The Jeremy Lewis Prize

Juliet Lewis has won the award that remembers The Oldie’s Jeremy Lewis, a genius at spotting new writers

Fifty-six years ago, I was considered, at 16, to be too plump to remain a student at the Royal Ballet School. So I took an au-pair job in Paris. My mother cheerily waved me off, thinking Paris a city full of romantic possibilities.

Waiting for me was a spartan room, down an unlit corridor, separate from my employers’ comfortable apartment. My job was to look after and feed, twice daily, three spoilt American kids.

Every morning, the mother would bark, ‘Ged on the ball, Juliet!’ And, every evening the father, Martini in hand, would attempt to grope me. In my room after work, I felt marooned in a silent deserted hotel.

One wet November evening, I bravely entered a brightly-lit local brasserie. I remember watching the rain streaming down the plastic awning into the gutter. Suddenly there was an announcement that JFK had been assassinated and, out of nowhere, a crowd of people materialised, all embracing and consoling one another.

Miserable and too proud to return to England, I found another job with a French family in the Latin Quarter. My new employers were astonished that I was adrift in Paris while their eldest daughter, two years older than me, was still at school.

In their lively flat, I learnt useful skills such as how to make ratatouille and lapin à la moutarde and how to eat globe artichokes by dipping the tender base of the leaves into vinaigrette. Best of all, I learnt to speak French just like Petula Clark.

My one charge was a cherub with blond curls. We would drink hot chocolate in cafés and shuffle through the autumn leaves in the Luxembourg Gardens.

One afternoon, I discovered Étienne Decroux’s School of Mime, tucked away at the end of a small city garden. I knew about pirouettes and grands jetés from ballet. But in Decroux’s basement studio it was all strange, aesthetic exercises with head, hands and trunk, and counterweights obeying the force of gravity.

I was invited to join his small cosmopolitan company and, over two years, we created some amazing and beautiful pieces. But we never once performed in public. Only occasionally, an aged fan of Decroux’s, Madame Spinelli, would come and clap enthusiastically from her folding chair.

Unsurprisingly, his talented company dispersed and I fell in love with a charming, alcoholic French poet, thus fulfilling my mother’s romantic expectations.