On The Parent Trap
and The Flying Classroom
‘There are so many books where it’s the combination of author and illustrator that makes you love them. In the case of The Flying Classroom and The Parent Trap… it’s the combo of author, illustrator and translator. The bold line drawings by Walter Trier are the work of genius… As for the stories, if you’re a fan of Emil and the Detectives, then you’ll find these just as spirited’
Melanie McDonagh, Spectator Children’s Books of the Year
‘A treasure-trove of childhood reading’
Huffington Post
‘I enjoyed every word… before reluctantly passing them on to my grandson. They explore childhood with wit and invention while spinning magical yarns interwoven with the erratic and bizarre actions of adults and the independent-mindedness of children’
Amanda Hopkinson, PEN Atlas Books of the Year
‘A perfect story for Christmas!… The Flying Classroom tells of the friendships and adventures of a group of lively boys… As Christmas gets ever closer, hopes and fears are raised and, in the final pages, beautifully resolved’
Julia Eccleshare, Lovereading4kids Children’s Books of the Year
‘This lovely looking reissue [of The Flying Classroom] breathes new life into the school story’
The Times Children’s Books of the Year
‘Two of [Kästner’s] best, The Flying Classroom (a magical school-based Christmas story) and The Parent Trap… have been revived… and fresh life breathed into them with bright new translations’
Daniel Hahn, Independent Children’s Books of the Year
‘[The Parent Trap] is famous as a film. Here, in this beautifully produced edition, Erich Kästner’s original is incomparably more subtle and touching while still being very funny… A wonderful story brilliantly translated’
Julia Eccleshare, Lovereading4kids Children’s Books of the Year
‘A marvellous piece of history… [The Flying Classroom] moved me to a place that few books do. Oh, just buy it!’
Bookwitch
On Emil and the Detectives
‘My favourite book as a child… funny, exciting and very atmospheric’
Michael Rosen
‘Marvellous’
Philip Pullman
‘A little masterpiece… Read it and you will be happy’
Maurice Sendak
Contents
Title Page
This Introduction is as Short as Possible
Chapter One
Dot Puts on a Show
Chapter Two
Anton Can Even Cook
Chapter Three
Shaving a Dog
Chapter Four
Some Differences of Opinion
Chapter Five
Do-it-yourself Dentistry
Chapter Six
The Children on the Night Shift
Chapter Seven
Miss Andacht Gets Tipsy
Chapter Eight
Light Dawns on Mr Bremser
Chapter Nine
Mrs Gast Has a Disappointment
Chapter Ten
Things Could Go Wrong
Chapter Eleven
Mr Pogge Practises Spying
Chapter Twelve
Klepperbein Earns Ten Marks and a Punch in the Face
Chapter Thirteen
Fat Berta Swings the Clubs
Chapter Fourteen
An Evening Dress Gets Grubby
Chapter Fifteen
A Policeman Dances the Tango
Chapter Sixteen
All’s Well that Ends Well
A Little Postscript
About the Publisher
Copyright
This Introduction is as Short as Possible
What was I going to say just now? Oh yes, I remember. The story that I’m about to tell you this time is extremely odd. It is odd because first, well, it just is odd, and second it really happened. It was in the newspaper about six months ago. Aha, you’re thinking as you whistle through your teeth, Kästner’s stolen someone else’s story!
But he hasn’t.
