Great Theatre Rescue (eBook)

Judith Eagle (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
384 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-36329-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Charley doesn't mind that she's had an unconventional childhood. Growing up behind the curtain in London's West End has been full of excitement. Charley has even begun taking a turn on stage. But her dreams of being a performer are shattered when she is sent off to boarding school. On arrival, Charley discovers that the school is a place where the girls are forced to do unpaid work in order to fill the pockets of the owners. With the theatre in peril back home, Charley has no choice but to escape, and to make a dangerous journey along the coast in order to get back to all that she loves, and to save her beloved home.

Judith Eagle's career thus far has included stints as a stylist, fashion editor and features writer. She currently works in two secondary schools as a librarian and library assistant.

Textauszug

Chapter One

By day it looked nothing out of the ordinary. By night it was something special. Ablaze with twinkling lights spelling out

in glamorous swirling letters. It was the smallest theatre in Soho but also one of the best.

‘Bijou,’ Charley’s dad Toby liked to call it: the miniature foyer; the minute box office (more of a cupboard really); the concealed door leading downstairs to three teeny dressing rooms; the narrow flight of stairs twisting up to the theatre; the ten rows of seats covered in rich brown velvet; the stage framed with swishy crimson curtains; the gilt-framed mirrors glinting light and shadow on the walls; the chandelier – with real candles in it – hovering regally above it all.

It was like a jewel, and quite perfect in Charley’s opinion. And tonight … tonight! She was performing there for the very first time.

A dream come true. Because just like acting had been in her mother’s blood, dancing was in Charley’s actual bones. There was nothing she loved more than dancing. Dad said she could dance practically before she could walk! She knew all the latest dance crazes that had whizzed their way across the Atlantic: the Charleston, the Shimmy, even the Lindy Hop.

She genuinely lived to move.

Clutching her tap shoes, Charley raced down Dean Street. The tap shoes were special. The most precious things she’d ever owned. For years and years they had been wrapped in layers of rustly pink tissue paper and stored in a box on top of the wardrobe. Then on Charley’s twelfth birthday, Dad had got the box down. The shoes were sublime: bright red leather with satin-ribbon ties, and silver taps at the toe and heel.

‘Try them!’ Dad had said. It had been a moment of pure magic. The shoes had belonged to Charley’s mother, and now they fitted Charley perfectly.

Quick, quick. The show was due to start in less than an hour. Silly Mrs Bloom had insisted Charley finish all her tea (‘how can you dance if you don’t have your strength mein Liebling?’), watching her until she’d chomped down every last crumb of sardines on toast, followed by a large helping of chocolate cherry cake.

In the rush, Charley had forgotten to grab her raincoat, and specks of early summer rain settled on her nose and in her hair. Mrs Bloom would say, ‘You’ll catch your death,’ but she knew she wouldn’t. She’d be inside soon, and anyway, just the excitement, the anticipation of the night ahead, was giving her a warm glow.

If all went well tonight, her dad had hinted that she might become a regular fixture at The Wren – not during the week, of course, when there was school – but in the holidays or at the weekends.

‘Break a leg, Charley!’

Charley stopped and spun around. Mrs Bloom had followed her out on to the street, still wearing the flower-sprigged apron that smelled of cardamon and cinnamon, busily pushing back the stray wave of snowy white hair that had a habit of escaping the thick plait she always wore coiled into a bun.

Mrs Bloom lived in the rooms below Dad and Charley, in their tall, slightly wriggly house a few doors down from the theatre. Long, long ago, when Mrs Bloom was a little girl, she had travelled all the way to London from Germany. She was a kind, bustling sort of person, and since her children had grown up and moved away, she had been like a mother to Dad and a grandmother to Charley.

She’d been a dancer herself once, and as Charley’s dad liked to say, she knew ‘the lingo’.

‘Break a leg’ meant good luck.

‘Thanks, Mrs Bloom!’ yelled Charley and she blew her a kiss, just like Violet-the-voice-Nightingale, who was one of the headline acts at The Wren and the most glamorous person Charley knew. Not only because she had the best style, the best voice and the best hair in town (gloriously long, wavy and auburn, not at all like Charley’s carroty-straw plaits), Violet was also funny and kind and generous, and Charley hoped fervently that she would share her dressing room with her tonight.

