Now Mom was driving along a gravel road. Dust whirled up behind us. As the road narrowed and nothing of any significance seemed to lie ahead, she turned and drove back. On the other side, down by the water, there was another road she tried. That didn’t lead to any school, either.
“Are we going to be late?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she replied. “Fancy not bringing a map with me!”
“Haven’t you been here before then?” I said.
“Yes, I have,” she said. “But my memory’s not as good as yours, you know.”
We drove up the hill we had come down ten minutes earlier and turned onto the main road by a chapel. At every sign and crossroads she slowed down and leaned forward.
“There it is, Mom!” I shouted, pointing. We still couldn’t see it, but I remembered the green to the right; the school was at the top of the gentle gradient that followed. A narrow gravel road led down to it, there were lots of parked cars, and as Mom turned into it, I spotted the school playground swarming with people and a man everyone was staring at was gesticulating on top of a rock, beneath the flagpole.
“We’ve got to hurry!” I said. “They’ve started! Mom, they’ve started!”
“Yes, I know,” Mom said. “But we have to find somewhere to park first. There, maybe. Yes.”
We had ended up right down by the woodwork-room-cum-gym hall. A large, white building from the olden days, and outside it, on tarmac, Mom parked the car. We weren’t exactly familiar with the school layout, so instead of going to the end and taking the shortcut across the soccer field, we followed the road on the other side up to the playground. Mom scooted along, with me in tow. The satchel bumped up and down so wonderfully as I ran, every bump reminding me of what I had behind me, shiny and glossy, and hot on the heels of that thought, the light-blue trousers, the light-blue jacket, the dark-blue shoes.
When we finally reached the playground, the crowd was slowly moving into the low school building.
“We seem to have missed the welcome ceremony,” Mom said.
“That doesn’t matter, Mom,” I said. “Come on!”
I caught sight of Geir and his mother, ran over to them with Mom holding my hand, they smiled in greeting, and we went up the steps in the middle of the crowd of parents and children. Geir’s satchel was identical to mine, as most of the boys’ satchels were, whereas, from what I could glean in passing, the girls sported quite a wide variety.
“Where are we going? Do you know?” Mom asked Martha, Geir’s mother.
“I’m afraid I don’t.” Martha laughed. “We’re following their teacher.”
I looked in the direction she nodded. And there, sure enough, was our Frøken. She stopped in front of the staircase and said that all those who were in her class should go ahead, and Geir and I ran down the stairs, through all the people, and along the corridor to the end. But Frøken stopped in front of a room close to the staircase, making us not the first, as we had imagined, but almost the last.
The room was full of children dressed in smart clothes and their mothers. Through the windows you looked down onto a narrow field; the forest was close behind. Frøken stood at her desk, which was on a little dais; on the blackboard was written HELLO, CLASS 1B in pink chalk with a flowery border around it. On the wall above the desk there were maps and charts.
“Hello, everyone,” Frøken said. “And welcome to Sandnes School! My name is Helga Torgersen, and I’m going to be your class teacher. I’m really looking forward to this, I can tell you! We’re going to have a lot of fun. And do you know what? You are not the only ones who are new to this school. I am new, too. You are my very first class!”
I looked around me. All the adults were smiling. Almost all the children were craning their necks and glancing at one another. I knew Geir Håkon, Trond, Geir, Leif Tore, and Marianne. And the boy who used to throw stones at us and had that frightening dog. I had never seen the others before.
“Now we are going to do a roll call,” Frøken said from the dais. “Do you know what a roll call is?”
No one answered.
“You call out a name and the person with that name answers,” I said.
Everyone looked at me. I put on a broad smile over my protruding teeth.
“That’s correct,” Frøken said. “And we start with the letter A. That’s the first letter in the alphabet, you see. You’ll learn all about that later. So, A. Anne Lisbet!”
“Yes,” said a girl’s voice, and everyone turned toward the sound, I did, too.
The voice belonged to a thin girl with shiny, black hair. She looked like an Indian.
“Asgeir?” Frøken said.
“Yes!” said a boy with big teeth and long hair.
After the roll call we sat down at our desks while our parents stood by the wall. Frøken gave everyone a recorder, an exercise book and a notebook, a schedule with our lessons printed on it, as well as a money box and a leaflet with a picture of a yellow ant on it from a local savings bank. Then she told us about some of the events that would be taking place during the autumn, one of which was a swimming class to be held in a pool at a school on the next island, as there wasn’t a swimming pool on Tromøya. She handed out a piece of paper with a slip you could fill in and return if you were interested. Then we did some drawing, with our parents still there watching, and then it was over. The following day school would start in earnest, we would catch the bus on our own, and be there for three hours without our parents breathing down our necks.
As we left the classroom I was still wide-eyed with all the newness and strangeness, and the feeling continued when everyone in the new class got into their respective cars with their parents, normally it was only on the seventeenth of May that there was this level of synchronous vehicle activity, that a location was left simultaneously by so many children, but as we were driving home disappointment began to set in, and I became more and more dejected the closer we came to home.
Nothing had happened.
I could read and write, and I had counted on having a chance to show that on the first day. A bit at least! And I had been looking forward to having break time, to the bell ringing at the end of one lesson and the start of the next. To using my new pencil case and the compartments in the satchel.
No, the day hadn’t lived up to my expectations, and I had to take off the clothes I looked so good in and hang them up in their place in my wardrobe, to await future formal occasions. I sat on the kitchen stool chatting to Mom while she made dinner, it was rare I had her to myself in the middle of the day, and on top of this she had been with me where it counted most, so I exploited the opportunity for all it was worth, and babbled away.
“I wish we had a cat I could play with,” I said. “Can’t we have a cat?”
“That would be nice,” Mom said. “I like cats. They’re good company.”
“So is it Dad who doesn’t like them then?”
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “He’s just not that interested, I think. And he probably thinks they’re a bit too much work.”
“But I can take care of it,” I said. “That’s no problem.”
“I know,” Mom said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
“Wait and see, wait and see,” I said. “But if Yngve wants a cat, that’ll make three of us.”
Mom laughed.
“It’s not that simple,” she said. “You’ll have to be patient. Who knows what will happen.”
She put the peeled carrot on the board and chopped it up, lifted the board, and slid the pieces into the large pot where there were already bones and bits of meat. I looked out of the window. Through the many small holes in the orange curtain Mom had crocheted I could see the road outside was empty, which it invariably was in the middle of the day.