American children! As though we were worse than other kinds! And her mother DIDN’T like having us there.
I decided that when I grew up, I’d never make guests feel unwelcome, even if they were — especially if the guests were children from another country.
But Veronica liked us, especially me. She had stuck up for us, too.
“That sounds fun,” I said, trying to sound like it would be.
I knew what the English beach was like: cold, with gray, not blue, water and tiny waves. Instead of sand there were little pebbles — but still, it was the ocean!
When we got there, Veronica told us that waves with white curling tops are called “prancing ponies.” Emmy and Bubby loved that.
They ran up to the little waves holding hands and then, shrieking and giggling, ran away from them. I was about to dive in (I love to swim) when Veronica said, “Oh, look! A wishing pebble!”
She picked up a pure white — almost transparent — pebble.
“When I was a child, we believed that you could make wishes on white stones.”
“One wish for each stone?”
She nodded.
“You throw the stone into the sea and make a wish.”
I decided to find a white stone and wish to go back to America. In Cornwall, my father had talked a lot about how much he loved London and what a “great life” it was for them and for another American couple they knew. My mother didn’t say anything until he used this couple as an example. Then she said: “Yes, it’s a great life for Helen — lugging the coal scuttle up from the basement!”
It sounded as though she didn’t want to stay, either, but I was still worried. I liked Veronica, and lots of things in England were interesting and fun, but I didn’t belong here.
So, I looked for white pebbles. The sun came out for a minute, and the pebbles all shone — there seemed to be quite a lot of almost white ones. The others were holding hands and trying to jump over the waves, but I kept looking for white pebbles.
I found one and ran to the water. I faced west, where America was, thinking of a long, straight line, with me at one end and America at the other. Then I threw the stone into the gray water, straight towards America, towards Henry and home, and wished.
Chapter Twenty-seven:
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.
Chapter Twenty-eight:
Trying
I started trying right away.
On the first day of lessons, Miss Tomlinson, the teacher, put me in the first row, the row closest to her desk. IIA’s class and classroom were bigger than IIB’s, and everyone was my age or older. Some of the girls in the back looked a lot older; at least, they were a lot bigger.
Lessons started the same way, with Scripture; but instead of telling us what chapter to do, Miss Tomlinson said, “From now on, instead of just describing what happens in the chapter, you’re to explain what it means.” Some people looked a little confused. “Just write what the chapter says, as usual, and then explain the meaning. You’ll need to think a bit.”
She smiled when she said the last part, and then told us to go to Luke, Chapter 19. I read the chapter quickly — I always like reading and writing, and I liked the idea of saying what we thought it meant. I read the chapter and I thought I really DID know what it meant.
Eagerly, as fast as I could, but in my best handwriting, I wrote:
Miss Tomlinson corrected our Scripture while we did our arithmetic.
Then, looking annoyed, she said only one person had done her Scripture properly. “And on her very first day, too.”
I was the only new person, so it must have been me. Everyone looked at me, some people not in a very friendly way — a girl in my new dormitory, Jennifer Dixon, looked especially cold. (My new dormitory was called Florence Nightingale. Brioney was still in the Night Nursery, with other younger children, but I was in Florence Nightingale and everyone in the dormitory was in IIA: Clare, Veryan, Jennifer Dixon, and me. I was in a dormitory AND a class, IIA, with the other people my own age.)
I felt relieved that I would be able to do the lessons, and a bit odd: a teacher had never said anything good about me before. A bit odd is the English way of saying it, but that’s how I thought by then; now, I would say it felt strange and a little uncomfortable, but nice, too. That made me want to try even more.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE was a famous English lady and nurse. She was called “the lady of the lamp” because she carried a lamp around a hospital in one of the English wars — but she had also STARTED the whole hospital. Before that, they didn’t have hospitals for the wounded soldiers.
Once, a ma
n in the government had said, “It can’t be done,” and Florence Nightingale just looked at him calmly and said, “But it must be done.”
The man said he never forgot the force of those words. And whatever it was got done.
