Enough was enough, and in the end my aunt and my grandfather took her to rehab in the suburbs of Vladivostok, to a place where the most severe addicts went.
I couldn’t find it in my heart to visit her. I just didn’t want to, so I woke up on my seventeenth birthday all by myself in the flat. That evening I invited some friends round from dance school and I cooked for everyone. They asked me where my mum was and I just said she was away – I didn’t want anyone to know she was in rehab.
The truth was, while I was living on my own, I realised I was OK. Does that sound awful? I was OK with the thought that my relationship with my mother was broken for ever. In my mind, I thought we hated each other as we would always scream and shout at each other. And I blamed her for so much, too – for my terrible childhood, for my dad leaving, for being so aggressive and abusive towards me. It was a time in my life when I felt like, ‘I can survive on my own. This is my life. I will dance and I will compete and I will survive.’
I honestly thought I would be on my own for ever but then I got a phone call from a doctor at the rehab clinic. He explained that he was a psychiatrist who was working with my mum and they had made lots of progress. Apparently she seemed to be in a very good place at the moment but they wanted me to come in and visit her.
But I couldn’t do it. I was very honest with him and told him I didn’t think I was up to it – how could I go there and visit her? I was doing OK by myself; I didn’t want to go. And then he told me about what he had been working on with my mum over the past three months, and that the only reason she had given for wanting to live was me.
‘There is no other reason apart from you that is keeping her going,’ he explained. ‘She has said over and over again that if she doesn’t have a relationship with her daughter, she has no other reason to live.’
So I went. It was tough, really tough, as I felt like I was seeing a stranger. Mum didn’t look like herself at all, she was so thin – just a shell of herself really. She said she loved me and told me the only way she could continue with her life was with me. I can’t really describe how I felt at that point – I still had a lot of anger towards her and deep down I didn’t believe that she would change or that she would stop drinking. The psychiatrist explained that she had inherited a weakness for alcohol from her father and, although she had proven herself to be a very strong person during her time at the clinic, she needed to stick to the programme he had set out.
That was it. She came home a couple of weeks later, having been in rehab for about four months. It was hard to have her back in the flat – I was living with my mum but it was as if we were strangers. We were like two different women living together because I was an adult now, doing my own things. I had started at college and I had become quite independent, too.
I never really wanted to go to college because I thought it was a complete waste of time. I’d been earning money since I was fourteen years old so I couldn’t see the point. And I was becoming popular with the kids I taught and their parents because they knew I was good and I cared about teaching them. In my heart I always knew dancing would be my profession and that I could make a living while teaching. But after finishing school, college was the next step. At least that was according to my mother. I had finished school with reasonable grades, mostly As in Literature, Russian Language, Biology and History, but I didn’t fare quite so well in other subjects like Maths and Physics.
School had become a lot more relaxed since the break-up of the Soviet Union. We no longer had to wear school uniform and the divide between rich and poor was never more evident. The children who came from rich families were wearing all these amazing, beautiful clothes and some of the teachers, who were struggling to feed their families with the poor wages they were getting, looked scruffy by comparison.
Whenever there was a school concert that would involve our school competing with others in the area, I was always the one chosen to represent the school in dancing competitions. The teachers encouraged it and they didn’t mind quite so much if my grades slipped in certain subjects as I always did well for the school when it came to dancing! I didn’t really have many friends either – as I have already mentioned, I found it hard to fit in when I moved schools and my main friendship group was always the people I met at dance school. I think the other kids thought I was a snob for not wanting to socialise with them but I just wasn’t interested in boys or going to parties, I wanted to go and dance. At fourteen years old, when lots of girls began going out with boys and started smoking, drinking and having house parties, I was making money teaching. I did have one good friend called Lena, who was very musical and would be as passionate about music as I was about dancing. We both had strong hobbies that we loved and we couldn’t see the point in boys or parties or anything like that so, in a way, I think that made us the subject of a lot of gossip – we were the two girls who weren’t bothered about fitting in as we had our own lives outside of school. And I still had Vera as a friend. I was happy to have her friendship and guidance at school, too.
A few times in the last couple of years in school I found love notes left on my locker, which was quite sweet. I used to try and figure out where they came from, but I didn’t want a boyfriend: I was committed to dancing, not boys.
When I look back at those years, of Perestroika, of the Soviet Union’s collapse, it is little wonder my generation is sometimes called ‘The Lost Generation’. Kids of twelve or thirteen years old don’t understand what is happening and they want to belong to something. At that age you have such a need to fit in and I had that same sense of wanting to belong, but I found it through dancing. Other friends at my school didn’t have a path to follow and they would fall into gangs that would groom them for a life of crime. It was easy to see how they became lost, turned to drugs and fell into a world of desperation to somehow fit in. Seeing my friends like that affected me greatly. It is one of the main reasons I am so passionate about the charity work I do now with Dot Com Children’s Foundation. Living through those times made me realise how vitally important the values of the foundation are in helping young people find a path in life. Children are desperate to have a sense of belonging which is why, although I couldn’t help my friends, I am even more focused on helping children in society today with the values of dotcomcf.org. But I will explain more about that incredible charity later.
