Theatre Shoes (11 page)

“Oh, just a bit of a play that she asked us to do. Is this the classroom?”

In the next few weeks the children were so busy that they had no time to think if they liked London or the Academy, or living with Grandmother or anything else. Every morning they left the house at a quarter past eight to be ready and dressed for their first class at nine. They worked at lessons until twelve. From twelve till one Mark and Holly played games with the smaller children in the garden near the Academy, but Sorrel had special ballet classes with Winifred. At one o'clock they went down to the dining-room, which was in the basement, and had lunch, which was brought in vast containers from the British Restaurant. They were then sent out when it was fine, or, if it was wet, did what they liked indoors until two-thirty, they then did lessons until four-thirty. Sometimes they had singing or dancing or an acting class in the afternoon, and then they did extra lessons after tea. Normally, tea was at four-thirty, and from five till six-thirty they had special classes; ballet one night, tap dancing the next and on each night acting in either French or English, or a mime class.

All day long, unless there was a special class, the girls worked in their black overalls, white socks and sandals; but if there was a special class, such as Sorrel's extra ballet lesson before lunch, or Holly had an extra ballet lesson in the afternoon, then down they had to rush to the changing room, get into their tunics and knickers, snatch up their towels and go up to their class. At the end of that, after a quick rub down, back they had to dash into their overalls. “It's not so bad as it used to be,” the other children told them. “Now, until you get to wearing block shoes, the same sandals do for everything except tap, and the world doesn't come to an end if you just wear your tunic knickers and a shirt for tap; but when we could get the stuff there was all that changing into rompers, and we'd special satin sandals for ballet. It was change, change, all the time.”

As far as the lessons were concerned the children found things easy. The Academy standard was reasonably high, but nothing like as high as it had been at their previous schools, and some subjects were dropped altogether, such as Latin, but, of course, other things took their place. There was a tremendous lot of history of dancing and of the theatre, and any amount of time given to music. They had not only to learn the theory of music, but there were special classes on rhythm and special classes on appreciation, when music was played to them on gramophone records, and they were taught how to listen to it and to understand it. Music was an afternoon class. A Doctor Felix Lente came every afternoon and taught the whole school.

The children could have kept pace with all the ordinary school things, even the music, for, as a whole, the pupils were not exceptionally musical, but it was the dancing they found so difficult. In spite of extra coaching and the fact that all three were quite intelligent, they were taking a long time to catch up. Sorrel, in fact, was obviously never going to catch up with her age, and when she was finally put to bar work with a class, it was with girls of Holly's age. Holly and Mark worked with a special little class of beginners.

As well as all the dancing they had to memorise. Each of the children had two or three acting parts. In those first weeks they frequently found themselves trying to do three things at once. Have a bath, say a part out loud, and stick out one foot, murmuring with half their minds, plié and rise, plié and rise.

Everything was much more difficult for Sorrel than for Holly and Mark. Mark took his dancing lessons very lightly. He tried to remember all he could but he felt it was a shocking waste of time for somebody who was going into the Navy. Holly had only to compete with the new girls, who knew no more than she did, and very soon she began to like dancing and became one of the best in her small class. It was not saying much, but it was something to show for the person who held the Posy Fossil scholarship. But, for Sorrel, life was pretty tough. Every girl of her age had been learning dancing for at least two years, most of them had been working on their points for quite a while. Of course the majority had been evacuated for about a year during the heavy bombing, but they had kept up fairly well by working under a local ballet teacher. Sorrel could see that however hard she worked and however many extra classes she had she was never really going to be a dancer. It was not even as though she had any especial talent. She was light on her feet and quick at remembering, but it took more than that to make a dancer. Sometimes, in the night, she thought desperately of going to Madame and asking if she could not drop all this dancing, but even before she had framed the thought she knew it would be hopeless. Madame's Academy was primarily for dancing, and to get inside those doors you had to dance.

