Header overlay

Winning on Points

The first book I ever bought for myself was Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild. I’ve bought thousands more books since, but Ballet Shoes is still a very special favourite. It hasn’t been out of print since it was published in 1936. I recently treated myself to a first edition with its rare silver cover (so fragile it generally disintegrated within weeks) but my first copy was a Puffin paperback.

Three girls in white ballet dresses danced across the cover, two on the front and one on the back. They were the three Fossil sisters, Pauline, Petrova and Posy. I didn’t yet know anything about them but I knew I wanted to be them. I longed to go to ballet lessons and take part in dancing displays wearing a white tutu. Oh, the glamour! But my mother said we couldn’t afford it, so I had to make do with dancing at home, pretending my pink bedroom slippers were ballet shoes.

We might not have had money to spare for ballet lessons, but my parents still gave me one shilling pocket money every Saturday. Maths isn’t my strong point, but I think that’s five modern pence. It seems a pathetically small sum now, but when I was a child it seemed an agreeably large amount. If I’d been helpful doing the Saturday morning big shop my mother would then let me spend my weekly windfall.

Woolworths was always tempting, with its sweets and its shiny notebooks and its little penny dolls the colour of bubblegum, but I was a passionate reader so I asked Mum if we could go to W. H. Smith. As soon as I spotted Ballet Shoes on the Puffin shelf I knew I had to have it. It cost two shillings, so I had to save for another week, which was torture. There was only one copy and I was terrified another child would come along and snaffle it. But there it was, waiting for me the following Saturday, and I took it home ecstatically.

I’d finished it by Sunday teatime. It’s a simple enough story: three baby girls are adopted by an eccentric old fossil collector (hence the surname) and left in the care of his great-niece Sylvia. The girls are sent to a stage school run by a formidable Russian called Madame Fidolia. The idea is that they can go on the stage at soon as they are 12 and start earning much-needed money. All three have great performing potential. Pauline is the prettiest, with pink and white skin and long fair hair. She’s a very promising actress. Dark Petrova is the most interesting. Her Russian heritage excites Madame Fidolia, but Petrova isn’t at all the sort of girl who likes being on the stage. She wants to be a car mechanic or fly planes. The youngest sister, Posy, is a mischievous little redhead with a gift for dancing, and it soon becomes clear that she’s destined to be a ballerina.

Ballet Shoes is in many respects a fairy story with a happily-ever-after ending. Pauline is a great suc

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

The first book I ever bought for myself was Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild. I’ve bought thousands more books since, but Ballet Shoes is still a very special favourite. It hasn’t been out of print since it was published in 1936. I recently treated myself to a first edition with its rare silver cover (so fragile it generally disintegrated within weeks) but my first copy was a Puffin paperback.

Three girls in white ballet dresses danced across the cover, two on the front and one on the back. They were the three Fossil sisters, Pauline, Petrova and Posy. I didn’t yet know anything about them but I knew I wanted to be them. I longed to go to ballet lessons and take part in dancing displays wearing a white tutu. Oh, the glamour! But my mother said we couldn’t afford it, so I had to make do with dancing at home, pretending my pink bedroom slippers were ballet shoes. We might not have had money to spare for ballet lessons, but my parents still gave me one shilling pocket money every Saturday. Maths isn’t my strong point, but I think that’s five modern pence. It seems a pathetically small sum now, but when I was a child it seemed an agreeably large amount. If I’d been helpful doing the Saturday morning big shop my mother would then let me spend my weekly windfall. Woolworths was always tempting, with its sweets and its shiny notebooks and its little penny dolls the colour of bubblegum, but I was a passionate reader so I asked Mum if we could go to W. H. Smith. As soon as I spotted Ballet Shoes on the Puffin shelf I knew I had to have it. It cost two shillings, so I had to save for another week, which was torture. There was only one copy and I was terrified another child would come along and snaffle it. But there it was, waiting for me the following Saturday, and I took it home ecstatically. I’d finished it by Sunday teatime. It’s a simple enough story: three baby girls are adopted by an eccentric old fossil collector (hence the surname) and left in the care of his great-niece Sylvia. The girls are sent to a stage school run by a formidable Russian called Madame Fidolia. The idea is that they can go on the stage at soon as they are 12 and start earning much-needed money. All three have great performing potential. Pauline is the prettiest, with pink and white skin and long fair hair. She’s a very promising actress. Dark Petrova is the most interesting. Her Russian heritage excites Madame Fidolia, but Petrova isn’t at all the sort of girl who likes being on the stage. She wants to be a car mechanic or fly planes. The youngest sister, Posy, is a mischievous little redhead with a gift for dancing, and it soon becomes clear that she’s destined to be a ballerina. Ballet Shoes is in many respects a fairy story with a happily-ever-after ending. Pauline is a great success as an actress and leaves England to become a Hollywood movie star. Petrova is given the chance to fly aeroplanes (very unusual for a young girl in the 1930s). Posy starts training with a prestigious ballet company in Czechoslovakia. Noel Streatfeild ends the story cleverly:

‘What different things we are going to do!’ said Pauline. ‘In such different places,’ added Posy. ‘I wonder’ – Petrova looked up – ‘if other girls had to be one of us, which of us they’d choose to be?’

I loved questions like this and pondered them deeply when I was 7. Sometimes I wanted to be Pauline, mostly because I longed to have her long fair hair. I already knew I wanted to be a writer, but I wondered if I could be an actress too. I was good at reading aloud, but I was very quiet in class so my teachers thought I was too shy to act. I was a silent shepherd in old brown curtains in the nativity play, and desperately envied the girl playing Mary in stunning sky blue. Pauline always has the best parts and is a huge success playing Alice in Wonderland, but it goes to her head. She becomes unbearably conceited and bosses everyone around, especially lording it over her understudy Winifred. I always felt uncomfortable reading about poor Winifred. She’s a better actor, dancer and singer than Pauline, but she is plain, comes from a poor home and wears shabby dresses, so is never picked first. I wanted to be Pauline but knew I was much more a Winifred. She’s always haunted me. Perhaps she haunted Noel Streatfeild too, because in a later book, Curtain Up, a grown-up Winifred is described as ‘a tall, ugly girl with a clever, interesting face’. I still wince at that word ‘ugly’. Would I prefer to be Petrova? I found her intensely interesting, with her passion for cars and planes and her stoic determination to earn money for the family on the stage though she hates performing. She’s very much the tomboy sort of heroine current now in children’s books – but I didn’t really want to be her. That leaves Posy. I loved her independence, and her naughtiness, and her wicked imitations. I admired her talent and wished I could be a brilliant dancer too. But though Posy has a certainty about her that I envied, it also irritated me. Nowadays I’d choose to be Noel Streatfeild herself rather than any of her characters. Her understanding of children and her ability to make them seem utterly real and convincing was a great gift. The three Fossil sisters, and indeed poor Winifred, are so psychologically sound and so naturally portrayed that Ballet Shoes (and most of Streatfeild’s other books) remain wonderfully compelling reads. Times change, of course, and more than eighty years after publication it strikes us as bizarre that the girls are considered poor when they live in London’s Cromwell Road in a huge house, and Sylvia, their guardian, employs a nanny and a cook and a maid. However, the detailed description of the girls’ daily lives, their plans to pawn the necklaces given them by their Great Uncle Matthew, their pressing need to get a new audition dress, and Petrova’s lack of proper presents on her twelfth birthday are all utterly convincing. I savoured the passages about those turquoise, pearl and coral necklaces and the black chiffon velvet audition dress from Harrods. People often ask which books have influenced me. I know they’re asking about writing style, whereas I’ve always tried to write in my own way – but I’ve just realized that I happen to be wearing a black velvet dress with a turquoise necklace as I write. Ballet Shoes was a huge hit when it was first published. When Noel went to Hatchards to buy twelve copies for friends’ children she was firmly told that customers were restricted to one copy each. The reviews were splendid: it was described as sparkling, enthralling, delightful and very original. But it wasn’t original at all. It was certainly Noel Streatfeild’s first children’s book, but five years earlier she had written a first novel for adults called The Whicharts which is bizarrely similar – and yet incredibly different. Noel Streatfeild had been an unsuccessful actress, a surprising choice of career for an upper-class vicarage daughter in the 1920s. She lost heart and announced to her sister that she wanted to ‘leave the stage and write a best seller’. (She seems to have had Posy’s supreme confidence.) The Whicharts was accepted by the first publisher who saw it – he Pointsthought it brilliant and unusual. Reviewers were kind and Noel got admiring letters from famous authors. I was thrilled when I tracked a copy down in a second-hand bookshop. The opening paragraphs were startlingly familiar:

The Whichart children lived in the Cromwell Road. At that end of it which is furthest away from the Brompton Road, and yet sufficiently near it to be taken to look at the dolls’ houses in the Victoria and Albert every wet day, and if not too wet expected to ‘save the penny and walk’.

Saving the penny and walking was a great feature of their childhood.

Apart from a change of surname the beginning of Ballet Shoes is identical. The Whicharts and Ballet Shoes tell very similar stories – but as I read on I realized that Noel’s first book is a much darker, seedier novel than her much-loved children’s classic. It wasn’t her own idea to write a child’s version. A children’s editor at J. M. Dent had read and enjoyed The Whicharts and asked Noel if she would write a similar children’s story about the stage. Pauline, Petrova and Posy are very similar girls to the three Whicharts, Maimie, Tania and Daisy. (They call themselves ‘the Whicharts’ because of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Our Father Which Art in Heaven’.) The girls are half-sisters. Their father is a Brigadier ‘with many honours, and even more mistresses’. Here, great-niece Sylvia in Ballet Shoes is Rose, the first of all the mistresses. The Whicharts is still a very readable novel and well worth tracking down, but I found it disconcerting all the same. It shows the sleazier side of stage life. Even the stage school itself is a grubby, sordid place, and Madame a comical figure with clownish make-up and a bizarre wig. The Whichart girls are also seen in a very different light from the innocent, talented Fossils. Maimie (Pauline) becomes a chorus girl at 15 and by 16 has started an affair with an influential producer. Daisy (Posy) gives up her dancing career and ends up in respectable suburbia with her rediscovered grandparents. Noel allows only Tania (Petrova) a satisfying ending. She finds her mother and goes off with her for a year’s exotic travel, with the future promise of an aeroplane. There seems a very clear message that the stage is not a worthy career choice, Noel’s own experiences clearly still influencing her. The Whicharts seems too brittle, too cynical, too determined to shock. Ballet Shoes, on the other hand, has an inner truth, a sweetness that never becomes sentimental, a moral message that hard work and talent and belief in yourself can sometimes make your dreams come true. It was the best two shillings I ever spent.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 63 © Jacqueline Wilson 2019


About the contributor

Jacqueline Wilson has written over a hundred books for children. The main character in her book about evacuees, Wave Me Goodbye, fantasizes that she is a fourth Fossil sister. Jacqueline has actually achieved her acting ambition: she has a cameo role in a forthcoming film adaptation of her book Four Children and It.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.