Stage Mum (12 page)

Dora, to her credit, took the disappointment very well. She had been very much looking forward to meeting the penguins, but was pleased that she wouldn’t miss seeing the results of the science experiment they’d been conducting at school (leaving an egg in a variety of different liquids – Coke, tea, milk and water – to see which stained the shell the most). ‘Oh well,’ she said, philosophically, ‘I didn’t really want to be dead anyway.’ She changed her tune a few months later, though, when she watched the brother of one of her
Sound of Music
colleagues playing a boy who died in the BBC drama
Cranford
.
‘It’s not
fair
,’ she complained. ‘Haydon was allowed to be dead. Why wasn’t I?’ I opened my mouth to tell her and then closed it again. I didn’t think I could explain how a realistic drama has a different impact on the viewer than a period drama does. ‘You would be allowed to play a character who dies in period costume, but not in contemporary costume,’ simply wouldn’t compute in Dora’s brain.

One of the things, I realised, about all the child star casualties was that they were child
stars
. And stars of films or TV shows. To keep things in proportion, Dora was not about to become a child star. She was going to be one of a team of children performing in a stage musical, a show that would be seen by thousands, but not by millions. And lots of them would be sitting a long way from the stage, and so, despite her highly visible face and those annoying red opera glasses that you have to pay fifty pee (FIFTY PEE!) to use and then have to give back at the end of the show and don’t really work, wouldn’t be able to see her that well anyway. Also, from what I’d read, most of the child performers who went on to have major problems were those who earned shedloads of money and were recognised whenever they walked down the street. I soothed myself with the thought that
The Sound of Music
would make Dora neither famous nor rich, nor lead to me becoming financially dependent on her. Appearing in it would probably make her no more likely to spend her late teens and early twenties going wild than she was anyway – than I had been. She had already, two years earlier, expressed a strong interest in motorbikes.

We were sitting in my car, in a traffic jam. A man on a moped wobbled past us, L-plate slightly askew. ‘That man is riding his motorbike well,’ Dora informed me, impressed in a way that only someone with stabilisers on their pushbike could be. ‘When I grow up, I want one.’

‘Dora,’ I said, taking a deep breath and trying to imbue my voice with gravitas, so that she’d always remember the significant piece of
guidance
I was about to impart, ‘there are only two things that I really, really don’t want you to do when you grow up. One is smoke cigarettes. The other is ride motorbikes.’ I’ve seen too many casualties and consider both even more dangerous than going on the stage.

‘Mummy,’ replied Dora, who at four was already able to muster more gravitas, with less effort, than I ever could, ‘I will never smoke a cigarette. But I’ll get a motorbike when you’re died, because you won’t be able to know anything about it.’

Oh well, I thought. She’s obviously grasped the concept of death.

With Dora starting back at school, I had some more immediate worries to deal with. She’d been begging to be allowed to switch from packed lunches to school dinners, longing for those delicious meals of pasta, pizza, chips and bread followed by chocolate pudding with chocolate custard sprinkled with brightly E-number-coloured hundreds and thousands that you never find in a health-conscious, middle-class lunch bag, which is, instead, bursting with nectarines (in season), carrots, cherry tomatoes and some very tasty lettuce. As rehearsal and performance schedules were likely to mean that she’d be missing lots of hot meals at home over the winter months, I caved in, on the condition that if she had pudding at school, she could only have a healthy snack when she came home, but if she had fruit for afters, she’d be allowed a couple of biscuits.

Meanwhile, another email had arrived from Jo Hawes.

Hi guys,

We would like to get all of you together on the morning of Monday 18 September in order to decide on teams and for Jeremy [Sams – director] and Arlene [Phillips – choreographer] to see you all together.

Please confirm that you will be able to attend – it does need everybody of course or we cannot achieve what we are setting out to do!!

