Читать книгу Tales of a Tiller Girl - Irene Holland - Страница 8

Walking towards the heavy black door, I swallowed the lump in my throat. Today was the day that I’d been waiting for. It was my audition at Italia Conti, the country’s most prestigious theatre arts school.

As usual I was here on my own. My grandparents hadn’t said a word when I’d told them about the audition. No ‘Good luck, dear’ or ‘I hope it goes well.’ Not that I’d expected them to say anything or take any interest in what I was doing, as I knew by now that wasn’t going to happen. I knew that it was down to me to do this. Mum had sacrificed everything and gone away so that I could achieve my dream, and I had to get in.

My tummy was churning with a strange mixture of nerves and excitement as I walked up to the front door of Tavistock Little Theatre in Tavistock Square where the school was based. It was an old Victorian building and nothing fancy, but as soon as I pushed open that black door I entered a hive of activity.

Like a Tardis, it opened up inside to reveal several huge rehearsal rooms. There were girls running past in their black dance tunic uniforms, and every time a door opened I could hear the faint tinkle of a piano, the clatter of tap shoes or someone singing scales. I instantly felt at home and I knew this was where I wanted to be, singing and dancing all day long.

I stopped one of the girls going past.

‘Hello, I’m here for an audition,’ I told her, thankful that I hadn’t stammered.

‘I’ll go and get Miss Conti for you,’ she said.

A few minutes later one of the doors opened and a middle-aged lady with short, dark hair came out.

‘Hello, I’m Rene … I mean Irene Bott,’ I said. ‘I’m here for an audition.’

‘Wonderful to meet you, Irene,’ she said. ‘I’m Ruth Conti, Italia’s niece.’

Before she left, Mum had told me that Italia Conti, or old Mrs Conti as everyone called her, was still around but she was in her seventies now and so her niece Ruth had come over from Australia to help run the school.

‘You’ll have to excuse us,’ she said. ‘Our old school in Lamb Conduit Street was bombed out by the Germans last year, so the theatre have kindly lent us their rehearsal rooms until we can find some new premises.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I hope no one was hurt.’

She shook her head.

‘Thankfully all of the staff and pupils were on tour at the time with one of our shows. It was our poor building that took the brunt of the Nazis but we’re managing to muddle through.

‘I see you’ve bought your dance bag,’ she said. ‘Get yourself changed and then you can join in a ballet class first.’

‘Thank you, Miss Conti,’ I said.

Even though she seemed friendly, I could tell by the steely look in her eyes that she wouldn’t take any nonsense. As I got dressed into my dance tunic I started to feel very nervous and overwhelmed.

You can do this, Rene, I told myself.

I followed Miss Conti into an old, draughty rehearsal room, where lots of girls and a few boys were waiting. There was a ballet barre running down one side and big mirrors. The windows were all blacked out because of the war, so the room was lit by dim electric light. Miss Conti led me over to the front of the room where two women were talking. One was very tall and masculine looking. She had bobbed straight hair and was wearing trousers, and I couldn’t help but notice the big stick in her hand.

‘Hello, dear,’ she said. ‘Come in and join us. Have you done much ballet before?’

‘I’ve been going to classes since I was four,’ I said.

The other teacher couldn’t have been more different. She was small and feminine and had her hair pulled up in a bun, a floaty skirt on and a face full of make-up.

‘I’m Toni Shanley,’ said the tall, fearsome lady. ‘And this is my sister Moira Shanley.

‘Take your place and let’s begin. Just do what you can.’

‘Yes, Miss Toni,’ I said.

A grey-haired lady in a flowery dress was sitting at a piano in the corner with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. Miss Toni gave her a nod and she starting playing, puffing away on her cigarette with a bored look on her face.

‘Ready, girls,’ said Miss Toni. ‘Heads up, straight backs.’

As we stretched, she walked down the length of the barre correcting people by giving them a sharp rap with her stick.

‘Bottoms in, shoulders down,’ she yelled, coming down the row towards me.

‘Chin up, chest up,’ she said, lifting up my head with her finger and pressing in my rib cage. ‘Carry on, dear.’

