Library of Ice: Readings From a Cold Climate by Nancy Campbell

Author:Nancy Campbell [Campbell, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471169328
Google: H-zptAEACAAJ
Publisher: Simon + Schuster UK
Published: 2018-11-14T23:00:00+00:00

Harriet and Lalla play out between them the central conflict of figure skating in the twentieth century: between the tension of compulsory figures (from which the sport gets its name) and creative freestyle. Streatfeild’s novel was published in 1951, and I like to think Harriet’s introverted application to figures, her anxious checking of her traces by contrast with Lalla’s extrovert passion for performance, was inspired by real debates within the sport.

In 1948 the number of figures that skaters needed to demonstrate in competition had been reduced from twelve to six. It was the first sign that the influence of figures was waning, although they still counted for a majority of the overall score. As TV coverage of sporting events grew in the 1960s, so too did the importance of free skating: the repetitive and intricate nature of figures did not make for good general viewing. Neither did the judges’ time-consuming analysis. In 1980, the president of the International Skating Union, Jacques Favart, as if channelling a petulant Lalla, called figures ‘a waste of time’. Worth only 20 per cent of the final score by 1989, they were eliminated entirely from international competition in 1990.

When I was the same age as Harriet and Lalla, I turned triple salchows on the living room carpet as Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean skated their Boléro routine at the Sarajevo Olympics on Valentine’s Day, 1984. Was anyone in England impervious to their charm? Millions of TV viewers watched as the pair performed doomed lovers hurling themselves into a volcano. They skated laps of the rink, scooping up cellophane-wrapped bouquets thrown down by fans, as the score was read out over the tannoy: a unanimous 6.0 from every judge for artistic impression, the highest score in figure-skating history. Describing the ‘plot’ behind the routine, Dean said: ‘It was a volcano erupting and we had to climb to the very top before throwing ourselves into eternity.’ His words could equally have referred to their gruelling training, and subsequent stardom.

Torvill and Dean’s Face the Music tour received five-star reviews, with newspapers proclaiming ‘a new ice age’. The show came to Whitley Bay Ice Rink in 1995, the year I got my first pair of glasses. I could see everything from my seat at the back of the stands: the monks’ firebrands in the brooding Carmina Burana; the musical notes sewn onto sequined waistcoats in Let’s Face the Music, the final number. I was struck by Dean’s solo, set to the Beatles song ‘Paperback Writer’. Unusually for a pop song, the subject is not love but a man trying to offer a book to a publisher. The book is not a novel but a memoir, constantly added to, about a man who is writing a book. The singer’s revelations about this self-reflexive, Sisyphean endeavour run absurdly counter to the jaunty enthusiasm of the tune. For once Dean skated alone – or rather, his partner was not Torvill but a cumbersome desk complete with typewriter, which he manoeuvred around on the ice.

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