Theatre Shoes

by Noel Streatfeild

  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:

  “All ready? Now, off we go.”

  The merchant seamen had all walked or been pushed into one big ward of the hospital. At the far end was a space meant to represent a stage and at the side of this was the piano. It made rather a good kind of stage because there was a door each side and at the back there was a nurses’ sitting-room, which the children used as a dressing-room. The two cars had got there before the seven children who had come with Miss Jones arrived. Everybody was talking in whispers and fussing about and trying not to look excited. Winifred and Miss Jay had rouge and some lipstick and made the children up. Mrs. Blondin remained as detached as usual. She had not got on her usual red blouse to-day, but had changed into a crêpe de Chine one because it was a party. She stood by the window and peered out over a lot of bomb damage to the distant wharves, and sang under her breath “Down in the forest something stirred.” Sorrel was changing near her and though she did not mind the song at first, she found it a little depressing when she heard it for the fourth time, especially as there was not a forest. Obviously, Mrs. Blondin was one of those people who got great comfort from singing about her little grey home in the west when she was not in her little grey home, or about Dixie when she was in London.

  The programme was to open with a speech made by Miranda. For it she wore her school black overall. The clock struck three and Winifred looked round and beckoned to Miranda. She tried to beckon to Mrs. Blondin, but she was engrossed in singing “It was only the note of a bird,” so she did not notice things like beckonings, and Winifred had to tap her on the shoulder. Miss Jay looked round the room.

  “Absolute silence, children.”

  As Miss Jay said those words and the doors shut behind Mrs. Blondin and Miranda, Sorrel felt not herself, but part of everybody left behind in the dressing-room. She felt her breath coming in little short gasps, she felt she could hear her heart beating and she felt her fingers grow sticky. Miranda’s voice, in a muffled way, came through the closed door. She was speaking beautifully, telling the seamen how proud they were to be allowed the chance to amuse them, how they would please remember that they were only children and how they were going to do their best, and how immensely grateful they were to them because they knew, but for the men who were the audience and men like them, they would have starved. And then, in quite a different voice, she began to recite Kipling’s “Big Steamers.”

  As Miranda finished, the heads of all the children turned towards the doors and Miss Jay and Winifred exchanged glances. Everybody was waiting, and then it came—the applause. Sorrel, because it was her first performance with the Academy, did not understand why that clapping with its roaring, pleased sound meant anything to her. Of course, Miranda was her cousin, but why should she care so much how Miranda was doing? Why did she feel that what Miranda did was part of what she did? Winifred was shepherding through one of the doors children who were dancing in a little ballet which was to come next. They were being sent on through the same door as Miranda had gone in by, and as they went on Miranda came back through the door on the other side. Miss Jay gave Miranda a pleased nod and Miranda ran to the corner where she was changing and pulled off her overall. Winifred closed the door behind the last of the ballet and came across to Sorrel. She picked up a brush and began brushing Sorrel’s hair.

  “They’re warming up nicely.”

  Sorrel liked Winifred and ventured a question.

  “Does it make a great difference if a thing starts well? I mean, if Miranda had forgotten her words, which of course she wouldn’t, it couldn’t have spoiled the ballet, could it?”

  There was a very little bit of curl at the bottom of Sorrel’s hair. Winifred made the best of this, twisting it round her fingers.

  “It always matters. This sort of show has to be built up. If anything goes badly and the men don’t like it, then you’ve lost something, the interest and so on of the seamen, and you’ve got to start again to get it back.”

  Winifred went away after that and Sorrel, who was in her black crêpe de Chine lamb’s tunic and had nothing further to do for the moment, leant against the wall and thought. If in a performance like this to seamen just done by children at an Academy everything mattered so much, what on earth could it be like when you were a real actress like her mother had been? If you were bad in your part for even a moment, if you became yourself and slipped out of the play for a second or, most awful of all, if you forgot your words, how fearful it must be, everybody else who acted with you having to work doubly hard to get the audience back to the mood of believing in you, which they had been in before.

