‘“From where?”’
‘“I don’t know. Somewhere.”
‘“I don’t know where to find a decent one that’s cheap.”
‘“Ah. Bollocks. I hate people that say they can’t do things. Find one. Steal one. Hijack a band.” And then he grabs his jacket and gets up to leave. I ask him where he’s living.
‘“In a train at Victoria station. It parks up in the sidings at night and I sleep there. In the morning I get up and use the wash-and-brush-up in the station and go to work.”
‘“Where do you work, then?”
‘“Building sites. I prefer them because when the work’s finished the workforce moves on. Everywhere else the workforce stays stuck in the same place and the product moves on. I like to keep moving.”
‘“I’ll give you the phone number here if you like.”
‘“Fuck off. I hate telephones. It’s like talking to a fucking shoe or something. You think – I hope nobody can see me talking to this lump of plastic. Look, I’ll just come back some time.” He spun a drumstick into the air and caught it and put it down on the bed.
‘“Look after these drumsticks for us.”
‘And he was off down the stairs two-at-a-time. I didn’t see him again until just now.’
That’s the man I’m going to marry, thought Ella.
Chapter Sixteen
When she danced as a child what was most noticeable was her gift for stillness.
In the winter of 1959, when England had not yet shaken off its post-war austerity, three examiners for the Royal Academy of Dance sat behind the table at one end of a draughty south London hall. An icy morning fog swathed the streets outside. Some children were late because of cancelled buses and there were arguments between mothers in the changing-room as to whose turn it was to go into the examination hall next. Parents unwrapped their offspring from scarves and coats and rubbed their blue fingers and feet to bring back the blood. That December it was so cold that the examiners kept their coats on in the hall. Their breath steamed out in wisps as they looked down at the marking papers and up again at the performing candidates. Behind the upright piano Mrs Patrick kept her woollen mittens on to play. Her permed hair was dyed black and she wore bright red lipstick with wartime bravado, although the war was long since over. Number five on their list for the Grade II exam was Elissa de Vries, aged six.
The examiners noted that the child had the sinuous grace of a cat. Her straight black hair was cut in a pudding-basin style with a fringe. Her skin was the colour of agate. Her obsidian eyes were wide-set. One of the examiners wondered to himself whether she might not be Mexican. Another thought that the wide slanting eyes might be from somewhere in the orient. She wore a black swimming costume and over it a short, homemade, ill-fitting tunic with a slit down each side. Her scuffed ballet shoes had turned from pink to grey. The pale face and intense eyes gave an impression of mischievous remoteness as if she belonged elsewhere or was entirely focused on her own inner life. She barely looked at the examiners but concentrated on executing the steps which she did reasonably well.
When one of the examiners asked her what she would like to do next, she thought for a moment and then replied:
‘Walk on my hands.’
‘I mean what other pieces have you prepared for us?’
The child looked far away, up at the high windows which were still covered with a mesh of wire netting to protect them from bomb damage. She had lost interest in the examination. What she wanted was to be either a trapeze artist or an acrobat. She enjoyed flipping onto her hands, arching her back and then letting her elbows give slightly until she found the correct balance to walk forward. She wanted to show them how she did it. The examiners waited. Mrs Patrick leaned round from behind the piano and hissed loudly, ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’, and began to play.
Ella danced the hornpipe with reluctance. She disliked the dance with its folded arms, mock salutes and mimed gestures of looking out to sea. She preferred the gaiety of the polka where she could spin and whirl using the space of the whole room. The pinched frown remained on her face all the way through the hornpipe. It lost her marks.
Deportment: 80%
Steps: 82%
Dance piece – hornpipe: 54%
‘You must teach her to smile,’ said Mrs Patrick afterwards to Ella’s mother, a cockney woman with wide cheekbones and blue eyes, who was leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette in the swirling fog. ‘She’s not going to get anywhere unless she learns to smile.’
And so Ella’s mother set about teaching her daughter to smile.
‘She’s a solemn little creature. Solitary. Like her dad. I can’t always make head or tail of her,’ said her mother to her sister Doris as they washed dishes.
However, amidst the calm stillness which had been so striking to the examiners, lay a degree of recklessness and abandon that would eventually reveal itself.
*
Every Thursday after school Ella’s mother took her to a dance class at the Cambridge House Settlement for Underprivileged Children in the Walworth Road.
‘It’s not that we’re underprivileged,’ she said to her neighbour. ‘It’s just that it’s cheaper than anywhere else.’
The classes were held in a shabby building owned by Cambridge University. Light blue paint peeled off the front door. There Ella learned ballet and tap-dancing. In the basement of the building was an unheated kitchen, a cracked sink, an old wooden table pale from scrubbing with too much bleach, and a few rickety chairs. Sometimes when one of the girls went down to fetch a glass of water she would find an obscene note left on the table or a crude sexual drawing. It seemed that a paedophile – maybe more than one – frequented the premises, which were used by several charitable organisations. The adults tut-tutted but did nothing. The children went down to look and have a snigger. Most of them had seen men exposing themselves on a bomb site or in a dark alley or had experience of an uncle gripping their thigh too tightly. A little molestation was the norm in that part of south London. Nobody took a lot of notice.
