Tales of a Tiller Girl

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.

5

Ballet in the Blitz

Every night it was the same routine. As soon as it got dark the air-raid siren would go off as regular as clockwork. While I was at Italia Conti there were nightly bombings in London.

‘Action stations, Rene,’ boomed my grandfather’s voice from downstairs as the loud, familiar wailing rang through the streets. ‘Go and help Miss Smythe down from the attic.’

‘All right, Papa,’ I sighed.

Miss Smythe was the tiniest woman that I’d ever seen in my life; she was like a little bird with fluffy white hair that stuck up in a fuzzy halo around her head.

Instead of an Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden like the one we’d had at our old house, my grandparents had a Morrison shelter in the dining-room. It was a big steel cage with a solid top that you could use as a table during the day and then climb underneath into the cage part during the bombings. It was a huge, ugly thing that almost took up the whole room, but at least it was warm and dry inside, and it was safer than being out in the garden in a rickety Anderson shelter.

By the time I’d helped the frail spinster down three flights of stairs we could have been bombed to high heaven. But finally we made it down to the dining-room.

‘In you go,’ I said as I gave her her a helpful push into the shelter.

‘Thank you, dear,’ she replied.

It was a bit of a squash with four of us all laid out in a row, and it wasn’t very comfy. When the air-raid siren sounded really early on like tonight I got so bored cooped up in that metal cage with three old people. But suddenly I had a great idea.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ll do a performance to cheer you all up.’

‘Rene, I really don’t think that’s necessary,’ sighed my grandmother wearily.

But I was all fired up after a day of singing and dancing at Italia Conti, and once I’d got a bee in my bonnet there was no stopping me. Every woman at that time wanted to look like the film star Jane Russell, and even though I was only twelve I was no exception. Much to my grandmother’s disgust I took off my nightie, whipped off the scarf that she had around her neck, wrapped it round my non-existent boobies and started flouncing around like a Forties risqué glamour girl in just my vest and knickers.

‘I know a fabulous Betty Grable number,’ I said, before launching into an enthusiastic rendition of ‘I Heard the Birdies Sing’.

‘I took one look at you and Cupid took a good swing,’ I sang, failing to notice that the three OAPs who formed my audience were sitting there with a look of complete horror on their faces.

‘Rene, I really don’t think this is appropriate,’ said my grandmother.

‘Oh, Gaga, you’re such a spoilsport,’ I said. ‘I’ve got another song I could do if you don’t like that one.’

‘Rene, that’s enough,’ said my grandfather sternly. ‘You’ll give poor Miss Smythe a heart attack.’

It was only then that I glanced over at the old woman and saw the shocked look on her face. I’m surprised she didn’t have a stroke on the spot.

‘I only wanted to try and cheer you all up while the bombs were coming down,’ I grumbled.

As usual we spent all night in the shelter under the table, and then at 7 a.m. I climbed out and went and got myself ready. I pulled my hair into a bun, made sure that my dance bag was packed, and then stepped over the rubble of the previous night’s bombings and headed to the Tube station. By now the war had just become part and parcel of my daily life.

My grandparents never showed any interest in my dancing and they never asked me anything about Italia Conti. There was no ‘How was your day?’ or ‘What did you have for lunch?’ I was left to get on with it, and that was what I got used to.

My grandmother would make an evening meal for me, although she was a dreadful cook. The pastry on her steak and kidney puddings was always as heavy as lead, and the filling was just as unappetising, with grey meat floating in a watery gravy. My grandfather would make himself useful around the house, and he’d boil up my washing in the big copper in the scullery and do the shopping every day.

In many ways he was a nicer, more approachable person that my grandmother, so it was him whom I asked to get me some sanitary towels when I started my periods.

‘Papa, when you’re out doing the shopping today, please could you bring me some sanitary towels from the chemist?’ I said, my cheeks turning red.

Even though he was very Victorian in some of his attitudes, he wasn’t the least bit embarrassed.

‘Yes, all right, dear,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you your women’s things.’

I think the reason he was always so keen to do the shopping was that it was an excuse to stop in every pub on the way home and have a few pints of ale. That day, when I came home from Italia Conti, there was no sign of my grandfather.

‘Where’s Papa?’ I asked my grandmother.

‘No idea,’ she sighed. ‘He went off to do the shopping and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him since.’

By 10 p.m. I was starting to get worried. But Grandmother went to the front door before going to bed, and suddenly I heard the door open and then a terrible thud.

‘Good grief, Henry!’ I heard her yell.

I ran out into the hallway and there was Papa sprawled out face down on the tiled floor.

‘Look who I found asleep on the doorstep worse for wear,’ she tutted. ‘He must have nodded off stood up with his head resting on the door, because when I opened it he fell straight in.’

Gaga was certainly not amused.

