The Tutti-frutti Collection by Jean Ure

Author:Jean Ure [Ure, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

6. My Gran

For the first few years of your life you lived in

Samuel Street, in Bethnal Green.

We lived with my Gran and Uncle Eddy in Gran’s house where Mum and Uncle Eddy were brought up. The house was very little and old. It was squashed in the middle of a row of other little, old houses, all the same.

Downstairs there was a front room and a back room and a kitchen. Mum used to complain that it was dark and poky. Some people in the street had knocked down the wall between the front room and the back room to make one large room. Mum wanted Gran to do it in her house, but Gran wouldn’t. She said, “Lose all me privacy that way.”

She had a piano in the front room which she called “a Joanna”. I don’t know why she called it that. Maybe Joanna is also Cockney slang. If you called a piano a pianner then it would rhyme, so maybe that is it.

Gran said that the Joanna was mine and I could play on it, but I wasn’t ever very good.

Later I went to Mrs Dearborn and did it properly, scales and things, but Mrs Dearborn said that although I was musical I would never make a pianist. But that was all right because I didn’t want to be a pianist, I wanted to be a dancer. Ever since I was tiny I have wanted to be a dancer. Being twelve is my immediate goal, but being a dancer is my Big Ambition.

Sometimes people expect me to want to be an actress, because of Mum, but I don’t think I would like that. For one thing I wouldn’t like having to learn lines. Learning steps is different: you learn with your feet. When I have done a step once, I can remember it. With lines you have to go over and over them. Mum is always grumbling about it.

And then for another thing there is resting, which means being out of work sometimes for months or even years. I think with dancing that wouldn’t happen so much because if you were in a dance company you would be dancing all the time.

Of course I realise you might not be lucky enough to get into a dance company and then you would have to do something ordinary, like working in a shop or being a waitress, but that is what Mum would call “thinking negatively”. Thinking negatively is a bad thing to do. So I am not going to do it. I am only going to think positive things, such as going to Wonderland.

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