Theatre Shoes (26 page)

Miss Jay had said, “Let's pity the poor Children's Hour staff and try to find something new for your audition. How awful it must be for those who have to listen to hear the same thing over and over and over again.”

In the end Miss Jay, assisted by Sorrel, wrote a short version of the “Princess and the Pea.” It was nearly all conversation. The princess spoke and the man and woman peasants, and there was a lovely bit at the end where the princess was supposed to be in bed moaning and groaning about the bruises that were coming up on her because of the pea under the mattresses.

“One ought to have some stuff in dialect,” Miss Jay had said, “but you're not very good at dialect. I think, for the second item, you'd better recite some Shakespeare. You shall learn Titania's speech from ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream.' You will be able to have the script in your hands, because people do when they're broadcasting, but no pupil from this Academy has ever gone to an audition without being entirely word perfect, and they never will.”

Sorrel sat up in bed. In a much bigger and heartier voice than her own she said, “Sounds a wild night,” then she spoke in a deep gruff voice, “Aye, there's a rare storm. The yard's a-swim with water and the river's running down.” Then she went back to the hearty voice, but this time it sounded anxious, “You'll not go out again to-night?” Then the man's voice, “No, I have locked the gates, none will wish to go through now till morning.”

Sorrel paused there. It always gave her an excited feeling imagining the scene. The doorkeeper's home inside the castle walls, the great gates locked for the night, and the whisper running round everywhere, “Our prince is to be married. Our prince is to be married, and who do you think he is going to marry? Why, the very first princess to knock at the palace gates.” When Sorrel thought about all this going on she could hardly wait to knock on the big postern; it was such fun, the part where the princess arrived and, looking small and shabby and dirty, bowed graciously to the two peasants and said kindly, “You may kiss our hand.”

Holly and Mark and Hannah came bursting in at Sorrel's door.

“Happy birthday, Sorrel.”

“Happy birthday. I've bought you the most lovely present, will you undo mine first?”

Sorrel made room for Holly to get into bed with her. Mark and Hannah sat on the sides. Before she undid her parcels Sorrel opened her box of candy. Hannah made clucking noises.

“Oh, you shouldn't go eating all that rich stuff before breakfast, bound to turn your stomachs.”

Nobody paid any attention to Hannah because they knew that she knew that one sweet before breakfast was permissible when it was a birthday or Christmas or Easter day. Sorrel looked at the three parcels on her knee. She undid Holly's first. Inside was a pin-cushion made not very well but with immense pain and toil. Alice had given Holly the stuff, which was part of one of Grandmother's old stage dresses.

“It's to be put away until you have a part,” Holly explained, bouncing with excitement. “Now you're twelve, and going to an audition, you're sure to have a part soon.”

In Mark's parcel there was a ruler, a hammer and a small bottle of glue.

“That's so that you can mend anything yourself that wants mending,” he explained, “or at any rate you can get me to come and mend it, and then you've got the things you need.”

From Hannah there were two black bows on little slides.

“As you're to wear your black tunic up at the B.B.C. I thought you might like two new ribbons. Alice says you have your plaits undone at an audition.”

Alice came in with her parcel, or rather it was not a parcel, it was a little tiny screw of tissue paper.

“It's a little chain to hang that little fish the sailor gave you round your neck when you go to your audition. He said it was for luck, so that's the time to wear it.”

Mark sprawled across the bed and looked longingly at Sorrel's box of candies.

“Of course, I knowit's Sorrel's birthday, but anyone would think that she was the only one that was going to an audition, nobody seems to remember that I'm going to sing.”

Alice gave him an affectionate slap.

“Nobody's under any illusion that you're going to be nervous about it. All I hope is that you don't break the microphone. As a matter of fact, you've not been forgotten, has he, Hannah? Old Hannah here has sat up night after night knitting you some new almond rocks.”

Mark recognised almond rocks as socks. He looked suspiciously at Hannah.

“What sort?”

“Grey wool,” said Hannah, “two pairs lightweight for the summer.”

Alice moved to the door.

“Well, I can't stay here gossiping, I've got our breakfast to take up yet. When you're dressed, Sorrel, your Grandmother would like to give you a kiss.”

Mark waited until the door had closed behind Alice and then he lowered his voice.

“Of course, one shouldn't criticise one's grandmother, but ever since I've been in this house I've thought it pretty mean; there's never been a present, not at Christmas, not at Easter, not on Holly's and my birthdays, and now not on Sorrel's birthday.”

“That's enough, come and get dressed,” said Hannah. “There are some people that don't need to give presents to show their affection.”

Mark followed Hannah obediently to the door, but before he reached it he looked back at Sorrel.

“I don't think Grandmother's one of those sort of people, do you?”

The audition was going on all the afternoon. Sorrel and Mark had an appointment at half-past three. They were taken by Miss Jay and Doctor Lente. As a rule only one teacher went to an audition, however many pupils were going, and for two people to go caused rather a sensation in the Academy, especially as one of them was Dr. Lente, who never went to auditions. However, a talent once accepted acquired squatter's rights, as it were, and so the pupils looked wise and said to each other. “That's because of Mark.”

They went to the B.B.C. on a bus. Sorrel walked to the bus with a glassy look in her eye, muttering:

“These are the forgeries of jealousy:

  And never, since the middle summer's spring,

  Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,

  By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,

  Or in the beached margent of the sea,

  To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,

  But with thy brawls, thou hast disturb'd our sport.”

Mark skipped along, swinging his attaché case in which was his music, his head in the clouds, deciding what his voice looked like when it left him and went out over the air to everybody's wireless set. Miss Jay was talking to Dr. Lente about some change in the classroom at the Academy when Mark, without warning, broke in with the result of his thinking.

