3. THE PRINCESS DANCE

The second world war has ended.

It was a busy time. It was May the eighth in the year 1945 and Maureen Rosebush was having her seventh birthday, and it hardly crossed her mind that the war might be over. After all, being seven is more important than a war that that had persisted for all of her conscious life somehow being at a peaceful end.

There were going to be celebrations over the days and weeks to come, but not for her birthday. That had to be celebrated on the proper day and with a party (of sorts). Parties weren’t always easy things to organise because the war might be over but rationing of most foodstuffs wasn’t, and what’s a party without foodstuff?

She was given presents, though, a model car made of wood that you pushed along until you got bored to tears. It had been Uncle Jack’s as a boy, and for roughly five minutes he had treasured it before forgetting it ever existed until he rediscovered it in a toy cupboard when they moved into the vicarage a few years earlier. Her mother, on the other hand, gave her a story book, which she loved.

But none of that mattered to Maureen because her very favourite person was going to be at her party. It was her cousin Wallace Pratchett, and she loved him with all of her being. She had even let her uncle give her second favourite doll (she did have two until that decision) to a poor family who had lost everything as a consequence of the war because dolls were nowhere near as wonderful as Wallace. That poor family had a shrivelled daughter, at least that’s how Maureen saw her. Malnourished might have been a better word, and that girl welcomed that doll with the sort of indifference that meant that her feeling of hunger was more relevant than her need for a doll.

The party was a dull affair. Whilst most of the people in the neighbourhood were busy erecting bunting and talking in jolly tones about loved ones returning from the front, Uncle Jack, or the Reverend Jack Pratchett, thought it best to spend the time thanking his Lord and Saviour for the outbreak of peace. So the girl’s birthday party was intermingled with prayers and even the odd hymn sung mostly in baritone. Maureen didn’t like it very much and she managed to escape (with the toddling Wallace in tow) to another room where she could pretend to be a princess from a rather tatty old story book that she had loved for ever.

“I am Princess Beauty,” she said to Wallace, who loved playing with Maureen because she was always, without exception, totally kind to him.

“Beauty,” he managed to pronounce. He might have found the word difficult had she not been Princess Beauty for as long as he could remember them playing that game, which was for as long as his memory went back.

“And you are my handsome Prince,” she said, twirling around and making her hair swirl like a halo around her head.

“Prince,” he said, smiling hugely. He loved it when her hair swirled like that.

“I’ll show you,” she said, her smile so sweetly close to that of a real molly-coddled princess that any genuine prince from a far off land would have been hard pressed to tell the difference.

In the corner of the room was a box, and in that box was her Princess paraphernalia. It didn’t consist of much, but she made the best of everything in it.

For starters, there were lengths of an old net curtain that had been replaced before the war when it was possible to replace old net curtains. Her mother had washed them (two years ago, before her father was killed in the war) and they’d been the main ingredient of her dressing-up box ever since. But, and this was glorious, in her hands they stopped being redundant and almost tatty net curtains and instead became a marvellous gown that even managed to sparkle when she wore it. Every time she came upon an unwanted glittery thing she added it to her princess costume: bits of old foil, discarded lengths of tinsel, that sort of thing.

But that wasn’t the entirety of her Princess splendour. She had a coronet. A cardboard coronet with buttons sewed on it so that, along with her magnificent gown, it glittered when the light caught it, and it being a lovely May day with sunlight finding its way into the room it glittered very often.

Then she became the Princess rather than a seven year-old girl in fancy dress. She felt it swamping her with magnificence as she walked serenely round the room, avoiding two chairs and a split pouffe as she went.

“I am Princess Beauty,” she said majestically, “and I am looking for a prince to marry me. He must be tall and dark and handsome and wear velvet breeches. And he must look at me, his eyes glazed by my rapturous splendour, and vow to love me for ever. He must sweep me off my feet and take me from this dark kingdom to one where the sun always shines like it did in days of yore...”

She didn’t know what the days or yore might be but thought it sounded splendid, like things in her storybook sounded splendid in her head when she read them to herself.

“Yore,” grinned Wallace.

“And we will dance together. Sweet music will play and angels will sing, and you and I, my prince, will be arm in arm and rapturous. And we’ll move to the music gently swaying while our worshippers look on, and moonbeams will light us our way round the dance-floor...”

“Like this?” he giggled, and held out his arms to her.

“Like this,” she agreed, and held him by his hands and dressed in her finery and with each hand holding the hand of her consort, she glided round the tatty pouffe.

“Maureen! What do you think you’re doing to Wallace, dressed in those rags!” barked a voice from the doorway.

She looked up. It was Uncle Jack, the Reverend Jack Pratchett, and his face had the reddest tint of anger to it that she had ever seen.

“Put Wallace down!” he ordered, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you’re not to do it with little Wallace, not now and not ever!”

She couldn’t help releasing Wallace’s hands and bursting into tears as she ran to a corner of the room. The thunderous dark reality of existence had wormed its way through the weasel words of her uncle into the shining fantasy of her birthday.

Wallace started crying. At eighteen months he found everything too confusing for words, and his daddy, usually benign and even loving, had spoiled things.

So he ran towards the Princess Beauty and as he did so his nappy, wet and aromatic like moistened nappies are, wormed its way down his legs.

“Now look what you’ve done!” barked the Reverend in his most accusatory yet somehow musical voice, “you disgusting, disgraceful little girl! Don’t you look at Wallace like that, not now and not ever!”

© Peter Rogerson 29.05.19