I was nervous, as I knew both Miss Shanleys were watching me closely, but I was also very determined. I managed to follow every step and carry on until the end, but I didn’t have a clue how it had gone.

‘Well done, Irene,’ said Miss Moira after class. ‘You’re a good little dancer. I think Miss Ruth wants you to go to drama and elocution now.’

She seemed very sweet and gentle compared with her fearsome sister.

I hoped it had gone well but I was terrified that I wasn’t good enough. I knew I could do ballet, but I’d only been to my little local class and I’d only briefly had a few tap lessons.

If Miss Toni was scary, the drama teacher was the most terrifying woman that I’d ever seen in my life. She was wearing a long fur coat that dragged on the ground behind her and a huge Russian fur hat.

‘Don’t mind Miss Margaret,’ one of the boys whispered to me. ‘She’s a bit of a dragon.’

‘I can see that,’ I said.

She was very theatrical and what people might call a bit of a ‘luvvie’.

‘Come in, de-arr,’ she said in a big, booming voice when she saw me lurking by the door. ‘I’d like you to recite some Shakespeare for the class today.’

My heart started to pound with nerves.

‘Up on the stage?’ I said. ‘In front of everyone?’

‘Yes, de-arr,’ she said. ‘Is that a problem?

‘N-no,’ I said.

I didn’t normally get nervous but suddenly I was the most frightened that I’d ever been in my life. It wasn’t the fact that I’d never done drama before that was bothering me; it was my stutter that I was worried about. Would they give me a place at stage school if they knew that I stammered?

My legs felt like jelly as I stood on the stage and Miss Margaret passed me the play. It was one of Macbeth’s well-known speeches.

The whole room was deadly silent and all eyes were on me. My hands were shaking as I scanned the words.

Is this a dagger which I see before me?

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

You can do this, Rene, I told myself.

I took a deep breath.

‘I-is th-this a d-d-d- …’

B’s and d’s were particularly tricky for me to say, and no matter how hard I tried, the words just wouldn’t come out. I completely panicked and started gasping for breath.

I seemed to be up there for ever, but finally Miss Margaret waved her hand to stop me.

‘I see you have a stammer, dear,’ she boomed.

‘Y-yes,’ I said, ashamed and completely mortified that I’d shown myself up in front of the whole class

‘Let’s leave it there, then,’ she said.

I felt sick afterwards. She didn’t say anything else, but I was so worried that I had blown my chances.

Next up was a tap class, where the teacher was a tiny woman with jet-black hair and bright red lipstick. I much preferred ballet to tap, but I’d done a little bit before and managed to follow all the steps.

At the end of the morning, Miss Conti called me in to see her.

‘Well, Irene, I’ve had a chat to the teachers,’ she said.

I could feel my heart thumping out of my chest. I didn’t know what I’d do if they didn’t want me. How would I tell Mum that I’d failed?

‘By all reports you’re a lovely little dancer,’ she said. ‘A few other areas need a bit of work but we’ll take you.’

‘Pardon?’ I gasped. ‘Really?’

‘Yes, dear,’ she smiled. ‘I’ll give you a list of what you’ll need to bring with you to class. You can start next week.’

I couldn’t believe it, I was on cloud nine. I’m going to be a dancer, I thought, triumphantly. I’d done it! I couldn’t wait to write to Mum and tell her the news when I had an address for her. It really was a dream come true. I was going to spend every day doing what I loved and was so passionate about.

‘Gaga, Papa, I got into Italia Conti!’ I told them excitedly when I got home.

‘Very good, Rene,’ said my grandmother, not even bothering to look up from her needlework. I didn’t expect to get glowing accolades, but it would have been nice for them to acknowledge it. After all, they always seemed so proud of their other grandchildren who were all very academic and had gone off to good schools and universities.

The only downside of starting at Italia Conti was that I would have to leave Honeywell Road Primary, where I was very happy. I had a wonderful teacher there called Mrs Ritchie, and I couldn’t wait to tell her my news.

