Whistling in the Dark by Shirley Hughes

triumph, intended to make everyone in the class green with envy.
    “What will you be wearing, Ania?” she asked sweetly, knowing very well that Ania only had her school uniform and whatever hand-me-down clothing the WVS had managed to find for her.
    “Oh, shut up, Angela,” said Doreen. “I don’t suppose anyone’ll notice what any of us wears.”
    Slowly, the main feeling in the class was turning in Ania’s favour. They were all sick of Angela’s bullying tactics during break time and her insufferable gloating. But only Joan knew Ania’s real story, and how lonely she was at Miss Mellor’s.
    She decided to make a drawing for Ania, a funny picture of a grinning crocodile emerging from a half-open door with two little legs sticking out of his jaws. She wrote a rhyme to go with it:
    “A fussy old lady named Mellor,
    Kept a crocodile down in the cellar.
    She said, ‘It’s all right –
    I feed him at night!’
    But whatever has happened to Mellor?”
    When Joan gave it to Ania at school the following day, Ania scrutinized it in silence for a long while. Then, very slowly, a tiny smile appeared at the corners of her mouth. Then she began to laugh. Ania was actually laughing! A small, stifled, timid laugh, but a laugh nonetheless.
    Things are looking up, thought Joan.
    The build-up to the school dance involved a lot of serious preparation. They practised the foxtrot up and down the school gym to strict tempo dance music played on a wind-up gramophone operated by their gym mistress, who also called out the steps: “Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow! Now a reverse turn at the corner…”
    Joan’s problem – as this was an all-girls grammar school – was that the big, tall girls like her had to take the man’s part. Wheeling a smaller, daintier girl along while counting the steps under your breath was a feat that demanded maximum concentration. Joan wondered how on earth you were supposed to manage – if you ever actually got invited onto a dance floor by a male partner – to make the necessary light conversation as well as resist the urge to propel him firmly backwards.
    The event was scheduled for late afternoon, rather than evening, to avoid the blackout and the possibility of an air raid. They were let off school early that day to allow time to change out of uniform into their best dresses. Doreen had come up trumps by producing a really pretty dress for Ania to wear – very pale blue to set off her dark hair – as well as a pair of shoes that fitted her and even some precious nylons. At first Ania was reluctant to try them on. But when at last they persuaded her to change, and helped her loosen her hair out of the tightly wound braids and combed it back into a ponytail, the effect was a huge improvement.
    The grammar-school boys arrived promptly at four-thirty by bus or on bicycles. Sandwiches and soft drinks had been laid out in the school hall, where eagle-eyed members of staff were hovering. This was clearly going to be a heavily policed event. Grammar-school girls were not supposed to talk to the boys on their way to and from school, or outside the school gates. This invested boys with a glamour that they might not otherwise have had.
    Sometimes, in the mornings, as they cycled past (they were experts at riding with no hands on the handlebars), one of the boys would flick a screwed-up note at a girl. This struck Joan as rather romantic. But more often than not the messages she picked up said something like “Tell Doreen Russell I want to take her to the pictures next Saturday. I’ll see her outside the Queensway at 6.30” – which was disappointing, though not so much that Joan was ever going to let it spoil her friendship with Doreen.
    Now, shambling warily into the school hall, the boys showed less bravado than when they were on their bicycles. They herded sheepishly together on one side of the hall, loitering and jostling about in groups and attempting to appear nonchalant, while the girls chatted