Authors: Lisa Gee
So I stuffed my laptop into my backpack and we moseyed on back to W.H. Smith. Here, I bought two copies of
The Great American
Mousical
and, as Dora wanted to start queuing straight away, and I couldn’t think of anything better to do, a cheap Barbie colouring book that came with four felt-tip pens,
The Observer
, a packet of crisps and two bottles of water. We took our places in the queue, after I’d read a notice that informed us that we could only have one book per person signed and that Ms Andrews Edwards wouldn’t do dedications, just sign her name. ‘How many books do you have?’ asked the man from Smith’s who was patrolling the queue, before giving us two pink raffle tickets: Ms Andrews Edwards was only going to sign 200 books, so we all had to be numbered.
‘Can we see her soon?’
‘No. We have to wait for almost two hours. Why don’t you colour in one of these pictures and give it to her? You could write her a letter too, if you like.’ I wanted to read my newspaper.
Dora set to colouring in with a level of enthusiasm that would have been appropriate if she hadn’t been planning to hand the result to Julie Andrews: i.e. not very much. Although entirely capable of doing so, she didn’t bother to keep inside the lines, or pay much attention to whether the colours she was using were appropriate to the Barbie body-part she was applying them to. I couldn’t entirely blame her. Maybe colouring in does enhance the development of hand–eye coordination, but it has always struck me as a singularly futile activity, one designed merely to absorb little girls’ attention and stop them bothering their parents. Which would be okay if it actually worked, but it doesn’t, because it’s boring.
When Dora had finished her desultory colouring, she started writing a note to Julie Andrews on the picture. ‘Hello Julie Andrews,’ she scrawled, in thick black, largely illegible felt-tip. ‘I’m going to be Gretil in
The Sownd of Myoosick
at the Paladyum. I hop you are well, love Dora.’
I’ve finished,’ she announced, ripping the sheet carelessly out of the book and crumpling it slightly. ‘Can we see her now?’
‘Have some crisps,’ I said. ‘Do another picture.’
‘How much longer do we have to wait?’
‘Another hour and a half.’
‘I’m bored. Can we go back to the shop and get something else to do?’
‘No.’
I turned back to my newspaper. I was quite enjoying sitting on the floor outside Smith’s with nothing much to do. Dora was semi-occupied with her colouring and her crisps. I browsed the paper and flicked through
The Great American Mousical
. It looked sweet and rather jolly and the illustrations were very cute indeed. At the end of the story there was ‘A Glossary of Theatrical Terms’ which I thought might come in handy over the next few weeks. I read Julie Andrews Edwards’s biography on the flyleaf. ‘While she is perhaps best known,’ it ran, ‘for her performances in
Mary Poppins
,
The Sound of Music
and
The Princess Diaries
, she has also been an author of children’s books for over thirty years.’ I didn’t know that. Above her biography was a photograph, in which she looked as perfect as ever, wearing a pink sweater and looking sensibly, grown-uply beautiful. Beneath her biography was a brief paragraph about Emma Walton Hamilton: ‘Julie Andrews’s daughter as well as her coauthor’, and then another about Tony Walton, the illustrator, Emma’s father.
I started wondering about what she’d be like in person and whether we should tell her about what Dora was doing. Given that we’d have, at my reckoning, about thirty seconds in her company, would it be rude to mention it: ‘Hello, Julie Andrews, how are you, my daughter’s going to be in
The Sound of Music
. Thank you for signing our book. Bye.’ Or should we just say hello quietly, smile mysteriously, and hope she had enough time and interest plus a degree in cryptography with which to decipher Dora’s note? Or would that be silly? Would it actually be doing the right thing to tell her? And why was I devoting so much time to thinking about the rights and wrongs of the situation when it mattered so little?
‘How much longer?’
‘Not long now. Look, the people at the front of the queue have started to go in.’
‘What numbers have we got?’
