Shortly before she died a few years ago, my Aunt Lizzie was recalling her courting days in the late 1920s and early 1930s and remembering the dance-halls in the locality; places which survived into the 1960s and were familiar to me, too. The St Margaret's Hall and the Kinema Ballroom, Dunfermline; the Palais, Cowdenbeath; and the 'Snake Pit', Rosyth. That wasn't the last's real name, which neither my aunt nor I could remember. It was really no more than a big room above the Co-op store, near the roundabout on Admiralty Road. On the way home from the pictures - the Rosyth Palace, maybe having seen there a naval epic such as The Cruel Sea or Above Us the Waves - I sometimes stood at the bus stop opposite and listened to the drums, trumpet and saxophone, and through the windows saw the shadows of people dancing in a subdued orange light.

LRB 2 January 2003 | PDF Download