What Sorrel did find as the weeks went by was that she looked forward to all the acting classes. Mime, where you acted scenes with no words spoken at all, she loved. Then there were her speaking parts. She had the part of the queen in a French version of “The Sleeping Beauty.” She had a scene or two of Rosalind's in “As You Like It” and she had Friar Tuck in “Robin Hood.” Every acting class, she liked acting more. She found things happened to her. One day, quite suddenly, she knew what her hands should be doing. Another, she discovered how she should get from one place to another across the stage. She found that she knew what it meant when Miss Jay said, “You were well in the scene, Sorrel dear.” She began to know how to be acting, and yet to sound natural. Quite a lot of these things she could not possibly have explained, but they were each becoming clear thoughts, so that she knew that presently each one would be sorted out and she would be able to say, “I did that because …”

All the time in front of her at the acting classes there was Miranda to watch. Miranda in the school, or Miranda at a dancing class, or Miranda listening to an appreciation of music lesson was just an ordinary schoolgirl. But Miranda acting was something so special that you forgot she was Miranda. It did not matter to Miranda that she was dressed in a black overall and white socks and black sandals, and looked just like all the other girls, for when she was acting she became the person she was meant to be. As the princess as a child in “The Sleeping Beauty” you knew that she was very young and wearing stiff satin, and that she had never heard there were such things as needles in the world, and when the needle pricked her, though there was no needle there, you could see that it had gone in and had hurt her, and you could watch her going to sleep and know it was not just an ordinary sleep but would last for a hundred years. In her Rosalind scene she took the words and they sang out of her mouth in a golden stream, and yet, somehow, she made them ordinary words and Rosalind a real girl. And so it was when she played Maid Marian. Miranda always played the best parts; she never thought that she would not play them, and it seemed to be the rule that she picked what she liked and the rest of the class shared out what was over. Both Miss Jay and Madame Moulin treated Miranda as something special when she was acting. When she was not acting they treated her as the rather conceited schoolgirl that she was. It was all very muddling. In what little time Sorrel had to think about anything except her work, she thought about Miranda. Miranda was full of talent, she had inherited all the family gifts, everybody said so. To Madame Moulin and Miss Jay it was something wonderful to be descended from the Warrens. Sorrel respected Madame Moulin and Miss Jay, and so what they thought mattered to her. She still thought of herself as Forbes, but just now and again, when she was watching Miranda act, something stirred in her, and she felt excited and then part of her mind said, “You're a Warren too. You're a Warren too.”

CHAPTER IX

AN AUDIENCE

One morning the Academy bell clanged and all the children were summoned to the big main hall, for Madame wanted to speak to them. The big main hall ran through all three houses. At one end there was a platform with a table in the centre. The children filed in, the small ones in front and the big ones at the back. As each class arrived their teacher left them and went up on to the platform. When everybody was ready and after a little pause, Madame, in her stiff black frock and cerise shawl and ballet shoes, only this time without the stick, for the rheumatism was better, came to the middle of the stage. At once all the teachers and the girls swept big curtseys to the ground and the boys bowed, everybody said “Madame.” Madame smiled.

“Sit, children.” All the children sat on the floor with their legs crossed and their backs perfectly straight in the way they were taught to do in their classes. Madame waited until the last rustle of sitting down had died, then she came forward to the front of the platform. “I want to talk to you about the performances we are going to give in hospitals and for the troops. First of all I want to talk to you about transport. As, of course, every child here realises, petrol must not be wasted. Each of you will in time appear at these concerts but we shall not be able, as is our custom, to send you all in taxis. A car will be hired, or two cars if need be, to carry the costumes, and as many children as can be accommodated in the cars will travel in them. The rest of you will go in charge of your teachers by usual means of transport, whatever that may be; buses, trams, trains, or the Underground railways. It is not easy for your teachers to escort a lot of children by these means and I shall expect perfect obedience from even the smallest of you. Owing to the possibility of air-raids and the distance outside London which most of you live, these concerts will take place in the afternoon, usually on a Saturday, so that you may get home well before black-out.

“Now I want to speak to you about the concerts themselves. We have in this country men of practically every nationality in the world, including the Asiatic races, who don't perhaps speak or understand our language, but every one of them has, of course, been a child himself and most of them think of children of your age whom they've left behind in their homes. We shall, of course, give of our very best to these entertainments; but each one of you will know that you're not very skilful and you've got a great deal to learn; but in spite of these defects you will perhaps get a great deal of applause from your audiences. It's about that applause I want to speak to you. I want you to remember that when you've done a little dance or song or sketch, that the applause that you get is not only because you yourself have done your best, but because each of those men is seeing in you some child at home, and because of you is able to forget for a little while the unhappiness of not being in his home, and in some cases the great tragedy of not knowing what has happened to the children in his family. I am taking you all into my confidence about this because we, as a school, are gaining a great deal by these performances. Each one of you will have an opportunity of experiencing how it is to work before an audience, and it is, therefore, of the utmost importance that none of you should get conceited. Every child in this room is a beginner, and whether you're going to be an actor or actress or a dancer, or perhaps a musical performer, you've a great deal to learn, and all your life on the stage you will go on learning, and it would be a very sad thing if a great deal of applause just now made any one of you think that you know more than you do.” Madame paused and smiled. “There, I've made you all look very serious! What I want from each of you is the best that you can give and a secret knowledge in each of your hearts of how many are your faults and how much better you will do next time. That's all, children.”