‘Are you all right, Papa?’ I asked, trying to pull him up.

‘I’m fine, Rene. And don’t you worry, I’ve got your women’s things,’ he beamed, handing me a large packet of sanitary towels.

But for the most part I dealt with things on my own, and there were only a few times that it bothered me. One of those was at the end of my first year at Italia Conti when the school put on its annual production of Where the Rainbow Ends. It was a very famous play about a group of children who have to rescue their parents and face lots of dangers on the way. In the end they’re helped by St George, and it’s all very English and patriotic.

‘It’s going to be at the Coliseum,’ said Tony excitedly. ‘’Ere, imagine that, Rene. Us lot prancing round on one of the West End’s biggest stages.’

‘And in front of the King,’ said Daphne.

I couldn’t believe that we would be doing a Royal Command Performance for King George and Queen Elizabeth. I was even more thrilled when I was given a brief solo to perform.

‘Irene, I’d like you to be the evil blue fairy,’ Miss Moira the ballet teacher told me. ‘It’s your job to flit from one side of the stage to the other. Do you think you can do that, dear?’

‘Yes, Miss Moira,’ I said.

I was even more chuffed when I saw my costume – a blue dress with a boned bodice and a skirt with floaty bits of fabric coming off it.

But my heart was in my mouth as I turned up to rehearsals. With over 2,300 seats, the Coliseum was the biggest theatre in the West End and I was completely overwhelmed.

‘This place is huge,’ I sighed as I stood on the eighty-foot stage and stared out at all the seats. ‘It’s going to take me all day to dance across this stage.’

It seemed to go on for ever, and there was a huge, ornate domed roof and marble pillars.

We were thrown in at the deep end, as we were expected to learn the routine in half a day and we only had a week of rehearsals.

‘At the end of the performance the whole cast will come back on stage, and you must all turn stage right and curtsey to the royal box,’ Toni Shanley told us. ‘But there must be no staring, and under no circumstances must you look directly at the King and Queen, as that would be a breach of royal protocol. Please cast your eyes downward.

‘Is that clear?’

‘Yes, Miss Toni,’ we all replied.

I was fascinated by the whole idea of the royal family.

‘Do you think they’ll just use the normal theatre toilets like everyone else?’ I asked Tony Newley.

‘Oh, Irene, don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘They’re royalty. They don’t go to the lav.’

I was so naïve that I didn’t realise he was joking, and for many years afterwards I still believed that the royal family were too posh to go to the toilet!

Soon it was the night of the big performance. As I waited in the wings for my turn to dance on stage I just felt tremendously excited rather than nervous.

‘Blue fairy, on you go,’ whispered Moira Shanley.

Right on cue I ran onto the stage. The bright lights dazzled me and I could only make out the first row of the audience as the rest of the auditorium just looked very black. I took a deep breath and forced myself to remember Miss Toni’s words:

‘Focus on the front row of the dress circle. That way you’ll lift your head up, and the audience will see your eyes and the whole of your face. And smile, girls. Smile.’

As I danced across that stage I made sure that I had the biggest, broadest smile on my face. But the strange thing was, it wasn’t forced or fake. I was genuinely happy, as I suddenly realised in that moment that my dream really had come true. Here I was, nearly ten years later, dancing like one of those fairies I’d seen in the pantomime at the Clapham Grand. Not only that, it was on the stage of the biggest theatre in the West End. Performing in front of that huge crowd gave me such a thrill.

‘If only Mum were here to see me,’ I thought to myself.

But there was no time to be sad, and soon I was curtseying to the King and Queen and basking in the audience’s applause. Everyone was on a high and even strict Miss Toni seemed pleased with our performance.

‘That was a job well done, everyone,’ she said, although her face still didn’t crack a smile.

I was still buzzing afterwards, and I didn’t want to take off my fairy costume and get changed back into my ordinary clothes, as that would mean it was all over. As I got ready to go home I watched the rest of my classmates being greeted in the dressing-room by their proud parents, who had all come to watch the show.

‘Oh, Daphne darling, you were absolutely wonderful,’ said her mother, handing her a red rose and a huge box of chocolates.

Others were being lavished with hugs and kisses and praise for their performance. I knew there was no one in the audience who was there for me, but I hadn’t expected there to be. As I squeezed my way out and headed to the Tube I refused to feel sorry for myself or let it get to me.

As part of your training at Italia Conti you were also sent off to appear in other productions during the school holidays. In the early Forties there were little variety theatres in every town and suburb, so there were endless opportunities to perform in summer seasons and pantomimes. I did a short tour with the Sadler’s Wells Opera in which I played a gingerbread child in Hansel and Gretel, and I appeared in a variety show in Brighton. There were no such things as chaperones in those days. We just got on a train on our own and got on with it. A lot of the time we had to find our own places to stay.