Stage Mum

by Lisa Gee

  The third email told us that Saturday’s rehearsal would last all day, instead of just the morning as we’d been told. The children would be singing in the morning and blocking in the afternoon. Very nice, but ‘blocking’? What was ‘blocking’? It sounded more like rugby than musical theatre … I emailed Jo. Blocking, it turns out, means staging. Oh, right. I adjusted my diary and added a new word to my lexicon of theatrical jargon.

  Thursday, same routine: school, lunch, journey, Harry Potter, noisy wait at the Jerwood, coffee at the Arlington, followed by a halfhearted attempt at getting on with the research and report-writing I was supposed to be doing. The trouble was, everything else going on around me was so much more interesting. Even Café Arlington, with its own art gallery and its community projects. Concentrating on what I was supposed to be doing wasn’t easy. Still, there was always Friday, when Dora’s team weren’t in, she would do her first full school day of the week and I would have a whole day at home to catch up on my work. And things like washing, shopping and spending time with my husband. With a little bit of luck – and an impressive amount of multitasking – I could fit all of that in between nine and three thirty. In my dreams.

  Jo’s email arrived at six o’clock, with the subject line ‘Lots of things – sit down with a drink!’, but I didn’t. She confirmed Friday’s rehearsal times. The following week there would be rehearsals every day from ten in the morning until eight at night. The children wouldn’t be required all the time – that would be illegal – but Jo thought the timetable would be very different from the first week. Also, we or our agents (Dora was one of the minority who didn’t have one), might be contacted by the BBC, who would be making a documentary about Connie and filming during rehearsals. And – because the show was likely to finish ‘the wrong side of 10 p.m.’, the performance schedule had to be two days on, four days off, in order to comply with child labour laws. So it would look like this

  Monday

  Geese

  Tuesday

  Geese

  Wednesday

  Kettles

  Thursday

  Kettles

  Friday

  Mittens

  Saturday

  Mittens

  Monday

  Mittens

  Tuesday

  Mittens

  Wednesday

  Geese

  Thursday

  Geese

  Friday

  Kettles

  Saturday

  Kettles etc.

  The Gretls, because four of them were being divided into three teams, would be dancing to a different beat, one that was yet to be decided. Jo was planning to do a draft schedule for everyone else, which would exclude the first couple of weeks, because it would be a while before the creative team decided which team – and which Gretl – would be performing on press night. This meant that everyone apart from those with Gretls in the show would soon be able to book tickets, at least for their children’s later performances, but we wouldn’t.

  And finally:

  We have been asked by the Jerwood Space to ask you all not to take the children into the Glasshouse while you are waiting for the chaperones if you arrive early. If you would all wait just inside the main entrance doors that would be great. Also on Saturday the building itself does not open until 10 a.m. so if you arrive early please don’t think that you have got it wrong and that the rehearsal has been cancelled.

  Later on the Friday, another email arrived from Jo, this one asking us to provide our kids with a small tape recorder so that they could record the music. Great, I thought, after begging Laurie to let Dora use his old Sony handheld tape recorder. I’ll be able to find out what’s going on.

  We were early on Saturday, Dora was desperate for the loo, and the Jerwood wasn’t yet open. Fortunately, the pub across the road was, and the woman behind the bar let me sneak Dora in for a quick visit. Most of the parents headed home to enjoy a slightly quieter than usual day with the rest of their families. A couple stayed up to shop. As Laurie – being a children’s party entertainer – works most weekends, I headed off, with my trusty laptop, to the Arlington. Much to my dismay, it was closed. Situated as it is in the midst of officeville, Café Arlington doesn’t do Saturdays. I wandered up to the South Bank to find an alternative.

  On Sunday, I sat down with Dora and listened to some of the rehearsal recordings. The singing parts were cute, and whilst they didn’t actually make me feel like I was in a privileged fly-on-the-wall position, they did give me at least the sense of being an ear at the door. ‘That’s me!’ said Dora, when it came to her part. ‘That’s Molly-May. That’s Adrianna. That’s Emily.’ ‘What I want to try and stress today,’ I heard Ros, the children’s music director, tell the von-Trapps-to-be during a run-through of ‘Edelweiss’, ‘is that you don’t have to sing loudly all of the time. It’s all about emotion in this piece, isn’t it?’ There were parts that just sounded like a lot of muttering. From what I could tell, Frank, the children’s director, was working out a scene with them: ‘Let’s walk and talk it through,’ I heard him say. ‘Molly-May, show me your curtsey. And you, Dora.’

  ‘Were you supposed to record this?’ I asked Dora. ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘But we weren’t doing any singing.’ She also seemed to have accidentally taped lunchtime, but at a distance, so all I could hear were muffled voices and doors slamming, followed by a discussion of Christmas, which seemed to be dominated by Dora shrieking about her visit to Santa Claus at Brent Cross Shopping Centre, and finding an orange in her stocking. I could hear Russ’s voice, but not what he was saying, and then one of the boys announced that they’d just had surround-sound installed and it was ‘wow’. I strained my ears to try and catch something revealing, but to no avail.

