Dancing Day

Tomorrow shall be my Dancing Day …. that’s one of those songs where the title and the tune and all manner of memories and associations find a firm ledge in the mind, but somehow the words and the verses and the order slip and slew and mingle and muddle.

     But I did still recall from singing it in the school choir, and having a music teacher who doubled as choir conductor, that it dated back to the tradition (reality, not rumour) of people dancing in church in the Middle Ages, not just singing and listening, and that it was originally associated with Christmas, the Dancing Day being the coming of the True Love – generally taken to mean Jesus. The same phrase is used in the Twelve Days of Christmas on an even more symbolism-laden level.

     Okay. End of anthropology or musicology (or whatever) lecture! 

     But even though I knew ( whilst plainly heavily loaded in pagan predecessors!) that it was a Christmas carol, for me it always and every time seemed to have so much more to do with spring. It wasn’t a song to sing round a candle-twinkling tree so it could resonate in cinnamon-redolent air, but one that went with lengthening days and dawn choruses, and would have been far more appropriate as the melody of a Maypole Dance with twining ribbons and a world full of daffodils and tulips and the unfolding of the first roses. 

     You hear often enough, and I’ve sounded off about it myself, that Christmas music played at the wrong time of year or even too early grate and grind and irritate. They do, though I’ll make an exception for Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Like all of his work, there is never a day or time that is inappropriate for it. Easter music played untimely is never so jarring.

     Yet for me Dancing Day sung when snow was falling and daylight was a few greedily grasped and garnered hours, and the moon was frost-ringed, was as inappropriate and misplaced and lost as any echo of Silent Night in May or September.

     It was, and yet it still seemed to dance and pulse and twirl and harmonise and change partners in my mind at any time of the year, and I thought that if I were ever the guest on Desert Island Discs (which was never going to happen!) it would be the one record I would opt to take with me when compelled to answer that Judgement of Solomon if you only had one question. 

     I lived in one of those villages that had kept up the ancient tradition of the May Dance. Or even the May Ball.

     But, well, to be boringly and pedantically honest, I didn’t. Oh I’m quite sure that had such an ancient and august tradition existed, it would have been kept up. But much as we lived in hope of discovering evidence that at least offered the glimmer of a possibility of a venerable tradition, it had only started in 1995.

     Still – and one finds comfort where one can – accident of birth and chronology meant we could say entirely truthfully that it dated back to the previous Millennium. And to be even more boringly and pedantically honest, we never claimed to perform any rituals, mating dances, sun worship, moon worship, or anything else but dance.  Dances like the waltz and the foxtrot that might be old-fashioned but had no roots in antiquity. Even though the Village Hall was used every alternate Tuesday by a local line dancing club, they just knew that incorporating line dancing into the May Ball would be wrong. Still, it had been established by a local couple, Luke and Morag Nicholas. Well – okay, Luke was a local lad who had come back to the village when he retired. Morag was from Newcastle! But contrary to the stereotype, though some folk could be a bit snarkey, there was no backbiting and sarcasm about “foreigners” the way you hear of in some Fenland villages. Anyway, it was Morag, not Luke, who had been the driving force, though he was a willing assistant and helpmeet. That was an old-fashioned word, and could have seemed studiedly and rather tediously quaint for the sake of it, but somehow it wasn’t. The word was just right for a quiet, much loved, and utterly reliable man who was universally liked, or at least in the little universe of the village. 

     It was also an all-day thing. Oh, I don’t mean that we set to beat any endurance records or that it carried on 24/7 (ugly but useful expression, I’ve always thought). But there were a few of us (and yes I’m using that famous royal we as I was one of them) who were known as early risers and trusted to be keyholders at the village hall. The evening before I often found myself humming Tomorrow will be my Dancing Day. I could create rituals, too! In a way, as my friend and fellow “trustee” Laurel said, it was a bit like election day, when the village hall was used as a Polling Station. Though I don’t recall seeing any dancing going on around or within the ballot booths and though it wasn’t a written rule, mentioning politics at the May Dance would have been seen as somewhat bad form. I was on duty last year. To my relief, the previous user group had obeyed the “polite but firm” notice we had about clearing chairs away after use, and I had no need to stack and push them myself to create the dance floor. I put on a CD (we hadn’t got round to streaming at the May Ball!) so anyone coming into dance would have music to dance to. Later on in the day sometimes we had live music. Usually there was at least a school band or someone playing the piano (which we really must get around to having tuned) or who brought their violin around. As dusk fell, we switched on the fairylights that we had draped round the prefab walls of the village hall and around a few of the trees. Even if it were freezing and blowing a gale or pouring down a chance to dance outside under the stars and surrounded by the fairylights was part of the May Ball. 

