An unpromising beginning, but two days later we are back. Elly is reluctant to enter the school gate. I carry her to it, set her down, and wait. She goes in under her own power. This time the watchful overseers have provided two basins, and dolls to go with them; Elly is able to play uneventfully with her basin beside another child. But difficulties arise that Miss J. could not have anticipated; she does not know that Elly’s doll must sit in its bath and must have jointed legs in consequence. By chance, the other child’s doll is jointed, but Elly of course cannot be allowed to grab it. I look for another but can’t find one. Elly shrieks. Calmly, the tubs and water are taken away, while Elly is introduced to less sensitive playthings.
Next time Elly was able to transfer her water fixation to the small hand-basins. This was a less isolated activity; she watched the children wash their hands in fascination, especially since the pipes led into an open drain into which water whished visibly every time a child removed a plug. As one child finished washing, Elly, who had been watching from a distance, went up to her and touched her arm. I interpreted: Elly was asking her togo through the process again. The little girl was reluctant, but did so when I explained that Elly might feel braver if she could see her do it. The second child that Elly asked refused. I offered to fill the basin myself, but Elly did not want that. She returned to touch the child, at which point a third little girl, who had been watching, did it unasked. And then Elly did in fact feel brave enough to put in the plug and turn on the water herself, retreating eight feet away to watch the water gush into the drain when the plug was removed.
The staff did not take part in this compulsive activity, but they were aware of it. Elly began each session at the basins. At first they let her play there go on as long as she liked, but after a few sessions they decided that she was ready to have it curtailed in favour of freer activity. The school was simply but well equipped with toys — books, puzzles, play-dough (made by the busy staff), wagons, slides, paints. Half-heartedly, Elly began to explore these, encouraged by the teachers. There was a high rocking-horse, splendidly painted and accoutred by a grateful father; there Elly, and other children in need of a temporary retreat, could retire and in rhythmic motion survey the life of the school without taking part in it. After a time a teacher would come over, to reinvolve the child who had been alone too long, to facilitate taking turns, to sing the pretty rocking-horse song that became Elly’s leitmotif for school. When her turn was over, Elly would come down and be led into play. She was no longer interested in puzzles, though she did them without difficulty. She gravitated straight to the doll-house bathtub, but with skill it was possible to divert her to a toy telephone or even a wagon. She tried out the paints, filling a sheet of paper with neat parallels. We had paints at home, but for months, whatever my strategies, she had only mixed and poured colours from vessel to vessel. Here, seeing other children use the easels, she made a picture almost daily — abstract figures in pure colours, never puddled or mixed. Once she made a little girl; Miss J. gave it to her to take home, a departure from the rule, since to save paper all sheets were normally used on both sides.
She began to respond to the teachers as people; after two weeks had passed, in her fourth session, with a brilliant smile she showed one of them a toy horse. Although she paid less attention to the children, by the sixth session she was actually sharing water in the tub. By the eighth she no longer required the full attention of a teacher. After four weeks Miss J. asked me to retire into the office; I could watch through the window, but Elly was able to function on her own.
Elly liked school. She might not herself be able to vary the monotony of her activities, but she welcomed variation when it came from outside. The analyst had told me to watch for signs of tension at home and to be ready with extra indulgence. None however, appeared. Yet I could see the ambivalence in Elly’s attitude towards this demanding new experience. At first she had tensed with pleased excitement as we approached the building, but on the sixth day — the third week — as we passed in the car a turnoff which though ten minutes away she recognized as leading to the school, she sang a bar of the rocking-horse song and began to cry bitterly. She kept on crying until we arrived. I parked the car across the street as usual and wondered what to do. She had seemed to like school — and besides, tolerant as the teachers were, I hesitated to introduce a crying child into the peaceful building. It would be better if she could go of her own free will. So we sat still in the car. I made no move to open the door, but waited. Crying, she put her own hand on the door handle. I opened it. Crying, she moved forward to be lifted down from the high Microbus. I put her on the pavement. Crying, she made the move to cross the street, to open the gate, to run up the path, to enter the school. She stopped crying as soon as she was inside and she did not cry again. The next time she merely whimpered. Then the approaches to school were no longer marked by tension. She was learning to take it for granted.
Elly was able to go to that school for five months. Then we had to leave. We would have had to leave anyway, for in a month she would have been five and too old for the school. It’s idle to speculate about what progress she could have made there. Miss J. had shown me a boy Elly’s age, playing, talking,kissing the teacher, apparently normal except for an odd mincing walk. Two years before, she told me, he had been admitted, silent, withdrawn, diagnosed as deaf-mute. The staff noticed first that he winced when objects were dropped; gradually — I had seen a little of how — they had drawn him into activity and speech. Miss J. said that Elly was very like what James had been then, and James was going to an ordinary school in the autumn. But Elly was five and James had been two and a half. And none of us were diagnosticians — James’s problem may have been quite different. In any case we could not remain here. Yet our experience was ours to take away — invaluable training for me and for Elly, who on her return home was able to enter a small local private school in the nursery class. She has been in school ever since. That this has been possible we owe to the kindness, flexibility, and intelligence of the professionals of England.