Ella’s teacher was Miss Dolores Beer. She had crinkly hair and a manner both diffident and gushing. ‘I was trained under Biddy Pinchard,’ she would say to the mothers as her eyes misted over with admiration for her revered teacher. ‘Biddy Pinchard would never allow anyone to chew gum in class,’ she said reprovingly to her pupils. The mothers hoped their daughters would escape the drab environs of south London and become Bluebell Girls or Tiller Girls and move into a world of elegant stage-door Johnnies and afternoon teas at The Ritz.
Miss Beer’s troupe was booked to perform in Manor Place Baths, Camberwell. In winter the swimming pool was boarded over and a boxing ring erected on top of it. Amateur boxing matches took place there for all ages and weights. Miss Beer’s troupe was to provide the pre-match entertainment in the boxing ring. The baths were in a dank old building half a mile from the Elephant and Castle. The building also housed the public wash house where the air was hot, steamy and filled with the tang of chlorine, wet clothes and disinfectant.
Ella had rehearsed a short ballet solo. She watched from the side as the other children went on first with their tap-dancing routine. Their arms swung from side to side in unison as they sang:
‘Hey neighbour, say neighbour
How’s the world with you?’ Clickety-clack. Clickety-clack.
Something had gone wrong. The tap shoes did not sound right on the canvas of the boxing ring. In fact, they did not sound at all. Confused by the muffled noise, the tap-dancers broke rhythm like a troop of soldiers breaking step to cross a bridge. They tip-tapped to a halt and stood looking at each other. An anguished Miss Beer, near to tears, gestured desperately for Ella to go on next.
Ella climbed in the ring and stood, as she had been taught, with one foot crossed behind the other and her arms curved at her sides. When the cue came and she started to dance it was as if the music had suddenly overflowed and caused her to move.
Half-way through her p
iece there was a disturbance. A skinny boy of about nine, ready for combat in his blue boxing shorts and gigantic boxing gloves jumped up from the front row of the audience and dashed towards the ring. He put his boxing gloves up to the sides of his head like two enormous Mickey Mouse ears, pulled a terrible face and capered up and down on the spot in a wild parody of her dance. An attendant grabbed him in a neck-lock and hauled him away.
Ella finished the piece. Sporadic applause echoed through the hall. Miss Beer, already distraught by the silent tap-dancing, tried to make the best of the incident to Ella’s mother:
‘She was very heroic to carry on. Very professional. That’s what I was always taught to do if anything went amiss. Just keep going. I trained under Biddy Pinchard, you know.’
Ella slipped away to the deserted stage at the end of the hall where the boy had been confined. The black curtains hanging at either side of the stage smelled stale and musty with disuse. The boy was sitting swinging his legs on a bench in the dark wings. She could barely distinguish his features in the gloom. They stared at each other. He pulled another terrible face and after a minute or two she backed off and returned to the others.
*
As a child, Ella was convinced she could break the laws of physics. She had heard about, although not seen, a doll – some sort of little mannikin – that could not be knocked over and which always bounced back upright. Ella was convinced that, given the chance, she could knock it out flat. She longed to see one, knowing without doubt that should she ever come across one of these resilient creatures she would be able to deck it for ever. She had also heard about the secret of perpetual motion and was sure she could solve that. She would lie on the floor of their council flat for hours trying to make four pencils resting on each other in a square click around for eternity. It never worked but she always felt that she came close.
Later on, when she became a dancer, it appeared as if she was almost able to break the laws of physics or at least bend them to her will: the forces of gravity, spin and friction all came under her control.
*
Ella’s father came from Surinam. Her parents met at a tea dance in the Locarno on the Strand. Alice Pimms soon fell for Hubert de Vries. He was a man with gentle manners who danced with a timeless grace that made her feel that she was floating across the floor. He had come over from Surinam via Holland to work as a clerk for a Dutch sugar company. Unbeknownst to either of them, his tuberculosis was already well advanced when they married. Six months after the wedding he jerked up in bed with a coughing fit. When Alice switched on the bedside lamp she found their pillow streaked with dark blood. Hubert was sent to a sanatorium in Surrey. Four months after he was admitted, Ella was born in Camberwell’s King’s College Hospital.
Every other Saturday, the ‘fever bus’ left Trafalgar Square to take relatives of the patients to the sanatorium. For two years Alice de Vries caught the bus and took Ella along. A nurse would wheel her husband along the paved walkways to where she sat waiting in the grounds with the baby in her arms. She was anxious about letting him hold her for too long and tried to pull Ella away after a few minutes lest the child too became infected.
For most of her childhood Ella’s father was in and out of hospitals and sanatoria. Sometimes he was allowed home for a few months. At one point they performed an operation to remove his left lung. The doctors warned him never to return to South America. The climate, they said, would kill him. Alice took odd jobs waitressing and managed somehow with the help of her sisters.