‘Mrs Ritchie, I got into Italia Conti,’ I told her with a big grin. ‘I start next week.’

‘Well, that is excellent news,’ she said.

At the end of the day, she called me over to her and pulled out a chair from under the table.

‘Stand up there, Rene,’ she said in a loud voice. ‘Now tell the rest of the class what you’re going to be.’

‘I’m going to stage school and I’m going to be a ballet dancer,’ I said proudly.

The whole class clapped and gave me three cheers. She was the only person to recognise my achievement and it felt lovely to have someone making a fuss of me. It made me feel really special and I’ve never forgotten that.

Even though I was sad to leave school I couldn’t wait to start at Italia Conti. I spent the next week getting all of the things that I needed for class. Thankfully Mum had left me some money for any extras that I might need. My grandmother made my uniform, which was a black sleeveless satin tunic with two slits up the side and tied in a bow at the back, and black cotton gym knickers.

One afternoon I got the bus up to Covent Garden and went to Frederick Freed’s in St Martin’s Lane, which I’d heard was the place for professional dancers to get their shoes.

‘I’d like some dance shoes, please,’ I told the shop assistant. ‘I need some bright red tap shoes with bows, pink ballet shoes and pink satin pointe shoes.’

‘Well, that’s quite a list, Miss,’ she said. ‘Are you here with your mother?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m here on my own.’

Thankfully she knew what she was doing and fitted them for me. There’s something special about dance shoes when they’re brand new, and I loved every minute of it. The shop assistants made such a fuss of me and brought out about a dozen pairs of ballet shoes all in different shades of pink satin. I loved the pointe shoes the most, as I’d never done pointe work before and that was what prima ballerinas wore. They were stuffed with papier mâché in the toes.

‘They’re beautiful,’ I sighed. ‘I can’t wait to learn to dance on those.’

‘You’ll have to get your mother to sew the ribbons on,’ the shop assistant told me.

‘Oh, my mother’s not around at the minute,’ I told her. ‘I can do it myself.’

It was special pink ribbon that was satin on one side and cotton on the other, so they didn’t slip when you tied them around your ankles.

‘It’s important to get them just right,’ the woman at Freed’s told me. ‘Not too tight, not too loose.

‘You also need to darn the ends with embroidery cotton so they don’t wear out and place a lamb’s wool pad on your toes to protect them.’

I also had to sew the elastic straps on my flat satin ballet pumps.

I went home with my head spinning about all the things I had to remember to do. Although I’d been taught needlework at school, I wasn’t much good at it, but I was determined to do it and not have to ask my grandmother for help. So I spent the next few evenings sewing away for hours. God knows what sort of a job I did, but I was so proud that I’d done it all myself.

Soon it was time for my first day and I was filled with excitement as well as a few nerves. Walking through those doors at Italia Conti felt to me like going into fairyland. I wasn’t even disheartened when the first person I saw was Miss Margaret, the drama teacher.

‘Hello,’ I said nervously. ‘I’m here for my first day.’

‘What’s your name, de-arr, and I’ll put you down on the register?’ she asked.

‘Irene,’ I said. ‘Irene Bott.’

Miss Margaret put down her fountain pen and gave me a look of utter disdain.

‘Excuse me?’ she said.

‘Irene Bott,’ I repeated.

She fixed her steely gaze on me.

‘Bott?’ she boomed. ‘You can’t possibly come to Italia Conti with a name like Bott. Come back tomorrow with a new name.’

‘Oh – er, all right then,’ I said.

I’d never thought there was anything particularly wrong with my name. She never said why, but perhaps she thought that Bott was too much like bottom. I wouldn’t have dreamed of saying no to her, but I worried about it all day.

By the time I got home that evening I’d really started to panic. How was I going to come up with this new name? Pluck one out of thin air completely at random?

I went up to my bedroom and was flicking through my favourite comics for inspiration when I noticed the name of one of the characters in the Beano – Sylvia Starr, ace reporter.

‘That’s it!’ I said.

The next day I went back and Miss Margaret was waiting there with the register.