I handed her the tickets, and told her to hold them carefully. ‘If we lose them, we can’t get in. We have to give them to that man at the door. Give me your colouring book and pens,’ I added, trying simultaneously to fold my newspaper and pick up two bottles of water, an empty crisp packet, two copies of
The Great American Mousical
and my backpack in a quixotic effort to avoid holding up the queue. There was now a sizeable gap between us and the people in front as the queue was moving at the speed of a highly efficient production line. With a final effort, I managed to stuff everything into my backpack and, beckoning Dora, we caught up. Then I realised that I shouldn’t have put the books in there, as we needed to keep them out for signing. So I struggled down into the bottom of the bag, where they were nestling happily underneath everything else, and pulled them out, only just preventing newspaper, bottles, crisp packet and computer from cascading to the floor. Then for a moment I panicked, thinking I’d dropped, packed or accidentally eaten the pink raffle tickets.
‘I’ve got them, Mummy,’ Dora said calmly, holding them up for me to see as I looked round wildly and broke out in a sweat.
‘Well done,’ I said, trying to zip up my backpack.
A couple of minutes later, we’d handed in our raffle tickets and were at the front of the queue. The staff had constructed a little booth for Julie Andrews to sit in, so she was shielded from view. Only the person whose book she was signing and the next in line could see her. There was a small and rather jolly man assisting, making sure only one person went up at a time, with their book open on the right page. He beckoned Dora over. She looked up at me and I nodded. She walked up to the table where Ms Andrews Edwards was sitting, looking exactly like her photograph, quietly beautiful, skin flawlessly
unlined,
smiling, hair elegant. She said ‘hello’ to Dora. In reply, Dora held out a felt-tippy hand and proffered the picture she’d coloured.
‘Is that for me?’ Julie Andrews asked.
Dora nodded.
‘“Hello Julie Andrews”,’ read Julie Andrews, smiling, then she put the picture down.
Dora smiled and said nothing.
Julie Andrews signed Dora’s book.
She didn’t tell her
, I thought. I looked at the organising man quizzically. He nodded. I went over.
‘She’s going to be in
The Sound of Music
at the Palladium,’ I announced, without slipping in anything polite and civilised first like, say, ‘hello’, or ‘how are you’, or ‘I’m really looking forward to reading your book’.
‘Are you?’ Julie Andrews asked Dora.
Dora nodded.
‘Who are you going to be?’ Julie Andrews asked Dora
Dora fidgeted.
‘Gretl,’ I said, proudly.
‘You’ll be perfect,’ said Julie Andrews, smiling sweetly into Dora’s eyes, and quickly signing her name in the book I’d put in front of her.
‘Thank you,’ said Dora.
We left.
I cringed all the way back to the car and for most of the rest of the day. And then some more in quiet moments during the following weeks. Oh no: Julie Andrews must have thought I’d tracked her down, queued up and bought the books just so I could tell her that my daughter was going to be in
The Sound of Music
. It was all wrong. It was an accident. I shouldn’t have said anything except ‘hello’, ‘how are you’ and ‘thank you’. I should have just smiled mysteriously. The cool thing to do would have been to meet Julie Andrews and not tell her that my daughter was going to be in
The
Sound
of Music
. It would, I thought, have been all right if Dora hadn’t suddenly gone uncharacteristically tongue-tied and had excitedly blurted it out herself. That would have been sweet. But she hadn’t, and I had opened my big mouth, allowing my inner stage mother to pop out, clear her throat gently, bat her heavily mascara’d eyelashes and declaim. Must acquire more self-control, I thought. Must develop sense of dignity. Must not think too much about developing sense of dignity after what happened that time when I was eighteen and running to the station in Brighton chanting to myself ‘I must be more dignified, I must be more dignified’, only to skid in some dog poo and end up sitting in it.
‘Julie Andrews is nice,’ said Dora.
Dora was named after my beloved maternal grandmother, Dorothy. I’d hoped and prayed for a little girl I could name after her, but didn’t want to give my baby exactly that name. Dorothy just sounded too grown-up for a wriggly bundle of noise and smiles, and although I loved the diminutives my grandmother answered to – Dot, Dottie, Dolly or Dee – they didn’t feel like the sort of thing that should appear on a birth certificate. Whilst I was pregnant, I’d come across the name Dora when writing about Hartley Coleridge (Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s son, also a poet) and his relationship with the Wordsworths: it was William Wordsworth’s daughter’s name. Also, her father Steve’s mum was called Doreen (though, hating the name, she shortened it to Dee), and calling our daughter Dora would honour her. It felt gentle, soft-sounding and easy for a small child to learn to say and, eventually, spell. It was uncommon, but not outlandish. Even though Dora is already a diminutive of Dorothy, she could still choose to call herself Dot, Dottie or Dolly, if she so wished. The name is originally Greek and means ‘a gift of God’. I’d waited a long time for her to arrive, and she is.
