Dancing Shoes
Page 1
Two left feet are no good for dancing….How about acting?
When Cora Wintle goes to pick up her orphaned niece, Rachel, she discovers that Rachel’s adopted sister, Hilary, would be perfect for her dancing troupe, Wintle’s Little Wonders! Cora is determined to make Hilary and Rachel members of the dance troupe.
But Rachel doesn’t want to be a Little Wonder! She can’t dance, and she’d rather not wear that ruffly costume. Nothing seems to be going as planned, until Rachel discovers her talent for acting….
BOOKS BY NOEL STREATFEILD
Ballet Shoes
Skating Shoes
Dancing Shoes
Theater Shoes
Movie Shoes
Circus Shoes
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1957, 1958, and copyright renewed 1985 by Noel Streatfeild
Cover art copyright © 2003 by Alissa Imre Geis
Excerpt from Theater Shoes copyright © 1944, 1945, and copyright renewed 1973 by Noel Streatfeild
Excerpt from Skating Shoes copyright © 1951 by Noel Streatfeild. Copyright renewed 1979 by Noel Streatfeild and Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United Kingdom as Wintle’s Wonders by Collins, London, in 1957, and subsequently in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1958.
Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
Ebook ISBN 9780525581505
2018 Random House Children’s Books Edition
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Other Titles
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1: The Dancing School
Chapter 2: Rachel and Hilary
Chapter 3: Mrs. Wintle Goes to Folkestone
Chapter 4: The Move
Chapter 5: Breakfast
Chapter 6: In the Schoolroom
Chapter 7: Rachel in Trouble
Chapter 8: Settling In
Chapter 9: Good Friday
Chapter 10: Pocket Money
Chapter 11: Summer Term
Chapter 12: Summer Holidays’ Plans
Chapter 13: Life with the Wonders
Chapter 14: The Talent Contest
Chapter 15: The Finals
Chapter 16: The Autumn Term
Chapter 17: Festivals
Chapter 18: Being Eleven
Chapter 19: Red Riding Hood
Chapter 20: Chicken Pox
Chapter 21: Mrs. Storm
Chapter 22: News for Hilary
Chapter 23: Rehearsal Trouble
Chapter 24: Hilary Fights
Chapter 25: Little-Girl Frock
Chapter 26: Rose-Colored Glasses
Chapter 27: The Studio
Chapter 28: The End of the Story
Excerpt from Theater Shoes
Excerpt from Skating Shoes
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
The Dancing School
The School of Dancing was in North London. Outside it looked just an ordinary house, rather big perhaps for the shabby neighborhood to which it belonged. But it was anything but ordinary to the neighbors, who knew that in it were trained Mrs. Wintle’s Little Wonders.
Cora Wintle had danced on the stage. She had never got beyond the chorus, for though she danced well she did not have a good figure, nor was she pretty. But she had loved the life and had found it hard to give it up when she had fallen in love and married an artist called Tom Lennox. Tom was a good painter, but a poor earner of money.
Tom and Cora had been married about a year when they had a baby. She was a little girl, and they christened her Dulcie. It was after Dulcie was born that Cora saw that if she was to bring the child up properly she must have more money than Tom was likely to earn. That was when she had her big idea. Why should she waste her dancing talent? She was getting old for chorus work and anyway she could not be away from home, but why should she not teach others to dance?
Cora was a person who usually by determination got her own way. If she had not been that type she would never have got into any chorus, for she was usually turned down at sight. But she had refused to be beaten and had worn managements down by her persistence until they had said: “Engage Cora Wintle. I’m tired of saying no.”
The dancing school had its start two days after Cora had first thought of it. She was out shopping with Dulcie when by mistake she pushed the perambulator into a passer-by, a woman, not at all young but fat and cozy-looking. The woman won her way straight to Cora’s heart by not being at all angry about the perambulator hitting her in the stomach but instead being rapturous about Dulcie.
“Oh, what a little love,” she said in a warm, purry voice. “I’ve looked after many a baby in my time, but I never saw a prettier.”
That conversation led to a cup of tea in a shop. There is nothing like a cup of tea for telling things. In no time Cora was explaining about Tom not earning much, and her dream of a dancing school. “I was well trained myself, and I would see any child that came to me was well trained. I shall call myself Wintle, as that’s how I’m known in the theater. Tom won’t mind.”
The stranger, whose name was Miss Purser, then told Cora about herself. “I’ve been a children’s Nanny since I was a slip of a girl, but now, provided I can be with children, I might give it up. My ship’s come in, so to speak, only I wish it hadn’t the way it has. One of my babies, the Honorable George Point^e maybe you read of it in the papers. Eaten by a shark he was.”
