Resist & World Ballet Day ~ Guest Post by Tom Palmer

It is an privilege to welcome author Tom Palmer to my blog with a guest post in honour of #WorldBalletDay. Dance is such a significant part of Edda’s story – her determination, resilience and strength were built through her dedication to ballet.

How Ballet Helped Audrey Hepburn Win Her War

The night before the Germans invaded the Netherlands on 10th May 1940, eleven-year-old Audrey Hepburn was in the audience watching the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company perform at her local theatre in the Dutch city of Arnhem. At the end of the performance, Audrey was tasked with presenting a bouquet of flowers to the dance company director and – for a few minutes – she shared the stage with the legendary ballerina, Margot Fonteyn.

That night, after all the excitement, Audrey and her family were awoken in their beds by sounds of the German war machine rolling into Arnhem, one of the first towns they needed to take to capture the Netherlands. For the next five years, Audrey would live in a Nazi-occupied country.

Audrey Hepburn loved to dance. It was her life as a child. So I knew, when telling the story of her wartime activity for the Dutch resistance, that ballet had to be part of the story. Her story.

Then, the more I read about Audrey Hepburn’s childhood passion for ballet and her absolute ambition to be a ballerina, the more I understood how ballet helped her survive the war.

Resist is a story about war and bravery. But it is also a story about dance.

After reading biographies and watching TV films about Audrey Hepburn – including one documentary by Darcey Bussell – I identified several instances where dance helped Audrey Hepburn win her war. And where she helped the resistance, too.

These stories – handed down by her sons and biographers and from the few remarks she made about her wartime experiences – gave me the material I needed to include dance as a part of Resist.

Deliveries

Audrey’s first mission for the resistance was to deliver illegal newsletters around her home village of Velp. Under the noses of the Nazis. Although we don’t have many details about those nights, I imagined Audrey using her ballet agility and strength to move swift and silent through the night.

There was no one about as Edda moved stealthily through the front gardens of the houses she was to deliver to. She slipped between rosebushes and leaped over vegetable patches in which people grew their own potatoes and greens to make up for the food shortages.

This ability to leap and run and land without making a sound was another skill she had learned from dance – like her good memory. It all proved so useful tonight as she dropped off the newsletters and slipped away unnoticed.

Dark evenings

Audrey’s handler in the resistance came to learn that she was an excellent dancer and his next role for her was to do what she loved most.

Dance.

To raise money to help the resistance help allied airman and Jewish people escape the Nazis, the resistance hosted secret music and dance shows, called dark evenings. Audrey took part in those, knowing she and her family would be punished severely if they were caught. She was afraid, but she went ahead.

Edda pushed her worries to the back of her mind as the piano music began. Chopin. Soft and gentle; slow and quiet. As soon as the first notes played, she felt it. That sense of wonder she experienced when she was dancing. All her excitement and fear and anger evaporated. Edda was completely in the moment, moving to the music, to her choreography, careful to land as silently as possible, conscious she was breathless and felt a little shaky. I’m hungry, she thought as she danced. I’m always hungry.

Hunger Winter

And she was hungry. The whole of the Netherlands was hungry and thousands of Dutch civilians starved to death. The Germans were stealing the produce from Dutch farms and taking it home, leaving the Dutch on rations at best.

In the end, Audrey had to give up dancing. She was too weak and suffering from malnutrition and oedema and hiding in a cellar as war was fought hand to hand in the streets around her, following Operation Market Garden, when thousands of British soldiers parachuted in in a failed attempt to capture Arnhem, made famous in the film A Bridge Too Far.

In the cellar Audrey drew pictures of ballerinas to keep her dream alive. Some of those pictures have survived and can be seen in Audrey’s son, Sean Ferrer’s biography of his mother.

Dance teacher

Audrey understood the power of dance to captivate the minds of children, having loved dance all those years. Towards the end of the war, not yet fifteen, she was asked to find ways of occupying the younger children of her village – and refugees from nearby towns – and she chose to teach the children to dance.

I like to think that ballet was Audrey’s way of fighting back against the Nazi occupation and I created this scene, based on what we know about her experiences and those of other children at the time, to try to show that she used dance to defy them:

And then they were in the doorway. Three Nazis. Edda could smell their sour soldier sweat. All had machine guns pointed at the children… Scared for the children, she turned to them. “Sit on the floor, all of you,” she instructed. The children sat, many now crying in fear. Edda stood in front of her tiny cowering dancers while attempting to look outraged, facing the soldiers and their guns as if she were a character in a dance. Trying to do the thing she had encouraged the children to do: to play a role. A heroine challenging a villain. To pretend she was brave and strong. She hoped that the children would look small on the floor, small and vulnerable, so the soldiers might feel ashamed and leave. The seconds ticked by. None of the three soldiers spoke. Nor did they step into the room. And then – after glancing at each other furtively – they lowered their guns. One even attempted to smile at the children. “Entschuldigung,” one of the soldiers said. Excuse us.

London and UNICEF

After the war, Audrey Hepburn moved to Amsterdam with her mother to train as a dancer, then she was accepted on a scholarship at the Ballet Rambert in London.

From there her career took off and she became one of the most iconic film stars we have ever known.

But she did far more than that. In 1988 she became an ambassador for UNICEF, helping to draw the world’s attention to children who were suffering in countries of war and famine.

Just as she had.

My review:

Tom Palmer tells a heart-wrenching story of strength, courage and sacrifice in a time when Nazis took everything. The reality of war-time life in German-occupied Netherlands is described with details that really mean something to young readers – family, friendships, giving up passions like dance and music, giving up a childhood to risk everything to protect the ones they love.

Resist begins with a girl on a bicycle – a young Audrey Hepburn known as Edda so as to not give away her English connections. As she delivers illegal resistance newsletters, she faces almost unbearable fear and dreams of liberation.

Edda must deal with the loss of her brothers, worries over her mother’s pre-war links to Hitler, supporting refugees from a nearby occupied town and all-consuming hunger. One thing keeps her focused and moving forward – dance. A sharp memory, agility, speed and strength, grace under pressure and confidence to stand up for herself – ballet has provided her with skills that are invaluable in facing the enemy and making a difference in the resistance movement.

It is wonderful to see a strong, graceful female main character in a story of war. Edda is inspirational in her determination and unrelenting spirit. I’m looking forward to my own little ballerina reading this story and seeing value in all the skills she possesses.

Tom Palmer is the master of accessible historical fiction that gets right to the heart of the feelings of young people in crisis. In the face of adversity, Tom’s characters prove that they can keep moving forward in the hope that things will get better. When liberation finally does come, I was proud to see Canadian troops leading the way. My own Grandfather, Lieutenant William Guest, was a one of the Canadians in the Netherlands pushing back the enemy.

Created in partnership with Barrington Stoke, Resist meets the needs of so many readers. Page tint, font, spacing, vocabulary choices and a manageable length (165 pages) mean so many more children will benefit from this powerful story.

Click on the cover below to find out more or purchase online:

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