Irene Holland - Tales of a Tiller Girl

‘Oh, Mummy, I miss you,’ I sighed, my eyes filling up with tears.

I felt so lonely sometimes but I knew there was no point in moping. I tried to take all the positives from it – like my freedom, for a start. Unlike most twelve-year-olds I never had to ask permission to do anything.

I also loved every minute of being at Italia Conti, and that eased the pain of being parted from Mum. As soon as I walked in the door and heard the tick of a metronome or the tinkle of a piano I felt secure somehow. It was my sanctuary, my escape from the outside world. The war was raging, my family was thousands of miles away from me, but in there I felt safe and I could spend all day doing what I loved, which was dancing.

Everyone there shared the same love of performing and I soon made close friends. I had been worried that, with the fees so high, the other pupils would be from wealthy families, but there were children from more ordinary homes like mine. One of them was a boy named Anthony Newley, who we all called Tony. I liked him straight away because he was fun and loud, and he was always happy and laughing. He was the son of a single mother and he had four siblings.

‘I’m an East End lad, Irene,’ he told me in his strong cockney accent. ‘I’m only ’ere ’cos they gave me a job as an office boy in return for my fees. I ain’t no rich, pampered prince.’

He was always joking around and getting ticked off in class. Like the time in tap he pulled funny faces behind the teacher’s back as she demonstrated a routine. We all sniggered, but mainly because he hadn’t realised that Miss Gertrude had spotted him in the mirror.

‘Mr Newley,’ she said. ‘You’re as mad as a March hare. Now please stop larking about.’

‘Yes, Miss,’ he said, giving me a wink.

He was quite a character, but he was also very talented and you could tell there was something special about him. He had what we would describe today as the X-factor, and I knew he was going to have a bright future in show business.

Another member of our gang was a girl called Nanette Newman. She was a few years younger than me, and she was pretty but very quiet and shy. One of my best friends at Conti’s was a stunningly beautiful girl called Daphne Grant. She had bright blue eyes, was very glamorous like Rita Heyworth and had a lovely singing voice. She was an only child and her parents, who were quite elderly, spoiled her rotten. They doted on her and had done absolutely everything for her as she’d grown up. Anything that she asked for, she got, whether it was clothes or jewellery or having a shampoo and set every week at the hairdressers.

No one at Italia Conti dared misbehave. We all knew how lucky we were to be there and we knew the rules – don’t be late for class, always be correctly dressed, at the end of a ballet class curtsey to the teacher and the pianist, but clap them after a tap or jazz class.

‘You’re all here because you want to be,’ Miss Conti told us sternly. ‘And while you’re here I expect you to listen and to work hard. If you don’t want to do that, then you’re free to go whenever you want.’

I loved the discipline and the structure. The curriculum was a mixture of ballet, tap, contemporary dance, singing, drama and acrobatics. I liked everything except acrobatics, where I struggled to do the forward and backward stopovers, which were like somersaults that you did from a standing position.

Much to my surprise, during my first week at Italia Conti I discovered that I had a good singing voice. Miss Polly, the singing teacher, was an absolute darling. She was potty about Ivor Novello, and she would sit at the piano and go off into some sort of a trance as she played his songs.

‘That’s wonderful, dear,’ she said after I’d sung for her for the first time. ‘Absolutely marvellous. You make a lovely mezzo soprano.’

‘Do I?’ I said.

Singing also had one other bonus.

‘My stammer’s gone,’ I said proudly.

‘Of course it has,’ she said. ‘Have you ever heard a stammering singer?’

I didn’t stutter at all when I sang, and after two weeks at Italia Conti my stutter had practically disappeared.

Even though I loved it, they were long days and we worked hard. I’d leave the house at 7 a.m. and it would be after 7 p.m. when I’d get the Tube home. A few weeks after I started there I was allowed to move on to pointe work, which I’d never done before. We were told to rub our feet with surgical spirit every night and then put cold cream on them to try to soften the skin, but I still got blisters from my toes pressing on the pointes. When they split and bled I was in absolute agony.

‘What’s wrong, Irene?’ said Toni Shanley, seeing me wince in class one day.

‘My feet are bleeding,’ I told her.

I could see the blood seeping through the pink satin on my shoes.

‘So?’ she said. ‘Carry on and put a plaster on them later. You and your feet need to toughen up.’

I knew there was no option but to carry on dancing. You wouldn’t dare put a foot wrong in Miss Toni’s class, and if you did you’d get a sharp rap from her dreaded stick.

One afternoon we were doing a ballet class with her when suddenly there was an almighty explosion. The walls literally shook, and it felt like the whole building had been lifted up into the air and put back down again.

We all looked at each other, our eyes wide with terror.

‘What the heck was that?’ Daphne whispered to me.

I didn’t know, but I was worried that the whole theatre was about to fall down and collapse on top of us. Miss Toni didn’t even flinch, however, and just carried on as if nothing had happened.

‘Demi-pliés,’ she said. ‘Bottoms in, long necks, strong legs.’

I think we were all in a daze, but in a way we were more frightened of Miss Toni and her stick than a German bomb, so we just carried on dancing.

It was only after class that we all gathered round in a huddle.

‘Did you hear that?’ I said. ‘What the heck was it?’

‘I think the Jerries just dropped a big one on us,’ said Tony Newley.

We all ran to the front door, and as we opened it and walked down the steps I felt glass crunching beneath my feet. Outside we were greeted by a scene that I can only describe as utter devastation.

‘Good grief!’ I gasped.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Practically the whole of Tavistock Square apart from our little corner had been totally destroyed in the blast.

‘The church is completely gone,’ someone said.

It was now just a pile of rubble, and all the windows of the few buildings that were still standing had been blown out.

Looking around at the carnage, I knew we had been very lucky. It was a miracle that the windows in our rehearsal room had remained intact.

‘It must have missed us by a whisker,’ said Daphne.

It was scary to think how close we had all just come to being blown to smithereens and that we had just danced our way through it.

Every night it was the same routine. As soon as it got dark the air-raid siren would go off as regular as clockwork. While I was at Italia Conti there were nightly bombings in London.

‘Action stations, Rene,’ boomed my grandfather’s voice from downstairs as the loud, familiar wailing rang through the streets. ‘Go and help Miss Smythe down from the attic.’

‘All right, Papa,’ I sighed.

Miss Smythe was the tiniest woman that I’d ever seen in my life; she was like a little bird with fluffy white hair that stuck up in a fuzzy halo around her head.

Instead of an Anderson shelter at the bottom of the garden like the one we’d had at our old house, my grandparents had a Morrison shelter in the dining-room. It was a big steel cage with a solid top that you could use as a table during the day and then climb underneath into the cage part during the bombings. It was a huge, ugly thing that almost took up the whole room, but at least it was warm and dry inside, and it was safer than being out in the garden in a rickety Anderson shelter.