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place.’
    Touched, Lily promised to meet up with her old friends every dinner time. ‘If I’m late, save me a place in the canteen. We’ll be able to have our chats just the same.’
    â€˜And it’s not as if we’ve been able to talk while we work in any case,’ Sybil observed. ‘Not with the racket in there and Fred Lee watching our every move.’
    â€˜Ugh!’ Annie and Lily shuddered in unison at the mention of the overlooker’s name. They handed their coats and hats over the counter at the cloakroom and waited for Lily to do the same.
    â€˜Are we ready?’ Sybil asked.
    Standing side by side they examined themselves in the mirror on the wall – Lily in the lilac dress she’d sewn and taken great pains over, Annie in turquoise flowered silk with a dropped waist and a sweetheart neckline, Sybil in candy-striped voile with a high collar and full skirt. They smoothed and patted their hair, straightened their dresses and checked their lipstick.
    â€˜Ready as we’ll ever be,’ Annie confirmed, leading the way into the hall.
    The sight that met them made their hearts beat faster. The dance hall was long and wide with a polished wooden floor and rows of electric lights with marbled glass shades suspended from a high ceiling. Floor-length, red plush curtains added a touch of glamour and were drawn against the cold dark of the November night. As the three girls entered the already crowded room, which was thick with cigarette smoke, a five-piece band on a raised platform struck up a familiar waltz.
    â€˜There’s hardly room to move,’ Annie complained, but she’d already picked out Robert Drummond standing head and shoulders above the crowd and she quickly made her way down the side of the room to nab him for this dance before anyone else did.
    Sybil shook her head. ‘That girl’s got no shame.’
    Lily laughed. ‘Maybe we should warn him: “Watch out, Robert – Annie’s after you!”’
    â€˜It’s too late – he’s already smitten. He danced with her all night long the last time we were here.’
    Sybil and Lily kept on smiling and chatting as Annie reached her target and the tall motor mechanic quickly succumbed to her charms. She said something to him with a pout and a pretty tilt of her head towards the dancing couples. He nodded and stubbed out his cigarette. Next moment, his arm was around Annie’s slim waist and they were stepping on to the floor.
    Less bold than Annie, Sybil and Lily had to make do with partnering each other for this first dance, which was already well underway. They didn’t care – they would still enjoy themselves with Sybil taking the man’s part and steering Lily around the room, taking care not to get their toes stepped on by the clod-hopping feet of the butchers’ boys, grocers, brewery workers and mill hands who regularly filled the Assembly Rooms on a Saturday night. Though they were done up in brogues, snazzy blazers and neatly pressed trousers, the local lads were no match for Douglas Fairbanks when it came to steering girls through the Viennese waltz.
    â€˜Watch out, Ernie!’ Sybil cried as Harry’s stocky pal backed into them so hard that his partner, Hilda Crabtree, who worked alongside Margie and Dorothy in Kingsley’s spinning shed, stumbled against him and had to be clutched to his chest to stop her from falling to the floor.
    â€˜You did that on purpose!’ Lily protested.
    Ernie winked and set Hilda back on her feet. ‘Hilda’s not complaining,’ he pointed out before he whisked her off in another direction. For the moment he seemed to have dropped his longstanding crush on Margie and was discovering that Hilda was a more than satisfactory replacement.
    And so it went on from waltz to quickstep to foxtrot, with only an occasional glimpse of a smiling Annie whirling by in Robert’s arms, the skirt of her