The rest of the lessons were just as interesting as in IIB, and harder. We read Shakespeare. I said I didn’t see what was so great about him; Miss Tomlinson said I would understand when I was grown up. She seemed to find my comments more interesting than Miss Davenport had (maybe Scripture got things off to a lucky start?).
The coats, but not the hats, we wore: This is from a recent school catalog.
Now when we went to church we wore brown-and-white checked coats and brown velvet hats and brown wool gloves, and sat as close together as we could. I still thought church was boring, but I tried to understand what it was all about.
I knew the words of all the prayers and hymns. Usually the hymns were quiet. Often they had something in them about Jesus being crucified — nails in his ankles and arms and a crown of thorns on his head. All that blood and suffering, and prayers about miserable sinners — I didn’t like that at all.
There were some happy hymns, and I liked them:
All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wise and wonderful
The Lord God made them all.
Each little flower that opens
Each little bird that sings
He made their glowing colors
He made their shining wings.
This hymn had one verse that I didn’t like:
The rich man in his castle
The poor man at the gates
God put them in their places
And ordered their estates.
That was the bad side of England — what the Revolution stopped in America — but they still had it in England. It reminded me of someone’s father saying indignantly, “ … when a shopkeeper starts thinking he’s your equal!”
There were some quiet hymns I liked. One began:
For the beauty of the earth
For the blessings of the field …
The earth IS beautiful — around Sibton Park it was, anyway; why couldn’t all the hymns be about that? Another one was about England’s “green and pleasant” land and “clouded hills.” That IS what England looks like (“clouded hills” always made me think of the horses’ meadow, sloping up to trees at the top), so I liked it, too.
But although I WANTED to believe in God, and tried to believe, I just didn’t see how there could be someone up in the sky who cared about everyone. But maybe it was true, in ways I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t understand how space could go on forever — but it did.
I wondered a lot if all the English children believed; I thought probably they did — God seemed so English. It seemed as though they thought God had blessed England in a special way and that in church they were worshipping England as much as God.
There were hymns and prayers about English sailors:
O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea …
and soldiers:
Our fathers heard the trumpet call
From lowly cot and castle wall …
and the English ruling foreign lands:
From Greenland’s icy mountain
To India’s coral strand …
The hymns gave a picture of English people all over the world, ruling it and being protected by God. In America we only had God on money and in the Pledge of Allegiance, but in England, even the national anthem was called “God Save the Queen.” I know Marza believed, in England and in God. You could tell by the way she said the prayers every morning, even by the way she walked into prayers. Maybe, I thought, if I were English I’d believe, too — but I wasn’t and I didn’t.
Chapter Twenty-nine:
Little Women
Clare and I were both ill and had to stay in bed all day — it was fun. We talked all morning without stopping, and I was wondering how to ask her what she thought about God when Matron (the new Matron — just a typical grown-up, not bad, not good) brought our dinners in on trays.
As soon as she left Clare said, “Do you bother with proper manners when you’re alone?”
I wasn’t sure what to say; finally I decided it would be safe to tell the truth.
“No,” I said.
She looked relieved and happy.
“Shall we eat with our fingers, then?” she said.
We did — REALLY messily. We didn’t even wipe our faces or fingers at all until we were all done. It was a lot of fun and I was really glad I’d said no. And we talked about books: One of the most fun things about Sibton Park was that everyone read a lot so you could talk about books with people and they would say things back. In America I could never do that. We talked about Little Women (it was one of her favorites, too).
I told her about a book I’d taken out from the library in America. A girl in this book was getting married to an old man. Her little sister didn’t want her to. She said so and someone else in the book said, “Oh, I think it’s so romantic — think of Jo and Professor Baer.” The little sister said, “I always wanted her to marry Laurie.”
In real life, another child who had taken that book out of the library had written in the margin: “Me too.” So I got a pencil and wrote under HER writing, “So did I.” (I always thought that was neat: a little club of girls who didn’t know each other all thinking the same thing and telling each other, in a book.)
Clare said, “I wanted Jo to marry Laurie, too: Everyone does.”
Then I told her that I had always thought I was like Jo. She gave me one of those sensible, considering English looks.
