by Jim Jepps

But were you there for the dancing? That’s all I used to hear. Old timers with grizzled faces and paws as big as your face would stare down and shake their heads.

People like me would never know what it was like. How it was to dance night after night after night. Never knowing if this step might be your last, or your last but one.

Those of us who came after. Those of us who were there for the talking, we get no love. I’m sorry but we don’t. We get no respect for our sacrifices.

You think we liked it? You think that just because the music had stopped then that was the end of it? Not by a long shot.

My grandfather’s feet had been worn down to nubs and although my grandmother thought there might be a silver lining to this cloud he most certainly did not.

Sometimes he would sing so long and so hard that grandmother would wheel him down to the shed and lock the door. They all suffered. They all bare scars.

Once on Christmas Eve all the veterans got together to drink and reminisce. I joined them for a while, as a courtesy, but there is only so much nostalgia one man can take.

No. I was not there for the dancing. No. I have never seen ten thousand men advance as a reel, bawling and chanting and wearing the weight of the world upon their shoulders.

I am not comparing the two but if they think we had it easy, well, they’re dead wrong. I had to talk solid for three days, without interruption. They stared at me the whole time in silence. Rows of them, all unblinking, unrelenting.

There was no sleep and as my raw, strung out voice stated for the hundredth time that night that we could live with one another without dancing, without speaking, I could feel my heart about to break. I could feel some kind of permanent damage happening within me. A damp snapping inside my chest.

They were indomitable. Impassive in the face of the weakness of my arguments. The paper thin cut of my jib too obvious as their eyes bore holes right through me.

I still see those eyes. When I’m driving, when I’m making love, when I’m unlocking the shed – eyes that confirm I have nothing. That I will never amount to anything. That no matter how hard I try the world will be unmoved.

I’m glad I wasn’t there for the dancing and I wish I had not been there for the talking either. But you can’t tell the old timers that. No one wants to hear that they had danced for nothing.