Outside the theatre people were already milling about: some of them holding newspapers over their heads to ward off the rain, most of them chatting and occasionally shrieking with laughter.

‘’Scuse me,’ said Charley squeezing past the suits, the satins, the feathers and the furs.

‘Let her through,’ they called to each other in high spirits. ‘It’s Toby’s little one!’

At The Wren, everyone was welcome: shopgirls, clerks, dukes and contessas; French, Italian, Russian and Caribbean. In Soho, it wasn’t who you were or where you came from that mattered, it was how much you loved dance and music; and the thing that everyone wanted: to have a good time.

‘There you are,’ said Dad as Charley burst into the foyer in a swirl of excitement and raindrops. He looked dapper, as usual, in his trademark blue shirt and red braces. ‘Thirty minutes ’til curtain-up.’

He and Max were squashed into the box office, doing a roaring trade in last-minute tickets.

‘All seats sold out. Standing room only!’ Dad hollered in the general direction of the crowd outside.

‘Hello, Max,’ said Charley, reaching into the cubby hole to scratch the dog behind the ears.

No one knew where Max had come from, or what sort of upbringing he’d had. But one day, when Charley had been quite small, he had just turned up, wandering along Dean Street, looking this way and that, and when he got to The Wren he had stopped.

‘Liked what he saw and stayed,’ said Dad.

Charley and Dad had liked what they saw too and welcomed him into their home with open arms. He was a funny old thing: short with stumpy legs, floppy ears and eyes that looked sad even when he was happy. He was clever too, and after ‘the acts’, Charley and Dad liked to joke that Max was their prize asset. If Dad had to pop out to the shops or fiddle with the lights or do any of the other million-and-one things he was responsible for at the theatre, it was always Max who took charge of the box office.

He did it splendidly and had developed an array of barks to signal ‘Hello’, ‘Goodbye’, and ‘How do you do?’ Now Max dipped his head in hello to Charley in a typically theatrical manner.

And then he growled.

Well, that was unusual. Max was known for being extremely even-tempered. In fact, he was just the sort of wonderful dog who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

‘Ticket for one, please, Sir.’

Charley and Toby turned to inspect the man who had pushed his way into the foyer behind her.

He was a striking-looking fellow, with a thick mop of black-and-white striped hair and a weather-beaten complexion. He was large, which had the effect of making the foyer look even smaller than it was. His brown-gold eyes roamed around hungrily, like a wolf’s. Or – what with the black-and-white striped hair – a giant badger’s.

He wore a long red coat with a straggly fur trim. The sort of outfit, thought Charley, that could have belonged in a pantomime.

‘Nice place you got here,’ said the badger man throatily. His voice sounded like it had been bathed in gravel. ‘Busy.’

‘Thank you,’ said Dad politely. ‘You’re right about busy. I’m afraid there’s standing room only left now.’

Which was a good job, thought Charley. She didn’t want to be rude but the badger man looked like he might have trouble squishing his sizeable frame into the brown velvet seats.

Max growled again, even more low and threatening-sounding this time, and the man raised a large black-and-white bushy eyebrow.

‘Max!’ said Charley and Dad together. ‘What’s got into you?’

Charley rested her hand on top of the dog’s head and she felt him relax a little.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘He’s not usually like this.’

The badger man was standing so close she could feel his hot breath on her skin. It smelled like the cockle-and-winkle stall in Berwick Street market – both fishy and vinegary at the same time.

‘He doesn’t a-fear me,’ said the man. Then he held out his huge hand to take his ticket from Dad. His knuckles were extraordinarily large, each one at least the size of a half-crown.

‘Violet’s already downstairs,’ Dad said to me as the man thumped away up the stairs to the theatre. ‘She says you can share her dressing room with her. Better go and get changed.’

Charley grinned. This was exactly what she had hoped for. The Tumbling Twins had one dressing room, the Skip Sisters had another. The third belonged to Violet and in Charley’s opinion it was the best, awash with...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 11.2.2025
• Illustrationen: Jui Talukder
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch ► Jugendbücher ab 12 Jahre
• ISBN-10: 0-571-36329-6 / 0571363296
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-36329-2 / 9780571363292