gusto, were engaged in dismantling a potato crate with a pair of hedge shears.
At last the day dawned when our mothers were to take us to the big school. Since it was our first day, our teacher, whose name was Miss Joyce, allowed our mums to accompany us into the classroom, a room with tall windows that let the autumn sunlight in. It felt very solemn in there, like in church. Maybe that was why our mothers’ faces were graver than usual. As we hunted for a place to sit, they kept hooking their hair back behind their ears and licking their lips. The desktops were scored with angry, indecipherable marks left by children long ago.
Thomas was the only one of us escorted to school by his father. He was so very clean that he gleamed from head to foot, as if his mother had scrubbed him with disinfectant so he wouldn’t bring home any germs. His father’s head was bare, he wasn’t wearing his sou’wester, which made him look a lot less intimidating; he looked like someone you’d known all your life, like the Luducos. He stood in front of the classroom with his hands in his pockets, chatting with Miss Joyce in a loud, self-confident voice. He didn’t seem to mind that everyone could hear what he was saying. ‘Sadly, mine’s like a leaky sieve, you know, though one does learn to live with it,’ he said. ‘But I’m chuffed Thomas doesn’t seem to take after me in that department.’
We craned our necks to see that leaky thing of his. The thought that he might be wearing a nappy under his overalls made us collapse all over each other in hysterics.
‘Behave yourselves!’ our mothers hissed. But we paid no attention, because in here Miss Joyce was the boss, and she was talking to Thomas’s father matter-of-factly, as if that leaky thing of his weren’t in the least bit funny. If she was that open-minded, she probably wouldn’t even bat an eyelid if you asked her where babies came from. We were suddenly seized with a great fever for learning.
‘Perhaps you could give us a tour of the parks and gardens someday,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘We’d all enjoy that, wouldn’t we, boys and girls?’
‘Yeah!’ we cried. ‘Great!’ We drummed on the desks with our fists.
‘Okay, and now it’s time to say goodbye,’ she went on cheerfully, ‘because I believe we’re all here.’
That was when Lucy barged into the classroom. Her hair wasn’t plaited. She wasn’t carrying a backpack, either, or a yoghurt snack. She slid into the desk next to Thomas.
Our mothers were perturbed. They murmured, ‘Lucy, did you come all by yourself? Is something wrong? Your mummy isn’t ill, is she? We haven’t seen her for ages! Is there anything we can do for her? Come on, tell us!’
They were so insistent that it made us proud. We generally thought of mothers merely as people who ignored you when you said something sensible, but it seemed there was more to them, then, after all. Only, what were they thinking they could do for someone who was going to have to take on the Ten of Swords?
‘Ladies! You too, sir,’ Miss Joyce admonished them. ‘Out, please.’ She consulted the list that lay on her desk. ‘Was I supposed to have a Lucy? Was I?’ she muttered to herself.
The leaky father was last in the line of parents filing out. He gave Thomas a quick thumbs up. Then he, too, left the room.
Miss Joyce picked up a piece of chalk and listed our names on the blackboard.
If you recognized your name, you were entitled to come to the blackboard and draw a little star next to it with a piece of coloured chalk.
‘Thomas!’ He was the first to call out his own name. He jumped up clumsily. The chalk on the blackboard made a screeching, bird-like sound, which made us think of the egrets and sandpipers in our meadow. Thinking about all the stuff we already knew or had figured out for ourselves made us feel a lot better. We were going to be detectives when we grew up, or beauticians, and you didn’t need to know how to read or write to be those. We crossed our arms and leaned back.
‘So your father was right about you,’ said Miss Joyce with a smile. ‘It’s a good thing too, Thomas.’ Then she looked around the classroom, as if to say, ‘Who’s next?’
Barbara and Tamara guessed wrong, and so did Floris and Joris. Safranja, however, scored, and Sam with the shaved-chicken neck nailed his, too. Vanessa, at the blackboard, glanced triumphantly over her shoulder to see which of us dummies hadn’t been up yet, and then drew a silly little heart next to her name. Some people really had everything going for them. Because Vanessa also had a cat that had cancer of the ear. The vet had lopped off its ears two weeks ago and cauterized the stumps. So now the cat had a new lease on life, and Vanessa was the only kid in the whole wide world to have a cat that looked like a hamster.
‘Come on, children,’ said Miss Joyce, ‘who’s next?’ She tapped the floor with the tip of her shoe to encourage us. Across these floorboards, she told us, hundreds of children before us had taken their first steps in becoming readers; this floor had been here long before the polders were pumped dry, back in the time when most everything out yonder still lay beneath the endless sea; that’s how old our school was, as old as the hills—you could tell from the way its name was spelled: School of Ye Bible.
The Bible, we knew it well. It was God’s word. God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and then all the stars in the sky had lit up, twinkling as bright as can be.
‘What about me?’ Lucy suddenly cried. ‘Where am I?’
Thomas started reading off the rest of the list.
‘No, don’t help her,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘It doesn’t really matter if you know how to read or write your own name yet. It’s just to give me some idea.’
‘Lucy isn’t even up there,’ said Thomas.
Lucy squealed, ‘You see!’
‘Oh, child,’ said Miss Joyce. ‘Of course you are.’ And she pointed.
Thomas’s lips moved. ‘That says Lucky.’ After a moment he added thoughtfully, ‘There’s no one here called Lucky.’
‘Aha,’ said Miss Joyce. Her face lit up, just like one of God’s stars up in the sky. Beaming, she went on and on about why the ‘why’ sometimes sounds like ‘ee’ and about how the ‘see’ in the ceiling looks like half a circle, or you’d have ‘keel’ and her own name would be ‘Joyk.’ It really made no sense at all. Letters, she said, could be tricky; they had a will of their own—one time they might sound like this and next thing they’d sound like that. But we could count ourselves lucky we weren’t in China: we had only twenty-six of them—letters, that is—and you hardly ever needed the q or the x; you could live to a ripe old age and never need to use x or q. ‘There’s nothing to it, really there isn’t,’ she promised, smiling at us somewhat damply.
It was true. One moment we were still ignorant know-nothings fidgeting in our hard seats, longing for some distraction, and the next we were reading about See and Spot, Spot and Dot, Spot and Dick. How did we do it? Had Miss Joyce unlocked a little shutter in our minds to release some fairy dust that magically gave us the power to decipher the letters, letters that, when strung together, formed whole words, even? Has she used some secret formula that made us—we, who never missed a trick—forget everything else around us? We no longer saw the worn floorboards or the faded walls of our classroom; we no longer even noticed the dead-carrion smell in the corridor.
‘Mmmmmmoon,’ went Miss Joyce at the blackboard, on which she’d drawn a gaily smiling moon.
‘Mmmmmmoon,’
