Theatre Shoes (12 page)

“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.

“He gave me that.”

“Why you? What on earth for?” asked Miranda.

Sorrel was so frightfully pleased at having been given the little fish that she hardly noticed the rude way in which Miranda spoke.

“Just for luck.”

Miranda opened her mouth as if to say something, and then she shut it again. It was as if words were tumbling into her head and she was swallowing them. Then finally she blurted out, not in the lovely voice in which she spoke on the stage, but in the voice of a jealous schoolgirl.

“Well, I hope it does you good. If you're going to be an actress I should think it would take a row of fishes to make you a success.”

CHAPTER X

NEWS

It was lucky in a way that the children had to work so hard, for really it was very peculiar living with Grandmother. Fortunately, it did not seem as peculiar to them as it would to most children, because they had got acclimatised in the holidays at the vicarage to a rather odd way of living. There had been Grandfather, much more interested in Bible animals than he was in them, so their holiday life had centred round Hannah. At Number 14 Ponsonby Square there was Grandmother living a quite separate life from the children. Quite a lot went on in Grandmother's drawing-room—people came to call, the telephone rang—but none of it concerned the children. Their world was upstairs with Hannah, and with Alice when she could make time.

Next to Hannah and Alice the nicest thing about Ponsonby Square was the garden. Before the war, when there were railings round it, it had been a garden beautifully kept up at the expense of the people who lived in the Square. Even in wartime you could see somebody was trying about it. The grass was cut, there were Michaelmas daisies of all colours in the beds, crab-apple trees with crab-apples hanging all over them, and endless shrubs with gay leaves and berries. At one end of the garden vegetables were being grown, but right down the centre of the vegetable beds were some incredibly old mulberry trees, fairly dripping with mulberries. Two aged gardeners looked after the garden and they became great friends with the children. The head gardener told them that before the war dozens of children had belonged to the garden and played there regularly, but they were all evacuated now. He said he missed them very much and hoped that now that this there 'itler had stopped making a nuisance of himself they would come back.

“A garden ain't rightly a garden,” he would say, shaking his head, “without children in it.”

The whole of one half of the garden was divided into allotments, most of which belonged to wardens. Every Sunday after church the children would walk round the allotments to see how everything was getting on, deciding which allotment they would give a prize to. Their choice always fell on the same allotments because the wardens who owned them had not only grown cabbages and things like that, but had put in a few flowers as well.

In the middle of the garden was the lawn and all over this, on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, which were, of course, the only days when the children saw the garden, people lay in deck-chairs asleep. Most of the people were very nice to the children and talked to them; but somehow, just being three in a garden full of grown-up people, they never felt they could be really noisy. Sometimes, of course, they made a mistake and shouted; usually when they did, an old lady woke up with a jump and dropped her knitting, or an old gentleman's eyebrows shot up, and then they went back to playing quietly again. Fortunately, the lawn was not the only place. There was a shrubbery path all round the garden, which was very good for hide-and-seek, and when they felt energetic there was a low overhanging branch which made a bar for practising their dancing exercises.

In the house, Alice and Hannah had done everything that could be done to make their rooms look nice. They had bought some gay green paint and painted up both Mark's room and the nursery. Alice had found some old curtains and she and Hannah washed them and cut them up and hung them in Mark's room; and she had found a red table-cloth, and that made curtains for the nursery. Sorrel had been given a latchkey, which was hung on a piece of string round her neck so that they could always let themselves in, and save, as Alice said, “Somebody's understandings on the old apples and pears.” But, in spite of a latchkey, either Hannah or Alice always managed to be about, looking pleased to see them when they came in.

Hannah, after a lot of searching, had found a church that she approved of in the neighbourhood, and the moment she found it, and got used to the times of the services, she began to feel at home. She considered the children ought to go to a children's service in the afternoon on Sundays, but, as there were so few children in London, there did not seem to be any children's services to go to. Instead, she took them to a morning service and managed to keep for each of them what she called “Sunday clothes.”