St. Vincent’s School
Jill, not my mother, took Emmy and Willy and me to school; Bubby stayed at home with my mother. (My mother had said we could stay home, too, but my father laughed and said there was no jet lag when you went on an ocean liner, and that he’d told the school we’d be there that morning.)
We didn’t walk: we went in a taxi — it was black, and square, and very old-fashioned.
I pressed my face to the window. London seemed old-fashioned, too. The sky was still dark gray, and most of the buildings, even the stores, looked like houses, not skyscrapers. Most were dirty-white — sometimes so dirty they were almost black — stone. There were lots of little parks; they looked wet and dark, too — dark green grass, bare dark trees.
The only colors were on the advertisements and buses. The buses were a bright, cheerful red, twice as tall as American buses. We’d seen them the night before, too (with both rows of windows glowing yellow), and my father said they were called “double-deckers.” I looked eagerly for more: I liked their color (bright red) and their shape, too. They were VERY cheerful.
The school looked just like the narrow, dirty-white houses on either side of it, except for a small metal sign that said: ST. VINCENT’S SCHOOL.
We went into a little hallway; two women were already standing there, smiling at us.
“I’m Mrs. Reed, the headmistress,” the older one said, still smiling. “And you’re the three little Americans. Who’s the eldest?”
I didn’t like her smile (too many teeth) or the way she talked (“little Americans”), but I answered.
“I am.”
“Come with me, dearie,” she said. “Miss Reed will sort out the others.”
None of us said a word. Emmy and I made a quick face at each other (she didn’t like the Reeds, either, I could tell). Willy stared after me with wide-open eyes: he looked horrified. I ran back and gave him a quick hug, and then I followed Mrs. Reed upstairs.
She opened a door and said to a roomful of children, “She’s new — from America.”
She left, and the children and I looked at each other.
They all wore white shirts and gray sweaters and navy-blue ties — even the girls had ties — and over the sweaters they had navy-blue jackets. The boys wore gray wool shorts and the girls wore skirts, and they all wore knee socks. The sweaters and skirts and shorts weren’t exactly the same, just the same colors; but all the jackets were exactly alike.
I was wearing a green plaid jumper.
“Do you live on a huge ranch?” a girl said eagerly.
“No.”
“Do you have your own gun?” a boy said. I could tell that he meant a real gun, not a toy. My six-shooter was in America, anyway, packed up in some box, because I’d brought Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
“No,” I said.
“Your own horse?”
“No.”
“Rum!” someone said.
I guessed that meant “weird” and I was right — I asked Jill about it later. I thought it was weird that they all acted as though America was like the Wild West on TV. Then an older boy with a thin face and blue-silver eyes (I guess they were mainly pale blue, with glints of silver) said, “What’s your name?”
“Libby. What’s yours?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he laughed. One of the girls said Libby was “an odd sort of name.”
“Libby drink Libby’s!” the boy with the glinting eyes said, and laughed again.
The kids all started playing again and then an even older boy who was holding a little book said, “Can you spell?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Women,” he said.
“W-o-m-i-n,” I said.
“E-n,” he said, and everyone laughed. I realized that he had meant Are you a GOOD speller? I am a very bad speller, but you probably already know that from the letter I wrote on the Liberté.
No one else said anything to me, so I sat down and watched the kids running around until the teacher came in and the older boys went out and the other kids ran to their seats. They didn’t sit down: They stood straight behind them, as though they were in the army standing at attention.
So I stood at attention, too. The teacher raised her hand and they sang a song that had the same tune as “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” It went:
God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen.
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the Queen!
Then they sat down. They folded their hands, bent their necks, closed their eyes, and said, all together:
I am the child of God,
I ought to do his will,
I can do what he tells me to
And with his help I will.
Then they sat up and the teacher looked at me.
“You must be the American,” she said. “Come here, Elizabeth.” She gave me three little books — all very thin — an old-fashioned pen, and a bottle of ink. I was looking at the pen when she said it was time for spelling.
“Curious,” she said, and the girl next to me wrote in her little book. But when I tried to write in mine, my pen just made scratches on the paper.
“You must fill it UP!” the teacher said, and everyone laughed.
They were all looking at me, waiting.
I opened the pen: The bottom unscrewed, too, and inside it, attached to the point, was a little rubber tube. I dipped the point into the ink, then squeezed the tube gently — ink went in, you could see it and feel it filling the tube. When the tube was hard and full, I squished it — ink squirted out.
“Honestly, Elizabeth!” It was the teacher. She sounded annoyed. “Haven’t you ever seen a pen before?”
Instead of having a smooth, straight point like a pencil, their pens had a big metal thing that ended in a point. The pointed metal thing, I found out later, is called a nib.
She was just being sarcastic, I think. Anyway I didn’t want to tell her that I really hadn’t. I just filled the pen up again as quickly as I could. A few people snickered; the teacher gave me a dirty look and then said, still in a sarcastic voice, “If you’re quite finished, Elizabeth?”
Then she said the next word.
When we were done, she collected the books and corrected them — I, she said, had gotten almost everything wrong. It’s true that I’m a terrible speller.
The metal desk was cold on my arms, and soon I felt cold all over, especially my hands and feet. I looked at the desk — it was very pale green, splotched with black. I didn’t like either color.
In the middle of the morning we went downstairs to another classroom; it was full of little children. Emmy ran next to me, and Miss Reed had Willy (who seemed to be the youngest of all) on her lap. He was smiling a little uncertainly.
I waved to him and then stood close to Emmy while Mrs. Reed passed out small glass bottles of milk with silver paper tops. At the top, the milk was all yellow (cream) — the kids shook the bottles before they drank the milk.
“Here’s your nice milk, dearie,” Mrs. Reed said to me. “Mind you don’t spill it.”
Emmy told me that this was their classroom, and that they did their lessons out loud, sort of singing. She said Miss Reed sat in the front of the room holding a big ruler like a baton and singing (and all the kids sang along): “One and one are TWO, Two and two are FOUR, …” Emmy thought this was very funny: As she told me about it, she kept stopping to laugh. I wasn’t sure what I thought, but it didn’t seem funny to me.
After “elevenses” (that’s what the snack was called), we had more lessons; they were more interesting than what we did in school in America. We read a real book, The Borrowers, and wrote a composition about it in the thin little books (these were called exercise books) in ink. I liked writing with an old-fashioned pen and ink: Everything came out so thick and black.
Then we had English history. I looked all through the history book, but I couldn’t find anything at all about the Revolution.
I decided not to ask about it. Everyone, even the teacher, laughed when I talked — not in a nice way, as though they thought it was funny, but in a mean way. They laughed as though there was something wrong with me, or the way I talked.
But what? What was wrong with the way I talked?
Nothing, I thought. I just sounded different because I had an American accent and they had English ones. Probably they would stop doing it when they got used to me. After all, I thought, it was only the middle of the afternoon on the first day. School would get better; they would get used to me and start liking me soon.