Tap dancers find it very difficult to do anything other than tap if that is all they have been trained in because, again, it’s a whole different ballgame that you’re constantly working on – bent legs, loose ankles – which you cannot afford to do when you’re doing jumps or anything else.
When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.
I was sent to boarding school – a grim place. The only good thing the headmaster did for us was every Sunday evening in the winter he would show us films in the chapel. He couldn’t afford a sound projector, so we saw silent films, which you could then still rent from photographic shops.
It was fear. He didn’t want to see a united Germany. Stalin made it clear to me – I spoke with him many times – that they couldn’t afford to let Germany build up again. They’d been invaded twice, and he wasn’t willing to have it happen again.
When I was younger, trying to afford football camps, my parents would sometimes have to miss bills. They sacrificed these things for me because they saw I had a goal.
We can’t afford to see Afghanistan roll backwards into a failed state that could become a base from which terrorist campaigns can be launched anywhere in the world.
