Fifth Position, by Elspeth Murrow

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

Miss Gethin had run the dancing school above the furniture showroom on Clifton Street in Cardiff for nineteen years, and in 1955 she still took every class herself, from the four-year-olds on Saturday mornings to the girls preparing for their examinations on Thursday nights. She wore her spectacles on a silver chain and kept time by rapping a walking stick on the bare boards, so hard that the salesmen downstairs complained. No pupil was let in without her hair scraped back into a bun. A girl who giggled at the barre was sent to stand by the piano until she could keep a straight face, and Mr Lloyd, who played for the classes, was never once allowed to choose the music. At the end of each summer term she put on a display at the Temperance Hall, and she sewed every costume herself on a treadle machine. It was said that she had danced in London before the war, though she would never say so. Yet when Myfanwy Price came to class in plimsolls because her family could not afford proper shoes, a pair of pink satin ones arrived at Myfanwy’s house the next week, addressed in Miss Gethin’s careful handwriting, and she never said a word about it.

List five things you learn about Miss Gethin in this extract.