School Days for Ruby

by Lucia Masciullo

  ‘Do nothing,’ said Cynthia. She blinked at Ruby. Her eyes were like Josie’s, pale blue, with colourless lashes. ‘You’ve been real nice to our Josie. You gave her them fairy scraps, didn’t you? She loves them so much she even brings ’em to school with her. So I just wanted to tell you, ta very much.’

  ‘I told you Doris wasn’t very nice,’ Bee said as she and Ruby cleared the supper table together.

  ‘I know you did,’ Ruby replied. ‘But if she never even liked me, why did she want us to be best friends?’

  ‘Doris latches on to anybody who’s new at school,’ May said from the end of the table, where she was letting down the hem of her skirt in the lamplight. ‘It’s what she does. She gets people to like her by giving them presents, but if you have a fight with her, watch out. She was best friends with Iris, once, and then Iris did something to upset her, and now she treats Iris like poison.’ She finished the new hem, bit off the thread, and started to take out the pins. ‘You can’t choose somebody to be your best friend. Either it happens, or it doesn’t.’

  ‘Very true,’ observed Aunt Flora. The old woman was sitting quietly in the shadows, smoking her pipe. ‘Best friends find each other, in time. You can’t choose your enemies, either, and in my experience young gerruls make the worst enemies of all. Give me boys any day. After they’ve fought to the death they’ll shake hands and be mates.’

  ‘Doris and Ruby did fight to the death,’ Bee pointed out. ‘Look at her hand!’

  ‘A lesson learnt, I hope,’ Aunt Flora sniffed. ‘There’s a right sort of anger, and a wrong sort of anger, and you should know the difference. There’s no honour in being scarred for life because somebody took your pencil.’

  ‘How could I help being angry?’ Ruby cried. ‘Doris started it! None of it was my fault!’

  ‘None of it?’ Aunt Flora said. ‘Lassie, a fight always takes two. You were happy enough to take sweets from this child, weren’t you?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t! Well, yes, I suppose I was, but –’

  ‘I rest my case,’ Aunt Flora said.

  ‘If Doris is cross with you, she stays cross with you,’ Bee said, stacking dirty plates. ‘Remember last year, May? Doris was as mad as a cut snake because you beat her in the exams. She still hasn’t forgiven you.’

  ‘I don’t want Doris to forgive me,’ said Ruby. ‘I just don’t want anything more to do with her. I wouldn’t ever trust her now. She scares me.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Aunt Flora said firmly. ‘You are as tough as the hide of a hairy goat. Now let us change the subject. How are the West children settling in?’

  ‘The oldest one, Cynthia, seems all right,’ said Ruby. ‘She was kind to me after I had that fight with Doris.’

  ‘Virginia’s terribly shy,’ Bee said. ‘Whenever Mr Miller asks her a question she starts shaking, poor thing. She can only say her times tables up to five, and she can’t even spell easy words like “parcel”.’

  ‘Where are they living?’ asked Ruby. ‘I’ve seen them walking along the road ahead of us a couple of times.’

  ‘Oh, didn’t you know?’ May said. ‘They’ve moved into that old cottage of ours.’

  ‘Of mine, in fact,’ Aunt Flora said, sucking on her pipe.

  ‘Of Aunt Flora’s,’ May said. ‘We – I mean she is letting them have it for nothing provided Mr West gives Dad a hand on the farm.’

  Ruby was surprised, and a little hurt. Why hadn’t anybody told her? ‘I didn’t know there was another house on Kettle Farm,’ she said.

  ‘It was the original homestead, but it’s falling down a bit,’ May said. ‘I’ll show you, one day. Dad wasn’t keen to have the Wests on the place, but Mr West was pretty desperate and Aunt Flora agreed to it, didn’t you, Aunt Flora? Apparently nobody would rent to him.’

  ‘Because he’s been in prison, I suppose,’ Ruby said. ‘Doris told me.’

  May wrinkled her nose. ‘Doris would’ve liked that bit of news,’ she said. ‘She loves it when she can look down on people, and she’d have had it in for the Wests anyway, because they’re so poor. But if their dad has been in prison, it means the whole family is ruined. Dirt sticks, doesn’t it? You can’t get over that sort of shame.’

  ‘Well,’ Aunt Flora said, ‘it’s clear that everyone in the district will know all about them soon, if they don’t already. Those poor people.’