The story in the newspaper was twenty lines long at the most. Not many people will have read it, because it was so short, only a little report saying that on such and such a day this, that and the other happened in Berlin. I went to find a pair of scissors at once, cut the report out of the newspaper and put it carefully away in the little box I keep for oddities. Ruth made me the little box for oddities out of cardboard and glue. It has a railway train with bright red wheels on the lid, and there are two dark green trees beside the train, and three white clouds as round as snowballs hovering overhead, all cut out of real shiny paper, lovely. The few other grown-ups who may have read the story too will hardly have noticed it. So far as they were concerned, the note in the newspaper will have been made of wood. What do I mean, wood? I mean it like this:
If a little boy fishes a piece of wood out from under the stove, and says to the wood, ‘Gee up!’, the wood turns into a horse, a real live horse. And if his big brother looks at the wood, shaking his head, and tells the little boy, ‘That’s not a horse at all, but you’re certainly a donkey,’ it makes no difference. It was much the same with my little story out of the newspaper. Other people thought: that’s just a newspaper story twenty lines long. But I murmured, ‘Abracadabra!’ and it turned into a book.
I’m telling you this for a very specific reason. If you write stories, you very often get asked, ‘Hey, you—did what you wrote really happen?’ Children in particular always want to know that. And there you stand, with your big, fat head, tugging your little pointy beard. Because of course a lot of what’s in your stories did really happen, but all of it? You don’t go following people around the whole time with your notebook, writing down exactly what they said and did! Or then again, when something happened to them, you may not have known yet that you’d ever write about it. That’s clear enough, isn’t it?
But imagine a whole crowd of readers both large and small, planting themselves four-square in front of you and saying, ‘My dear sir, if what you wrote didn’t happen, it leaves us cold.’ Then I’d like to say: it doesn’t matter whether it really happened or not. What matters is for the story to be true! A story is true when it really could have happened just the way the writer told it. Did you understand that? Because if you did, then you’ve grasped an important rule of art. And if you didn’t, never mind. And that, thank goodness, is the end of the introduction.
However, I know from experience that many children like reading things such as what I said just now about the piece of wood and the horse, reality and truth. Other children would rather eat nothing but porridge for three days on end than put their minds to such difficult subjects. They’re afraid their poor little brains might get creased. So what are we to do?
I know a way out of that. I’ll put everything to do with thinking in this book into small sections, I will call them ‘afterthoughts’, and I will ask the man who prints the book to make those ideas of mine look different from the story itself. I’ll get him to print them in italics—that’s lettering that slopes forward, like this introduction. So if you see something printed in italics, you can skip it if you like, as if it wasn’t there at all. Do you understand? I hope you do, and I hope you’re nodding your heads.
What was I going to say just now? Oh yes, I remember. I was going to say: and now the story can begin.
Chapter One
Dot Puts on a Show
When Mr Pogge got home at lunchtime he stood rooted to the spot, staring in surprise at the scene in the living room. There stood his daughter Dot with her face to the wall, bobbing little curtseys all the time and whimpering. I wonder whether she has a stomach ache, he thought
. But he held his breath and stayed put. Dot reached both arms out to the silver-patterned wallpaper, bobbed a curtsey and said in a trembling voice, ‘Matches, please buy my matches, ladies and gentlemen!’ Piefke, Dot’s little brown dachshund, was sitting beside her, looking puzzled and thumping his tail on the floor in time with her sales talk. ‘Take pity on us poor people!’ Dot went on pathetically. ‘Only ten pfennigs a box.’ Piefke the dog began scratching behind his ear. He probably thought the matches were too expensive, or maybe he was sorry he didn’t have any money on him.
Dot raised her arms even higher, curtseyed and said, in faltering tones, ‘My mother is totally blind, and still so young. Three boxes for twenty-five pfennigs. God bless you, kind lady!’ Apparently the wall had bought three boxes of matches from her.
Mr Pogge laughed out loud. He’d never seen anything like it before. There stood his daughter in the living room, where the furniture and fittings had cost all of 3,000 marks, begging from the wallpaper. When she heard someone laughing Dot jumped, turned round, saw her father and ran out of the room. Piefke scurried unsympathetically after her.
‘Have you gone soft in the head?’ asked her father, but there was no reply. He turned and went into the study. There were letters and newspapers all over his desk. He sat down in his deep leather chair, lit a cigar and began reading.