     There was no point to pretending otherwise – last year there was a sadness to the May Ball. Not a pall hanging over it or anything like that, but it would be the first one without either Luke or Morag. Luke had died of a heart attack three years ago. We had rallied round to help Morag, but as she once confided to me, she felt as if there were always a Luke-shaped hole beside her. “But not inside my heart,” she said. I was reminded of the saying about Old Soldiers. She faded away. Even though she had been in her 80s, somehow we had never thought of her as an old lady. But with the Luke-shaped hole by her side, she turned into one. Oh, she still had a wry sense of humour and her eyes could still sparkle, but though we were deeply saddened, none of us were surprised when her cleaning lady Babs (hired by her family under protest from Morag, though, happily, they had hit it off and become good friends) came in to find that Morag had fallen asleep in her armchair by the fire in the neat, but not too neat, cottage where she and Luke had lived, and would not wake up again. 

     Inevitably, my mind was full with thoughts of Morag as I opened up the village hall and filled the drinks urn, and put the CD on. I was glad of something practical to do, though they were the kind of routine tasks that I could do on autopilot. People generally didn’t start to come until an hour or so later, but music must be there for them if they did. I put on some Viennese Waltzes, knowing that Morag had loved them, and their sweet, lilting strains with a hint of longing blended into the joy was just right.

     I was surprised to hear “rival music” playing. Oh, people were entirely at liberty to bring along their own CDs, and we had never yet found one that we had cause to object to. But for it to happen this early would have been unusual, even on a lovely sunny day, which last year it wasn’t, though if the forecast were to be believed, things would look up later on. And though the music had a definite lilt and rhythm to it, it was vocal music. Or to put it less pretentiously, it was singing. To my mind, no matter what they seem to think on Strictly, dancing to vocal music just isn’t right. Oh, it wouldn’t send me to the barricades, or even make me fall out with someone, but it still wasn’t right.  There was something curious about that music, about that singing. Though not at a volume to annoy anyone (there weren’t any houses in immediate earshot of the Hall anyway) it was audible, and there was nothing wrong with my hearing. But I couldn’t make out some of the words, though others, like May and Day and Play came through clear and yes, predictable, but it was a predictablility that was reassuring rather than irritating, despite my views on dancing to singing. 

     Talking of clichés, there are worse ways of politely getting someone’s attention than giving a little cough, and it worked this time, too. For a minute I did a double-take then remembered that of course, Morag and Luke’s granddaughter, Amanda, who lived in the States but had kept in close touch with them had been in touch with us, and was to be the guest of honour and open the May Ball. We always had a little opening ceremony, usually after the hall had been open for several hours and the first dances had already been danced. Looking more closely I saw that she wasn’t as eerily like her grandma as I had first thought, but she had many of her little ways.

     Of course I asked her into the hall and glad to see (or feel – WHEN would I train myself out of the silly habit of tapping the side of it and ending up with a sore finger!) that the urn was up to heat, made us both a coffee and made the first inroad of the day into the ginger cream biscuits. Well, it was only manners …..!

     We hit it off at once, and Amanda said, “Sorry if I gave you the shock of your life, Cora!” Morag was fond of that expression, too, often about something very mild that wouldn’t have given a timorous termite the shock of their life, even though she wasn’t generally given to hyperbole.

     “It’s fine,” I assured her, but I had to ask, just to make sure, “That was your music playing, wasn’t it, Amanda?”

     “Guilty as charged,” she said, ruefully, “That was me singing. One of Granny’s songs from her childhood. They sung it at school, she told me, the day before May Day. It was their own local version of that Christmas Carol Tomorrow will be my Dancing Day. They had a teacher – I guess nowadays we’d call her a charismatic teacher! – who always insisted it was really meant for springtime. I’ll admit I don’t know if she wrote the words or they were handed down to her. But they were along the lines of:

Tomorrow will be my Dancing Day

Tomorrow my own true love will say

Oh, you shall be Queen, the Queen of the May,

Tomorrow I will rise at dawn,

And put my May Day Morn gown on,

And I will see my true love’s glance

and I will join him in the dance.

And see the springtime’s sunbeams play,

and cast the night’s dark veil away,

and I will smile and take my chance

And join my true love in the dance.

And I knew for certain, I didn’t just hope or fancy, I knew, that Morag had joined her true love in the dance.