Free Maeve Binchy by Piers Dudgeon Page A

then had a balcony apparently, and if you met a young lady you had to go up to the balcony for an orange or lemonade and then you took your chances after that.
    Maeve remembered that Mulcahy himself used to like to gee up his audience with clichéd innuendo that would set the dance floor alight in a riot of laughter and whistling. He would come to the microphone and ask for silence and make a serious ‘lost or found’ announcement that a certain girl had gone down to the sand hills last night and lost her … And then he would pause suggestively, and the audience would corpse themselves laughing. Boys’ minds were centred on lost virginity from about 8 p.m. on, when they were getting well oiled in the pubs.
    There were no great decisions to be made about what to wear. ‘For girls it was summer frocks, somewhere down to between the knee and the ankle and maybe a couple of layers of petticoats . A lot of the boys would have worn suits to the dances,’ Tim Hannan says. The great thing was not to look as if you were trying too hard. ‘They had a resident photographer in the old days and there was always a rush in the morning to see who you were taken with last night.’
    For Maeve’s first dance she wore a sixteen-shilling dress in turquoise and white from Clerys, the Dublin department store. She chose the colour, she said, because while red was reckoned by most people to attract more attention, girls prone to red face would be advised against it.
    In search of a tan she made up a mixture of Nivea and Brown Nugget boot polish (the cheapest you could get, so cheap, she said, that most people thought twice about putting it on their shoes). She applied this concoction to her face, which set off her white cardigan nicely but made her, as she put it, ‘very dangerous to dance with’.
    Generally, her apprehension added considerably to her problems . Expectations were high. Her younger sisters, Joan and Renie, would crane their necks around the main door to see how she was getting on, expecting her to emerge later that night at the very least engaged to a future husband.
    Inevitably, the reality turned out to be quite different. The dances started about 8 p.m. and the pubs didn’t close till ten, which meant that to begin with there were many more girls than boys in attendance. So crowded was the cloakroom that Maeve couldn’t even get a sixpenny spray of Evening in Paris which was available there. The few young fellas who didn’t drink and were out for a dance appeared to have been snapped up by girls a good deal older and more experienced than her.
    No one asked her to dance, and when she saw the eager faces of her sisters and their friends she was so desperate not to show how completely unsuccessful she was that she made a few passes, twirling by the half-open door in front of them asif her partner was just out of view. This was undertaken, Maeve recalled, during a rendition by Mulcahy of a jive number, which at least would have accounted for the absence of a partner in her arms.
    Maeve was actually a very good dancer. The girls at the Holy Child were taught dancing at school by a fine teacher, and before long she would have a whale of a time dancing the night away in Ballybunion. ‘If you could manage to get someone to dance with you,’ she once admitted, ‘then you were there for the night.’
    A school friend remembers Maeve coming back from Ballybunion one year saying that she had fallen in love with a fellow called Matt. Maeve showed her a photo of a big hulk of a guy six or seven years older than her and said that she spent the whole summer hovering around and standing at corners hoping to bump into him. ‘He featured for many years and it was always her hope that he would fall in love with her.’ That was Ballybunion, a harmless ’50s fantasy land in which everyone had fun at no one else’s expense. It seems likely that Maeve’s crush was none other than Dr Hannan’s oldest son by the same name, who sadly