put in an essss instead?’ Her arm, in the sleeveless checked blouse, came up. She erased the M. But we’d never forget it, never, that M. Coming from the mouth of Miss Joyce, that M just made you want to do your very best.
‘Sssoon!’ she said. ‘See?’
‘Sssoon!’ we agreed, in chorus.
We were her very first class because she’d only just finished her studies. That was why we had to be her little helpers, she said. Because everything was new to her. The chalk, the notebooks, the bell. And when she said that, she laughed, exposing her teeth—she was a bit buck-toothed, though, to her credit, she didn’t seem to mind. She went and sat down at her desk at the front of the classroom and looked at us hopefully. ‘Open your books,’ she said.
The Safe Way to Read was the method we followed.
The Safe Way Reader started you off on the word I. What a concept, using I as the foundation for learning to read, said Miss Joyce, all excited—wasn’t it a neat idea? And that little word I would lead you to all the other words! As soon as you could read I you had practically all the words in the whole entire world at your fingertips!
The Safe Way sometimes liked to have a little fun, too. For example, you’d get a picture of children armed with fishing rods pulling white bits of paper out of a pond. The balloons filled with letters coming out of the kids’ mouths showed which words were supposed to go on which scrap of paper. I fish hat. I fish rat. I fish sock. I fish fish.
I fish fish—that was a good one! Even the little boy in the picture thought it was funny. He had a mop of thick blond hair, just like Thomas’s. The girl fishing next to him was the spitting image of Lucy, with plaits and freckles. She wore a bright yellow jacket trimmed in purple, just the sort of thing the real Lucy always wore. The other children didn’t look like anyone we knew.
Miss Joyce had noticed the resemblance too. ‘What did Thomas fish?’ she asked.
‘Fish!’ we yelled at the top of our lungs.
‘And what did Lucy fish?’
‘Sock!’ we howled in chorus.
Clearly, immediately upon hearing of Thomas’s and Lucy’s engagement, the Queen had ordered all the old primers shredded and new ones printed with the right illustrations.
Every afternoon the lights in the classroom came on a little earlier, and when we walked home from school the leaves crunched beneath our feet. Long-forgotten scarves, mittens, and hats were dug out of hall closets. The bakery smelled of cinnamon and allspice, and Mr De Vries sold pumpkins and gourds, which our mothers displayed in the window in nice antique baskets. At night the temperature sometimes dipped below zero, and then the next morning the roofs were sprinkled with sugary frost, like gingerbread houses. On other mornings the fog was so thick on the way to school that if we hadn’t been holding on to the tips of one another’s woolly mufflers we’d have got lost in the fog. You had every reason to hold on tight, because if you were unlucky enough to disappear into the fog, you’d melt and dissolve right down to your last toenail, until a puddle was all that was left of you; everyone knew that. Every remaining drop of you would quickly have to be collected in a brass bucket and saved until an old crone who knew what to do about it came along, or else you were a goner, forget about it.
Every day, as we walked past the rectory, we saw that Lucy’s mother’s bedroom curtains were still drawn. She was in bed, said Lucy, because she had the flu. On the one hand that was good news, because that meant she wasn’t in any imminent danger. But the flu was such a commonplace thing that we really couldn’t get too worked up about it.
What made this flu unusual, however, was that it just went on and on. Weeks went by—in our reader we were already at ‘Dan in his Hut’—and still her fever hadn’t gone down. Our mothers would have been happy to go see how the patient was doing, but as long as there was still the possibility of contagion, Lucy’s mother didn’t want any visitors. Happily, talking on the phone was permitted, so our mothers were still able to find out what the cards had in store for them. Whispering, the receiver pressed to their ears, they protested—what about the well-disposed Page of Wands, or the generous King of Pentacles? But once they’d hung up, they would sit back, disappointed, and sigh that still, it was different, wasn’t it, to see the cards with your own two eyes, and besides, in some respects it was easy for Lucy’s mother to say, being a single woman with no husband and all.
Then, crushed yet still hopeful, they’d look up their horoscope, and as they leafed through their magazines we saw no end of words flip by which we hadn’t yet learned in our Safe Way Reader. It was hard sometimes not to lose heart. But Miss Joyce assured us on a daily basis that we were making great strides. Such a great job we were doing on ‘Dan in his Hut’! She was awfully proud of us.
‘Dan is at the gate.’
‘Dan picks up sticks.’
‘Dan carries sticks to the hut.’
‘Excellent,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘Okay, Lucy, your turn.’
Lucy followed the words with her finger. The tip of her tongue protruded from her mouth. ‘To. The. Nut,’ she grunted.
‘The Hu-Hut!’ we cried, irritated. We were dying to find out how the story ended, and if there were any Red Indians in it. That Dan was such a slowcoach anyway; with Lucy and her bungling we’d never get there.
‘Hut?’ she repeated, perplexed.
Whereas we could see the words jumping off the page like brightly coloured marbles, each with its own meaning, Lucy had made no progress at all since the very first day of school; she could only tell what a word meant if there was a picture to go with it. She simply didn’t get it. Even though Thomas spent every afternoon after school practising with her, she still couldn’t even tell the difference between moon and soon!
It made Miss Joyce sad sometimes. As she handed back our first report cards, she glumly remarked when she got to Lucy’s desk, ‘You really should try a little harder, honey. Or else your folks will think it’s my fault.’
‘Oh they won’t, miss, don’t worry,’ said Lucy. She opened her report card and peered intently at the writing, frowning.
The sight of it made us throw up our hands in despair. What good was Lucy to us if she couldn’t tell the difference between rock and dock? If she was the dumbest of us all, who in future would come up with our projects, who was there for us to look up to and obey? If this went on, we didn’t stand a chance of discovering a chest of gold ducats in the ruins of an old castle; we probably wouldn’t even get in a decent round of Donkey Derby, ever again! It was enough to make you want to vomit. Maybe we ought to give her a good shaking, to get her brain up to speed. Hey, Lucy! We gonna get you, if you don’t watch out! If only she weren’t as strong as six gorillas. If only that dork Thomas would try harder in the daily tutoring sessions. Which gave us an idea, suddenly. What if Lucy’s mother found out that the two of them spent every afternoon together? She’d have a fit, she would. ‘Oh, you want to go play outside, do you? I know what you’re really up to …!’
Oh, you do, do you? Our own mothers were nuts about that expression. Oh, you do, do you? was usually followed, at the very least, with a smack upside the head, and a hissed, ‘That’ll teach you!’
Teaching, the Safe Way: that was what it all boiled down to.
As soon as school was out we gathered in the bicycle shed, armed with pen and paper. We couldn’t
