Also Mrs. Thirm turned out to not like rhymes in poems, and the poems Nory had written for her had a fair amount of rhymes. One of her poems was:
I Went to a Poor Man’s House
I went to a poor man’s House yes,
The First thing I did was to Look at the poor man’s Dress
yes,
The second thing I did was to look at the Horrible big mess
yes,
The Third thing I Did was to stand up and confess yes
‘What a Horrible Big Mess’ yes.
The Poor man looked down at the Horrible big mess yes
And spoke up But did not confess but merely said ‘yes’!
Another one was:
Please Don’t Frighten Little Birdies Away
Proud people walk through
The little Birdies’ Feast.
And make them fly away.
And make it so they
Can not come back to where
They could have played
All day So please don’t
Frighten the little birdies
Away.
The poem she wrote most recently for Mrs. Thirm was:
I am trapped in a waterfall
And can hear the singing fishermen’s call,
But through the waves and
In a dark and gloomy cave,
I am enjoying what the world gave.
Basically all of Nory’s poems had rhymes in them somehow or other. And then Mrs. Thirm suddenly said: ‘I particularly don’t like poems that rhyme, but it’s just a matter of opinion.’ She told everyone, ‘It’s so difficult, there’s really no point.’ Nory raised her hand to suggest that one thing you could do would be to make a list of all the words that are rhyming words, which would make finding the rhymes a lot easier.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Mrs. Thirm, ‘but it’s such a waste of time to make the list, and then you’re right back where you started, aren’t you?’ So Nory’s poems were not exactly the poems Mrs. Thirm would have naturally preferred. She was still perfectly nice about them, though. She didn’t gnaw her teeth and say ‘Not more disgusting rhymes!’ Teachers in England weren’t like teachers in America writing ‘Great Job!’ and ‘This is a gem of a story, Eleanor!’ and whatnot, and stamping cat-chasing-a-ball-of-yarn stamps around on the page — they just made a quiet checkmark to prove that they’d seen what you did and sometimes corrected the spelling in the margin. Once in a great while they wrote ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent prep.’ They weren’t as emotional.
The complete and total ban on ‘said’ and ‘then’ and ‘nice’ was hard for Nory, though, and it got harder. Poetry they didn’t do that much of in class, but they did unquestionably do a fair amount of story-writing, and Nory would sit writing her story and come to a place where she needed to say, ‘he said’ and she would spend five minutes trying to figure out a way not to say it, and by then the thing she had in mind to write next had disappeared in a chuff of steam, as Littleguy would say. Sometimes she would even write the ‘s’ of ‘said’ and then think, ‘Oh, I’m too tired, I just can’t possibly go through the effort of pulling the top off the ink eradicator at this moment,’ and so she would try to imagine a word that began with ‘s’ but wasn’t ‘said,’ like ‘he smiled’ or ‘he smirked’ or ‘he shouted.’ But then whatever it was that ‘he’ did changed his personality totally and he became this very unaturally smiley or smirky and shouting person that didn’t fit in with the story. Another thing you could do was change the comma to a period and change the ‘h’ into a capital ‘h’ and then go on with a new sentence about what he was doing. Say as an example you by mistake wrote:
‘Mmm, this coliflower looks delishous,’ he s
You’re all the way to the ‘s’ of ‘said’ and suddenly you remember, ‘Oh no, I’ve done it again, Mrs. Thirm said no he said!’ Well, then just go around and around the comma with the point of your pen, turning it into a big and very circular and very confident period, and then just change the lower-case ‘h’ to a capital ‘H,’ which is easy to do since you just have to straighten out the rounded part of the ‘h’ and make the short part long — and then have him doing something casually beginning with ‘s.’ So it would become:
‘Mmm, this coliflower looks delishous.’ He spooned out a large amount for him self and breathed-in the steem.
That was just an example. But that way of solving it also could cause confusion in the story because often it worked out that when you read it out loud to people you couldn’t tell who was talking and it sounded jerky. That was why it drove Nory totally bonkers to have the ban on ‘said.’
As for ‘nice,’ well, yes, Nory did use ‘nice’ a lot, quite frankly. But ‘nice’ was a very, very important word for kids in fifth year, which is fourth grade in America, and it was important to the younger kids of Littleguy’s age as well, and kids in general, because if you think about a kid’s language, it can mean about eighty million different things. You can say a person is nice or a school is nice or a way of spending an afternoon is nice. It’s not as definite as ‘fun’—say a few things went wrong in your afternoon, so it wasn’t completely and frolickingly ‘fun’ but it was still a very ‘nice’ afternoon. Or say Littleguy made a drawing of the Lord of the Isles, a distinguished steam engine, and gave it to Nory as a present. So basically two little circles and a big circle and some driving bars. If you said, ‘Oh, Littleguy, that’s very kind of you,’ it could almost sound a little sarcastic, or too fancy, but if you said ‘Oh, Littleguy, that’s so nice of you,’ you were saying what you intended to say. If you said a person at school was very kind, you could just mean that they were very kind to you, and yet maybe you wouldn’t say they were very nice because for some reason you didn’t want to be with them because they had a different set of interests or maybe they were not very kind to some other person, like Pamela. And furthermost, it was the exact word that kids used, and Nory was writing conversation that kids had, so she would come to a point in the sentence where obviously the word that the child would tend to use was ‘nice’ and she would suddenly remember, ‘Alert, alert, no “nice” allowed’ and she would be ready to tear her hair out by the roots.
Actually Nory wouldn’t be ready to tear her hair out by the roots because it was almost impossible to tear out your hair, from Nory’s point of view, either by the roots or by the bare tips, because you would pull on one big grab of hair, but only some of that would come out, since you never have quite as much of a grip on the whole thing. And besides you can’t have the willpower to pull hard enough to make it all come ripping out like a plot of grass. You could of course cut your hair so that it looks like it’s been teared out if you want to be included in a chapter in one of those books that include all the amazing, but luckily untrue, things in the world. That would be ‘tearing your hair’ to some extent. But the only time Nory ever pulled even one hair out was not when she was going crazy over something like having to not use ‘nice’ in her prep, but when she was thinking very very carefully about something, and as she was thinking she would anonymously take a tiny piece of hair in her fingers and pull at it ever so very slightly, testing how much pulling it could take. Sometimes possibly one hair would finally go poink and come out but that was it, nothing drastic.