Dora was born and named some time before the children’s programme
Dora the Explorer
hit British TV screens. She enjoyed the
programme,
identified with her namesake and counted proudly to ten in Spanish along with her. What she didn’t enjoy, however, when she got slightly older, was being called Dora the Explorer by kids at school. Even though I could understand how annoying the constant repetition could be – especially once she’d grown out of the show’s target demographic – it struck me as being way up at the friendly end of the playground name-calling spectrum.
During the breaks at the technical rehearsals, some of the other
Sound of Music
kids started doing it too. Dora didn’t find this quite as annoying as at school, partly because the
Sound of Music
kids did it, over dinner, in perfect multi-part harmony, which sounded much nicer: ‘Dora, Dora, Dora the Explorer, -orer, -orer’, they’d serenade her, barber-shop-quartet-style. It sounded like the kind of exercise Dora told me they had to do for vocal warm-ups, both at the beginning of rehearsals and then, later, before the shows. They had to sing tongue-twisters – ‘Red lorry, yellow lorry’, ‘Six thick thistle sticks’ and ‘Licky sticky toffee pudding’ (that was my favourite, for obvious dessert-related reasons) up and down the scale, getting faster and faster and also ‘Rubber duck, rubber duck, rubber duck, duck, duck’ to the tune of the
William Tell
Overture. They were also supposed to practise them at home, which Dora did diligently, in the back of the car, any time we went anywhere. She also made me do it sometimes – ‘Come
on
, Mummy, you
have
to!’ – which I couldn’t. Six thick thistle sticks seemed to be the hardest. Those ‘th’ sounds did it for me every time.
Dora was enjoying being taken out for dinner. The kids went to Garfunkels, where she always plumped for spaghetti bolognaise, to the Plaza – where they could choose from a variety of exciting and unhealthy junk food options – and, very occasionally, to Wagamama. It meant she could eat and drink the kinds of things she wasn’t often allowed at home, but very sensibly and well-behavedly (although mostly, she recently informed me, because she doesn’t like it) stayed off the Coke, which she’s not allowed. Dora does not need caffeine.
On the Monday before the show was due to start previewing, Alicia, not Dora, rehearsed with Mittens and Dora rehearsed with everyone else later. On the Tuesday everyone went in at the same time, all day. An email arrived from Jo Hawes telling us what would be likely to happen on Wednesday, 1 November (to be confirmed later), with the addendum:
If you are all tearing your hair out / hurling the computer at the wall / cursing that you ever got involved in this at all – please remember that I did tell you these two weeks would be awful! Once we are running it will all be lovely!! There will be rehearsals on some afternoons during previews, though, I am afraid.
Actually, the technical rehearsals hadn’t been that bad. Tiring, yes, and tantrum-inducing, but nowhere near as boring as we’d been warned. Dora had, however, been slightly miffed at missing out on the Hallowe’en trick-or-treating experience. Immediately – and rather previously – she started thinking about which Harry Potter character she’d dress up as for next Hallowe’en, and continued to do so over the next twelve months. The following September she was still vacillating between being Hermione Granger and professors Dumbledore, Snape or Umbridge. By the middle of October 2007 she’d made up her mind and we started planning her Professor Snape outfit.
Anyway, I had a lot of fun during tech week. The mums had been hanging out together. We’d colonised Café Libre, which was next to the stage door, and spent lots of time and money eating, drinking and gossiping. We swapped stories our children had told us, shared the funny things our kids had said about each other – particularly useful for those of us with smaller children – and giggled at their small naughtinesses. We didn’t only do this when we met either. Phone bills were rising. There just seemed to be so much to talk
about
– and for some reason no one else we knew wanted to go into quite the same level of detail, quite as often, as most of us did. We expended a great deal of time and energy speculating about who would do opening night – my money was on Kettles and Adrianna – and about whether we’d get to go to the party. Having been swotting up a bit, I reckoned we wouldn’t be invited. But when I asked Russ, it turned out I was wrong. ‘Do you really think,’ he asked, ‘that I want to be chaperoning your children that night?’