Back to schooling and me: my mum was adamant that I went to college. Education was everything to her so she was always on my case. It wasn’t too bad because it was evening college and the lessons didn’t interfere with dancing or teaching, but I just didn’t see the point. I chose International Tourism Management as a degree as it was made up of all the subjects I loved – English, History, Geography, Russian Language, Sociology and Psychology.
Of course I don’t regret it now. I am happy to say I am a college graduate. As dancers, we can quite often overlook things like that because we are so passionate about what we do. I don’t know a lot of dancers with degrees because you just live your life as a dancer but it has helped me with what I do now to a certain extent, when I am working with different people on Strictly Come Dancing. You must find a way to click with the different personalities that you have to teach and the lessons I learnt in psychology during my college years certainly helped me. So would I have gone to college if it was a day course? No, I would have stood my ground with my mum! My argument would have been: ‘Why should I give up my job for an education? You have an education and where has it got you?’
But I am grateful to her that she was persistent and in a way it made me want to complete college all the more because I could not bear to hear her moan about it: I did it for her. The moment I got that diploma I gave it straight to her and I said to her, ‘Look, I have the degree! Now you can get off my case.’
CHAPTER 8
I grew up with an idea that any man in my life will always let me down…
Our country was a bleak place to be in the nineties. There was an endless circle of gang
crime and violence and people getting shot on a daily basis. That sounds very dramatic, doesn’t it? But it was the truth. It wasn’t just bleak, it was downright scary and no one was above corruption, not even those who were meant to protect us. You could bribe the police – you could bribe anyone if you had the money. And you could buy and steal whatever you wanted if you were in a gang; no one touched you.
There is a story I want to tell you about a girlfriend of mine that shows what was happening at that time in my country. Her name was Oksanna and she was a gorgeous girl, inside and out. We became friends through another friend of mine and would often hang out at discos and other places. While studying at college, I was offered a position at a dance school in a city called Nakhodka, which was another small seaport near Vladivostok. It was one of the biggest dance schools in the area and the woman who was running it asked if I would ‘try-out’ with her son Eugene, who was my age and a very good dancer. She wanted us to compete together and thought I would be the perfect partner for him. Quite often that is how couples come together – the teachers or judges or owners of the dance schools are the ones who pair them up. They work out who will match whom and work best together.
It was a brilliant opportunity for me so I took it – although I had to promise my mum that I was only deferring my college course for one year and that I would definitely complete it as soon as I returned to Vladivostok. So I moved to Nakhodka to dance with Eugene, and Oksanna used to come and visit me and her grandmother, who also lived there. I was missing all my friends from Vladivostok so it was always nice to see her and we had some fun nights out together.
Nakhodka was about three hours’ drive away and I think I went home most weekends when I wasn’t competing to see Oksanna and my other friends. But about two weeks after one of her weekend visits to me, I got a call from my friend Irina. Absolutely distraught, she didn’t know how to break the news to me that Oksanna had been killed. She had gone to a casino with her boyfriend, who was head of a fairly big, well-known gang, and they had both been shot as they left at 5am. Apparently she was just sitting in the car with him and someone shot them. They died from multiple gunshot wounds. Oksanna wasn’t a target, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but nobody cared, they killed her anyway. The official story was that it was just a fight between two gangs but the police simply closed their eyes to it. No one wanted to deal with it or investigate it further, so her family never really got the justice they were owed. We had to bury a twenty-three-year-old friend and all of us, all of her girlfriends, helped her parents pay for the funeral.
I think it was after that when I realised I didn’t want to live my life in Russia any more. It was a bit of a turning point for me, that tragedy, and I cried for a long time over Oksanna’s death. Would I grow up in this country and suffer the same fate? Most of my other girlfriends, who were just twenty-one or twenty-two years old, were now married with babies. It might seem young now but then it was normal, everyone got married and some at just eighteen or nineteen years old, because that was the dream. It was a young girl’s aspiration to be married to someone who had lots of money and power, even though it might come at a price. I’m not lying when I say I think around ninety per cent of my friends ended up being widows in those first two years of marriage, and were left alone with children and no money. I looked around and most of my girlfriends were widows at twenty years old, with young children and unable to pay for anything.
