Straw into Gold

by Hilary McKay

  This rather good joke (she thought) drifted brief as a bubble into the schoolroom air, lost its brightness, and vanished without a single person noticing it had ever existed. Fraulein Angelika Maria went a little pink about her cheekbones. Nobody noticed that either. They simply sat, waiting for her to say something that they could understand. They did not fidget. They looked ready to sit and wait all day.

  “Well,” she said, attempting to sound brisk. “Well, anyway, my name is Fraulein Angelika Maria, and that is what I would like you to call me.”

  There was a slight shuffling on the middle benches, as if they were preparing to bargain.

  “Fraulein Angelika Maria,” she repeated. “But”—she glanced at the middle benches—“Fraulein Angelika will do.”

  The shuffling stopped, but nothing else happened. The children gazed at her with exactly the same expression as they gazed at the raindrops on the windowpanes. Bored, waiting for it to stop. “The children will be adorable,” her friends in the city had said hopefully, when they had failed to talk her out of her extremely bad idea (which had seemed an extremely good idea at the time) of the school in the middle of the forest.

  “Of course they will!” Fraulein Angelika had replied, because she really thought they would be. She had read about country children in fairy tales. They had all been adorable. “Cherubs!” she had said.

  But these children were not cherubs, nor adorable. They were sticky. Their faces and hands, their wooden desks, the soles of their shoes, the cuffs of their jerseys and jackets, their pencils and books, were all sticky.

  On her second day (she had spent the first one in a sort of numb daze), Fraulein Angelika had started a shopping list. Soap, it said, at the top.

  And now it was day three, the bucket was in place, there was an ominous fizzing at the back of Fraulein Angelika’s nose that felt like the beginning of a sneeze, and on her desk was a pile of papers. They were grayish pages of very hard-to-read writing, some of it cramped, some sprawling, some wandering across the page like water running down a hill. All sticky. The one that Fraulein Angelika was reading at that moment was of the cramped kind, and the writer had pressed very hard, so that the pencil had made grooves in the paper.

  Fraulein Angelika had not thought very hard about the essay title she had given to her class. In fact, she had picked the first that came into her head: “What I Did in the Holidays.”

  And so she read:

  What I Did in the Holidays

  and

  Why Hansel’s Jacket Is So Tight

  (by Gretel, aged 10)

  What I did in the holidays, Gretel had written, was I shouted, “Hurry, hurry, Hansel!” and we ran all the way back home with the heaps of treasure . . .

  Fraulein Angelika paused to look at Gretel. Already in her mind she had divided the schoolroom into sections. The back-row desks: half asleep, the oldest children, and the most in need of soap. The middle-row desks: awake, but terrible suckers of pencils and fingers. The front row: the least sticky and best dressed, especially the girl with the pink frock and ridiculous name who could not say the letter R and had such a breathless way of speaking. “I like ‘withmatic,’ she had panted to Fraulein Angelika, ‘better than witing! Have you wead my witing yet?’ She had round sky-blue eyes and yellow curls, which she flounced.

  Gretel, who sat at one of the middle-row desks, had no curls to flounce. Gretel had thin greenish-brown braids with ragged ends, and a greenish-brown dress with ragged pockets. She was sucking her pencil, the pointed end, which left a damp ring of gray round her mouth.

  She did not look like she had recently run anywhere with heaps of treasure, and yet she had written:

  Pearls and gold money. That was what was in the boxes we found at the witch’s house. We stuffed our pockets full of treasure and I carried a lot more held up in my skirt and Hansel filled his hat like a bag and we ran and ran and ran and Hurray! we found the way home!

  Father was so pleased to see us and we spilled the treasure all over the floor and the pearls bounced and the gold rolled and it looked very pretty.

  “Now can Hansel and me live happily ever after with you?” I said to Father and he said, “Yes you can! And your stepmother is dead and you know how much I love you. Where did you get the treasure from?”

  “We stole it from the witch,” I said. “She is dead as well, so it doesn’t matter we did.”