“It wears long grey trousers made of cloud, its coat is buttoned up with notes, eight of them for the octaves, and the buttonholes are all the sharps and flats. It has a very long grey cloak made of little soft feathers and so long a feather in its hat that no matter how far away anyone's wireless is, the tip, tip, tip of the feather is still in my mouth.”

Miss Jay was always willing to talk to Mark.

“Who is this?”

“My voice, coming out of the loud speaker.”

Miss Jay ran rapidly over Mark's description to see if there was anything about it that would spoil his singing that afternoon.

“If that feather is in your mouth it mustn't spoil your singing, because I'll tell you something about the man that you don't know. If anything happens to that feather on his hat his heart stops beating and he's dead.”

Mark rather liked this version.

“And before anybody knows what's happening there's the dust cart shovelling him away for salvage.”

Miss Jay looked at Mark severely.

“Do you know what's going to happen to you if you sing badly? Madame is going to take charge of your attaché case.”

“What, for ever?”

Miss Jay looked as if even that were possible, but she followed Madame's instructions.

“No, but perhaps for a great many days; it would all depend on how bad the singing was.”

“There's no need for anybody to get in a flap. I'm going to sing very well indeed. I can't think why anybody thought I wasn't.”

The B.B.C. looked very imposing with its police outside and sandbagged entrance, and when they got inside past the policeman, and Miss Jay and Dr. Lente were at the reception desk getting passes, even Mark was reduced to respectful silence.

They were taken upstairs by a page boy whom Mark looked at with envy. He did not appear to be much bigger than he was himself. What a gorgeous thing to do no lessons and be a messenger boy in the B.B.C.! That would be even better than going into the Navy.

There were quite a lot of other children in the Children's Hour waiting-room. Three boys who obviously came to sing, a very smartly dressed girl of about fourteen, who had a mother who kept pulling her curls over her shoulders, and a small boy in spectacles with a violin case on his knee. The door opened into the studio and somebody ushered a girl out and said that they would be writing to her. Then they called in the first of the singing boys. His voice came to them faintly through the door singing “I'll walk beside you.” The girl with ringlets was sitting beside Sorrel. She gave her a nudge.

“I got here much too early—that's the eighth time someone has sung that song; it must be pretty awful for them up there,” she jerked her thumb at the ceiling.

“What is up there?” Sorrel asked.

“The judges. They sit in a room with a glass window looking into the studio, all our voices come to them up there. You can see them peering down at you. I always wonder what they're saying.”

“Have you been to an audition before, then?”

“Twice. Once before the war, and once in Bristol; each time I was going to be used my family moved and I couldn't.”

“What do you do?” Sorrel asked.

“Well, I think it's a mistake not to give them an all-round view of your work, don't you? I'm doing a speech from Bernard Shaw's ‘Saint Joan,' that's just for diction, and then I'm doing a speech of Edelgard's out of ‘Children in Uniform'—it's two separate speeches really, but I'm putting them together—and then I'm doing a little short funny thing in Scotch, and a rather pathetic bit about a child waiting for its father who's down the mine, that's with a Welsh accent. I finish up with a bit of good old North country, which is where I come from. What are you doing?”

Sorrel was appalled. How clever everybody else in the world was! How idiotic everybody in the B.B.C. would think it that she had only got a little bit of the ‘Princess and the Pea' and one speech of Titania's!

“I'm just doing some Shakespeare, and a version of one of Hans Andersen's fairy stories. It doesn't seem much, does it?”

“Well, it's no good doing what you can't, is it? It will only put them”—the ringletted girl jerked her finger at the roof again—“off.”

The door opened and the boy singer came out and the second one went in. Once more there were muffled sounds of “I'll walk beside you.”

The girl sighed.

“You'd think it was catching, like measles or something.”

Dr. Lente rolled anguished eyes at the roof.

“It is not suitable, as a song for little boys, and that child has a voice that overtrained is.”

It was after the third boy had sung “I'll walk beside you” that Sorrel was called. Miss Jay gave her a smile and sounded as matter-of-fact as she did in the classroom

“Come along, dear.”

In the studio there was a piano on the left-hand side, seats all round the room and in the centre, of course, the most important thing, the microphone. There was a solid stand and across this an adjustable bar, and from one end of the bar the microphone was hanging. A nice girl came up to Sorrel and asked her what she was going to do, and whether she would announce herself or would like to be announced. Sorrel looked desperately at Miss Jay, but Miss Jay was nodding and smiling to what appeared to be the roof. Sorrel, turning round, saw behind her the glass window and the faces looking through that the girl with the curls had told her about. She touched Miss Jay on the arm.

“They want to know if I want to announce myself.”

“Certainly,” said Miss Jay, “and you'll start with the Shakespeare as arranged.”

It was a queer feeling to stand by yourself in the middle of the room and speak to an inanimate thing like a microphone. It was a queer feeling to think that in the room behind the glass window people were not hearing your voice as it sounded in the studio, but as it sounded brought to them over the air. It was altogether so odd that just at first the queerness of everything overawed Sorrel and she could not bring Titania to life.

“I'm reciting Titania's speech from ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream,' by William Shakespeare,” she said. The lines came out of her mouth, just nicely rehearsed words, but meaning nothing. Then suddenly the studio was not there; she was in a wood, there were silver birches round her like there had been at Martins, and leaves were crackling under her feet and she was speaking in a proud way to Oberon who looked, in her imagination, rather like Uncle Henry looked when she saw him on the films, only, of course, as Oberon he was dressed as a fairy.

“Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,

Pale in her anger washes all the air,

That rheumatic diseases do abound.

And thorough this distemperature we see

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts

Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;

And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown

An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds

Is, as in mockery set; the spring, the summer,

The childing autumn, angry winter, change