But it wasn’t just that Vladivostok was rife with gang crime. Across Russia life was the same and I didn’t want it to be my life. To be honest, getting married and having babies didn’t appeal to me and as I had proved that I could earn money and support myself, I didn’t want to give that up for a man. And what sort of man would it be, anyway? Probably a man who didn’t think about what he was doing with his life, who just wanted to be part of a gang and didn’t care about the danger it brought to his family. I suppose everyone tried to live their lives and make money any way they could, but I was used to standing on my own two feet – I never needed to depend on a man. And I loved dancing so much I knew it was going to be my career and in a way, my saviour. So I looked at my girlfriends, who had nothing going for them and no way to support themselves because their husbands or boyfriends had been killed, and it made me think about my own life. Grateful for what I had, it also reaffirmed to me that dancing was my way of life and I had to see where it was going to take me.
Being in Nakhodka and competing with Eugene also meant that I had to take a break from teaching and helping Igor and Olga. They had become like parents to me and although they were sad about me leaving, they recognised that it was an amazing opportunity for me to compete. It was because of going to Nakhodka that I was able to visit Japan and England through the competitions I entered at the school. I have a picture of me with The Beatles in Madame Tussauds and another one on a double-decker bus! I never thought I would end up living in England – it is so funny to look back at that time now and think how much my life has moved on.
Sadly, there was another tragedy around the corner for me. I had been in Nakhodka for nearly a year when I heard that Olga had been involved in a car crash with three of her girlfriends. She died a few days later in hospital. Once again I was devastated. She was my mentor in so many ways and I loved her. When she died she was only thirty-four years old and yet she was such a strong character. She was the one who kept the school running. Igor was a lovely man but it was Olga who was the driving force. She was the one making costumes for the dancers, teaching us hair and make-up, and the one we went to if ever we needed advice. She was a lovely, lovely woman and I had lost a person so dear to me. All the women I had grown up with or knew in Russia were very strong. They are their own breed, I suppose: Olga, my mum, who was strong enough to come out of her addiction, and then my grandmother, who dealt with an abusive husband. They very much shaped my understanding of men and I grew up with an idea that any man in your life will always let you down; you can’t rely on them. That was my understanding of life in my early twenties: if you don’t do it yourself or try to make a living yourself, you can’t rely on anyone else.
I suppose that is why it was never my goal to be married and settled. Perhaps I never believed that it would happen or that any man would make me happy. I think I always thought that a man was weaker than a woman – even as a little girl I believed that. So how did it affect my future relationships? Well, it has made me very independent, which is something that most men don’t like. It’s funny, when you start a relationship, they like it, they like having an independent, confident woman. But they come to resent it a lot, too. In some ways I feel like I have always struggled to relax and breathe in a relationship – I can’t seem to let myself be happy or settled. I always have a need to know where the next job is going to be and how I will earn my next pay cheque. It’s a survival instinct in me and I guess that makes me quite a workaholic. And of course it has destroyed a lot of my relationships as I put work first. But you must understand that this was almost embedded in me from a little girl.
I dated some guys who might have changed my mind, whom I might have been able to let take care of me, but I never gave them a chance. A chance to show me that I could relax, that I could be looked after. I don’t blame anyone for this ideology that I have, it is just the way I was raised. And back then I was addicted to my dancing and to teaching and competing. It made me feel worthy and above all else, happy. As a child I felt very unworthy because my parents didn’t exactly make me feel like I was the centre of their world, so I was always craving some sort of admiration and I got that when I danced.
After Olga died, I went back to Vladivostok but I wasn’t sad to be going home. My relationship with Eugene wasn’t very healthy. He was, for want of a better word, a bully. He would push me around or slap me – that was just the way he was. He was an abusive man and to begin with I think that I put up with his behaviour because he was so great at dancing, and I thought this was something that I would
just have to tolerate. Like many men in Russia he didn’t have a very healthy relationship with alcohol and he would get drunk and then start saying something horrible. His mother knew about the abuse and I don’t think I was the first partner that he had bullied. I told her that I wasn’t going to carry on dancing with him if he continued to treat me the way he did and she was very upset. She told me I would be breaking up a very good partnership and that we had so much potential, but she could tell I wasn’t bluffing; I would pack my bags and leave. And after one particularly nasty fight when he slapped me across the face I did just that.
It was the right time to return home to Vladivostok as Olga’s death had affected Igor badly and he needed me to help and support him. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that he turned to drinking quite heavily as a way of dealing with his loss. But I couldn’t turn my back on him – I felt responsible for him because he had always been so encouraging about my dancing and he and Olga had helped me so much. So it was at that point that I decided to step in and take over the running of the whole dance school. At twenty-two years old I started managing it and teaching full-time. I taught all the children and took them around the country just as I myself had been taken around. During the day I worked hard to keep the school up and running but I also went back to college to finish my diploma in the evenings. I didn’t want to let Igor or the memory of Olga down as I felt so much loyalty to them, so it was then that I made the decision to stop competing, too. I decided I had to leave that part of me in Nakhodka and concentrate on the legacy that Olga had left. Around fifty children were attending the school in all sorts of dance categories and as well as teaching, I started judging in some of the smaller competitions, too.
Dancing Out of Darkness Page 6