The children got up and curtseyed or bowed and said “Madame” and led off in neat lines back to their classes.

To Sorrel, Mark and Holly, Madame's speech was rather puzzling. In the few school and village performances in which they had taken part there was, of course, applause at the end, but they had never thought that it meant anything more than that people had enjoyed themselves. What sort of applause did Madame mean that was likely to make them think that they knew a whole lot more than they did?

Sorrel was the first to find out. The upper middle concert for which they had rehearsed so long was taken down to South London to a seamen's hospital on a Saturday afternoon. Sorrel was, inside herself, scornful of the fuss that went on beforehand.

“You never saw such a fuss,” she confided to Mark and Holly. “I know every skip of that horrid lamb backwards, I've known it for weeks and weeks and weeks, and yet we never seem to have finished. There's an awful thing called a lay-out. That means the order in which everything comes and giving everybody time to change. It's all written out in a prop book with music cues. What on earth would it matter if there was a little pause? I bet the seamen wouldn't mind.”

When it came to the Saturday afternoon she had her first glimpse of the professional's angle of mind. Two cars took down the costumes to the hospital. Five children and Miss Jay went in one and five more and Winifred in another. Miss Sykes, the English literature mistress, who was stage managing, sat in the front of one car and Mrs. Blondin, the fat woman who played the piano, sat in the front of the other. There were seven children over, of whom Sorrel was one, and they were to be taken down by Miss Jones, the mathematics teacher.

The seven children waited in the Students' entrance and it was then that Sorrel first felt nervous. Nobody could possibly be nervous about dancing a lamb with a lot of other people, but it was a catching kind of nervousness for everybody. Would everybody get there all right? Were the clothes all right? Would all the music be there? Would anybody make a mistake? Would the Academy be disgraced?

Miss Jones had a mathematical mind. She had lived and breathed figures since she was much smaller than the seven children she was escorting. Until she came to teach at the Academy she had built her life on facts. Two and two made four and so on, and that was the end of that. Since the school at which she had taught had been bombed, and become a static water tank, she had taught at the Academy, and she had found herself in a new world. First of all, the Academy being a theatrical school, ordinary lessons could not, and did not, come first. That was a big shock to Miss Jones, who up till then had thought that nothing could be more important than mathematics. Shock number two had been war conditions. Since 1939 she had seen her pupils evacuated at a moment's notice to the other end of everywhere, and found herself teaching new children for a week or two, and then they too disappeared to be evacuated. When she came to the Academy it had been another sort of life. Children travelled in from miles out for classes and went away back to the country every night, and they did not come in because of mathematics or English literature, which she would have quite understood, but because of their dancing or acting classes. Now there was suddenly a full school again of children who lived in or near London, and had come back in the hope that severe bombing had ceased. She had thought then that they had come to get what she called “a proper education,” but once more she discovered that it was the dancing and the acting that had drawn them back. This, in itself, would not have confused her if she had not found that children who were training for the stage, and who put their stage training first, could be every bit as intelligent when learning mathematics as a child who came to school for just ordinary lessons. Miss Jones was just as much puzzled about this performance in a seamen's hospital as was Sorrel. In Miss Jones's reckoning, if you could add and subtract and understood decimals, then you did understand them and that was that. Surely, in exactly the same way, if you learnt a dance or a song or a sketch, you could do it and that, too, ought to be that. Then what was this nervous, keyed-up feeling? The only thing she could compare it to was an examination. She knew from experience how the things that you knew perfectly well could fade from you in an examination, and she guessed that giving a performance was the same thing. So as she collected her seven children in the hall she gave them the sympathetic smile that she gave to examination pupils, and said in the same encouraging tone: