Free Stage Mum by Lisa Gee

and play-dates with her friends and cousins, and started learning to swim and to ride her bike without stabilisers. Her school report was calmly complimentary. A couple of days before the holidays started, I met with the teacher she’d have the following year: Mrs Arin; very dedicated, very bright and switched-on, who leads the school choir, thinks singing is important and believes that learning should be fun. We discussed how Dora would keep up with her work whilst rehearsing and performing, and Mrs Arin handed me a thick wodge of maths worksheets for Dora to complete over the summer.
    The confirmation letter from Jo Hawes arrived on the last day of term, welcoming us to
The Sound of Music
and enclosing the licence forms I needed to complete so that Dora could legally work on the show – all children working in the entertainment industry must be licensed by their local authority: there are strict legal controls on the amount of time they can spend on stage or set
    The first UK regulations limiting the employment of performing children were introduced in the Prevention of Cruelty to, and Protection of, Children Act 1889. Chapter 44 – which, incidentally, defined a child as a boy under fourteen and a girl under sixteen – prohibited adults getting children to perform on the streets for money (this counted as begging), performing anywhere not licensed for public entertainments between10 p.m. and 5 a.m. and prohibited all children under ten ‘singing, playing, or performing for profit’ anywhere. Contravention could be punished by ‘a fine not exceeding twenty-five pounds, or alternatively, or in default of payment of the said fine, or in addition thereto, to imprisonment, with or without hard labour, for any term not exceeding three months’.
    If, however, it was ‘shown to the satisfaction of a petty sessional court, or in Scotland the school board, that proper provision has been made to secure the health and kind treatment of any children proposed to be employed thereat’, local authorities could license any fit child over seven to perform professionally. These regulations were refined in the Children & Young Persons Act 1933 and then again in Children (Performance) Regulations 1968.
    Also in the letter was a list of documents and details that we were required to provide, and five pages of information ‘regarding your child’s appearance in THE SOUND OF MUSIC’. Because Dora’s name had been changed, as well as her birth certificate I’d need to provide a photocopy of her passport. While I was working out what was required, it occurred to me that this would be a bad time to change our last names again. Not only would there be all the faff with the documentation, but Laurie’s surname is Temple. You can’t change a little girl’s surname to Temple when she’s just about to go on the stage. That looks like hubris. Anyway, I like ‘Gee’. It was my grandfather’s stage name: he changed the family’s (from Goldstein) to match it after another violinist also named Harold Gee got in contact from Yorkshire and complained that Grandpa had stolen his name.
    ‘You might,’ Jo wrote, ‘need to sit down with a drink or a cup of tea’ to wade through the information.’ I settled for a glass of orange juice, worrying about how I was going to write a ‘short biography’ for a child too young to have one, where I’d stashed her birth certificate and whether our doctor would still write a letter saying Dora was fit to perform even though she had an enormous verruca on her left foot.
    The five-page information pack included details of which teams the children would be in – with a couple of gaps as they were still one Louisa and one Brigitta short – with the caveat that this was likely to change. It confirmed that rehearsals were due to start on 25 September, and stressed very strongly that ‘Children will be expected to attend school whenever they are not in rehearsal and it is vital that they do because