Read Online Memoirs of a Dance Hall Romeo by Jack Higgins - Free Book Online

and led the way out. I paused at the door and glanced back, for the last time, for there would be no more Tuesday nights at the Trocadero, I knew that.
    For a moment her companions had their heads together, and that mask of hers slipped, a kind of mute appeal on her face, the hand with the wedding ring pushed forward across the table.
    I smiled once with all the reassurance that I could muster. I think she understood. I hope so, for I owed her so much. It may have been my imagination, but I fancied a kind of relief on her face as I turned away.
    I never set eyes on her again.

4
IMOGENE
    A jut with her bum would stir an anchoret.
    WILLIAM CONGREVE
    I T WAS YEARS BEFORE the term Blackboard Jungle became notorious. When it did, I always felt that I knew exactly what they were talking about having served at Khyber Street.
    It was a depressing business from that first Monday morning. A friend of Jake’s, noticing us waiting for a tram at the park gates, gave us a lift into town in his car. He dropped me about a quarter of a mile from the school, but at a point where I had to approach it from a different direction than was to become normal.
    I picked my way through an area which had been badly hit by bombing in the war, an undulating brick-field with, here and there, the odd row of houses still standing. Somewhere in the distance there was the sound of the sea breaking on the shore, an impossibility surely. When I reached the edge of the brick-field, the ground dropped steeply into a carpet of narrow streets, terraced houses, the air thick with morning smoke, and the source of that noise became plain. It was the roar from Khyber Street.
    The yard, small as it was, was divided by a brick wall topped by wicked rusting spikes. Girls on one side, boys on the other, for rape and worse was expected at an early age. The boys’ yard seemed crammed to bursting point. Certainly I had to use physical force to get to the entrance and the noise was unbelievable. It was more like a mob howling at some palace gate than anything else. An unnerving experience.
    Varley, the ginger-haired boy from the day of the interview, and his bovine friend whose name, as I learned later, was Hatch, lounged against the door, kicking out at any smaller fry who came anywhere near. I was prepared for trouble, my loins girded to meet it. However, Varley did everything but touch his forelock, opening the door for me with scrupulous politeness.
    ‘Mornin’, sir!’ he said gruffly. ‘Hope you like it here, sir.’
    ‘Why, thank you,’ I told him and went inside, considerably moved by this evidence of a sunnier side to his nature. It only went to prove, of course, that most human beings were essentially decent under the skin.
    The door to the woodwork room was open and my friend in the brown overall was standing at one of the benches lighting a pipe.
    ‘You didn’t think better on it?’ he called.
    I moved into the room. It was smaller than I had imagined. Ten ancient wooden benches, tools in racks along the walls, brown-painted cupboards and, even here, the statutory blackboard on the wall behind the desk.
    ‘Oliver Shaw,’ I said and held out my hand.
    ‘Wally Oldroyd.’ He grinned. ‘Intelligence, wasn’t it? I was in the paratroops myself. Comes in useful round here at times.’
    He started to lay tools neatly out on the bench, which I immediately took to be some kind of dismissal. I could not have been more wrong for, as I was to discover, he was one of the kindest men imaginable. A sort of latter-day Fabian trying to come to terms with a world gone mad.
    ‘I suppose I’d better report in,’ I said.
    ‘Staffroom’s top of the second stairs,’ he told me as I moved to the door. ‘Brace yourself, lad. It isn’t much. I make my own tea here, break and dinner. You’re welcome anytime you feel like it.’
    He obviously didn’t expect a reply, was already busy at one of the cupboards, his back to me, so I went out and climbed the stairs.
    The