The Victory Ball at Priory Dean Village Hall

Extract from “The Village” by Marghanita Laski (1952)

She had never seen the hall decorated for a dance, and indeed, for none of the wartime dances had the shabby wooden hall been bedizened as it was tonight. Everyone had contributed what they could find from their old stocks of party and Christmas decorations and everything in splendid confusion was tacked to the walls, to the platform, to the beams in the ceiling. Ted Pickering, who, having been invalided out of the Army after Dunkirk, worked at his Dad’s electrical shop when he wasn’t conducting his Ragamuffins, had managed to fix up the coloured electric lights that Mr Waters had dug out for Victory night so that they dazzled and twinkled (except for two blue ones that wouldn’t work) right above the heads of the band. Then there were Japanese lanterns and odds-and-ends of paper concertinas and little glittering glass Christmas tree toys and lengths of tinsel and tacked-up laurel branches – everything, in fact, that Priory Dean could produce in the way of festive gaiety to bedeck the village hall on the night of the Victory Ball.

http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/the-village.html

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