It was wish-fulfilment on a grand scale in my real life, blonde pink-and-white beauties were forever doing whatever they pleased and getting away with it. Pauline and Petrova victimise Posy because she has been marked out as unusually talented later Pauline, having become spoiled and bumptious, is forced to hand her lead role over to her ‘not pretty’ friend Winifred. The ‘golden-haired, pink-and-white’ Pauline, the ‘dark, sallow’ Petrova and the ‘decidedly ginger’ Posy suffer the intense growing pains of social sorting that will be familiar to anyone who has been a little girl: in-groups and out-groups, envy and spite, comparisons and jealousies, whispering in corners and getting found out.

As with all the best children’s books, though, it’s about many other things too.Īs a child, its depiction of sibling rivalry and bad behaviour got my motor running. Contentsīallet Shoes is a fairly standard tale of overcoming adversity: three adopted and not-biologically-related sisters battle unconventional beginnings and straitened circumstances to achieve success in their young careers.

The extraordinary illustrations, which have the kind of stripped-down simplicity that takes years to achieve, were by her sister, Ruth Gervis. She later remarked that she had initially despised it because she’d written it so easily. She published more than fifty books, but Ballet Shoes was her first for children and its roaring success took her by surprise. Noel Streatfeild was herself one of three sisters, and within her family cast herself in the role of plain, unremarkable middle child (Petrova, I suppose, although she was kinder to Petrova than she had been to herself). There are books I repeatedly re-read if I’m feeling mildly perturbed or sorry for myself, and Ballet Shoes was the first of these an enrapturing and emotionally satisfying little work of genius. It feels like one of those childhood totems that pre-dates conscious memory, like the pattern of a bedroom wallpaper. I can’t remember reading Ballet Shoes for the first time.

Surrounded by a cast of benignly eccentric adults, three adopted sisters grow up in genteel poverty in 1930s London and find their respective vocations in acting, motor mechanics and ballet dancing.

Ballet shoes book