Free Stage Mum by Lisa Gee Page A

failure to do so could result in the licence being revoked … If they are not well enough to attend school they are not well enough to do the show!’ There would be no time off for any reason except illness, and if our child was ill, we had to let Jo know as early as possible in the day, so she could get someone else’s to cover. If you were the someone else whose child she was asking to cover, you would be expected to jump to it: ‘I appreciate that it may be inconvenient but it is part of the job.’ As she didn’t have an agent, Dora’s ‘salary’ would be paid straight to her – time to open her first bank account – but travel expenses would come to me. I wondered idly if they’d cover the costs of a taxi home from the theatre, as the prospect of getting Dora home by tube at 11 p.m. at night was not one I wanted to entertain, any more than I wanted to pay congestion and parking charges to drive her in.
    I read on. Parents, I discovered, were required to provide a packed lunch or tea for rehearsals that we would not be permitted to watch. We also had to check regularly for head lice – a problem that Dora had, hitherto, happily been free from, and phone Jo the moment a nit reared its ugly egg. We would also be barred from backstage (no need to take up knitting): the children would be chaperoned by ‘professional, licensed chaperones’. We were also sternly warned against discussing our child’s performance with them. ‘Occasionally,’ Jo explained, ‘a child will deliver a completely different performance once their mother has watched – believe me, it happens!’
    A few days later I heard – from another source – a story about a little girl who’d been in
Annie
. She played her part brilliantly throughout the rehearsal and preview periods. Then, on opening night, the poor little orphan arrived at the stage door dolled up like a pop star, and once the curtain was raised proceeded to do her best to upstage the rest of the cast. When asked why she’d deviated from the director’s instructions, she said, ‘My mummy told me to do it like that.’ Apparently, it didn’t do her ‘career’ any good.
    Aside from all that, it was made very clear that the children had to behave themselves in a disciplined and grown-up way, keeping unnaturally – but necessarily – quiet while waiting to go on stage, and being extremely sensible at other times.
    I wasn’t too worried about sensibleness as far as Dora was concerned. Remarkably, given both genes and environment, she has always been pretty sensible. I’ve never, for instance, had to extract a Hama bead from her left nostril, a pencil from her ear or any of her fingers from an electric socket. Nor have I regularly needed to shout at her to
STOP
at the kerb, look, listen, think and
WAIT FOR ME!
    I was most worried about controlling my own curiosity. How would I cope with being excluded from rehearsals, barred from backstage? I need to know what’s going on, who said what to whom, why and when they said it. And my experiences of trying to get Dora to tell me what had happened during the auditions had proved to me that no matter how much chocolate ice cream you wave under its nose, you can’t bribe that kind of information out of a six-year-old. Not only was the information she provided in most cases as sparse as the hair on her grandfather’s head, it was also, I found out later, inaccurate.
    At the back of the pack – after
The Sound of Music
Anti-Bullying Policy, four to-the-point bullet points detailing how any unkindnesses would be dealt with swiftly – a team list was attached. There were three teams – red, blue and green. Dora’s name was in the red team. The green team had two gaps, still needing a Louisa and a Brigitta.
    I rang Jo Hawes that evening to ask a couple of questions about the licence forms and ended up having a long conversation about what to expect now my child would be working in the West End. During this conversation I