How should I describe my mother?
She was small, but very strong. Strong in a way that meant she could dance for hours on end, with faultless grace and precision, even as every muscle in her body must have burned with pain, as the blood from her poor crushed toes seeped into the wooden blocks that supported them, even as she was flung, and spun and blinded by the bright stage lights. Strong in a way that meant she was able to accept her position in the world – abandoned, parentless – and make it a part of her strength, the essential element in the June Darling fairy tale. I don’t want to describe the things that only I knew about her. Because they’re what I have left, what I can cherish. Besides, people aren’t interested in that much beyond the dancing, and the fairy tale.
You’ll have heard of my mother, I’m sure. Even people who don’t know ballet know her name – she’d attained that level of universal renown when she died. And when she died, that night when the plane spiralled out of the sky as though it were made of paper and lollipop sticks, those few left who had not known her came to hear of her. June Darling, the little dancing girl who through sheer talent had managed to escape the meagre path laid out for her.
My mother used to ridicule what she called the myth of her background. She never had it that bad, she would say. She was never neglected or maltreated, and though she may have started out with no natural family to call her own, she soon had Evie, and then me, and we were a perfect three, a tight triangle of love.
Or at least, that’s certainly how it appeared. In my more secret, shameful moments, I wondered whether Evie did in fact resent me for complicating things – for disturbing the sanctity of that bond between herself and my mother. Did I have any proof of this? Not specifically. Though I do not think it would be unfair to say that Evie never spoke to me in the way she did my mother: and with me she could be sharp, impatient, as I suspected she never had been with Mum.
I became rather obsessed with the idea of grandparents – of the sort that my school friend Georgina visited at weekends. The sort who would read to you, and make cakes with you, and take you to exhibitions. That wasn’t the relationship that Evie and I had. I didn’t call her Granny or anything like that. I called her Evie, and we spoke to one another like adults. Looking back, I am sure that she did love me, but next to all she had felt for my mother what she felt for me paled in comparison. My mother had been her saviour as much as she had been my mother’s, you see, and I think that Evie simply could not have cared for anyone as deeply.
Perhaps, too, she disliked the evidence she saw in me of my father, who she seemed to credit with having derailed Mum’s career via the pregnancy – notwithstanding the fact that Mum was old, in ballet terms, when she had me. My father had played the part of the villain well, disappearing off at the first sign of trouble. But there are two ways of looking at this. If you asked Mum, she would have told you that my father had meant little to her other than the fact that he helped to bring about me. We didn’t need him in our lives: we had one another.
My mother was christened June by the nuns who ran the institution in which she had lived from infancy. I always thought that her name had a curiously American ring to it, but – as she explained to me – it related to the month in which she had arrived. It was a good job that she turned up when she did, when the weather was balmy; if she had been left on the doorstep in February her story might well have gone no further.
Orphanages tend to get a bad write-up, but this wasn’t the Dickensian sort, and ‘institution’ suggests a level of deprivation that my mother always insisted was absent from her experience. True, there wasn’t much in the way of food or entertainment, but there were three modest-sized meals a day, there were lessons and musical sessions and excursions in the park. In comparison to some children’s experience it wasn’t a bad deal. It was also all my mother had ever known.
A couple of the older girls claimed to remember a woman. The velvet purr of an engine beneath the dormitory window had woken them in the early hours of the morning. They had clambered up to look out and had seen her approach the building carrying the bundle, and return minutes after without it. The doorbell had not rung. She had been, they would say later, as sleek and expensive-looking as the car that had driven her away, though they couldn’t agree on particulars – the colour of the hair beneath the hat, her height, her age. Yet both had been left with the impression of a great and peculiar beauty.
I once asked my mother if she had loved the nuns. She admitted that she couldn’t remember all of them individually – other than as a benevolent, omnipresent abstract, rather like the impression of God that the sisters had furnished her with. The one exception to this was Sister Rose, who didn’t stand out for any particular quirk of personality, but because she became an agent in the shaping of my mother’s future. She was the sister in charge of music lessons, which didn’t entail much beyond an elderly set of instruments, donated by various patrons and kept in a wooden chest in the gymnasium. Every Friday afternoon they would be removed and distributed with precise fairness for the girls to play on in their untutored way.
Then something rather unusual happened. When my mother was about six years old a new scheme was introduced. It was the brainchild of a wealthy patron – an anonymous philanthropist had an idea to set up a programme by which the girls might learn the joys of song and dance.
If my mother had been born a few years later, her life would have turned out very differently. Such a project could not have continued as German bombs rained fire upon the city. As it was, she got her chance.
The ballet teacher – and, as it transpired, the daughter of the philanthropist who had devised the initiative – was a woman named Evelyn Darling.