Dot’s real name was Luise. But she hadn’t wanted to do much growing in her first few years of life, so they called her little Dot, and the nickname Dot stuck, although she had been going to school for a long time and wasn’t so tiny any more. Her father, Mr Pogge, was the director of a walking-stick factory. He made a lot of money and had a great deal to do. However, his wife, Dot’s mother, didn’t agree. She thought he didn’t make nearly enough money and worked much too hard. When she told him so, he always said, ‘Women don’t understand these things.’ But she didn’t really believe that.
They lived in a large apartment not far from the bank of the river where the Reichstag parliament building stood in Berlin. The apartment had ten rooms, and it was so large that when Dot got back to her own room after lunch she was usually feeling hungry again, after going all that way.
And speaking of lunch: Mr Pogge was hungry himself. He rang the bell and Berta, the fat maid, came in. ‘Am I going to starve?’ he asked crossly.
‘Oh no, sir!’ said Berta. ‘But madam is still out in town, and I thought…’
‘Any more thinking and you won’t get your day off tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Off you go—lunch! And call the governess and the child.’
Fat Berta set off at a trot, hurrying through the door like a ball rolling along.
Mr Pogge was first in the dining room. He took a tablet, made a face and drank some water to wash the tablet down. He took tablets whenever he had the chance. Before meals, after meals, before going to bed, after getting up. Some of the tablets were circular, some of them were rectangular, some of them were like little globes. You might have thought he took tablets for fun, but it was because he had stomach trouble.
Then Miss Andacht turned up. Miss Andacht was the governess. She was very tall, very thin and very crazy. ‘She must have been dropped on her head as a baby,’ fat Berta always used to say. Apart from that the two of them got on well. Earlier, when the Pogges didn’t have a governess for Dot yet, and the nanny Käte was still there, Dot always liked sitting in the kitchen with Berta and Käte. They used to pod peas together, and Berta took Dot shopping with her and told her about her brother in America. And Dot had always been well and cheerful and didn’t look as pale as she did these days, now that crazy Miss Andacht had joined the household.
‘My daughter looks pale,’ said Mr Pogge, sounding worried. ‘Don’t you think so too?’
‘No,’ said Miss Andacht. Then Berta brought in the soup and laughed. Miss Andacht squinted at the maid.
‘Why are you laughing in that silly way?’ asked the master of the house, spooning up soup as if he were being paid for it. But suddenly he dropped his spoon in the middle of his soup, put his napkin to his mouth, swallowed the wrong way, had a coughing fit and pointed to the door.
Dot was standing in the doorway. But goodness gracious, what did she think she looked like?
She had put on her father’s red morning jacket and stuffed a pillow under it, so that she resembled a dented round teapot. Her thin bare legs, showing under the jacket, looked like drumsticks. Berta’s Sunday hat perched unsteadily on her head. It was made of brightly coloured straw. Dot was holding the rolling pin and an open umbrella in one hand, and a piece of string in the other. A frying pan was tied to the string, and in the frying pan, which clattered over the floor behind Dot, sat Piefke the dachshund, frowning. He wasn’t frowning because he was cross but because he had too much skin on his head. And as the skin didn’t know where to go, it fell into folds.
Dot walked once round the table, stopped in front of her father, looked at him hard and said, ‘May I see your tickets, please?’
‘No,’ said her father. ‘Don’t you recognize me? I’m the Minister of Railways.’
‘Oh, I see,’ she said.
Miss Andacht stood up, took Dot by the collar and removed all the extra clothes and other things until she looked like a normal child again. Fat Berta took the fancy dress outfit and the rolling pin and the umbrella out of the room. She was still laughing in the kitchen. You could hear her distinctly.
‘How was school?’ asked Dot’s father, and as she didn’t answer but just stirred the soup in her soup plate around, he went on, ‘What’s three times eight?’
