Granny’s School Journey
Rhys Hughes
If my grandmother was to be believed, and I see no reason to doubt her word, unless the word is something obviously made up such as yebba, blurgo or quargle, her daily journeys to school were dreadful ordeals, the sort of thing that famous explorers and adventurers would be reluctant to attempt.
There was a bus that picked her up outside her house and took her the twenty miles to her school, but don’t be deceived by the apparent luxury of this arrangement. The entire distance from her house to school was uphill and the bus had no engine. The children boarded it and took their seats but had to lower their legs through holes in the floor of the rusty chassis and then propel the heavy vehicle along using the muscles of their legs.
On very steep sections of the slope they had to vacate the bus and push it with their shoulders through snowdrifts and over landslides.
When they finally arrived at school, they were expected to learn Latin, Rhetoric, Airship Engineering, Canal Economics, Chemical Ballistics, Belligerence, Colonialism, Madrigals, Pouting, Etiquette and Trigonometry for ninety-six hours every day, without a break, and woe be to them if they mentioned the impossibility of doing this!
You might think that the return trip would be easier, the bus simply coasting down all the way, but no! The slope was on a pivot and the headmaster would pull a lever so that the voyage back was also uphill. In fact, he would also operate a stretching device so that the road was no longer twenty miles long but forty.
Poor Granny! But she never dreamed of complaining. In fact she never dreamed at all, being far too exhausted to do so. In her non-existent spare time she was compelled to finish her homework, nine thousand pages of equations and blueprints of steamships.
Her parents also expected her to fetch coal from a nearby mine, digging it out herself with a blunt pick. During storms, when the mines were flooded, they would burn her fingernails and teeth instead, often her hair too, and she was required to grow them back as quickly as possible.
There was no joy in her childhood at all. Her best friend was a dead spider. For breakfast she would be given a dish of yebba, for dinner it was a choice between blurgo and quargle, for supper there were only recriminations and overripe melancholy.
On Sundays, the organist at the local chapel would force her through a sieve and turn her into musical notes that he could play. She was praised for her toccatas but not her fugues.
On her birthday she was given a box that contained polio, typhus, diphtheria, measles, mumps, rabies and chickenpox. She was expected to be very grateful and use her imagination when playing with these awful diseases and if she couldn’t manage this, her imagination would be taken from her and sold in the local market for one penny, a sum of money sufficient to purchase two rocking chairs or one stick of army surplus dynamite.
Poor Granny! How times have changed!