Two dancers I adored when I was at the Royal Ballet School, back in the Sixties.

Horrid little bow though. I was once in the wings at Covent Garden, watching Nureyev in Swan Lake. At one point, he has to put down his cross-bow (in the wings) in order to catch the swan-queen before Von Rothbart mounts the ramp. I did not realise that he had put it behind my legs, and then the evil magician appears and Nureyev grabbed his cross-bow that had got caught behind my ankle. There was a crack. He cursed in Russian as I leapt to the side. Luckily for him (and for me) it hadn’t broken, but I retired from the wings and just heard the rest on the tannoy in the dressing-room.

Thinking back to Swan Lake…John Rider, a quite heavily-built dancer, was once playing Von Rothbart, and someone had forgotten to screw down the ramp to the floor. He rushed up it, struck an imposing pose, and the ramp tipped completely over. He told us, “I just breast-stroked off, my dears!”