  TO Ruby’s surprise, it didn’t seem to worry Doris at all that they were now enemies. Verna Pfeiffer became her best friend again, and the two of them spent every lunch and recess whispering together. Ruby was sure they were whispering about her, but she told herself to ignore them.

  And then something happened. A miracle.

  ‘I want you to change desks, Ruby,’ Mr Miller said to her on Friday morning, before assembly. ‘You are doing well at your schoolwork, and I’m pleased with your progress.’ He looked at her over the top of his spectacles. ‘Now I’d like to give you a little challenge. I think you’re just the girl for it.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ruby said, but her heart sank. The last thing she wanted right now was any sort of challenge. ‘What do you want me to do, sir?’

  Mr Miller lowered his voice. ‘Cynthia West is fourteen years old, so I’ve had to put her in Grade Seven, but in fact her standard is more like Grade Five. She has never had a proper education, because the family has had to move around rather a lot. At present she’s struggling, and unfortunately I don’t have time to give her the attention she needs. If you could hear her reading, keep an eye on her generally, it would help me a great deal. Would you do that?’

  I’d do anything, Ruby thought, not to have to sit at the same desk as Doris. I’d sit in the playground. I’d sit out in the road! ‘Yes, sir,’ she said, trying not to sound too eager. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Feeling more cheerful than she had all week, Ruby carted her things over to Cynthia’s desk. No more Doris! she sang in her head. No more Doris!

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Cynthia said afterwards, moving over to her own side as Ruby sat down next to her.

  ‘Why should I?’ said Ruby.

  Cynthia shrugged. ‘People do.’ She blushed so deeply that her blonde eyebrows looked white. ‘Sir says you can give me a hand with lessons, but I wouldn’t want to be a bother. You don’t have to help me if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I do want to, though,’ said Ruby said. ‘Really. I don’t mind.’

  For the first time since Ruby had known her, Cynthia smiled. She covered her mouth with her hand immediately, but not before Ruby had seen that her teeth were spotted brown with decay. ‘Ta,’ she said.

  Probably she’s never seen a dentist in all her life, Ruby thought. She looked sideways at Cynthia’s lank fair hair, and the grimy mark around her neck that showed where she’d finished washing her face. Although the weather was so cold that Mr Miller had lit a fire in the classroom fireplace, Cynthia was wearing just a faded cotton skirt and the same threadbare tweed jacket she’d worn on the first day of term. Her feet were bare, and there were raw-looking chilblains on her fingers.

  I don’t know what it’s like to be poor, Ruby realised. Not really. I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to be Cynthia West.

  Ruby enjoyed helping Cynthia. She showed her how to hold a pen properly. She corrected her spelling. Sometimes now she ate her lunch with May and her friends, but more often she spent lunch times with Cynthia, making her recite her times tables, or hearing her read from the Grade Five reader. When Cynthia was reading she ran her finger beneath the words and said each one aloud, just like a little kid.

  ‘You don’t need to do that,’ Ruby said. ‘Put your hands behind your back and try to read without opening your mouth. Reading is something you do quietly.’

  ‘All right, all right, don’t be such a boss.’ But Cynthia went on mouthing the words, although now she did it silently. ‘I can’t help it,’ she said. ‘If I don’t say ’em, it’s like looking at a picture with your eyes closed.’

  Cynthia
was slow at her lessons, but she was eager to learn as much as she could.

  ‘I know I’m a dumbcluck,’ she told Ruby, ‘but Virginia’s real bright, or she would be if only she had a chance. If I can read and write better, I can help her. Darcy’s smart too, but he don’t give a damn about school. He’d sooner be off rabbiting and that. Dad wallops him, but it don’t make no difference.’

  ‘What about Josie?’ Ruby asked.

  ‘Josie?’ Cynthia’s face softened. ‘She’s a pet, isn’t she? She wants to be a fairy princess. There’s not much magic at our place, but.’

  That afternoon Ruby heard Mr Miller speak sharply to the Grade Fours, who had just finished an arithmetic test. Immediately afterwards there was a scuffle as Mr Miller dragged Darcy West out into the porch, closing the classroom door firmly behind him.

  Cynthia looked at Ruby. ‘Oh, heck. I bet Sir’s gonna give him a thrashing. What did the little beggar do this time?’

