Where Shall We Run To?. Alan Garner

at her high desk and wrote in a book. Michael was next to me and his toe nails were long with thick white ends that let the light through.

      If I lay on my back I could see two things. One was a round window near the ceiling made of different-coloured glass which had patterns I could turn into dragons. The other was an old-fashioned framed picture of a mother talking to her children. My mother had taught me big letters before I started school, so I could read what was underneath the picture. It said:

      WE MUSTN’T SING ON SUNDAYS

      BECAUSE IT IS A SIN.

      BUT WE MAY SING ON WICKED DAYS

      TILL SUNDAY COMES AGAIN.

      When we got up, Michael had to lace my clogs and tie the bow because I didn’t know how.

      My first proper writing, January 1940 (© the author)

      Miss James taught us for a year; then we went to Miss Bratt. We called her Polly because her voice sounded like a parrot. My mother said when children were in Miss Bratt’s class they got too noisy to live with because Miss Bratt was deaf and everyone had to shout, and they shouted at home; and so did I.

      Miss Bratt’s room was not in the Infants part of the school. It was next to the hall, where we had Prayers, and it was horrible.

      There were two windows, set between carved stone, high up, so we couldn’t see out; and it was dark, because the branches of the holly and yew trees in the vicarage garden pressed against the glass all the time and weren’t ever cut back.

      Next to Miss Bratt’s high desk was an iron stove. It burned coke, which was kept in the playground without any covering and was always wet, and the smell made us cough.

      In front of the stove there was a wire mesh fireguard with a brass rail round the top. If any of us got soaked with rain on the way to school we had to stand against the fireguard until our clothes stopped steaming before we could sit in our desks. The stove was so hot it made our legs blotchy red and white, and sometimes it made us cry, but Miss Bratt went on teaching because she didn’t hear us.

      And Miss Bratt wouldn’t let any of us be excused during a lesson; so if we wet ourselves in class the boys had to stand at the fireguard to dry, and for the girls Miss Bratt took their knickers off and hung them on the brass rail. The smell of pee made us cough more.

      One day, the smell was so bad I ran from the classroom, through the hall, out of the porch and up School Lane. Miss Bratt ran after me, shouting, ‘Richard! Richard!’, but I didn’t stop and ran all the way home.

      My mother was cross and said she’d tell my father, and then I’d get what-for. But it was the end of the afternoon, so she didn’t take me back to school.

      When my father came for his tea, my mother told him what I’d done, but he laughed when I said how Miss Bratt had chased me and called me Richard. I said I didn’t know why she’d called me that, because she knew it wasn’t my name. And my father laughed even more, and then he told me how my uncle Dick had done just the very same thing when he’d been in Miss Bratt’s class, and she’d run after him shouting at him to come back, and she hadn’t caught him, either.

      My mother said my father must smack me, but he was laughing so much he gave me a hug and rubbed his whiskery chin against my cheek, and my mother went to wash the pots.

      After Miss Bratt, we had Miss Fletcher. She was fierce, but her classroom was big and light, and she’d built a museum with rocks and fossils and sea shells and butterflies and beetles in a glass case. And on Friday afternoons she read real stories to us: Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, and she did all the voices differently. But the rest of the week it was Class Reading, and that was Milly-Molly-Mandy books, and we had to read them aloud in turn or all together. This was boring, except when we had gas mask lessons, where we wore our gas masks the whole time.

      We put our gas masks on by dipping our chins into the rubber mask against the tin breathing part, which had woolly asbestos in to stop the gas, and then pulling the elastic straps over the back of our heads with our thumbs to hold the mask fast.

      The eyepiece soon misted up so we couldn’t see properly, and if we breathed hard the rubber sides of the mask made rude noises, but Miss Fletcher didn’t say anything.

      I liked Miss Fletcher, even though I got into trouble.

      One day, when there was an air-raid warning, I lost my balaclava in the shelter and the teachers had to look for it after school.

      The next morning, at the end of Prayers, Miss Fletcher called me out in front of everybody and told me what a nuisance I was. Then she lifted me up into the air with one hand by the back of my braces and spanked me. Because I was swinging in my braces it didn’t hurt much, and I didn’t cry, but it made me feel silly.

      Afterwards, though, the same day, when we had Class Reading, Miss Fletcher gave me one of her very own books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, all to myself. And I sat and read it with my fingers in my ears and breathed hard in my gas mask so I couldn’t hear that Milly-Molly-Mandy.