The lines, which a number of people together form, in country or figure dancing, make a delightful play upon the eye, especially when the whole figure is to be seen at one view, as at the playhouse from a gallery … [T]he dances of barbarians are always represented without these movements, being only composed of wild skipping, jumping, and turning around, or running backward and forward with convulsive shrugs, and distorted gestures.
WILLIAM HOGARTH, Analysis of Beauty
‘I don’t know what’s become of Hampstead,’ my great-grandmother once remarked. ‘It’s full of Turks and infidels.’ She lived (and is buried) on the city’s rim, at the top of the hill on which Hampstead is built. I was almost born round the corner but at the last minute my parents moved down the other side of the hill into a flat in a house that had been built by Evelyn Waugh’s father. Unlovely, it sat bang on the line between the postcodes NW3 and NW11, bohemian Hampstead and suburban Golders Green, or what Robert Lowell’s mother called, in terms of her own Boston geography, ‘barely perched on the outer rim of the hub of decency’.*
Our address was one of several aspects of our lives which resisted the expectations of our class and through which we stepped out of line. The general rule was that you could live in the wrong place so long as your house had charm. My parents were more gung-ho, and my mother somewhat resistant to the aesthetics she had been born into. We grew up in a confusion of shabbiness and beauty, thinking of possessions as there to be worn out or given away, and found ourselves lighter but emptier than we might have expected.
Our lives faced into the city where my father’s medical practice was in Camden Town. My father was most alive in that landscape, a place so various and full of things for a doctor to do. He looked after the homeless alcoholics who slept at Arlington House as well as young actors, architects and writers, some of whom became famous. We ate croissants, dolmades and rollmops, and brewed Turkish coffee in a brass pot. One of the handsome young brothers from Trattoria Lucca opposite the surgery brought over cappuccino on a tray held high on the tips of his fingers above the traffic; his mother, Mrs Boggi, gave me chocolate and pinched my cheek. The local baker took us into his kitchens where I was made delirious by the warm and sugary air. We bought paper twists of blue-tinged North Sea shrimps from a man who sold them in Flask Walk outside the (by then very smart) house in which he’d been born.
We loafed around market stalls and canal locks, and walked the dog on Primrose Hill at dusk just as the wolves in the zoo began to howl. The dog would howl back. I stood there in the dark with my father, in silence, and knew that we were both sad, that we could not speak of it and that we each drew something from the dark. I looked down onto a lit city that could not be tidied into circles or lines, and felt at home.
It seems strange now that in such a place as Camden Town I could have been taught English country dancing. My lessons took place at Cecil Sharp House, the headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. This kind of dancing was like gambling for matchsticks rather than money. It had no charge and I felt no flight or spring or joy but trailed around in a swill of children, learning patterns and steps which seemed even less interesting than the playground games I was beginning to grow out of. I was no longer prepared to jump and clap whenever music presented itself but needed to be persuaded.
We fumbled along, trying to master the reel or ‘hey’ in which two lines or circles of people move past each other in opposite directions in a kind of plait. The music sagged (where did the music come from? A gramophone?) as we children made flabby circles and limp lines, and bumped into one another as one pair set off with a spurt into ‘Heel and Toe’, only to crash immediately into their neighbours who were still trying to work out which foot to put down when and where.
Cecil Sharp drew heavily upon John Playford’s 1651 publication, The English Dancing Master, or, Plaine and Easie Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances with the Tunes to each Dance. Playford claimed that ‘Plato, that Famous Philosopher thought it meet, that yong Ingenious Children be taught to dance.’ His dances sound passionate and complicated: ‘Every Lad his Lass’ – a triple-minor-set; ‘The Friar in the Well, or The Maid Peeped Out at the Window’ – longways for as many as will; ‘Dissembling Heart, or The Lost Love’ – longways for six; ‘Fain I Would’ – square for eight; ‘The Collier’s Daughter, or, The Duke of Rutland’s Delight’ – triple-minor-set.
Later, I would do some fierce country dancing at ceilidhs and weddings, and would see what it could be used for. At seven, I was impatient and unimpressed. We were taught to ‘honour’ our partner at the beginning and end of each dance with a brief curtsey or bow, and did so drearily. I remember the passing impassive faces of the other children as we lined up, linked arms, clapped hands, skipped. There were no intricate steps or flamboyant gestures and you had to submit to your partner, to a four or an eight. We bumbled along while someone somewhere shouted instructions. The moves were homely – the cast or the basket. Even the promenade was only a measured stroll. Scottish, Irish and Welsh country dancing involved costumes, stamping, rigid posture and fine details. They danced among swords.
I gave up on Cecil Sharp and tried country dancing at a local school, where I had to wear a skirt covered with tiny green sprigs and a lacy white blouse with puff sleeves. The skirt stuck out from a crudely elasticated waist and the shirt scratched. There was something helplessly staid about the effect. I looked more like a great-aunt than a country maid, and not remotely frothy or verdant.
If this English dancing had any virtue, it was that it tried to be nice. It might have been dancing for people embarrassed about dancing. This was my national dance? Other people’s involved smashing glasses or plates; they wore sashes, hats, tassels, scarves and swirling skirts; they made noise. We were simply being conditioned, as in our sports days and Brownie troops, to join in.
My parents had both been miserably if well educated at boarding school and wanted for us a kind of social ease and equipment they felt they did not get: they wanted us to be able to join in the broader world. Joining in at my north London primary school was complicated by the fact that it had pupils from thirty or so different nationalities. There were automatic and visible allegiances as well as shared languages, food and observances. My Jewish friends stayed in on Friday evenings and kept the Sabbath on Saturdays. They could speak Hebrew, Yiddish and German. They had a separate assembly and weren’t allowed to write the word ‘God’. My Spanish friend was Catholic and crossed herself elaborately. My other friends were Mauritian, Indian and Japanese. I wasn’t even Catholic. We had a parade each year in national dress and I didn’t have one so couldn’t take part. I wasn’t going to wear my lace blouse and flowery skirt.
For a while I declared myself ‘half Scottish, quarter Irish and quarter Welsh’. My grandfathers were Scottish, one by birth, the other by descent. I had a kilt in my mother’s Mackintosh tartan and my brother a pair of Mackintosh shorts. That grandfather married a woman who brought into the family the wide face and eyes of, it was dancingly said, a ‘Mary Kelly of County Cork’. My Greenlaw grandfather joined the Gordon Highlanders in the First World War, had his lip shot off and endured some of the first plastic surgery. He had been training to be a classics teacher in Aberdeen and was one of only two in his class who returned from the war. Both gave up teaching and became doctors. His wife was the daughter of a Welsh Methodist minister.
This all-round Celticness gave me colour; Englishness seemed to have no colour at all. Only I wasn’t Scottish, I was English. There was so much difference around me that I wanted my own whereas my friends’ parents, especially the Jews who had fled Europe, wanted their children to belong. Surnames were anglicised: Silberstein became Silver, Rosenkranz, Rose. My Spanish friend was restricted to one of her four or five surnames and her first name toned down from Maria to Mary. I, on the other hand, was taught how to dance a reel, to promenade and do-si-do, to heel and toe. Instead of Hogarth’s barbaric wildness, I was learning through dance to be contained and regulated, and to have that great English form of beauty – to look nice.
*Robert Lowell, ‘Revere Street’, Life Studies, 1956.