  Ruby looked across the room to where the younger children sat. ‘What happened, Bee?’ she called.

  ‘He cheated,’ Bee said, looking almost ready to cry. ‘He was having a look at my sums, and Mr Miller caught him. I should have put my arm around the page better so he couldn’t see.’

  ‘He didn’t even have time to stuff a book down the back of his pants,’ Eric Weber said. ‘Ouch.’ He held up a finger. ‘Punishment starting . . . now.’

  There was silence in the classroom while everyone listened to the heavy sound of the strap landing four, five, six times, each time a little further apart. Then there was more silence, and at last the door opened and the teacher returned with his hand on Darcy’s shoulder. The boy was white-faced, but he held his head high.

  Ruby felt sick. It was the first time she’d heard anybody get the strap.

  ‘Will he be all right?’ she asked Cynthia.

  ‘Water off a duck’s back,’ Cynthia said. ‘It don’t make no difference to him. Darcy’s a good boy at heart, but he never learns.’

  RUBY had started bringing her camera to school so she could take photographs, mostly at lunch time. There were so many things she wanted Dad to see! So far she’d photographed May and Lorna doing French knitting together, and Eric and Bob kicking a football to each other, and Josie with her sheet of scraps, and Bee’s best friend, Ant, being the lonely cheese in a game of The Farmer in the Dell.

  Some of the children didn’t want to have their photograph taken, and one or two, Doris especially, had scoffed and called Ruby a show-off. Ruby didn’t care. She just knew that she liked taking photographs, and taking photographs of people best of all.

  One day, when Ruby was about to have her lunch with May, Lorna, Betty Pfitzner and Iris Dunn, she had an idea. ‘Could Cynthia sit with us too?’ she asked. ‘I brought my camera to school today, and I want to take a photograph of all of you, to show my father. Cynthia’s nice, really.  We could all be her friends.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said May. But the other girls were less happy.

  ‘She smells bad,’ Betty said, wrinkling her nose. ‘I can smell her from where I’m sitting, and that’s three desks away. I don’t know how you can stand it, Ruby. She probably never has a bath.’

  ‘I can’t see us being friends,’ said Lorna. ‘It’s not as if she’s on her own – she’s got her brothers and sisters here. And besides, her dad – I mean, he has been in prison, and you don’t want to get mixed up with anything like that, do you?’

  ‘Mr Miller caught Darcy cheating,’ Betty added. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s the kind of family they are. It’s fine for them to be here, everyone needs to go to school, but that doesn’t mean we should mix with them.’

  Iris nodded. ‘Best not to,’ she said, but she wouldn’t meet Ruby’s eyes.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Ruby said. ‘I’ll go and sit with her, then.’ She nearly added, ‘I know how it feels to be left out’. She saw Betty and Lorna look meaningfully at each other.

  Cynthia was sitting on a bench, Josie nestled into one side of her, Virginia on the other. Instinctively Ruby opened her camera. At the sound of the shutter release Cynthia looked up. She smiled, hiding her mouth with her hand as usual.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind that I took your photo,’ Ruby said. ‘Sorry, I should’ve asked.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’d want to,’ answered Cynthia, ‘but it’s fine by us, isn’t it, girls?’

  ‘That’s good,’ Ruby said, ‘because it’s a bit late to say no. Is it all right if I eat my lunch with you?’

  ‘We’ve finished ours,’ Cynthia said. ‘But yeah, of course you can sit with us.’

  Ruby sat down next to Josie and started to unwrap her sandwiches. ‘Egg again,’ she said, ‘and an apple. I’m really tired of egg. What did you have?’

  ‘Air,’ said Cynthia. ‘There wasn’t no bread in the house this morning. And we didn’t fancy a raw potato, did we, Ginia?’

  Ruby looked down at her sandwich, and then up at Cynthia. ‘Actually, I’m not very hungry,’ she said. ‘You can share this with the others if you like.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Well, that’s real nice of you,’ Cynthia said, quickly dividing the sandwich into three. ‘Look, Josie, an egg sandwich! What do you say?’

  ‘Ta,’ said Josie.

  As Ruby bit into her apple, a shadow fell over her. She looked up to see Doris with Verna and two other Grade Six girls.

  Doris smirked. ‘My,’ she said loudly. ‘I see you’ve come up in the world, Townie. Real nice company you keep these days.’