‘Three times eight? Three times eight is a hundred and twenty divided by five,’ she said. Nothing much could surprise Mr Pogge the walking-stick factory director now. He worked out the sum in his head, and since it was right he went on with his lunch. Piefke had climbed up on an empty chair, propped his forepaws on the table, and seemed to be frowning as he made sure that they all finished their soup. He looked as if he were about to make a speech. Berta brought in the next course, chicken with rice, and gave Piefke a little slap. The dachshund misunderstood it, and got right up on the table. Dot put him down on the floor again and said, ‘I wish I had a twin.’
Her father shrugged his shoulders regretfully.
‘It would be great,’ said Dot. ‘We’d both wear the same clothes, and we’d have hair the same colour and take the same size of shoes, and we’d be just like each other and have the very same face.’
‘So?’ said Miss Andacht.
Dot groaned with delight when she imagined being one of twins. ‘No one would know which was me and which was her. And if they thought one of us was me it would be my twin. And if they thought it was her then it would be me. Oh, it would be brilliant.’
‘It’d be unbearable,’ said her father.
‘And when the teacher said, “Luise!”, I’d stand up and say, “No, I’m the other one.” And then the teacher would say, “Sit down!” and call to the other one and shout, “Why don’t you stand up, Luise?” and she would say, “But I’m Karoline.” And after three days of that the teacher would get spasms and have to go away to a sanatorium on sick leave, and we’d have holidays.’
‘Twins usually look very different from each other,’ claimed Miss Andacht.
‘Karoline and I don’t,’ Dot contradicted her. ‘You’ve never seen two people look so alike. Not even the director could tell us apart.’ By the director she meant her father.
‘One of you is quite enough for me,’ said the director, helping himself to more chicken.
‘What do you have against Karoline?’ asked Dot.
‘Luise,’ he said in a loud voice. When he said ‘Luise’ like that, it meant she must stop arguing or she’d be sorry. So Dot kept quiet, ate chicken and rice and secretly made faces at Piefke, who was sitting on the floor close to her, until he felt so uncomfortable that he shook himself and ran off to the kitchen.
When they were eating dessert (it was greengages), Mrs Pogge finally turned up. She was v
ery pretty, but strictly between ourselves she was also unbearable. Berta the maid had once told a colleague of hers, ‘Someone ought to slap my mistress with a wet cloth. She has such a nice, funny child and such a charming husband, but do you think she bothers about either of them? Not a bit of it. She spends all day driving round town, shopping, taking things back to the shops to be exchanged, going to tea parties and fashion shows. And in the evening her poor husband has to trail along after her. Watching six-day bicycle races, going to the theatre or the cinema, balls, there’s always something going on. She hardly comes home at all any more. Well, that has its good side.’
So Mrs Pogge turned up, sat down and looked hurt. Really she should have been the one to apologize for being so late. Instead she sounded insulted because they had started lunch without her. Mr Pogge took some more tablets, rectangular tablets this time, made a face and washed them down with a drink of water.
‘Don’t forget we’re going to Consul General Ohlerich’s party this evening,’ said his wife.
‘No, I won’t,’ said Mr Pogge.
‘This chicken is cold,’ she said.
‘Yes, it is,’ said fat Berta.
‘Does Dot have homework to do?’ she asked.
‘No, she doesn’t,’ said Miss Andacht.
‘Child, you have a tooth loose!’ she cried.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Dot.
Mr Pogge got up from the table. ‘I hardly remember what an evening at home is like any more.’
‘Why, we never set foot outside the door yesterday evening,’ replied his wife.
‘But the Brückmanns were here,’ he said, ‘and the Schramms and the Dietrichs, the place was full of guests.’
‘Were we at home yesterday or were we not at home yesterday?’ she asked challengingly, looking at him hard. Mr Pogge the director said nothing, to be on the safe side, and went into his study. Dot followed him and sat down in the big leather armchair with him; there was room for them both. ‘Your tooth is loose, is it?’ he asked. ‘Does it hurt?’
DOT AND ANTON Page 1