I like to think of my old ballet mistress as the character that Dickens forgot to write. Rejoicing in the name of Esyilt Gwerica Briscoe, she was 78 when I began with the Saturday 2pm class for little tots. I had a white cotton tabbard and soft pale pink shoes and was six years old. Miss Briscoe was a shrivelled walnut of a woman; several inches under five feet, her tiny frame hunched in the shoulders and bulbous around the waist. When in profile, she was slanted slightly on the diagonal, like a tiny, bossy, leaning tower of Pisa. I had never seen anyone so ancient in all my life. When I stopped dancing at 18, I was one of the big girls, in a black leotard and leggings (we all watched Fame! on the telly and dressed accordingly) with proper, hateful pointe shoes and toes whose top joints flexed backwards as far as they went forwards. Miss B was 90 years old, and still going strong.
She looked so old that I could no longer discern the cast of her features, had no idea whether in youth she had been pretty or handsome or delicate. The wispy remains of her hair were scraped back into a meagre bun with always a velvet ribbon tied around them, giving her skull the look of a forlorn Easter egg. Her clothes were like nothing on earth. I think she must have made them herself as I can’t imagine what commercial outlet would have created them. They were dark in colour, muddy paisleys and thick, indeterminate prints, swathed into full skirts and billowing sleeves. In the mornings, when lunchtime was approaching, she wore an apron on top, and on her feet were brown tartan carpet slippers. She was reasonably deaf generally and in the teaching moment, entirely oblivious to the music, the struggles of the girls, our questions, and her own tendency to break wind with a gun-crack report. I died a thousand deaths of shame for her.
But much in the way that a neglected foreign language discards its vocabulary but leaves grammatical structures still firmly in place, so my dancing mistress retained everything about the discipline of dance, even if she could no longer do the steps herself. She could still pull up from her rib cage and execute a porte des bras like a pro, and this was enough to make us believe in her. She was a tireless and ferocious teacher, moving along the ranks of girls lined up at the barre to yank a leg into position, or correct sloppy posture. We were allowed a couple of minutes break in between barre exercises and floor work, during which we all lay flat on the floor like war casualties, but then it was up and back at it again. She was utterly indifferent to our pain. My most redolent ballet memory is the moment in every class where we would be stretched. Standing with palms flat against one of the big, clouded mirrors, facing ourselves, we would lift a leg behind us, where Miss B would catch it and hoist it up in the air, pushing it up and up and finally over, until our toes touched the tips of our foreheads. Joints would crack ominously but complaining was not an option. ‘Why does that hurt?’ she would quaver. ‘It shouldn’t hurt!’ She was so tiny that she was lost in the mirror’s reflection, a miniature gladiator disappearing under the upthrust limb she supported in an overhead press.
I don’t know that I ever heard her praise anyone, but when class went well she would smile beatifically into the middle distance, lost, I suspected, in memories of earlier days when she was whipping up a few entrechats herself. On the bureau in the room where we changed was a museum-piece sepia photo of her, apparently on tour in her dancing days. In that photo she was so young as to be featureless, a generic child the way she was now a generic old lady. All she was doing was standing in a reverence, one knee flexed, one foot pointing forward. I remember it as terribly frustrating when I wanted so badly to see her up on her points or in a perfect arabesque, that most graceful of positions. I wanted something to show me the glorious past that kept her so doggedly at it. All I knew was that she’d had an act with her two sisters at the local Hippodrome, back near the start of the century. Where were these sisters now? What was the act? She never spoke about the past, never told us war stories of her music hall days, never explained what had happened in the vast wilderness of decades between the photo on the bureau and her tiny, wrinkled, fabric-swathed, elderly self. I had no relationship with her. She was simply the incarnation of dance and a mystery to us all.
She had two sidekicks to add an element of drama to every class. The first was her semi-feral cat, Pickles. Pickles had the run of the place, and chose to hide amongst the battered old armchairs in the room with the photo on the bureau. Every hour on the hour there was a flurry of girls changing in and out of their dance clothes and Pickles liked to lurk under a chair and take a swipe at any bare toes he happened to see. Occasionally, and terrifyingly, he would hide on top of the huge old wardrobe in the corner, and leap out at us. The other uncertain factor was Miss B’s reel to reel tape machine. There was an upright piano in the corner of the practice room, but I never saw anyone play it in all the years I was there. Instead the music was dispensed by this beast of a machine that regularly rebelled, chewing up the Skater’s Waltz and the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies in its metallic maw. Possibly, it had dreamed of a better life for itself as it was undeniable that the quality of music was appalling. I wonder now whether the tapes were recordings of old-fashioned wind-up gramophone records, as the level of scratch and hiss was impressive in its way. When Miss B changed reels mid-lesson, we would all hold our breath. It was not at all uncommon to assemble at the barre while she was draped in garlands of glossy brown tape, wrestling to get them back on the reels despite her lack of dexterity and failing eyesight. At this moment, Pickles usually joined in, slinking over the scuffed wooden boards of the floor and making a leap at the gleaming tape. Miss B never minded. She would hold up her arms joyfully, the cat now suspended by its claws amongst the swags of her sleeves. ‘Isn’t he a pickle!’ she would exclaim, while we shrunk back against the barre, our eyes nervously tracking the cat’s movements.
Astonishingly, that music followed us to the yearly show we used to put on at the local theater. It was quite a big theatre, with a good reputation, and they must have longed for a reason to say no to Miss B, as it was not a commercial proposition. Parents who came loyally to watch were obliged to sit through a tedious three hour marathon, because she insisted on showing every single class’s floor work before we ever got onto the set dances. I remember that it was a lot of fun being in the theatre, and also full of potentially thrilling disaster in the form of falling over during the pirouettes, or ending up facing a completely different direction to the rest of your class in an exercise. But the costumes, whilst reasonably authentic from a distance, were of a piece with Miss B’s general ethos. As a little girl, one longs for the fairy tale transformation of a gorgeous tutu, but instead we got grubby silk and net that possibly came from the garden centre, so sharply did it slice the thighs. But she had of course, sewn every single dress herself, every single sequin, every single tulle frill. All the mothers who came to collect us would hang about in the corridors saying, ‘I just don’t know how she does it!’ in admiring tones, while we surreptitiously rubbed at the red welts left by the stranglehold of knicker elastic.
When I think of dancing, I don’t think of the fancy shows, though. What I remember is standing at the barre on a summer’s day, the big bay window open wide, and the serenity of working through the familiar exercises, boring in many ways, but comforting in many others. The repetition of practice is a mercy. Never success or failure, it is a gradual inching towards an ideal that will never be reached, an imperceptible progress that is always a reminder of how far there is to go. The discipline itself becomes hypnotic. When I think of Miss Briscoe, I think of her standing between the tape machine and the barre, her eyes closed, smiling slightly to herself. I did once see her dance. It was at her 90th birthday celebrations. She choreographed and taught us all a Spanish dance in which she took a central role. We big girls circled around her, stamping our heels, while she stood center stage, a black mantilla draped over her tiny head, and the castanets clacking in her shaky hands, that same expression on her face of closed eyes and secret, inward smile. I left for university shortly afterwards and never saw her again.