As Dora settled into the new term and the excitement of being-put-into-teams-day and the start of rehearsals – 25 September – drew nearer, I started thinking about the impact it would all have on her school life. Academically, I suspected she’d be fine. She’s not way out ahead of the other kids in her class, but is bright. Unlike me she enjoys, and has a natural flair for, maths. She reads well, writes carefully and neatly (also unlike me), and settles happily and conscientiously to do her homework. So I was fairly confident that she’d be able to make up for any schoolwork she missed while rehearsing or performing. She was, after all, only six, was contracted for only six months, and hence would have plenty of post-
Sound of Music
time to catch up before embarking on her PhD in rocket science.

I was more concerned about her friendships. Her best pals don’t go to the same school as she does, and although, from what I could make out from her reports of school life, she nearly always had someone to play with at playtime, she wasn’t particularly close to any of her peers. This was partly because she tended to, er, ‘direct’ them. The previous term, for instance, she’d come home one afternoon and flopped on to the sofa. ‘Phew,’ she announced, as if she’d just returned from a hard day at the office. ‘I needed
a lot
of people today to play Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus.’

‘And did you get them?’ I asked, one eyebrow raised doubtfully.

‘Yes,’ she said, adding an ‘of course,’ to demonstrate her annoyance at my lack of faith in her persuasiveness and directorial talent.

Given this history, I was worried that her frequent absences and the reason for them might further increase the distance between her and her classmates. At the auditions a couple of the other mums had told me how, once they’d started working on the stage, their daughters had been targeted by other girls at school and bullied. One mother – who works at her daughter’s school – told me how the ringleader had picked her daughter up and dangled her upside down.
‘The
teacher said it was happening because she’d got this part, and what did I expect?’

Perhaps it’s different for boys. Mark Lester remembers his childhood relationships being normal and uncomplicated. He attended a stage school for a while and then moved on to his local grammar school, where his friends were unfazed by his celebrity status. ‘They were okay. You have mates like anybody else. Kids are great levellers, they don’t really care if you’ve got one leg, or one eye. It’s only later in life that prejudices come in. Kids just get on, and get on together.’

On 14 September, Dora’s licence arrived. She was now authorised ‘to take part in performances on the dates specified below … subject to the restrictions and conditions laid down in the Children (Performances) Regulations 1968 and to such other conditions as the local authority or the licensing authority may impose under the said Regulations’. Then there were the what, when and where details, followed by the names of the chaperones and then the regulations:

On days where the child is required to take part in both afternoon and evening performances the child must not be present at place of performance no earlier [
sic
] than 1000 hrs and leave the place of performance no later than 2200 or 30 minutes after their required part is completed, [hooray, a comma!] whichever is the earliest; child must vacate location between performances for no less than one and a half hours for purposes of rests and meals; on single performance days child must leave the place of performance no later than 2200 hrs or 30 minutes after their required part is completed, whichever is the earliest. If the child has taken part in the performance on the previous day she may not be present at the location until 16 hours have elapsed; this does mean that she may return to a place where she would normally be the next morning.

She was allowed to be absent from school on the days she was due to perform, but there was no mention of rehearsal dates – and it was during the rehearsals that she’d miss school most frequently. Had there, I wondered, been a mistake? Could this be a problem? Did it mean that Brent Council had authorised her to perform, but not to rehearse? Would it all go horribly, horribly wrong?

I was thrilled to see the performance dates – but slightly confused by their presence. If the kids hadn’t yet been sorted into their final families, how could Jo – and Brent Council – possibly know the dates on which they would be performing? Could Jo, as well as being terrifyingly efficient and able to work round the clock on sub-Thatcherite amounts of sleep, also see into the future? I wouldn’t have been surprised.

The popularity of the
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?
TV show meant that
Sound of Music
tickets were selling fast. The five pages of information about the show that Jo had sent included the bombshell that we had to book our seats through the box office like everyone else: i.e., no freebies or reductions for stage parents. On top of everything else, it seemed a little unfair. But by then I’d resigned myself to spending the money and was more concerned that, given the show’s popularity, tickets might have completely sold out by the time I knew the dates when Dora would actually be performing.

