A new year for old passions

This New Year's Eve (unlike many before), I was able to look back at the old year with some sense of achievement. As most of you will know, I've had my first, albeit modest, success with The Writing. But there were other achievements in 2009: the Girl has happily made the transition from primary to secondary school; the Boy has found his football feet and has been promoted from goalie to striker; Hubby has managed to keep all bones intact and re-found his love of cycling, while cultivating a beard that I find surprisingly alluring.

But perhaps one of the most unexpected pleasures of the year was my rediscovery of dance. I used to love to dance, but somewhere around the time the Girl was born, I mysteriously lost all sense of rhythm and with it, all confidence on the dance floor. Coincidently, I also lost the ability to bake a decent cake and the curl in my hair. After the Boy was born, the curls and the cakes came back, but I never danced. Early in 2009 I slunk into the back of dance class at the gym. I was self-conscious and awkward, but the choreography came easily and as the weeks progressed, I got my groove back.

As a child I was sent to contemporary dance classes. Yes, that's right - while my friends were all doing ballet or Irish dancing, I was wearing a black leotard and footless tights and pretending to be a tree, or a mouse, or some such. Why my parents were so determined to make me a freak and a social outcast, I'll never know, but you have to admire the consistency of their efforts. Incongruously, my most immediate association with dance class is mud. About the time I started classes we lost several feet of our garden along with four venerable lime trees to the construction of a new fly-over outside our house. To get to dance class I has to wade through claggy clods of red clay that smelled of gas and that special sort of wetness that only comes from under the ground. I'd leave my shoes, now twice as heavy as when I left the house, in the porch of the church hall and slip into my soft black dance shoes. With the weight lifted from my feet, dancing felt like flying.

My dance teacher lived up to every stereotype of a dance teacher you could think of - she had a thick Eastern European accent, she was tiny but terrifying, she thumped the rhythm of the music out on the top of the piano like it had personally insulted her. I had no idea what I was doing most of the time, but whatever it was, she seemed to like it. I soon found myself, at the age of eleven, promoted to dancing with the adult class and even performed with the troupe several times. But of course, being me, this didn't build my confidence, it only gave me more opportunities to feel lost, out of place, an outsider. I gave up dancing two years later and never took a class again, until 2009.

I discovered many years later that my dance teacher, Helen Lewis, was an Auschwitz survivor. She always wore long sleeves to hide the identification tattoo on her arm. She was a respected choreographer and teacher and she published a memoir about her time in the Auschwitz, A Time to Speak. She died on 1st January 2010 at the age of 93. I shall dance with abandon in her honour.