Along with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women books and the Heidi stories, Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild looms large in my childhood reading. Goodness knows how many times I read it. I still have the rather battered paperback; my original copy. Reading it again a few years ago, two thoughts came to mind. Firstly, what a strange story it is and secondly that there must have been some chunks that I really didn’t understand as a child. I would certainly have been unfamiliar with the large passages about A Midsummer Nights Dream. Interesting how much one can gloss over and yet still enjoy the narrative.
For anyone unacquainted with Ballet Shoes, a two sentence synopsis: A scruffy Great Uncle Matthew arrives at his equally scruffy house on the Cromwell Road in South Kensington with three little girls he has ‘collected’ on his expedition, in much the same way as he collects fossils. He leaves the children with his niece and disappears again. The book shows us how the girls find security and happiness and see a way forward. (Well, three sentences!)
A comment about this book appears in the blurb of Streatfeild’s novel: The Saplings. ‘This is a dark inversion of the plot of Ballet Shoes.’ I couldn’t quite imagine what this might mean but having now read the story all has become clear. This is the first adult novel of hers that I have come across, although there are many. It was years before I knew any Streatfeild other than the ‘Shoes’ books.
So, the saplings are the four children of a wealthy, middle class family with a house on the Outer Circle of Regents Park as well as somewhere in the country. Theirs is a happy family where the children are secure in the knowledge that they are both safe and loved. However, the time is the late 1930s, just before the Second World War and there is a heavy greyness that is threatening and disconcerting. The unknown is surely always frightening.
And frightening indeed it proves to be. The father is killed in a bombing raid in London and the mother collapses, mentally and physically. She is unable to cope without her husband and retreats into alcohol and sleeping tablets. The children are packed off to various boarding schools and handed out one by one to a variety of relatives during the long holidays. They no longer know quite where they belong or who loves them. When a new man enters their mother’s life, wants to marry her and sell the house in the country, the fracturing of the family is complete.
The last lines of the book took me by surprise. Ripe with heavy irony, the housekeeper comments on the situation at the end of the war:
‘I was saying to my daughter only yesterday, we got a lot to be thankful for in this country. Our kids ‘aven’t suffered ‘o-ever else ‘as.’
The housekeeper thinks that as long as the children are alright physically, then they are indeed alright. She cannot see that what has happened has damaged them both mentally and emotionally. I was really impressed by Noel Streatfeild’s prescience and perception. She was no psychologist but she could somehow grasp the situation and see beyond physical health. She had the ability to see the world from a child’s perspective.
The seminal work by psychologist John Bowlby: ‘Child Care and the Growth of Love’ was published in 1951 and was still given huge amounts of reverence when I was studying in the seventies. It was basically concerned with attachment theory and was predicated on the belief that small children needed to know where they belonged and that they were loved. This radical theory (radical at the time!) changed the rules on children’s hospital wards. Parents were then allowed to stay with their children instead of being shut out or limited to narrow visiting times. All this would have been unthinkable to Charles Dickens and other veritable Victorian social reformers. If a child was fed, clothed and had somewhere safe to sleep, then surely all was well. Eventually attachment theory changed many childrens’ services. The Barnardos charity altered its way of working and put children together in family style groups rather than in huge impersonal orphanages and homes.
Interesting also to consider how the treatment of children, and childhood in general has changed over the centuries. In a memoir by the writer Penelope Lively, she relates spending long summer holidays with her maternal grandmother in a large house in West Somerset. This grandmother was essentially an Edwardian and although her granddaughter was welcomed, no accommodation was made at all for the child’s entertainment. Penelope was expected to breakfast formally in the dining room, then go for the morning constitutional walk even if it was raining (that was what raincoats were for) and in the afternoon she was expected to find some sewing or a book to amuse herself.
This was just post Second World War. A decade or so later and my childhood weekends were based around my father’s cricket club. Now, for my grandchildren, weekends are built around their own activities with their parents following on, taking, fetching and usually paying. I think there is a thesis in there somewhere but maybe somebody has already written it.
This was an extremely readable book that both surprised and pleased me. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is by the way a Persephone book. I still haven’t visited the shop in Bath but I will tell you when I do.