Your Space -- J

Josephine Jewkes

 

E-mail from Josephine Jewkes received 5 June 2009   jojewkes@yahoo.com

Hello Paul and John!

What a lovely idea to gather memories of 'Bush'! I have so many little 'snapshot' memories of my time at Bush - and all of them happy! We are trying to persuade the Swedish government (I teach at the Royal Swedish Ballet School now) to allow us to open a boarding school and I can tell them from my heart that it does not have to be like Dotheboys Hall!!!

1) 'Mr Harrison' playing the 'O' level music 'Harmonious Blacksmith' variations and swearing quietly under his breath when his fingers strayed! (I loved the music so much that I tried in vain to find the score to play at our wedding);

2) Watching Joy Camden flying across the room in a fantastic mazurka during her character class (unfortunately I never got to do that class, for some reason);

3) 'JERUSALEM'  that wonderful, inspiring music and text that exhorted us to strive for something worthwhile - I am moved every time I hear it played on 'Last Night at the Proms'!;

4) Going to sleep in my pointe shoes in the (mistaken) belief that it was a good way to soften them in;

5) Going to sleep STANDING UP in the wings in the Genée theatre during a late night emergency rehearsal for Jenny Jackson's 'Fanfare'. Even that is a happy memory - the sickly smell of burning gels takes me right back to that moment;

6) Being totally, helplessly, gigglingly useless in tap class: the only class I was too turned - out for!;

7) All those fantastic hours of inspiration and perspiration in a studio with Chris Gable;
( Ed. for Coppelia)

8) Walking in the 'grand defilé' imagining I was Anne Boleyn going to the scaffold;

9) Sharing a dorm with the demon tappers Louise and Karen, and sweet Lottie Baines and all of us listening to 'Genesis' on someone's tape machine;

10) Sitting in the wood-panelled music room with Richard Wherelock and some other students listening to 'Rite of Spring' at full blast;

11) Sailing through the air in a full presage lift and whizzing around in whip pirouettes courtesy of John Raven, feeling that I was a virtuoso dancer!

Those are just a few of the images that rumble around in my memory. Thank you for those wonderful years.

Love from Jo Jewkes (now  happily married ballet-teaching mother-of-two aged five and two and a half living in Stockholm).

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