Joan Turner’s difficult childhood: ‘I always went to bed wondering if we were going to make it through the night’

The childhood of Jane Turner , the woman whose life joined that of Víctor Jara, was marked by the imminence of death. He was 12 years old when the Second World War broke out and was living with his family in an old three-storey house in the heart of London at the time. The bombs, the smoke and the red color that tinted the sky with the reflection of the fires were clearly recorded in his memory. and they played a part in many of his memories.

“For several years we slept every night in an air raid shelter in the garden where we retreated even before the sirens sounded,” Turner wrote in Victor, an unfinished song, the memoirs where he compiles part of his shared history with Víctor Jara. “There were long periods when the German bombers buzzed night after night, and I lay awake in bed, listening to the whistling of the falling bombs and the loud explosions shattering the windows. I always went to bed wondering if we would make it through the night. “.

Among the chaos and violence, dance appears as a light which, as far as possible, manages to abstract it from the darkness of war. He never forgot the exact date he fell in love with this discipline. It was in July 1944 that, at the worst moment of the flying bomb attacks in the English capital, his mother took him to the Haymarket Theater to see The green tablewith the modern dance company Jooss Ballets .

From that moment on, everything changed for the young girl Joan. In total agreement with what was happening in Europe at the time, The green table It was a montage that, mimicking the conference table of a summit of world political leaders, delivered a powerful message about the effect that the horrors of war conflicts have on human beings.

“In one of the scenes, a woman saw her husband go to war and decided, against her own way of being, to fight with the guerrillas,” Turner recalled in his memoir. “This woman’s dance completely lacked the conventions of other ballets I had seen. She was vital, dramatic and impulsive. It seemed to me that it was a woman of flesh and blood, perhaps a peasant, who was dancing with all her being. So I made the decision that one day I would play this role. “.

Dance has always been part of his life. “I had danced for myself since I was little, improvising for hours to the rhythm of a series of old records that I had at home,” she comments in the text, and even regularly walked the streets during air raids to attend dance classes . However, the idea of ​​devoting himself to it professionally had never crossed his mind before.

His school years were spent at North London Collegiate School, a school in upper London where wealthy children were prepared to attend university. However, Joan’s situation was different from the rest of her classmates.

While most fathers were Protestant ministers or army colonels, sYour father was a shoemaker with no formal education, who now led a good life thanks to his work as manager of a major typewriter factory and, later, as an antiques dealer. A man proud of his working-class origins and his manual know-how who recognizes himself as a Marxist . His mother, 20 years his junior, also had socialist roots: she participated in the suffragette movement and worked as a volunteer secretary for Fenner Brockway British activist and politician, during various rallies.

Joan was the youngest of her siblings and She remembers being raised practically as an only child. . Thus, the loneliness that entered their home was immense. The relationship between his mother – who had abandoned her political life to devote herself to domestic work – and his father was not the best (they hardly exchanged a word), and the rest of his brothers had already left home , several of them recruited by the armed forces.

Turner’s mother felt trapped, deprived of her autonomy, and the possibilities of breaking this atmosphere of silent resentment were minimal. “At school, my home life was a shameful secret that I couldn’t even share with my best friends. . I tried to pretend to be like them and speak with the same accent as them, always hiding my true identity. Only when I danced did I feel truly free, happy and equal,” he wrote at that time.

After a year, the Jooss Ballets performed in London again and Joan managed to find the perfect way to sneak into the box office and get free entry to see all the performances. In total, he managed to see The green table about thirty times.

On the last day of the season, the young woman was able to overcome her shyness and approach the artists’ entrance to say that she wanted to speak to Kurt Joss , the prestigious German choreographer who was at the head of the ballet. There he expressed his desire to be part of his school. “He explained to me that at that time the Jooss Ballets did not have their own school – when the war started they had to close the one that existed at Dartington Hall – but that I could go to his house in Cambridge, where he sees me dancing,” Joan recalls in her book.

A week later, she took a test, almost paralyzed with nerves. To his surprise, Jooss’s response was that it was worth his time to complete professional training. and that he considered her a future member of his company. This is how in 1947 he began to prepare for guardianship of Sigurd Leeder , another prominent choreographer with whom Leeder shared his training, and after three years he managed to join Kurt’s team. This new step involved leaving England and moving to Germany, where the company was rebuilding after the end of the war.

This change of life had many repercussions for Turner on a human level. “Working at Ballets Jooss meant living with people I had been taught to view as enemies. I had never tried to make any distinction between the German people and the Nazis, so finding myself in a cosmopolitan group in which at least half of my colleagues were German and had participated in the war, was a good relationship lesson. human. ” he wrote.

But that’s not the only way dance changed her destiny. In addition to encouraging him to reject a scholarship to study history at the University of London , it was in the Jooss company that Joan established her first links with Chile. “Out of a total of twenty-four dancers, there were ten different nationalities and seven or eight languages ​​were spoken. Among them were two Chileans whom Jooss had hired after a visit to Chile in 1948.

These Chileans were Alfonso Unanue And Patrick Bunster . The first would become a friend for life, while the second would eventually become her husband, with whom she would later emigrate to our country. The rest is already history.