RANDOM JOTTINGS

Having loved Facing the Light , I shot out to Waterstones and bought Hester’s Story and bang went another afternoon as I read it straight through in one lovely gulp.  Even though I am now heading towards the Corps de Ballet in the sky rather than the White Lodge, I still go all dreamy when I remember how much I wanted to be a ballerina when I was a little girl, so to discover that Hester is a famous but now retired ballet dancer, was a delight.

Hester Fields no longer dances.  An accident cut short her career and she is now a highly regarded ballet teacher. She lives at Wychwood House in Yorkshire where, every winter, a special ballet is performed at the small, purpose built theatre in the grounds.  Just after Christmas everyone starts to arrive: Hugo Carradine, a choreographer and founder of the Carradine Ballet who is to present a new work called Sarabande; the composer, Edmund Norland who is an old friend of Hester; Claudia Drake a prima ballerina, perhaps past her best who is Hugo’s lover; her daughter Alison, akward and resentful of her mother’s lack of interest in her; Silver McConnell the newest, most sensational young ballerina and other various assorted members of the cast. 

Hester has never married but has had a passionate love affair in her past, from which she has never fully recovered.  She is looked after and cared for by Ruby, who has been her dresser and companion for years, from the days when she was taught by her first teacher and substitute grandmother, Madame Olga.

Christmas is never celebrated at Wychwood and we do not discover why until the end of the story.  We also find out a secret grief that Hester has kept to herself all her life, and then see her enjoy an unexpected happiness found when she was least expecting it.

This book has all the ingredients that made Facing the Light such a terrific read.  An assortment of characters in one place, all coming together for a single reason, all with their different hopes and fears and agendas.  I mentioned when reviewing Facing the Light that Adele Geras had very cleverly dropped clues throughout the story, hinting at the secret and the outcome.  Being a rabid reader of Dame Agatha Christie and a great fan of Poirot’s little grey cells, I keep an eye out for the odd non sequiteur or slightly unneccessary piece of description of an object or surroundings, as this can sometimes be pointing the reader in a certain direction.   So, I kept my eyes peeled and picked up on two totally separate comments quite far apart in the book which made me think ‘I wonder…’ and was delighted to discover that what I suspected was true.

Now, please don’t think I’m being a smart arse here because I have now made the right conclusions in both of Adele’s books (blame Dame Agatha), it has not mitigated my enjoyment one little bit and when the ending comes and all is right and happy it pleases me no end.  As with Facing the Light, guessing correctly made no difference to the pleasure I felt when reading both of these wonderful stories.

The descriptions of the rehearsals, the steps, the music all brought back to me my childhood when I used to attend ballet classes and wore pink ballet shoes and dreamed of being a ballerina.  I read and re-read Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield so often that the pages were worn out (it is still on my bookshelf practically fallling apart), read my way through all of the ‘Wells’ books by Lorna Hill and would dance around the room listening to Swan Lake and pretending that I was Margot Fonteyn.  Sadly, at 5′ 9" and with size 7 feet, these dreams soon came to an end, but it left me with an abiding love and fascination for ballet which has lasted all my life.  As I write this, I have nestling in my ticket box in my dressing table drawer, two stall seats for Carlos Acosta and Tamara Rojo dancing in Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden later on in the year and, though I have seen this Kenneth Macmillan version many times (with Nureyev and Fonteyn as well) I cannot wait to see it again.

So, another reason, if one was necessary, to explain why I loved this book.  I sincerely hope that Adele goes on to pen as many adult books as she has done for children.  I shall be waiting to read them all.