“Goodness,” said Cora, “a shark! Just fancy, and him an Honorable too.”
Miss Purser shook her head. “No respecter of persons, sharks aren’t. Well, when the will was read it was found he’d left his old Nan a little money and a house, bless him. In North London the house is, not a nice part, and a great barrack of a place.”
The idea hit them both at the same moment. There was Miss Purser with a house suitable for a dancing school, and wanting to be with children, and there was Cora with the training to teach children to dance. Why should they not become partners?
A few months later Cora moved her family, and Miss Purser moved herself, into Miss Purser’s house. Cora put an advertisement in the local paper:
Cora Wintle, teacher of children for the stage.
Classes daily. 67, Ford Road, Tel. PRImrose 15150.
She showed the advertisement to Miss Purser, whom by then she was calling Pursey.
“How’s that, Pursey?”
“Very nice, Mrs. Wintle. Now I do wonder who your first pupil will be.”
It was not a pupil who first answered the advertisement but a theater manager w
ho had liked Cora. “Is that the Cora Wintle who was on tour with my Sparklers’ Company?”
Cora said it was.
“Well, I saw your advert., and I’d like to do something for an old friend. Next summer I shall want twelve kiddies for a show I’m touring round the seaside towns. You going in for troupes?”
Cora was not a person to let an opportunity pass. Even as the manager was speaking she could see troupes of children trained by her dancing all over the country. “I certainly am.”
“What are you calling them, dear?”
There was a tiny pause while Cora thought hard. Then the answer came to her. “Mrs. Wintle’s Little Wonders.”
In ten years everybody except Tom had stopped calling Cora by her Christian name. She was Mrs. Wintle or Mrs. W. wherever she went. The school was a great success, the Little Wonders were known to everybody in the theater world, and they had appeared in films and on television. When the school started Cora had been the only dancing teacher, and Pursey had done everything else in the house. But soon there were two other teachers besides Cora—Pat and Ena—and Pursey was supposed to be only the wardrobe mistress and to employ the matrons who looked after the children when they were working. Actually Pursey never was only the wardrobe mistress, for she went on being the person everybody—staff, children, and Tom—came to whenever they wanted something, were unhappy, or had a worry.
Being the owner of the successful Little Wonders’ Troupes changed Mrs. Wintle. There were plenty of other schools training children for the stage, and it meant pushing harder than anyone else to get her dancers known. A person who spends all his or her life pushing to get to the top gets tough as a result of working so hard. This happened to Mrs. Wintle. She became a rather frightening person. In fact, sometimes people said she had a stone where other people had a heart.
There was one person who was not at all afraid of Mrs. Wintle, and that was Dulcie. Dulcie took after her father, who was good-looking, with gray-green eyes and dark curly hair. And from being one of the prettiest babies Pursey had ever seen, Dulcie grew up to be a noticeably lovely little girl, the sort of child people turn to look at in the street. Of course the moment she could toddle she had learned to dance, and so by the time she was ten and a half she danced very nicely. Unfortunately Dulcie was very conscious that she was an outstanding child, and did not try to hide it, and so was a great trial to the rest of the school. Behind her back the children called her “Little Show-Off” and “that awful Dulcie-Pulsie,” and the staff called her “Mrs. W.’s Little Horror.” But of course they had to be as nice as they could to Dulcie’s face, for none of them dared quarrel with Mrs. Wintle.
One evening early in March, when dancing lessons had finished for the day, Mrs. Wintle came into the room Pursey used as the wardrobe, looking very unlike her usual calm, hard self.
“I’ve got to go away, Pursey. Tom’s just had a phone call. His sister-in-law has died.”
Pursey laid down a pink frock on which she was working and made sympathetic clicking noises. “Oh dear. Very sudden, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it was an accident.”
Pursey tried to remember the little she had heard of the Lennox relations. “Aren’t there two little girls?”
“Yes, about Dulcie’s age. Rachel and Hilary. That’s why I’m going. It’s so tiresome, but it looks as if we may have to bring Rachel here. We have no responsibility for Hilary; she is an adopted child. I shall arrange to have her sent to a home.”
CHAPTER 2
Rachel and Hilary
Rachel and Hilary lived in Folkestone in a shabby house with a tiny garden at the back. Each summer their mother had taken in boarders, and in the winter too, when anyone wanted to stay. Rachel and Hilary did not think the house shabby, for it was home and they loved it, but they did think it was nicer when they had it to themselves. Rachel had once said so.
“It’s so nice, Mummie, when it’s only us.”
“I couldn’t agree more, darling,” her mother had answered, “but it means dull food and no fun.”