Evelyn Darling was born into the sort of life in which most things could be guaranteed. Her father, Bertram, had inherited his father’s metallurgical business, and had seen business boom during the First World War. As his only child, Evelyn stood assured of a large inheritance and a cosseted future. However it soon became clear that she wasn’t to be satisfied by the sort of life that heiresses normally lead. She had more ambitious and unusual plans for her future.
As a girl, Evelyn had gone several times to the ballet with her parents, and she had never seen anything as beautiful, as magical, as the creatures that flitted back and forth before her on the stage. It became her wish to learn to dance like them, and her father, unable to refuse her in anything, paid for her to have lessons – as many lessons as she could endure. He wasn’t sure about letting her perform: it didn’t seem to be quite the thing for girls of the sort of class to which he aspired. Eventually, though, he permitted her to dance in a small way at private gatherings.
Evelyn became rather good. Not, perhaps, of the highest calibre, but talented enough by nineteen to catch the eye of one young gentleman in particular. She might not have been conventionally pretty, Evelyn, but she had a way of moving – like a wood nymph – and a voice like the high clear ringing of a bell.
In 1935 Evelyn and Harry were engaged to be married. Evelyn would take up dancing again after they wed, but she would probably never perform again: it wasn’t fitting for a married woman to do so, and, besides, Harry was the love of her life now.
A scant couple of months before the date that had been set for the ceremony, Harry took Evelyn for a drive in the Sussex countryside in the new car that Bertram had bought them as an early wedding present. It was a glorious day, full of the promise of summer, the air filled with sunlight, the roads dry, so no one could be quite sure what it was that caused the tyres to skid. What could be established, however, was that the car was travelling at great speed, far too fast for Harry to have righted their course before they ploughed into one of the beech trees that lined the roadside. Evie was lucky. She lost the baby that she had not even known that she had been carrying, and her right leg was fractured in seven places, forever after to be held together by an ingenious framework of metal pins and bands. Harry was not so fortunate: he was killed outright.
Evelyn, for all the overabundance of her youth, was possessed of an innate toughness of character. She knew that she would never dance again, professionally or otherwise, that she would never again bear children, and that she could probably never love another man in the way she had Harry. And yet she took to the rehabilitation programme devised for her with great determination. Every day she would make the journey to Battersea Park – just across the bridge from her father’s townhouse – to perform her strengthening exercises in the green surrounds. It was here that she saw the troupe of orphanage girls in their maroon smocks taking their walk, with two of the sisters at helm and aft. In that moment the idea was born.
I don’t think it would be untrue to say that in my mother Evie found the daughter that she had never been able to bear, along with, perhaps, the story of success that could never have been hers. She taught her everything she knew. A year after Mum first crossed the threshold of the ballet studio, Evie had adopted her as her own.
In 1938, my eight-year-old mother won a scholarship to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School and Company. The rest, as they say, is history. The orphanage, the hand-me-down costume that she’d first worn to train in – these became part of my mother’s fairy tale.
Fairy tales, however, do not always end happily – in fact, quite often it’s the opposite, despite what modern retellings may ask you to believe. That was a difficult lesson to learn; perhaps I am learning it still. The fourteenth of April 1985. I tried to think, later, of what I was doing at the time, the exact time when the crash happened. Did I know, at that moment, in some fundamental part of my being? I have a terrible suspicion that I was buying a round for some of my old art-school friends at the Goodge Street pub we met in: blithely going about my day with no idea of how my life had suddenly changed.
After the plane crash I moved back into the house in Battersea where the three of us had lived: a big, cluttered Victorian conversion on one of those streets leading away from the park. It was only me there now. A couple of years before, Evie had gone into a home, diagnosed with progressive dementia. For a long time, Mum had refused to consider the possibility of moving her into care. Her work as a choreographer had seen her travelling frequently, but she said that she would downsize and find work closer to home so she could spend more time looking after Evie. Yet Evie’s behaviour became increasingly confused and erratic. When she was found on the other side of the borough with a broken elbow and no knowledge of how she’d got so far from home, it became clear that she didn’t simply need more extensive care, she needed it round-the-clock. Mum couldn’t afford to stop working completely, and I had to be at the Slade, where I was taking my degree in Fine Art.
‘It would be better’, said the social worker at St George’s, who had an illustrated-textbook turn of phrase, ‘for her to have the company of others – which can be achieved with at-home visits, but is far more easily accomplished in a nursing home, where she can have a social life, too.’
I can see why my mother found the decision such a difficult one to make. This was the woman who had cared for her from infancy, without whose love and influence she would never have had the life she did. I know she suffered over it, felt that she was committing a terrible form of betrayal. There was the added complication that Evie didn’t always seem in a particularly bad way – she could have moments of sudden and startling lucidity, and there were whole days when it would appear that nothing at all was amiss. But the bad days were very bad, and the possibilities of what could happen in the hours Evie might be alone were frightening. In the end, Mum had accepted that there was no alternative.