or engaged are rare on the dance floor, which h
noted as a highly respectable Marriage bureau.
I met only one dancer who could remember clearly how and why he began (perhaps because it happened to him rather late in life, at the age of sixteen). This was a policeman in plain Clothes at the Hammersmith Palais, who said: You know what you're like when you're sixteen, You're a dead loss at what to do. My mother said, "Why don't you go down the Royston Ball Room, Penge, renowned for ballroom dancing?" So I went along and saw all these couples doing these fancy steps. Have to do something about this, I thought.' Now he is captain of one of the celebrated Penge Formation Dancing Teams; he told me that he travelled to competitions all over the country, whenever he wasn't busy giving demonstrations with the team at business firms' dinners in big hotels. I wondered whether police duties mightn't clash with his other engagements, but he said no, he had a desk job. 'They're very keen on my dancing up at the station. They fol- low me on television.'
The policeman, too, had tried giving up dancing, but found that a life of luxury, with free evenings and money to spend, was not SPartan enough for him. 'When you're dancing, You lose weight, you never eat, you dash home
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