‘Please can I do that, Mummy?’ I asked afterwards. ‘Can I dance like a fairy?’
‘Well, you could do ballet lessons if you wanted,’ she said.
I didn’t forget about it, and Mum kept her promise and I started going to a weekly lesson at a local ballet school in Clapham. It was in a big house, and one room had been converted into a ballet studio with huge mirrors and a barre down one side. Each lesson cost 2s. 6d. (two shillings and sixpence), and it must have been a struggle for Mum to afford it, but I loved every minute of it and I lived for that day of the week. Leotards hadn’t been invented in those days and tutus were only worn for formal occasions like shows and exams, so I wore a loose black cotton tunic that my grandmother had made me, and I had a piece of pink chiffon wound around my head and tied in a big bow at the back to keep my hair off my face.
I hung on to the ballet mistress’s every word, and I memorised each step and practised until it was perfect.
‘I’d like you to be Greek slave girls today,’ she told us one afternoon. ‘I want you to pretend that you’re holding a vase as you promenade.’
It was very sad, melancholy music, and as I paraded around the room pretending to hold a heavy Grecian urn on my shoulder I felt in my heart I really was that unhappy little slave girl. So much so, I even felt tears in my eyes as I danced.
At the end of the class, when Mum came to collect me, my ballet teacher took her to one side.
‘I think Irene has great potential,’ I heard her say. ‘She really seems to feel the music and her timing is spot on.’
That didn’t mean anything to me. All I knew was that dancing was just another way of being a fairy and I loved it. But just a few weeks after starting my lessons I suddenly got very ill. I was burning up, and all this horrible stuff was oozing out of my right ear. I was in absolute agony.
‘We’d better take you to see the doctor,’ said Mum.
I knew it had to be serious for that to happen. These were the days before the National Health Service, and a visit to the doctor’s surgery cost a lot of money.
The doctor examined me as I whimpered in pain.
‘She has an abscess of the middle ear,’ he told my mother. ‘You need to get her to hospital straight away. If it’s not treated quickly it can be highly dangerous and spread to the brain.’
By then I felt so ill I could barely walk, and Mum had to carry me to St George’s Hospital in Tooting. When we got there she passed me to a doctor.
‘Say goodbye to your mother,’ he told me.
Suddenly I was absolutely terrified. I’d never been away from Mum and I didn’t know where they were taking me or what they were going to do to me.
‘No!’ I yelled. ‘I want to stay with Mummy.’
I kicked and screamed and made such a fuss it took three nurses to cart me off. My little body shook with sobs as they held me down on a table while the doctor poured peroxide in my poorly ear. It burned and stung, and I was petrified.
‘We have to be cruel to be kind,’ he told me. ‘This will hopefully kill the infection.’
There was no such thing as antibiotics then. Afterwards my ear was padded up with a big gauze dressing that had to be changed every week.
I was in such a state when they took me back to Mum, who looked really worried.
‘It’s all right, Rene,’ she said, giving me a cuddle. ‘You can come home with me now. It’s all over.’
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ I sighed.
I was exhausted but it was such a relief that they weren’t keeping me in. I had to go back every week for months so they could put more peroxide in my ear and I was in constant pain. Eventually it seemed to work and thankfully they managed to save my hearing, although I’ve still got scar tissue in my ear now.
As soon as I was better, Mum started working again. I was a bit older now, and she needed to try to earn some money to help support us. She would spend hours every day practising her violin, and then go to the theatre and perform in the orchestra at night when I was in bed. While she practised I would be left to my own devices to amuse myself, which wasn’t hard thanks to my vivid imagination.
One day I took myself off to Clapham Common and lay on my front with my nose in the long grass. I watched ants and ladybirds crawl around and worms slither in the soil, but I wasn’t there to look for wildlife.
‘Come out,’ I whispered. ‘I know you’re in there somewhere.’
I was there to find the fairies. I stayed like that for hours with my head buried in the grass, just watching and waiting for my favourite creatures to make an appearance. I believed that they were real and I could see them in my head. I knew that all fairies danced, they lived in flowers and they had very long, floaty wings like butterflies or moths. I used to spend hours lying there on the common waiting for them. I never told anyone, though, as I was frightened that they’d make fun of me.
Even now, at the ripe old age of eighty-four, if anyone asks what my religion is I tell them this: ‘I believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden!’
It often gets me a few funny looks. But I find it quite sad today that children don’t have vivid imaginations any more; they’re told so much.
I always say to my granddaughter Billie, ‘How do you know that I’m not a fairy?’
So she checked my back and found two little nobbles.
‘That’s where your wings will grow, Grandma,’ she told me.
Now, whenever I see her she checks my back to see if my wings have sprouted yet!
I suppose in a way I was a very lonely child as I was left on my own to get on with everything. Nobody asked me what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go, or thought up things to entertain me, so I had to make my own fun. In one sense it worked in my favour because I didn’t have to ask – Mummy, can I do this? I just went and did it. Although Raymond still lived with us, by now he had got a job as an apprentice for a company in central London that manufactured Bakelite, so he was out at work all day.
I knew my mother loved me and she was very affectionate, but all she lived for was her music. Looking back, I’d say she was very unsociable and introverted; she didn’t have friends and never went out. She would practise all day long and go out to work at the theatre at night. She never did anything but play the violin, and spent so many hours practising that I’d get fed up.
‘Mummy, I’m bored,’ I told her one afternoon.
‘Rene, only boring people get bored,’ she said.
So I decided to take myself off on an adventure. I walked down to Clapham and caught the No. 49 bus to the West End. I had a terrific sense of freedom that sadly children don’t have these days. Children were very free and I was always either on Clapham Common or Wandsworth Common, playing with friends, or on a Routemaster going somewhere exciting. I paid my tuppence ha’penny (two and a half old pennies) to the conductor and headed into town.
I sat on the top deck and looked out of the window as we went past Battersea Park and down the King’s Road. I got off at High Street Kensington and from there headed to Regent Street. I must have walked miles but I knew exactly where I was going – to my favourite place in the whole world, Hamley’s toy store. I wandered from floor to floor gazing in awe at the giant teddy bears, the life-size dolls, sailboats and pedal cars. Things I knew that my mother could never afford.
Afterwards