  Fraulein Angelika primly inserted that before we did, added lots of commas, and drew red circles around the worst of the mistakes. The drip bucket slowly filled. The pink-dressed girl sucked the blue bead necklace she wore around her neck. Someone gave a mighty sniff. Half the class had colds, and hardly any of them seemed to own handkerchiefs.

  Something for Their Noses, Fraulein Angelika wrote on the shopping list, underneath Soap. (Was she going to sneeze, or wasn’t she? Not, thought Fraulein Angelika firmly.)

  The witch was horrible to Hansel and me, Gretel had written. Her oven went BANG! after I pushed her in. I had to push her in because do you know what she said to me? “Stick your head in the oven, Gretel, and see if it is hot enough!” Which was all cheating and pretending because she knew it was hot. All morning she had made me put sticks in the fire underneath it until it shone bright red when you opened the door. But I was cleverer than the witch because I said, “We don’t have an oven at home. We just have a kettle and make toast. I don’t know how to tell how hot is hot enough.” Then the witch was taken in by my cleverness and she said, “You see if an oven is hot enough by sticking your head in LIKE THIS!”

  So she did and quick as a flash I shoved hard on her knobbly old bottom and in she went and I slammed the door shut and I ran outside fast and a good job too because it went BANG! like I said and the chimney shot up into the sky like a rocket when you have fireworks and black smoke came out and red and green sparks and that was the witch burning up.

  “Gretel, dear,” said Fraulein Angelika.

  “What, miss?” said Gretel.

  “You seem to have written this story backward.”

  “It’s not a story, miss,” said Gretel.

  “You have begun with the last thing that happened,” persisted Fraulein Angelika. “It’s a very good story, but it would be even better if you had started with the first thing that happened. And Gretel, I’m sure it isn’t good for you to suck your pencil so much.”

  “It makes it blacker,” said Gretel. “It isn’t black enough, else.”

  “It isn’t black enough, otherwise,” corrected Fraulein Angelika.

  “I know,” agreed Gretel.

  So good news, the witch was dead and we didn’t cook Hansel after all and I ran and let him out of his cage in the stable. Hansel had been in the cage for three weeks . . .

  No oven at home, thought Fraulein Angelika Maria, looking across the room at Gretel. Only toast and a kettle. No wonder the child was so thin. Hansel, on the other hand, her nine-year-old brother, was quite different. So tightly packed into his shabby brown jacket that the buttons pulled in the buttonholes like dogs on a lead. It was a mystery. Or was it?

  Fraulein Angelika read on:

  The witch was trying to make Hansel fat and when he was fat enough she was going to cook him and eat him and that’s why the oven had to be so hot. I wasn’t going to eat him, but I had to help cook. I don’t know why the witch wanted to eat Hansel. She had plenty of other food. She had more food than anyone else I ever knew and she cooked and cooked all the time. She gave most of her cooking to Hansel. That’s why his jacket is so tight, miss. But luckily the witch couldn’t see that Hansel’s jacket was tight. She had very bad eyes and she could hardly make out Hansel in his little cage. So she used to say, “Stick out your finger, Hansel, so I can see if it’s time to cook you yet.”

  But Hansel did not stick out his finger. Instead he stuck out a bone, a chicken bone, from some chicken soup that the witch had made. I found it when I was washing the soup pot and I gave it to Hansel and told him what to do. He would nev
er have thought of it himself, not in that cage. He was too frightened to think in the witch’s house, although usually he is clever. But he was not clever there. He just ate. He ate porridge with cream and eggs with ham and cheese and butter and puddings and cake.

  No fruit, thought Fraulein Angelika Maria. No vegetables. No salad. Salad made her think of her favorite restaurant in the city, where they served delicious salads on curved white plates, and pale gold wine in tall fragile glasses. She and her friends had met there for a farewell lunch, only a few days before. Her friends had all clinked glasses and laughed and called, “Good luck, Angelika Maria! You are mad! He’s definitely not worth it! But good luck!”

  “It will be a wonderful adventure! I adore the countryside! The air! The flowers! Orchids!” she had said, caressing the stem of pale green orchids in the vase on the table. “You know I love orchids, and they are so expensive to buy here in the city. Imagine picking them wild!”

