marriage started to unravel, she took up ballroom. “When I’m dancing,” she said, “nothing else seems to matter except the music; it seems to put the life back in me.” The husband of a young woman who helps me with the heavy work in the garden went to prison last year and she started to learn the salsa. “I didn’t want another man,” she said. “It just stops me feeling so lonely.”
It helps me too; when my daughter Candy was diagnosed with second-stage terminal cancer I found that dancing could occasionally make me think about something else. When my son died of a heroin overdose in 1980 I drank, I got stoned and I spent a month in a psychiatric hospital. When George died aged 80 of lung cancer and vascular dementia, his doctor said, “That was the best death I’ve ever seen.” She meant he looked peaceful, he was home in his own bed and the dementia wasn’t too advanced.
His attitude to his death, and he knew he was dying, is an example I hope I will be able to follow. I can’t think of anything else he set a good example for – well, not in the conventional sense.
The letters, the tributes and the arrangements helped with the sad period that followed. Much as I endlessly complained about him, we had been together for nearly 50 years.
Candy received her diagnosis in late 2007, the same year that George died. All her family were excited about the baby she was expecting, but were devastated by the completely unexpected diagnosis she received three days after Nancy was born. She was sitting up in bed nursing the baby when two doctors came in and sat on the bed. Always a bad sign. The older one said, “We’ve got the result of the biopsy. The tumour in your back is secondary breast cancer.” Her husband Mark was there when I left and I sat on the 148 bus doing what comes naturally to me – I rang all my friends. I also left a message with my doctor. She rang me back the next day and when I asked her what it meant she said, “Her life will be considerably shortened.”
“How long”?
“She might have five years.”
She did, she had five years, nine months and two weeks .
Montaigne wrote about a king who when captured saw his neighbour being led away to prison, then his son led away to his death. The king only wept when he saw what happened to his neighbour. When questioned about it he replied, “One event can be marked with tears, the other is beyond expression.”
Sometimes Candy went into remission, sometimes it seemed as if the drugs and the chemo could win. She came to Spain with me when Nancy was just one and she went to Goa with Mark and Nancy three years later. They moved out of London to live on the south coast and as usual she made many new friends.
She’d asked me to be her chemo friend, and once I went with her to the hospital and we sat there with the chemo trickling through her. I caught a train back and arrived in time to go to a tea dance in the Camden Centre near King’s Cross. Sometimes when she went into the hospice for a rest, I took the dogs and stayed at a dog-friendly hotel and then went to be with her. When she closed her eyes and I got up to leave, she would say, “Don’t go. No need to talk, just sit and knit like you used to.” When she was well enough we would go for rather slow walks in her local park. The metal vertebrae in her back made it ache and she often had to rest on a bench.
Unlike George, she battled with the cancer and almost until the end she thought she could win. When she knew she couldn’t, like George she planned her funeral, a big party in a place overlooking the sea.
Three months before she died, we were warned that the steroids that were keeping her alive would suddenly stop working; they did and she died, aged 52, at home surrounded by all her family.
In the ten days between her death and her funeral I went to Majorca, where Mr Wonderful had organised a dance holiday.
I’d been grieving for Candy since my doctor had said five years; I was still grieving but I went. The space needed to be filled with something. Anything.
Acknowledgements
Thank you Susannah for landing me a contract at Short Books; Joan for kick-starting the project by sending a chapter to the Oldie; Christina for walking Bobby and Joey, and Sylvia for cleaning my house so I could go dancing; Dora for a new friendship; Malcolm (Mr Wonderful) for the best music to dance to; Andrée, Nell, Jane and Anula for patiently reading early drafts; Penelope for chapter 13; Carmen whose encouragement I can’t write without; and Aurea, Klara and Rebecca who have turned my words into a proper book.
Praise for Take a Girl Like Me by Diana Melly:
(Chatto & Windus, 2005)
Hardly short of a masterpiece, this book brilliantly evokes the frenetic egotism of Bohemian life of the sixties.
– Hugh Massingbird, The Daily Telegraph
Told with panache…its pages fizz with gaiety.
– Mail on Sunday, Book of the Week
This well-written memoir is wonderful because it is so naturally contrary to the notion that a memoir should paint over everything and make the author shine… She makes her life quite present to the reader – even those parts where she wasn’t particularly present herself – and that is the sort of gift to posterity that posterity can remember.
– Andrew O’Hagan, Sunday Times
It is rare to find a book that describes a marriage with such breathtaking intimacy as Diana Melly does in her autobiography, Take a Girl Like Me. She writes the story of her grippingly unconventonal life with an astonishing yet matter-of-fact frankness.
– Nicholas Haslam, The Spectator
Hers is an extraordinary story, exceptionally well told.
– Independent on Sunday
Copyright
First published in 2015 by Short Books,
Unit 316, Screen
Works, 22 Highbury Grove,
London, N5 2ER
This ebook edition published in 2015
Copyright © Diana Melly 2015
The right of Diana Melly to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Some of the material in this book is adapted from articles originally published in the Oldie and the Big Issue.
ISBN: 978–1–78072–255–9
Cover image © Getty // Jeff J Mitchell, image ref: 96492886