‘So have you got a new name, de-aar?’

‘Yes,’ I said proudly. ‘I want to be called Irene Starr.’

She looked at me in disgust and said, ‘Well, I suppose that will have to do then, won’t it?’

From then on, Irene Bott didn’t exist any more. I was always known as Irene Starr.

A few days later a letter arrived from Mum. I had written to her to tell her all my news but it took weeks for the mail to get through to the troops. It was lovely to see the familiar scrawl of her handwriting.

Dearest Rene,

I was so pleased to hear that you won a place at Italia Conti and I bet you are enjoying doing your beloved dancing all day. Don’t worry about the fees, I have contacted Miss Conti directly and taken care of them from here.

It was clear from her letter that my mother was enjoying travelling and she was really taken with Egypt.

It’s so different to performing in the orchestra of the big London theatres. Our ‘stage’ is four wooden planks of wood resting across oil drums or ammunition boxes. There are a couple of shoddy dancers, a singer (if you can call her that) and I’m one of a quartet of musicians. Some people have cruelly nicknamed ENSA ‘Every Night Something Awful’ but we are doing the best we can to entertain the troops and keep up their morale in difficult circumstances. Despite all the hardships, I am finding it fascinating experiencing another culture so different to ours.

Mum still had her strong principles, though, and she described how one day she had seen a little boy begging in one of the villages. She had gone over and given him some money but the sheikh of the village had seen her.

This man with a long beard wearing a robe came and snatched the money off the poor boy and put it into his own pocket. Well, Rene, you know me. I went berserk. I ran over to him and said: ‘Don’t you dare do that. Give it back.’ I think the fellow was stunned that a woman, and one as tiny as me, would challenge him. I know I could probably have got into all sorts of bother but he did as I asked.

I smiled at the thought of the man’s shocked face as my mother had come marching over to him and given him what for. I bet he hadn’t been expecting that!

Love you and miss you, Rene.

Love always,

Mum xx

She’d sent me a black-and-white photo of her sitting by the Suez Canal. She looked happy, and I noticed that she’d had her hair cut into a shoulder-length bob, which was probably cooler in the oppressive heat of the desert.

‘Oh, Mummy, I miss you,’ I sighed, my eyes filling up with tears.

I felt so lonely sometimes but I knew there was no point in moping. I tried to take all the positives from it – like my freedom, for a start. Unlike most twelve-year-olds I never had to ask permission to do anything.

I also loved every minute of being at Italia Conti, and that eased the pain of being parted from Mum. As soon as I walked in the door and heard the tick of a metronome or the tinkle of a piano I felt secure somehow. It was my sanctuary, my escape from the outside world. The war was raging, my family was thousands of miles away from me, but in there I felt safe and I could spend all day doing what I loved, which was dancing.

Everyone there shared the same love of performing and I soon made close friends. I had been worried that, with the fees so high, the other pupils would be from wealthy families, but there were children from more ordinary homes like mine. One of them was a boy named Anthony Newley, who we all called Tony. I liked him straight away because he was fun and loud, and he was always happy and laughing. He was the son of a single mother and he had four siblings.

‘I’m an East End lad, Irene,’ he told me in his strong cockney accent. ‘I’m only ’ere ’cos they gave me a job as an office boy in return for my fees. I ain’t no rich, pampered prince.’

He was always joking around and getting ticked off in class. Like the time in tap he pulled funny faces behind the teacher’s back as she demonstrated a routine. We all sniggered, but mainly because he hadn’t realised that Miss Gertrude had spotted him in the mirror.

‘Mr Newley,’ she said. ‘You’re as mad as a March hare. Now please stop larking about.’

‘Yes, Miss,’ he said, giving me a wink.

He was quite a character, but he was also very talented and you could tell there was something special about him. He had what we would describe today as the X-factor, and I knew he was going to have a bright future in show business.