  “Surely not in autumn?” someone had wondered. “Surely it’s mostly mud in autumn?”

  But then lots of other people had chimed in to say that they had often bought orchids in autumn, and roses and lilies and violets too, and they must come from somewhere.

  “Of course they must,” agreed Angelika Maria. “And the children will be adorable. Bliss!”

  It seemed so far from the forest, and so long ago, as to be the memory of a dream.

  The witch was a very good cook, for a witch, continued Gretel’s extremely black writing, and when me and Hansel first found her house she seemed a kind old lady. “Come in, little children, come in out of the cold,” she said, when she found us eating her windowsill. She wasn’t cross at all, although we ate quite a lot of it, and we ate a corner of the roof too and Hansel licked the windows. He said they were made of barley sugar but I didn’t try them.

  At this point the blanket of dullness over Fraulein Angelika Maria lifted once again. Barley-sugar windows! What a wonderful imagination! Gretel must be encouraged with her writing, thought Fraulein Angelika. She must be shown how to tell a story from the beginning, as well as from the end, and she must not be made ill from the consumption of pencils. Edible Pencils, Fraulein Angelika wrote on her shopping list, and she was about to search through the pages on her desk for Hansel’s “What I Did in the Holidays,” to see if he was equally talented, when she was distracted by a paper with no proper work on it at all.

  Just the name Jack at the top, and a single sentence:

  Mam says us will have to sell our Sukey.

  The paper was distinctly damp, as well as sticky. Fraulein Angelika Maria rightly deduced that the blots were tears.

  “Which one is Jack?” she asked, for except for the jacket-bursting Hansel, the boys all looked very much alike to her.

  A stringy-looking person with very close-together eyes blinked and said, “Me, miss. What, miss?”

  “How are you getting on, Jack?” said Fraulein Angelika, thinking how much he looked like a burglar. “Are you managing your work?”

  “No, miss,” said Jack. “Not really.”

  “Then you must let me help,” said Fraulein Angelika. “That’s what I am here for.”

  Jack’s mouth dropped open in surprise, but his eyes looked suddenly much brighter, and after a moment of gathering his thoughts he said all the fences could do with a patch, and there was a haystack needed shifting, and if they could get the back field dug over then they might put in some winter beet.

  At this point Gretel gave him a sharp shove with a very bony elbow and hissed, “She can’t do nothing like that!”

  “She said that’s what she were here for,” hissed Jack, shoving back.

  “She’s not got the clothes for it!”

  “Us could find her some overalls,” said Jack stubbornly. “You mind your own, Gretel! Us could find you some overalls, miss, and a fork for the hay.”

  “I meant help with your arithmetic, Jack,” said Fraulein Angelika, as patiently as she could manage, “if you are finding it difficult.”

  “I done the sums,” said Jack ungratefully. “I done them easy. Sums is a sitting-down job. I wouldn’t mind doing sums all day. Did you see what I wrote you about our Sukey, miss?”

  “Yes I did,” said Fraulein Angelika, and took from her bag a second snow-white linen handkerchief, handed it to him for his tears, and tactfully turned her attention to Hansel while he mopped.

  Hansel’s jacket was so tight that he could hardly bend his arms.

  “Hansel, would you be more comfortable if you took that jacket off?” asked Fraulein Angelika.

  “I’ve not got nothing underneath, miss,” said Hansel, sounding shocked.

  “I haven’t got anything underneath,” corrected Fraulein Angelika Maria, and Hansel looked even more shocked and blushed bright red and would not look at her.

  “I got a vest!” murmured Gretel, proudly.

  “I got a vest and a petticoat!” said the fat little girl with the curls.

  Fraulein Angelika Maria resisted the very strong temptation to join in with, “I’ve got a French silk camisole, peach with satin embroidery,” and said, “Quiet please, girls!” instead.

  Hansel’s “What I Did in the Holidays” began:

  Our stepmother said there wasn’t no more food hardly. Only enough for her and our father and none for Gretel and me. Be best, she said, if our father was to take us off and get us lost in the forest so we never came back no more. O my poor children said our father. It is for the best, said our stepmother. Trust me because I am always right.

