Back at Sibton
But when I got back to Sibton Park for Autumn Term, we were all a little bit excited to see each other again, and I was extra-excited because I’d done so well in all my subjects, including French, that I was going to be in IIA, not IIB! Then, when we were in the cloakroom changing into our house shoes (it was one of those warm fall days and we’d been playing outside), something even more exciting happened.
I was on the floor tugging off my Wellingtons when someone came running in shouting, “We’ve got a study! IIA has its own study!”
We’d never had a study before, only the older girls had them. I’d never even been in one — they’re private, that’s the whole point. In school stories they have fireplaces and the girls roast chestnuts and make tea and have little parties in them.
Wellingtons
“Hooray!” I said.
That sounds fake, but it’s the kind of thing people say in England when they’re happy. It didn’t SOUND as happy as I felt, though, so I kicked my Wellington the rest of the way off — off, and up in the air — hard.
It flew up and then out through the (closed) window, smashing the pane completely.
Everyone kind of gasped.
I stood up.
“Where are you going?” Clare said.
“To own up, of course,” I said.
She gave that little Clare half smile — as though something was amusing.
I didn’t find Marza, but I did find her mother, an old lady we didn’t see much who always wore black dresses down to her ankles. I told her my name and then what I had done. She said, “I’m sure Marza will understand.”
She didn’t.
About half an hour later, she sent for me. When I went into her office she was sitting up very straight, as usual. (She told us once that her posture was so good because when she was a girl they had to wear special things on their backs to MAKE them straight. Hers had worked, I guess: I never saw her back touch a chair.)
She just looked at me without saying anything for what felt like a long time. I could see that she was quite cross. When she asked me how I had broken the window, her voice sounded a little like all the mothers in America when these things happened and they said things like, “What were you doing with the record on your head, Libby?”
But when I’d finished talking and Marza said, “That wasn’t very sensible, was it?” I minded. I admired Marza.
Then she asked me, sounding kind of curious, why I had done it.
“I was just so excited about our getting a study,” I said, and that sounded feeble (that’s what they say in England — it’s a good word, I think) even to me.
She said that when “one” did things that were “foolish or unguarded” or “thoughtless,” someone else usually had to “bear the consequences.” In this case, she said, someone else would have to mend the window. She also talked about being “sensible” and “careful.”
“You have high spirits,” she said (and the way she said that made it sound as though high spirits weren’t a bad thing to have), “but you must learn to be sensible and have self-command or your heedlessness will be a source of grief to you as well as to others.”
That was probably true, I thought.
“I will,” I said. “Well, I’ll try.”
“Very well then, off you go.”
When she said that, she didn’t sound so cross. I would try, I thought.