One September afternoon Alice and her sisters decided to take Hubert out for a picnic in some woodland near Chislehurst. Ella saw her father standing a little way apart under the trees. Suddenly, she saw him as a stranger might and understood that a stranger might find him a little frightening. She saw that he was alien to the landscape. Amongst the slender birch and silver beech trees he looked so un-English. He was lost in thought. Alice had brought his winter coat along even though the weather was not yet cold. Tuberculosis and the operation to remove his lung had twisted his spine into a question mark, so the ill-fitting herring-bone coat hung loosely from his shoulders. His complexion was dark and sallow. His eyes were circled with black. Ella had inherited his slender arms and obsidian eyes. She felt a rush of affection for him and ran over to give him a hug. He bent his head and butted her lightly with his forehead. He had learned long ago never to kiss his child directly or even breathe on her.
‘All right. All right. Run along now,’ he said and patted her on the shoulder. He rarely spoke. He conserved his energy. Often his speech was preceded by a cough or he would clear his throat. He was thin and gaunt and seemed somehow removed from the robust fair-skinned English family into which he had married, and who now sat chatting and joking apart from him surrounded by the debris of the picnic.
Chapter Seventeen
One year later there was a rupture in Ella’s life. While her father was in the sanatorium Alice too became seriously ill and was hospitalised with a series of operations for appendicitis and then peritonitis and septicaemia. In a flurry it was arranged for Ella’s uncle to take her back to Surinam until her mother was well again.
Pa Tem or Uncle Pa as Ella called him was nothing like her father. The siblings in that family had a kaleidoscopic mix of racial features, African, Amerindian, Dutch and Indonesian. Pa Tem looked more African. He spoke both English and Dutch creole. Ella’s father Hubert was slender and had an Amerindian’s lighter skin colour.
They disembarked at Paramaribo on a Carnival weekend and the city shook its old bones in readiness to greet Ella with its salt-laden trade winds and well laid out grass-edged streets. But the alien heat and the wind which carried strange stagnant smells made her nauseous. Pa Tem and his official wife Tanta Marti lived in a white wooden box of a house off Gravenstraat. Tanta Marti welcomed her at the door wearing a bright skirt and stiff head-wrap that scratched Ella when she bent to embrace her. At the back of the house was a small patch of lawn.
‘You can play here on the grass as much as you want,’ said Tanta Marti.
Ella looked down at the tough wide blades of coarse tropical grass:
‘This isn’t grass. It’s leaves,’ she said.
The next morning Ella was unable to eat the paw-paw, fresh guava and bakes that were put in front of her. Her face was a smooth rink of glycerine tears.
‘I want my mother,’ she said.
‘As soon as your mummy gets better you will go back to her.’
‘What if she dies?’
Tanta Marti looked at the child with concern. She wiped her hands on the back of her hips:
‘I’ll tell you what we will do today. I’m going to take you to visit a friend of mine who will know all about your mother.’
The heat pressed down on Ella as she followed her aunt through the streets. Tanta Marti took her hand as they entered a small rum shop.
‘Ella, this is my old friend Papa Bones. He has a list of everyone who is going to die. He can tell you about your mummy.’ She gave Papa Bones a meaningful look and put money on the table. He beckoned Ella to sit on his lap. His eyes were glazed with rum. He mumbled something in Dutch creole and pulled four grubby lined sheets of an exercise book from his pocket. On each line was written a barely decipherable name.
‘What is your mama’s name?’
‘Alice de Vries.’
Papa Bones went through the list naming each name in turn and looking questioningly at Ella after each one. He reached the end of the list:
‘Your mama’s name is not here so she can’t die yet.’
Tanta Marti beamed.
‘Thank you, Papa Bones. You should join us in the Wie Eegie Sanie independence movement. My husband is a member now.’
‘I don’ business with politics.’ Papa Bones looked over at Ella who was standing by the door. He whispered in Tanta Marti’s ear:
‘That chile is danger. She attracts danger. Or she attracted to it. Or she cause it. I don’t know which.’
‘What parts do they fondle?’ asked Papa Bones. The woman touched her breast and pointed further down.
‘I will come to your home tonight and throw holy water on whatever parts the dead men play with.’
Tanta Marti thought she saw Papa Bones give her a sly wink as she steered Ella away and through the door.
Outside Carnival was underway. Ella gazed with delight at a group of Djukas dancing to a powerful drumbeat. The dance required great stamina. They crouched low to the ground with raised knees that looked like the bent legs of black spiders. Their feet drummed on the ground as they passed. After half an hour the baking heat made Ella wilt and she was sick at the side of the road.
*
Uncle Pa took Ella with him to the interior when he visited his mistress. The night before they left Tanta Marti smashed some plates against the kitchen wall.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Pa Tem to Ella. ‘Tanta Marti is vex. She havin’ a little tantrum and throwing some crockery about de place.’
They travelled by boat. Uncle Pa’s consort was a Trio Indian woman called Suki, dark and fiery with eight children, some by Pa Tem. When she spoke her own Trio language it sounded to Ella as if she were shouting. But there was an immediacy in her glance and a tremendous vitality and vigour about her that appealed to Ella. One of her daughters, Marijke, was the same age as Ella. The two little girls fell in love with each other the way children do and played together. Ella loved the physical freedom of running around all day naked apart from her panties.
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