REVIEW: A Time to Dance
A Time to Dance: Robina Beckles Willson, Collins 1962
It’s not often that a book leaves a song playing in my mind, but this one did. Its title comes from the passage in Ecclesiastes, reminding us that there is a time for everything. So, from when that passage is read at a wedding and becomes a mottod for one of the characters, the Byrds ‘Turn! Turn! Turn! For every season’ has been in my head.
I have a ‘let’s start a school’ tag, in honour of The School at the Chalet as much as anything, well, here’s a subgenre: let’s start a ballet school. The world-famous (fictional) Celeste school and company, based in London, is establishing a satellite school in (fictional) Melcaster, Lancashire, to be known as the Celestina. Run by Angus Jacob, whom the students will all call Angus if not to his face, we start off being introduced to four of the resident students. There is balletomane Camilla; Maria, the daughter of dancers who think her dancing has been held back by unhelpful comparisons with her more talented younger sister; Elaine, the daughter of a local businessman, who knows already she is too tall for her age to be a ballet dancer, but has hopes of becoming a Modern dancer; and shrewd Scot Fiona, full of character.
The story encompasses their settling down as the school’s founders, alongside older day students Kay and Debbie, male dancers Paul and Edward, and the house mother, Elspeth, the widowed mother of baby Dorothy. Elspeth becomes a general confidante as she comes to understand what dancing means to the students and headmaster, while trying to keep them fed and healthy. The students’ ages range from about twelve to nineteen, and as it’s set in the sixties, it’s a lot more interested in appearance than most earlier girls own stories, not just through the lens of having the right body shape for ballet. It’s about giving a good impression as a new school, where there is no uniform, but which is trying to bring ballet to the north of England. This clashes with the girls’ desire to be fashionable.
The writer must be drawing on experience from the descriptions of various classes and the realism about the demands of a ballet career. The students come from varied backgrounds, with Debbie and Kay attending class around part-time jobs. These are not all middle-class girls with cushy home lives, one is genuinely worried her parents are going to divorce.
Though the book ends a year and a term after it started, with the students performing in their own theatre, or the bare bones of it, even that keeps within the realms of possibility, give or take a fortuitous benefactress.
But compared to Lorna Hill and Jean Estoril (Mabel Esther Allan), the author falls short on character. Yes, talented Camilla will have to battle with nerves if she is to reach her full potential, but Maria’s problems are more or less set out by her when she first arrives at the school, it’s just a matter of discovering where her real talents and passions lie. Elaine and ‘Wee Fee’ are the equivalent of naughty middles, adding colour in contrast to the staider older girls. The adults are a bit more enigmatic than they needed to have been - I’d have liked to learn a bit more of how Angus became this demanding, ambitious teacher. What was his dancing career like? Granted, his romance with thoroughly decent and sensible non-dancer Elspeth was credible and telegraphed to the reader, if not the schoolgirls, who misunderstand his relationship with a visiting student, the accomplished dancer Violette. Granted, too, that this is a subplot in a story for girls, but there’s not a hint as to how being married and losing her husband might have shaped Elspeth or affected her attitude toward a second marriage. I wondered if a narrower focus on fewer of the characters would have made this a better book, but I think ultimately the problem was the author’s weakness here.
There is an early sixties-typical attitude towards race: a 2020 viewpoint made me wince at the depiction of ‘natives’ in a Robinson Crusoe pantomime one of the students has a part in, and although the depiction of Trinidadian dancers dancing the limbo is positive - Angus Jacob being interested in all kinds of dance and eager for his students to learn from them - the broken English of Swami, who owned the restaurant where the dancing took place, also made me wince.
So, it’s an interesting, fairly realistic, of-its-time book about ballet for girls, but let down by the author’s handling of characterisation. This entry was originally posted at https://feather-ghyll.dreamwidth.org/181629.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.
It’s not often that a book leaves a song playing in my mind, but this one did. Its title comes from the passage in Ecclesiastes, reminding us that there is a time for everything. So, from when that passage is read at a wedding and becomes a mottod for one of the characters, the Byrds ‘Turn! Turn! Turn! For every season’ has been in my head.
I have a ‘let’s start a school’ tag, in honour of The School at the Chalet as much as anything, well, here’s a subgenre: let’s start a ballet school. The world-famous (fictional) Celeste school and company, based in London, is establishing a satellite school in (fictional) Melcaster, Lancashire, to be known as the Celestina. Run by Angus Jacob, whom the students will all call Angus if not to his face, we start off being introduced to four of the resident students. There is balletomane Camilla; Maria, the daughter of dancers who think her dancing has been held back by unhelpful comparisons with her more talented younger sister; Elaine, the daughter of a local businessman, who knows already she is too tall for her age to be a ballet dancer, but has hopes of becoming a Modern dancer; and shrewd Scot Fiona, full of character.
The story encompasses their settling down as the school’s founders, alongside older day students Kay and Debbie, male dancers Paul and Edward, and the house mother, Elspeth, the widowed mother of baby Dorothy. Elspeth becomes a general confidante as she comes to understand what dancing means to the students and headmaster, while trying to keep them fed and healthy. The students’ ages range from about twelve to nineteen, and as it’s set in the sixties, it’s a lot more interested in appearance than most earlier girls own stories, not just through the lens of having the right body shape for ballet. It’s about giving a good impression as a new school, where there is no uniform, but which is trying to bring ballet to the north of England. This clashes with the girls’ desire to be fashionable.
The writer must be drawing on experience from the descriptions of various classes and the realism about the demands of a ballet career. The students come from varied backgrounds, with Debbie and Kay attending class around part-time jobs. These are not all middle-class girls with cushy home lives, one is genuinely worried her parents are going to divorce.
Though the book ends a year and a term after it started, with the students performing in their own theatre, or the bare bones of it, even that keeps within the realms of possibility, give or take a fortuitous benefactress.
But compared to Lorna Hill and Jean Estoril (Mabel Esther Allan), the author falls short on character. Yes, talented Camilla will have to battle with nerves if she is to reach her full potential, but Maria’s problems are more or less set out by her when she first arrives at the school, it’s just a matter of discovering where her real talents and passions lie. Elaine and ‘Wee Fee’ are the equivalent of naughty middles, adding colour in contrast to the staider older girls. The adults are a bit more enigmatic than they needed to have been - I’d have liked to learn a bit more of how Angus became this demanding, ambitious teacher. What was his dancing career like? Granted, his romance with thoroughly decent and sensible non-dancer Elspeth was credible and telegraphed to the reader, if not the schoolgirls, who misunderstand his relationship with a visiting student, the accomplished dancer Violette. Granted, too, that this is a subplot in a story for girls, but there’s not a hint as to how being married and losing her husband might have shaped Elspeth or affected her attitude toward a second marriage. I wondered if a narrower focus on fewer of the characters would have made this a better book, but I think ultimately the problem was the author’s weakness here.
There is an early sixties-typical attitude towards race: a 2020 viewpoint made me wince at the depiction of ‘natives’ in a Robinson Crusoe pantomime one of the students has a part in, and although the depiction of Trinidadian dancers dancing the limbo is positive - Angus Jacob being interested in all kinds of dance and eager for his students to learn from them - the broken English of Swami, who owned the restaurant where the dancing took place, also made me wince.
So, it’s an interesting, fairly realistic, of-its-time book about ballet for girls, but let down by the author’s handling of characterisation. This entry was originally posted at https://feather-ghyll.dreamwidth.org/181629.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.