Rachel had been leaning against her mother’s chair. When her mother said that, she had laid her face against her hair. “Silly Mummie! As if Hilary and I mind about food and fun. We only want you.”
Hilary had been lying on the floor looking at a magazine a visitor had left behind. Now she said: “I don’t mind giving up my dancing lessons if that would help.”
That had made Rachel and her mother laugh, for it was no sacrifice to Hilary to give up any kind of work, whether it was school lessons, dancing classes, or helping in the house. Rachel’s mother said: “That’s one thing we shall never give up. Rachel and I are expecting to be kept in luxury by our star ballerina.”
Hilary had started proper dancing lessons when she was eight. This came about in a rather interesting way. The teacher who taught games and physical exercise at the school the girls went to had appeared one day at the boarding house and asked to see Hilary’s mother.
“I’m not really her mother,” Rachel’s mother had explained. “She is not Hilary Lennox, though that’s what we call her. She’s adopted.”
“Do you know anything about her?” the teacher asked.
Mrs. Lennox led the way into her kitchen, where she was cleaning spoons and forks. “I don’t know why you want to know, but sit down and, if you don’t mind my getting on with my work, I’ll tell you all about her. My husband was George Lennox.”
“The film star?”
Mrs. Lennox nodded. “Yes, only he wasn’t a film star for very long. When we were first married he was a poor, struggling actor.”
The teacher helped in the work by piling the cleaned spoons in their proper heaps—tablespoons here, dessert spoons there, and so on. Then she said: “Did he become famous all in a night?”
“It was after a television play. He was seen by a film man and given a screen test, and the next moment he was off to Hollywood.”
“Did you go too?”
Mrs. Lennox nodded. “I sometimes think Rachel has lived on a seesaw. She was four at the time. We left our horrid little flat near the B.B.C., stepped on an airplane, and found ourselves in a world of orange trees, swimming pools, endless sunshine, up to a point as many pretty clothes as we wanted, grand spoons and forks like these, large motor cars, everything. That lasted two years.”
The teacher leaned over for some teaspoons Mrs. Lennox had just cleaned. “What happened next?”
“George adopted Hilary.” “Why?” the teacher asked.
“Well, for one reason she was the same age as Rachel, and he thought it would be nice for Rachel to have someone to play with. The other reason was that she was an orphan; both her parents were killed in a hurricane.”
“A hurricane!” said the teacher. “How awful. Did you know who they were?”
“Oh yes, George had known the father quite well. He was an assistant film director; the mother was a dancer.”
“A dancer, was she? That explains a lot.”
Mrs. Lennox looked surprised. “Does it? In no time Hilary was as much one of the family as Rachel. Then George got an offer to make a film in England. We had got rid of the flat near the B.B.C. of course, so we decided the two children and I should go home at once and find somewhere for us to live near the film studio. We sailed the next week on the Queen Elizabeth. George was to fly over.”
The teacher remembered the rest of that story. It had been headline news when George Lennox, the film star, was killed in an airplane crash. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
Mrs. Lennox turned a tablespoon around so that the light shone on the back of it. “George hadn’t been a star long enough to have saved any money, and the children were only seven. I had to make a home for them. I thought it would be healthy here, so with what money there was I took this house and advertised for boarders. I can’t say we’ve got rich on it, but it doe
s keep us.”
The teacher thought Mrs. Lennox looked very tired. “It must be hard work.”
“It is, but I engage someone for housework in the summer if we are full. Rachel is a wonderful help, and at least both children are well and happy.”
The teacher thought of the children. Serious, brown-eyed, straight-haired Rachel, with the high cheekbones which she had inherited from her father, and the moonlight-fair, curly haired, pink-and-white Hilary. “They certainly look splendid, and of course they’re happy, though I think Rachel worries about you.”
Mrs. Lennox laughed. Then she said: “Rachel was born a worrier. She thinks it is her job to take her father’s place and to look after Hilary and me.”
The teacher looked again at Mrs. Lennox and could see why Rachel worried. “Haven’t you any relations who could have helped when your husband was killed?”
“I’ve nobody. My husband had a brother named Tom who’s an artist. I should think he’s a dear, but from what George told me he has a terrifying wife. She runs some kind of stage agency, I think. Anyway, all the money is hers, and they have a child called Dulcie to keep. Even so, Tom wrote to say I was to let him know if I couldn’t manage and he would find a way to help. Luckily I haven’t had to bother him. We write to each other occasionally.”
The teacher came to the point of her visit. “I’m afraid what I have come about may cost a little, but I think it will be worth it in the end. I want you to allow me to take Hilary to a dancing teacher. I think she has talent. If she has, I thought you might consider having her trained as a dancer. I feel more sure than ever, now you have told me her history, that an expert ought to see her.”