  Our stepmother never knew we heard because she sent us to bed but we listened through the holes in the floor. Gretel cried. Do not cry Gretel, I said. Do not worry because I will make a plan.

  For my plan I got up very early and I collected in my pocket a lot of little white stones, all the little white stones I could find around our house. I was very happy when I had my pockets full of stones and I whispered to Gretel, “It is going to be all right, Gretel,” and Gretel believed me and she stopped crying.

  So that morning our father and our stepmother took Gretel and me deep and far into the forest, and when we got a long way from home they lit a fire and said, “Stay here till we come back.” And they didn’t come back and night came and there were stars over the trees and the moon was shining.

  But with the little white stones I had made a trail, right from our house and in the moonlight they shone bright and we could see them and we followed them all the way home.

  Now what shall we do? said Gretel.

  We will knock on the door, I said, and we knocked on the door.

  The End

  “Hansel,” said Fraulein Angelika Maria, “I have your essay here on my desk, but it does not seem to be finished. You have written The End, but it cannot be the end.”

  Hansel peered at her from under his thatch of shaggy brown hair. His eyes were round and dark. They did not show his thoughts.

  “It was going so well, with the stones and the moonlight,” continued Fraulein Angelika Maria. “It was getting quite exciting. Wouldn’t you like to write some more?”

  “No, miss,” said Hansel, shaking his head. And just as he spoke the clock on the wall behind Fraulein Angelika Maria began to strike twelve and the whole class, which had a second before looked sleepily, firmly, fixed to their seats forever, erupted into boots and clatter and hoods and reaching arms and falling books and the door pulled open and let in a gale of wet air.

  Bong! went the last strike of twelve o’clock, and every child in the room had vanished.

  On the first day that this happened, Fraulein Angelika Maria had been so frozen with shock she had not moved for the entire lunch hour. On the second day, she had run after the class, shrieking. Now, on this, the third, day, she simply opened her bag and took out her lunchtime apple. It was a very red and lovely one, wrapped up in crisp tissue paper, one of a box that her friends had given her as a goodbye present. Fraulein Angelika thought of those friends in the city (who w
ere probably only just out of bed). She thought of her dreadful ex-boyfriend, who had said, in cold blood, on her birthday, that he thought he’d never get a better bargain than his wonderful mother, with whom he intended to live forever. She thought, with satisfaction, that at least she’d pushed him into the river, since they were handily standing on a bridge. She remembered how cross she’d been at the time when a heroic policeman dived in and fished him out.

  Although, admitted Fraulein Angelika Maria to herself, it would have been very inconvenient if he’d drowned. Prison! Me? And now here I am, a million miles from civilization, to prove that I do not care if the ridiculous man lives with his mother till he’s ninety!

  And I don’t care either, thought Fraulein Angelika Maria. And I can even see that some of the children might really be adorable. Hansel, anyway. But they are so incredibly sticky and they will come back after lunch even stickier. If only there were a spare drip bucket, they could wash their hands in the full one . . . I could warm it on the stove . . .

  Spare Drip Bucket, wrote Fraulein Angelika Maria triumphantly on her shopping list. Then, finishing her apple, she turned back to Gretel’s story:

  The windowsills of the witch’s house were made of gingerbread. I ate a lot of windowsill while Hansel was licking the barley-sugar windows. It tasted a bit moldy but I was so hungry I didn’t care. The roof was nicer. It had sugar-icing patterns. There was so much wood in the forest it seemed silly to build a house of gingerbread, but that was what the witch did. The other thing wrong with having a house made out of gingerbread is what about when it rains? It would go soggy. And why didn’t rats and mice and birds eat it up? And foxes and bears? Perhaps it was a trap for children like Hansel and me. But I don’t suppose many children go that far into the forest.

  Hansel and I only went so far because we were lost. We couldn’t find Hansel’s breadcrumbs. Do not think Hansel was not brave, miss, because he was so frightened at the witch’s house. Anyone would be frightened if they were locked up in a cage and fattened up for a witch’s dinner. Until that happened Hansel was the bravest of the brave.