  The lambs’ turn came in the last half of the performance. Sorrel was the third lamb from the end, and she stood in a queue by the door, fiddling with her tunic and seeing that her shoes, that she had just taken off, were where she could find them again, and looking at Winifred with an anxious eye. Then the shepherdesses’ song was over, the door was opened and Mrs. Blondin started to play one of Schubert’s “Moments Musicaux.” Sorrel held out her arms and raised her right leg.

  It was impossible while Sorrel was being a lamb for her to think about the audience. Even simple work such as the lambs did took all of her mind. Toes had to be pointed just right, hops had to happen exactly on a beat, and she had to make her exit on exactly the right bar. But at the end when she ran on to curtsey with the rest she had a chance to look round. In the front of the ward were the beds, behind them the sitting chairs and behind that were the walking cases. It was then that Sorrel saw what Madame had meant about all nationalities. There were black faces and yellow faces and white faces. There were bandaged heads, limbs in plaster of Paris, there were some men so covered with bandages that you could hardly see them at all. A whole lot of the seamen, especially three Chinese, she was certain could not understand anything that was said in English, and yet everybody was smiling and looking pleased. Because of Madame’s speech she could see why, and what she had meant about conceit. Of course, it was not anything much that they had just done. They had spent a lot of time on it and there was no muddle or anything like that. Probably any children anywhere could have done it. But these broad smiles that were greeting them were because of some other children somewhere else. Just as, if she were away, she might think some boy or girl somewhere like Mark or Holly. When she ran back the second time to curtsey with the rest of the lambs she gave an especial smile to one of the three Chinese. He had one arm in plaster of Paris and, as far as she could see, the rest of him was in plaster of Paris too. Anyway, he was lying very stiff and flat in his bed, and in spite of it all he was managing to smile.

  It was hard for Sorrel, having got her lamb off her chest, not to burst into excited talk with the others, but Miss Jay and Winifred were strong on discipline and at the first sound of a raised voice they flew to the culprit with an angry face. Those of the lambs who were not taking part in any other act huddled together by the window.

  “Seemed to go all right, didn’t it?”

  “I nearly tripped as I came on, there was an awful rough bit on the floor just there. Did you see?”

  “Nancy’s got her Shepherdess dress on wrong. Those panniers ought to stick out.”

  “She sang all right, though.”

  “Did you feel nervous, Sorrel? Didn’t make any mistakes, did you?”

  The entertainment finished with another short speech from Miranda and then all the children came on in the dresses in which they had last appeared and sang “There’ll always be an England” and “God Save the King.”

  It was while they were changing to go home that the exciting thing happened. The Matron of the hospital came in and spoke to Winifred and Miss Jay. Winifred and Miss Jay had a puzzled conversation and then Winifred called out, “Will all the lambs come here a minute?” Surprised, the lambs stopped dressing and came over to her. Matron looked at them all and then laid her hand on Sorrel’s arm
.

  “I think this is the little girl.”

  Winifred finished fastening Sorrel’s frock and tidied her hair.

  “We’ll send her out and see.” She turned to Sorrel. “There’s a sick Chinaman who wants to speak to one of you.”

  Matron took Sorrel by the hand and led her over to the bed of the Chinaman in plaster of Paris. There was no doubt that it was Sorrel he wished to see, for he nodded. He was too weak to say very much, but he smiled and whispered.

  “Makee plesent.” He then fumbled under his pillow and brought out a queer little china fish on the end of a string.

  “It’s a present for you, dear,” said Matron. “Speak slowly if you want to thank him.”

  Sorrel went round to the left-hand side of the bed because that hand was free from the plaster of Paris. She laid her hand in his.

  “Thank you, so very much,” she said, speaking every word slowly. “I will keep it always.”

  The man smiled.

  “Makee mluch luck.”

  Back in the nurses’ sitting-room, the other children crowded round Sorrel.

  “What was it? Who wanted you?”

  Sorrel told them. Then she held out the little fish.