War & Peace Quote by Ninette de Valois

Memory doesn’t arrive here as a neat historical summary; it barges in mid-sentence, breathless, almost impatient with nostalgia. De Valois’s “Oh yes” is the tell: a conversational shrug that masks how total the deprivation was. She doesn’t moralize or amplify. She lists. “Starving.” “No proper food.” “No proper shoes.” The repetition is the point, each clause another rung down the ladder of bare essentials, until the image lands on footwear - the dancer’s most intimate tool, and also a blunt marker of poverty. Shoes aren’t just comfort; they’re mobility, dignity, the ability to work. For a dancer, they’re vocation itself. Saying “no proper shoes” is a quiet catastrophe.

The quote’s intent feels less like performance and more like refusal to romanticize resilience. Postwar narratives often get softened into grit-and-triumph arcs; de Valois pushes back with the plain logistics of survival. The subtext is that culture - ballet, rehearsal, “high art” - doesn’t float above material conditions. It is conditioned by them. Starvation isn’t a metaphor; it’s the body’s limits, the thin line between training and breakdown.

Context matters: de Valois lived through two world wars and built institutions (notably British ballet) in a country remade by austerity. Her voice carries a generational impatience for comforts taken as baseline. The casual phrasing is the sting: this wasn’t exceptional hardship. It was the weather.