Another member of our gang was a girl called Nanette Newman. She was a few years younger than me, and she was pretty but very quiet and shy. One of my best friends at Conti’s was a stunningly beautiful girl called Daphne Grant. She had bright blue eyes, was very glamorous like Rita Heyworth and had a lovely singing voice. She was an only child and her parents, who were quite elderly, spoiled her rotten. They doted on her and had done absolutely everything for her as she’d grown up. Anything that she asked for, she got, whether it was clothes or jewellery or having a shampoo and set every week at the hairdressers.

No one at Italia Conti dared misbehave. We all knew how lucky we were to be there and we knew the rules – don’t be late for class, always be correctly dressed, at the end of a ballet class curtsey to the teacher and the pianist, but clap them after a tap or jazz class.

‘You’re all here because you want to be,’ Miss Conti told us sternly. ‘And while you’re here I expect you to listen and to work hard. If you don’t want to do that, then you’re free to go whenever you want.’

I loved the discipline and the structure. The curriculum was a mixture of ballet, tap, contemporary dance, singing, drama and acrobatics. I liked everything except acrobatics, where I struggled to do the forward and backward stopovers, which were like somersaults that you did from a standing position.

Much to my surprise, during my first week at Italia Conti I discovered that I had a good singing voice. Miss Polly, the singing teacher, was an absolute darling. She was potty about Ivor Novello, and she would sit at the piano and go off into some sort of a trance as she played his songs.

‘That’s wonderful, dear,’ she said after I’d sung for her for the first time. ‘Absolutely marvellous. You make a lovely mezzo soprano.’

‘Do I?’ I said.

Singing also had one other bonus.

‘My stammer’s gone,’ I said proudly.

‘Of course it has,’ she said. ‘Have you ever heard a stammering singer?’

I didn’t stutter at all when I sang, and after two weeks at Italia Conti my stutter had practically disappeared.

Even though I loved it, they were long days and we worked hard. I’d leave the house at 7 a.m. and it would be after 7 p.m. when I’d get the Tube home. A few weeks after I started there I was allowed to move on to pointe work, which I’d never done before. We were told to rub our feet with surgical spirit every night and then put cold cream on them to try to soften the skin, but I still got blisters from my toes pressing on the pointes. When they split and bled I was in absolute agony.

‘What’s wrong, Irene?’ said Toni Shanley, seeing me wince in class one day.

‘My feet are bleeding,’ I told her.

I could see the blood seeping through the pink satin on my shoes.

‘So?’ she said. ‘Carry on and put a plaster on them later. You and your feet need to toughen up.’

I knew there was no option but to carry on dancing. You wouldn’t dare put a foot wrong in Miss Toni’s class, and if you did you’d get a sharp rap from her dreaded stick.

One afternoon we were doing a ballet class with her when suddenly there was an almighty explosion. The walls literally shook, and it felt like the whole building had been lifted up into the air and put back down again.

We all looked at each other, our eyes wide with terror.

‘What the heck was that?’ Daphne whispered to me.

I didn’t know, but I was worried that the whole theatre was about to fall down and collapse on top of us. Miss Toni didn’t even flinch, however, and just carried on as if nothing had happened.

‘Demi-pliés,’ she said. ‘Bottoms in, long necks, strong legs.’

I think we were all in a daze, but in a way we were more frightened of Miss Toni and her stick than a German bomb, so we just carried on dancing.

It was only after class that we all gathered round in a huddle.

‘Did you hear that?’ I said. ‘What the heck was it?’

‘I think the Jerries just dropped a big one on us,’ said Tony Newley.

We all ran to the front door, and as we opened it and walked down the steps I felt glass crunching beneath my feet. Outside we were greeted by a scene that I can only describe as utter devastation.

‘Good grief!’ I gasped.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Practically the whole of Tavistock Square apart from our little corner had been totally destroyed in the blast.

‘The church is completely gone,’ someone said.

It was now just a pile of rubble, and all the windows of the few buildings that were still standing had been blown out.

Looking around at the carnage, I knew we had been very lucky. It was a miracle that the windows in our rehearsal room had remained intact.

‘It must have missed us by a whisker,’ said Daphne.

It was scary to think how close we had all just come to being blown to smithereens and that we had just danced our way through it.