  Ruby pretended she hadn’t heard. Don’t lose your temper, she told herself. Remember what Aunt Flora said.

  ‘And guess what, Townie?’ Doris went on. ‘I know something you don’t, about your dad.’ Her smile widened. ‘He’s got himself in trouble, hasn’t he? My mum read about it in the Mail, and she said it was something ba-ad.’ She drew out the word ‘bad’ so that it sounded like a sneer. ‘Your dad’s a crook, and I’m going to tell everyone, so there.’

  Ruby couldn’t let this go. ‘My father is not a crook,’ she said in her coldest voice. ‘And anyway, I know about what happened to his business, and it wasn’t his fault, not the tiniest bit.’

  ‘Yes, it was.’ Doris pushed her face close to Ruby’s. ‘No wonder you’re friends with this lot.  You’re all crooks.’

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ said Ruby. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Yeah, leave her alone, Doris,’ said Cynthia. ‘Buzz off.’

  ‘As if I’d do what you say,’ Doris said scornfully. ‘Your dad’s a jailbird, and everyone knows it.’ She held her nose. ‘Come on, girls. Something stinks around here.’

  ‘She’s just trying it on,’ Cynthia said when Doris and her friends had gone away. ‘You can bet she’s making it all up.’

  But Ruby didn’t feel comforted. Had Dad really done something she didn’t know about, something so awful it was in the paper? What had Doris’s mother seen?

  After school, she hunted out the weekend Mail, which was in the kindling basket waiting to be used to light the bath-heater. She spread it out on the bathroom floor and turned the pages, dreading what she might find. But there was nothing.

  Ruby knew her father was bankrupt, but losing all your money didn’t mean you were a crook, did it? Doris was just being . . . Doris.

  NEXT Monday it was freezing cold and raining, raining, raining. Everybody was excited because the drought had broken at last, but joy soon changed to moaning and shivering. Nobody could go outside to play at recess, and at lunch time all the children had to eat their lunch at their desks. Rain hammered on the iron roof, the fire in the fireplace burned smokily, and the classroom smelled of wet wool and Clive Schwartz’s mettwurst sandwiches.

  Mr Miller, looking grumpy, stayed in the room to supervise. Mrs Miller brought him his lunch on a covered plate.

  ‘Sausages and gravy,’ Ruby whispered to Cynthia. ‘Lucky thing.’


  Ruby hoped it would rain all day, because she and Iris were rostered to clean the girls’ lavatories. ‘Doing the dunnies’ was a job for the Grade Six and Grade Seven girls, and nobody looked forward to it. But half way through lunch, the rain stopped. Mr Miller shooed everyone outside and went back to his house, saying that he needed a cup of tea.

  ‘Dunnies, Ruby,’ Iris said.

  ‘There’s a queue,’ Ruby replied, looking through the porch door. ‘We’d better wait.’

  When the queue had gone, Ruby and Iris went to collect the buckets. They filled them at the tank, then measured out the strong-smelling carbolic acid and swirled it into the water. Carrying buckets, mops and a broom, they staggered off to the lavatories, about twenty yards downhill from the schoolhouse.

  There were three cubicles. Iris went into the first one and Ruby the last. Trying not to breathe up the carbolic fumes, Ruby swabbed the floor and the seat until her arms ached. She went outside, took several gulps of fresh air, and then moved on to the centre cubicle. To her disgust, it was littered with tiny pieces of torn paper. Lolly wrappers, probably.

  What a mess! she thought, putting down her mop and getting the broom.

  She soon realised that it wasn’t lolly wrappers. It was the crumpled, torn-up remains of a sheet of scraps. Here was a bit of rose, there a fragment of fairy wing. Here, ripped in two, was the face of the violet fairy.

  ‘Oh, poor little Josie,’ Ruby said under her breath. She swept up the bits of paper and put them in the bin. It must have been one of the older kids, she thought. Nobody in Grade One or Grade Two would do such a cruel thing. I’ll get Josie another sheet of scraps, to make up for it.

  As soon as she began to walk back to the schoolhouse, Ruby could see straightaway that something was very wrong. It had started to rain again, but the children hadn’t returned to the classroom. They were out in the schoolyard, playing. Or perhaps they weren’t playing. They were shouting, and dancing around, and pointing at something. Or someone.