Oh the excitement! I am off to the theatre this week, to see the National Theatre's adaptation of Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild's wonderful story about three resourceful orphans and their progress towards putting their names in the history books. I'm going with my daughter (my husband and son will be going to the cinema to see Gladiator), and we can't wait.
Noel Streatfeild was one of my favourite writers when I was a child (along with Mara Kay and Antonia Forest), and although Ballet Shoes wasn't my absolute favourite book of hers, it came near. My favourites - in order - were Wintle's Wonders (orphans, dancing school), followed jointly by White Boots (skating) and Curtain Up (near orphans, dancing school). Then came Ballet Shoes and The Painted Garden (Hollywood).
If you've never read Noel Streatfeild, you can get the idea from those short descriptions - children plus show business/sport - but not the flavour. I re-read Curtain Up this week in anticipation of the play (I didn't want to re-read Ballet Shoes itself, because I know the adaptation will take liberties with the test, as adaptations have to, so I'll wait until after I've seen it). Curtain Up has been rather confusingly renamed Theatre Shoes (what they?) to tie in with the more famous Ballet brand, but reading it confirmed to me that I was right to have loved it so much.
There were several things about it that I noticed:
- It's very contemporary. There are descriptions of wartime London - the bombed houses, the blackout, the sandbags, the missing railings around the garden, taken to make munitions - that probably baffled me, reading in the late 1960s, but didn't bother me at all. The children's home was originally in Guernsey - at that point occupied by the Nazis - which was actually an important plot point. In fact the books passed seamlessly into historical fiction without even trying.
- The adult characters are well drawn and flawed. They argue and gossip and fail to solve problems. The children are therefore even more resourceful, because they are making good the lack of solutions created by adults. Occasionally the right adult steps in to do the right thing - Aunt Lyndsey makes Sorrel a wonderful dress - and when that happens, it's just like magic. Better than magic. Because this is what's meant to happen, but it so rarely does. Hannah's egg sandwiches on the train are another example.
- There are contemporary Jewish characters who are neither foreign nor victims. Miriam, the children's cousin though is very plain with a bush of dark hair (we call it a Jewfro). Uncle Mose, her father - successful comedian, lovely - what a rare and marvellous character to find in a children's book when I was a kid, the only Jewish girl in my class at school.
- The emotions of childhood - envy, jealousy, over confidence, under confidence, sibling support, anxiety - are all there, described so well that you feel (I felt) 12 years old again. The importance of toys and books are there too, and also food and clothes. And money! So many of Noel Streatfeild's books are about the lack of money and how difficult that makes life.
Of course, having read one I now want to read them all again. Which was your favourite? Will you be seeing Ballet Shoes?
4 comments:
Great post, Keren, thank you. My mother is now nearly 98 years old and remembers seeing a bookshop window in Norwich decked out with ballet shoes and pinkness and copies of the book, and being desperate to read it.
That was fascinating to read about the depiction of contemporary Jewish characters in 'Curtain Up', which sounds really good and which I definitely need to read now. I would love to go and see 'Ballet Shoes' - my daughter went to see it and loved it but has warned me that it has been changed quite a lot, as you suspected it would be. We watch the film with Victoria Wood and Emma Watson in, every Boxing Day! As a child, I remember I really loved 'Ballet Shoes,' 'White Boots' and 'The Painted Garden,' (which was SO exciting as you met grownup characters from 'Ballet Shoes!') My favourite one however, was 'The Growing Summer,' as that had Ireland in it.
Lovelt post. I had a ticket for last week but had to give it away as I was ill. I hear it is a wonderful production. I am a huge Noel Streatfeild fan and have been reading her adult fiction as well as the novels she wrote as Susan Scarlett. They have been reissued by Dean Street Press
Curtain Up has been my favourite since childhood, I was a theatre kid, and I loved reading about these other theatre kids. But I do love Ballet Shoes, although I loved it as a child more for being utterly dissimilar to everything I knew, in a strange and wonderful way. Curtain Up seemed more like a life I could imagine, even if some things were very odd to my Canadian 1980s and 90s life.
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