“I think you’re more like Amy,” she said.
Jo not marrying Laurie, from an old copy of Little Women.
Amy! She wasn’t a writer, she wasn’t a tomboy; and she was so selfish and so ridiculous, using all those big words and sleeping with a clothespin on her nose. How could anyone think I was like that?
Maybe it was because I tried so hard at everything — to talk and eat properly, to ride well, to be really good at lessons, especially French — and Amy tried hard, too. Jo didn’t care what other people thought: the book said Jo “walked through life with her elbows sticking out,” but Amy wanted people to like and admire her, and at Sibton Park, I did, too. But I didn’t think anyone knew that — I didn’t even really know it myself until Clare said I was like Amy, if that’s what she meant. I didn’t ask her: I was too hurt to say anything.
Chapter Thirty:
Guy Fawkes
It was Guy Fawkes Day and everyone was at the bonfire. I wasn’t going because I had wrecked my mackintosh. I’m not sure if this was a punishment (to teach me to be more careful and sensible) or just that everyone else was wearing theirs and I didn’t have one. Anyway I wasn’t going.
In England they have Guy Fawkes Day instead of Halloween. Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament. He put lots of gunpowder underneath it — but it was discovered before it went off. They don’t have trick-or-treating on Guy Fawkes Day: they have fireworks and bonfires.
I was really CURIOUS about the bonfire and the guy (they burn a guy on the bonfire — I thought it was a kind of scarecrow but I wasn’t sure, and that was one of the things I was curious about) and the fireworks — kinds we don’t have in America. Roman Candles and Catherine Wheels sounded especially interesting — I pictured Roman Candles as like the Roman time candles we learned about in second grade (they were striped and timed to burn for exactly an hour). But the fireworks, I thought, would also do something exciting: sparkle, maybe, or explode. Catherine Wheels I imagined as circles of fire revolving in the air, but I couldn’t really imagine how they would work. So I was disappointed that I wouldn’t see them — I was so curious, and I probably wouldn’t be in England by the next Guy Fawkes Day.
A mackintosh is a warm, completely waterproof raincoat, with buttons and a belt. Our Sibton P
ark ones were tan on the outside and a brownish plaid on the inside, with rubber in between. Mackintoshes weren’t always tan: Emmy, Willy, and Bubby’s school had navy-blue ones.
But they were there, I wasn’t; there was no sense in thinking about it.
I looked around the room, at the blue-and-white tiles by the fireplace (each tile was different), and at the pale yellow walls. The house was so quiet that I could hear the wind in the bare branches and even against the creepers that grew all over the outside walls.
It felt strange to be all by myself: not unpleasant, just strange — I’d never been all alone in the house before. I hadn’t been by myself in a long time except to go to the loo, and that only takes a minute.
What about baths? you might think. We were together for those, too — each dormitory had its own time. There were four bathtubs in the room; each one had a curtain, but it was modest in a bad way to draw it so no one ever did. We played and talked while we had our baths.
Once, when I first came, Veryan turned on both faucets (they call them “taps”) and then squatted and, pointing between her legs, said, “Three taps!”
Everyone laughed; I was a little bit shocked. At first I hadn’t liked to take off my clothes in front of strangers, or have them see me in the bathtub, but by now I was used to these English ways.
I thought about how cozy our study was, and then I got out the story I was working on — I was hoping to finish it in time for Hobby Day. This was a day when things we had made were displayed in the Art Room. The whole school walked around and looked at them. My first term, mine looked very childish compared to the things the other girls had made.
But for THIS Hobby Day I was writing a story I hoped would be really good. It was called “The Richardsons” and it was already seventeen pages long — seventeen big pages, not composition-book pages (our composition books were only about half the size of regular big paper).
I hoped I could finish another chapter before the others came back and then read it to them. It felt snug to be writing in bed. After I’d been writing for a while I heard a lot of noise in the cloakroom downstairs, and soon everyone was running in. Their cheeks were all pink and they smelled of leaves and smoke and fresh air and everyone was talking at once. They described food they’d had, and then Clare pulled out her handkerchief tied up in a knot.
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