I loved to dance. As a young teenager, I would dance around at home when I was alone and listening to my records, or to music on the radio, using my movement to express the story in the song, and as an outlet for the tensions and feelings that I kept so privately locked away inside me. But I never expected to do more than that.

Then an opportunity arose in a school drama production. There was a show every year, sometimes a school play, sometimes one from each of the three houses, and sometimes individual form plays. I’d had a part every year, and in my fourth year I auditioned for the school’s production of Peer Gynt. To my delight, I was to be Anitra, who dances for Peer Gynt when he is in Morocco, and the gym mistress was to choreograph a dance routine to be performed to Anitra’s Dance from Grieg’s musical score to the play. It was magical. For three nights I was no longer an unhappy, lonely girl but a beautiful Arabian princess who could dance.