So I emailed Jo Hawes hopefully, asking if there was any chance that the dates on Dora’s licence might be accurate and could I, therefore, book tickets? No chance. They would, she responded, almost certainly change. And some councils just didn’t include rehearsals in the licence. So that was all right then, Dora could attend the rehearsals. I didn’t book tickets, but continued to monitor availability on seetickets.com, the Really Useful Group’s ticket sales website. Most of the top-price tickets were already sold out for the first month or so, but at fifty-five quid apiece, I couldn’t see myself forking out for many of those anyway. There was plenty of availability in the upper circle, though, so I probably would be able
to
watch her long distance. Not to worry, I already knew what she looked like … I just wanted to make sure I could be there on her first night. Whenever that might be.

¹
As Joal Ryan reports in her book
Former Child Stars: the story of America’s least wanted
.

²
Early Havoc
, by June Havoc pp. 174–5.

³
Early Havoc
, pp. 129–34.

SOMETHING GOOD

DORA HAD SETTLED
well into Year 2. She tackled school and homework industriously, enjoyed Mrs Arin’s teaching and played with her friends and her cousins, Millie and Freddie, who we visited most Saturday mornings. There were the usual rounds of play-dates and sleepovers. She rode her scooter to school most days (I rode it home) and arabesqued happily around her dance classes. It was a fairly busy routine, but she still managed to fit in plenty of telly-watching. Life would be like this for another week.

Monday, 18 September, I was up bright and early for our trip to the Really Useful Group’s offices. It was only when I found myself standing stretching my formerly black, now a sophisticated shade of dark grey, Fenn Wright Manson silk top (bought
circa
1990) over our ancient wobbly ironing board and pressing the button so an extra spray of steam and limescale burst through the base of the cracked iron that I should have replaced years ago, showering everything with white chalky stuff, that I realised how excited I must be. I only iron on really important occasions: posh parties, job interviews and live music – doing it for the latter being a complete waste of time as it’s always really dark anyway. Mostly I wear casually creased trousers and even more noticeably distressed t-shirts (you’d be distressed if you spent most of your time crumpled up in an overstuffed drawer). Dora was sporting her trademark almost-even bunchies – my
technique
was improving – together with jeans, pink t-shirt and trainers.

After much pleading from Dora, I’d recently started reading
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
to her at bedtime. We were still near the beginning, but, like millions of others, were both already engrossed in Harry’s story. Realising that, on the journey into town, I had a choice between reading aloud from it, potentially irritating the other passengers who didn’t care what happened to Harry, Hermione et al., and Dora playing a game where she tries to rearrange my face by pulling and squishing my features in different directions, I plumped for irritating the other passengers. The journey passed without us needing to count the stops, and at the end my nose was still in its usual position. We weren’t the first to arrive at the Really Useful offices, but there were only a couple of other people there when we arrived – an older boy sitting quietly with his mum on one of the sofas. They’d come from Birmingham, and Jack, who was going to play Kurt, and had done lots of other theatre work, would be staying with a friend in London for the duration of the show.

It wasn’t long before the room filled up, and there were soon nineteen excited, chattering children, and about the same number of perhaps even more excited, chattering parents. The atmosphere was quite different from the last time we were there: all the adults were introducing themselves to each other, and one mum – Lynn, whose daughter Grace had filled the Brigitta gap on the last team list – was passing around a printout of the kids’ names for us to fill in our contact details. I was impressed. She was obviously very confident, organised and experienced in the stage mothering department. It was only months later I found out that I was completely wrong. It was Grace’s first professional stage role, and Lynn had been terrified at the prospect of meeting the other parents. ‘I thought everyone would know each other already and be really pushy,’ she told me. Adrianna – the first person we’d met at the first audition we’d been to – had been cast as a Gretl, and had both happy parents with her, and there
were
a few others I recognised, including Yasmin and her mum Wendy, the people who Dora had invited herself to move in with at the final audition. It was lovely to meet everyone under such relaxed conditions.