  Over the next few weeks, we settled into an all-consuming, haphazard kind of routine. Dora would be rehearsing four out of five weekday afternoons and generally all day Saturday. We parents – okay, almost exclusively the mums – would sit there nattering. Within a few days, we had bonded. We were routinely telling each other our deepest secrets, information that we either hadn’t yet divulged to our partners or our best friends, or that we didn’t intend to. ‘I don’t know why I just told you that. I haven’t told any one else,’ was a common refrain. It was wonderful. We’d expected to be having an awful time, but here we were, looking forward to seeing each other and becoming completely absorbed in each other’s lives and stories. We heard tragic tales and triumphant ones, listened to each other, dispensed, took and ignored advice and guidance and frequently laughed until we couldn’t breathe. Several of us also found we had a weirdly visceral reaction to each other’s children. Part of the reason they’d been picked for the show was that they looked like each other, like part of the same family. They all looked like part of our families. And the sight of the whole chattering mass of them pouring out of rehearsals provoked an unexpectedly primordial kind of recognition: a gut-level impact based, it seemed, entirely on appearance.

  As these new bonds deepened, my grip on everything else – i.e. real life – started to slip. I had stumbled into a whole new world, and whilst I was as disoriented as Alice in Wonderland, I was also as full of wonder. And at least as busy. The trouble with this whole performing child thing is that it eats your life. Aside from the essentials, everything else had to be put on hold. It was actually a positive thing that my friends had stopped answering my phone calls because they were tired of me wittering on about The Sound of Music, as there was no room left in my brain for anything except managing the complex logistics of getting Dora to where she was supposed to be with a (nutritious) packed lunch and no nits, and almost keeping on top of the work I was being paid to do. I’ve no idea how I would have managed if I’d also had to deal with the guilt and consequences of neglecting other children. Dirty washing hung out of the laundry basket, and no matter how hard I tried to shove it all in, there was no way I could get the lid on. The clean washing piled up, creased and uncared-for, on
the chaise longue that I’d bought off eBay, planned to work on and never have, until it fell off, gathered dust on the floor and needed to be washed again before it could be worn. Meanwhile, the new life-forms growing on forgotten leftovers in my fridge had evolved so far that they’d held democratic elections and invented a cure for Ecover, as I discovered on the occasion when I tried, much against my better judgement, to find and deal with whatever it was that was making it smell like that. Neglect had prompted a fit of creativity and our house had transformed itself into a Tracy Emin art installation.

  I couldn’t imagine Lauren’s mum Nicky’s fridge being anything like as rank. Or at all rank, in fact. It would be spotless, and full of fruit yoghurts, cherry tomatoes and other sensible salad stuff – lettuce, cucumber, spring onions, but nothing pretentious like frisee or radicchio. There would be a cold, neatly roasted chicken, with one breast carved off, covered in cling-film, a giant pack of thinly sliced ham and a four-litre bottle of semi-skimmed milk. Her freezer would be well stocked with pre-prepared meals, plus a couple of packs of fish fingers, a big bag of healthy oven chips and plenty of peas for emergencies. Washed clothes would be instantly ironed and either hung up in wardrobes or folded and stacked on shelves or in drawers that were full, but not to bursting. Nicky always looked perfectly turned out and was always on time – even though she had three other children to look after and get to the places where they were performing or rehearsing. Graham, her husband, also mucked in whilst simultaneously working as a plumber. On one occasion, after Nicky had described the intricacies of her timetable, which involved getting Kirsty (her oldest) to Southend, where she was filming, while Hayley (the other girl triplet) was making a commercial somewhere on the other side of London, Haydon (her son, the other triplet) had to be got to school, and Lauren needed to be at the Jerwood Space, I asked her how on earth she managed. ‘Oh, I’m just permanently stressed,’ she told me. In awe, I told her I thought she could segue straight from this to heading the UN, or single-handedly protecting Gotham City, diplomatically, humbly, with sense of humour intact whilst modelling a perfectly pressed cape sparkling with sequins she’d sewn on herself. ‘No way!’ she laughed. ‘I don’t sew. And if you want to know what I’m really like, you should ask the kids. They’ll tell you how Mummy’s always shouting!’

  I’ve just realised that I might have given a false impression here, attributing the state of my house to Dora’s involvement in The Sound of Music. Whilst it’s true that it was worse than usual, I have to admit that my house is always a bit disgusting. In fact, it may have been a mistake having the floors stripped. The old boards do look nice all stained and varnished, but carpet – even carpet with yucky brown swirly patterns on it – absorbs dust much more effectively. These days, it just gathers in corners on the stairs, until it’s reached a critical mass, at which point it bowls down into the hall like tumbleweed.

  Then there are all the things that I haven’t got round to putting away, because I can’t decide where to put them. In all other aspects of my life I’m a ferociously decisive person, subscribing to the point of view that in most situations it doesn’t really matter which option you choose, so long as you choose one and follow through. Time management is no problem, the files on my computer are all carefully organised, my work backed up. My diary is accurately planned and I never forget an appointment. But I have a problem with objects. The problem is that they don’t have minds of their own. This is very inconvenient, as it means that I have to make all their decisions for them, and that just doesn’t come naturally.

