Walking to the ballet classes I took as a child, it was always exciting to be told I was passing the place where Margot Fonteyn had been born as plain Peggy Hookham. It was a hint of the transformations that life could bring. Since 1980, a statue by Nathan David has marked that spot near to a level crossing in Reigate.
It was the glamour and precision of ballet, which is often seen as such an esoteric form of entertainment, that really communicated to me strongly at that age, even though I mostly watched it on television.
The Royal Opera House has just announced it will be recreating the great dame's Covent Garden dressing room as part of its mini-residency at the Lowry centre in Salford, featuring her makeup cases, her shoe-darning kit and the tutu she wore in Swan Lake. Nostalgic ephemera maybe, but powerful stuff for me, and perhaps for visitors to the Lowry when the show opens in October, who may have had their interest in the dancer reignited by Anne-Marie Duff's portrayal on BBC4 in April or by the very recent revelation that she was much more heavily mixed up with her husband's Panamanian coup plans than she ever publicly let on.
