Stage Mum (16 page)

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.

I spoke to Mark Williams-Thomas, one of the country’s leading child protection consultants and a former police detective
specialising
in major crime. He feels there is some risk, in that theatres are places where people who want to abuse children can gain access to them (it’s more of an issue with amateur productions, where companies tend to use volunteer chaperones rather than professional ones). But whilst he is very keen on limiting potential abusers’ access to children, he does not believe that you should try and eliminate risk from their lives. ‘The simplest way to protect children is to ensure that they are educated about being able to protect themselves. In other words, make them aware that there are some horrible people out there. Make sure they understand that if they feel uncomfortable about something, then the chances are it’s probably wrong. So talk to somebody about it. Make sure that there is communication on a two-way basis. But give children privacy, give them respect, help them to grow up in an environment that enables them to be safe, but at the same time allows them to take a certain amount of risk.’

The next few days’ emails were mostly concerned with rehearsal and costume fitting schedules, with the odd googly bowled in. As she didn’t possess any I found myself dashing round all the children’s clothes shops in Brent Cross trying to find a pair of black trousers for Dora to wear with her
SOM
t-shirt at the photo shoot. They were, obviously, out of fashion (in other words, nothing suitable in H&M), and something in me baulked at paying over a tenner for a polyester school-uniform pair that didn’t look remotely Dora-shaped and that she’d never wear again. After about an hour of fruitless searching, I fetched up at Zara, where a rummage turned up a pair of plain black cotton leggings with a little lace trim. Perfect! ‘Couldn’t she just wear jazz-dance trousers?’ asked one of the other mums the next day. Well, she could’ve, if she did jazz dance and had any.

In the same email that provided the details of the photocall at the Palladium came the following ADVANCE WARNING.

The kids are working very hard and everyone is very pleased
with
how it is going. Could I ask you please to make sure they get plenty of rest when they can. Half-term week is the first week of technicals and it is going to be intensive and the most difficult of all the rehearsal period. It is especially important that they sleep well that week and if they do have a day off (which they must) please don’t rush off on a busy activity day. They really will get tired especially the little ones with a lot of evening calls.

Dora didn’t seem that tired yet. She appeared – the Marta swap aside – to be taking it all in her stride. Her first sleepover with Molly-May – great excitement! – took place at Molly-May’s father’s house while he was away, and Molly’s mum Helen was down from Yorkshire looking after her. When I went to collect Dora, the two girls announced that they were going to put on a show, and promptly performed a Reduced Shakespeare Company version of
The Sound of Music
, playing all the roles themselves. Where they’d been unable to decide which of them should play a particular part, one of them mimed while the other sang or spoke. They performed studiously, sang and spoke perfectly and only occasionally dissolved into girlie giggles. Meanwhile, Helen and I were hysterical and lamented the lack of a video camera that we would, undoubtedly, have been laughing too hard to operate.

There was more great excitement for Dora. A couple of weeks into rehearsals she was handed her first payslip and cheque. The payslip was more exciting than the cheque, because it had three perforated edges which needed tearing off in order to open it, and also because it told her not only how much money she’d earned that week, but how much she’d earned so far. ‘Is that enough for a bike with gears?’ she asked, jumping up and down. I assured her that it was, but suggested that we didn’t go out and buy one until spring as she wouldn’t have much opportunity to ride it before then. A few weeks earlier, we’d emptied her piggy bank and lugged the contents – five notes and a ton of small coins – to our local bank to open a savings
account.
To my annoyance, she could only have the kind of account that required me to queue up and hand the money in over the counter.

Every day I’d drop her off at the Jerwood reasonably neatly dressed with either almost equal bunchies or, if time was short, an acceptably tidy ponytail. Every day I’d pick her up, and although her clothes would still be more or less in the same order, her hair wouldn’t: she’d emerge looking more like a disarmed Edward Scissorhands than a Gretl von Trapp. And she’d be bursting with tangential and incomplete information, setting half a scene for me, or bubbling out stories shiny with the kind of gloss that only six-year-olds can broadbrush across their world. She told me all about the Big Boys in her team – Jack Montgomery, nearly fifteen, the oldest member of the children’s cast, who was playing Kurt, and John McCrea, just about to turn fourteen, who was playing Kurt’s older brother Friedrich. John’s mum Jane had taken him, aged eight, to the local drama club after the teachers at his school had called her in and begged her to find something to channel his energy: ‘He was really naughty. Never anything malicious or vindictive, but just naughty. Used to moon at his teachers. Things like that.’