  In my defence, about once every six months I do have a flash of inspiration and it suddenly becomes clear how to solve a particular storage problem, at which point I visit IKEA, morph into the Flat Pack Queen and it gets sorted in a flurry of manic activity and everything looks much better. Then my back starts hurting, I have to lie down for a month and by the time I’ve recuperated everything doesn’t look much better any more.

  Every night, just before I went to bed, along with all the other Sound of Music parents, I’d check my email, just in case something important had come through from Jo Hawes, breathlessly hoping that she’d write. Most nights she did, even if it was just to confirm or amend the following day’s ‘call’. On the nights where there was no email, I’d find myself feeling anxious, neglected and out of the loop. It would be difficult to get to sleep. I’d keep my laptop by the bed, and if I did doze off, would wake at varied intervals in the night and check that she hadn’t sent something after midnight. Had other people been receiving emails when I hadn’t? Was there something going on that I didn’t know about? It was like having a love affair; that on-tenterhooks feeling of waiting for a communication from someone you feel you can’t contact first, unless you have a very good reason or a plausible excuse.

  On a very wet 1 October, Jo emailed round to say they were making a change to the teams. The Martas from Mittens and Kettles were swapping round, but for some reason not for another week. Cue four crying girls – two Martas and two Gretls who had all bonded passionately and were gutted to be parted in what felt to them a rather arbitrary way. I comforted Dora by pointing out that she would still get to see Molly-May because one of the brilliant things about being a Gretl was that she would get to work with all three teams. I promised to arrange a sleepover with Molly-May and reminded Dora that she liked Yasmin a lot too.

  Two days later, another email announced an outbreak of nits in the group, together with Jo Hawes’s suggested treatments (she recommends either a combination of tea tree oil conditioner and white vinegar – you leave the latter on overnight, and repeat several days on the trot – or Hedrin). I checked Dora, who, I was relieved to discover, had escaped infestation. I knew that at some point it was inevitable: most of her friends had already had them, and I was dreading the hours I’d be forced to spend sitting on the toilet seat in our tiny bathroom, combing them out of her long, excessively thick, conditioner-soaked hair, while she whinged bitterly and yelled ‘ow’ every time I hit a tangle and sometimes, just for effect, when I hadn’t.

  The next day another email arrived.

  Just to let you know that there will be a photocall on Tuesday at the Palladium for all the children with Connie. The arrangements are TBC but I think they will need to arrive at the Palladium at 9.30 and when they are finished they will be minibussed with the chaperones back to Jerwood to rehearse in the afternooon. You will be able to collect them from Jerwood time TBC. Apparently they will be given SOM t-shirts to wear.

  More news as I have it.

  That was exciting. But also worrying. The previous day I’d been at a meeting with one of the organisations I work with, the Reading Agency, who coordinate inspirational and enjoyable reading promotions in libraries. We’d been looking at the company’s child protection policy. I’m slightly cynical about child protection policies, many of which seem designed to protect the adults looking after children from allegations of abuse, rather than actually protecting children from abuse and neglect. I’ve seen policies and procedures followed in a way that proved extremely distressing to a young child and watched someone’s life turned upside down when a cocked-up CRB check credited them with an offence they had not committed – one which was so out-of-character that it would have been laughable had the consequences been less devastating (they also mixed up the person’s name and date of birth). Child protection policies can inculcate an atmosphere of fear, in which children are encouraged to view all unrelated adults with suspicion, rather than learning to discriminate between those who are trustworthy and those who aren’t: an inexact science, obviously, but a necessary part of all our emotional development. How, otherwise, can we bond properly with other people? And personally, I would prefer a trusted teacher, chaperone or other carer to apply sun cream to my small child than just leave her to burn in the sun, because the child protection policy prohibits touching the children being cared for. I would also like someone she turns to for comfort to cuddle her if she’s distressed
and I’m not there to do it.

  That said, child protection policies are there for a purpose. And one aspect of the policy that the Reading Agency was working on caught my eye: the section on photography. The guidelines stated that even where parental permission had been given for the child to be photographed and for that photograph to be displayed, the Reading Agency wouldn’t use the child’s name with the photograph, or provide any information about the child’s whereabouts. We’d discussed this point at some length: one of the organisation’s managers had had a strange man turning up on their doorstep offering, bizarrely, to cut their child’s hair after a photo of the child had appeared in a local paper, with their name as the caption. It is standard stuff in child protection. You don’t let people who might want to do something horrid to a child know where that child can be found – even though the majority of people who do horrid things to children know where they are, because they are either related to the child or close to their family.

  Anyway, here I was, doing one hundred per cent the wrong thing child protection-wise with my daughter. The short biog I’d sent in with Dora’s photo for The Sound of Music gave details of the area we live in and the schools – primary and dance – she attends. I couldn’t think of anything else to write. Putting her on the stage at all goes against the first principle of child protection: guarding a child’s anonymity. But how big a risk was it really? After all, several of the other children had been doing this for years with no obvious ill-effects.