The big band music played.

We have all experienced the school dance or disco as they are now called and every one of us will have good and bad memories of them especially when they occurred during our delicate adolescent years.

In our school we had to give up our physical training (or gym as some schools called it) weeks before the dance was actually due and replace it with sessions learning the Cha Cha or Gay Gordons, ETC. with the girls in our class who were just as reluctant to dance with us as we were with them.
The lady teacher who taught us would play the big band music such as Glen Miller on a small record player and demonstrate how it should be done before letting us loose on the poor girls.
Our class had more boys than girls and even then I had a preference for the slightly older women so I came as a great and pleasant surprise when four girls from the third year (almost fifteen and due to leave school that term) (us being thirteen and just starting our secondary school) volunteered to make up the numbers. I made a point of heading for one of the older girls who had dark hair and hazel eyes and asked her if it would be O.K. to practice with her (dancing only ha ha.) and after shyly accepting we proceeded to enjoy ourselves.
She attended all our practice sessions after that and lucky for me we always danced together but never spoke outside of school, me never having the courage to and her not wanting to associate with a younger boy outside of school.
On the night of the dance everyone gathered at the school all dressed up, the girls in their party frocks and the boys in their suits. When the music started up from the same record player that was used during our training (no pop group to play at our dances) most of the boys rushed over to grab a girl before they were all taken but not me I hung back in the hope of a more mature girl to dance with. The third year girls were not allowed at our dance and most likely would not have wanted to be there but there was a fairly young teacher who was a small blond blue eyed beauty who when I approached her agreed to dance with me and with a bit of shrewdness on my behalf allowed me more during the evening.
I went home from my first dance very happy having escaped the younger girls and by dancing with the most beautiful woman there.
I was never allowed long trousers at primary school and it used to embarrass me, so much so that I never went to these dances for that simple reason, but now I was into long trousers there would be no stopping me in the future.
The memory of that older girl in training and the dances with my mature beautiful teacher always comes back to me when I hear the sound of the big band dance music playing on the radio with the sax and trumpets softly blending romantically with the strings in the orchestra as their melodies resound in my head taking me back to the delicate years of my youth when the allure of the older woman was beginning to register.