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
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