Susan, her sister Linda and some of the children from the neighbourhood were playing in Susan's garden. Strictly spoken it was not Susan's garden. Like the back yard and the semi-detached house it belonged to her mum and dad, but to the children it was Susan and Linda's garden.
"Oh!" Linda said, "I'll give an arm and a leg for some privacy. I hate that old crone watching us from the laundering place!"
"Yes," Fatma added, "ever since they remodelled the laundry hand-in room she's been sitting there at the window, looking at us every day. I'm sure she tells my mum and dad that I'm having way too much fun playing in your garden!"
Fatma's mum and dad worked in the laundry place Her mum in the ironing room and her dad was a lorry driver, bringing out the laundry.
"Couldn't we go to your garden, Henry?" Linda asked. "Then Madam Stare can't see us. Your fence is much taller than ours."
Henry lived with his younger brother, Jack and mum, dad and Grandma in the other half of the semi-detached house. Susan's bed stood up against the partitioning wall, and many were the evenings she had been lulled to sleep by Henry's Grandmother practising on the piano. She played in a dance studio.
"No," he answered, "the small pears are just forming on our tree, and the beans are sprouting. Mum will pull off my ears if I let this wild horde in to play."
It was no use asking Fatma, she lived in a small apartment over the laundry with mum, dad, two older and two younger brothers. And at Jens' place vegetables were growing in the gardens as well. Susan and Linda's garden normally was an oasis for the children, grass and no plants to watch out for, only two wonderful old lilacs you could climb in and hide behind, a lot of tulips and other flowers in spring. And then the lamp post. It was a real, old lamp post, from somewhere Susan's mother had lived. It was so fun to run and run around it with the fingers tracing the carved lines until you got all dizzy and had to sit or fell down. When Linda was a baby and Susan a bit older, there had been a bed of roses around the lamp post, but Linda and often Susan too, fell into the roses when running around the lamp post. Mum and dad had become tired of comforting crying girls with scratched arms and legs or pulling rose thorns out of loudly screaming girls. The roses were moved to the fence bordering Henry and Jack's garden, where you could not tumble into them.
Now Fatma's youngest brother was circling the lamp post, his chubby, brown fingers following the swirls, then clutching the pole until he fell. He cried and Fatma put him on his legs again whereupon he once again tumbled. All the children laughed at him, and he said something they did not understand. Fatma translated: "He says it's not fun. The world is wobbling!" The other children laughed again, but now with a sympathetic note to their laughter. Madam Stare poked her head closer to the window and stared myopically out at them. She was the book keeper in the laundry place, keeping a ledger over who handed in what laundry, if they had paid or not, and if they came to fetch it or wanted it brought out. She had much spare time and kept a stern eye on the children.
"Why don't we go into Susan's kitchen and have a sammich while we think!" That was the always hungry Lucy, she lived in the mission house back to back with Susan's house. One of the attractions of Susan's house, apart from the garden with no vegetables, was that Mum always had a loaf of bread and a jar of jam for hungry children, the sole condition was: Clean up the crumbs!.
"She's often barking up the wrong tree, too" Henry said. "She can only see what we're doing, not hear what we say."
"Yes," his brother Jack added, "and then granny scolds us for being evil to Fatma's small brothers, when we only try to play and not fall over them. That's unfair. If only she could not see us!"
"Laundry!" Lucy said with her mouth full of bread and jam. She chewed and swallowed: "If we hang big laundry, like sheets and blankets over that fence in your front garden, then she cannot see us."
"Brainwave!" Linda said, and the other agreed.
The fence to the road was made of tall poles with an iron mesh in between, absolutely not stare-proof. All the children went into the cellar, where Linda and Susan handed out sheets, duvet covers, blankets and clothes pegs to everybody. Soon the garden was protected from Madam Stare's busy eyes and the children had a lovely afternoon all for themselves.
But in the evening, when the other children had left for their homes and mum and dad had returned home, Susan and Linda got a solid scolding from Mum. They were not any more going to hang laundry on their fence, they were not going to trying to hinder the woman in the laundry from looking at them.
"But, Mum, she's not looking, she's staring!" Linda said. "It's not polite to stare you always say, and she tells on Fatma to her parents, and then her dad belts her for being evil to her smallest brother. He's cute, but he's really a pain in the behind to be around."
"Susan, do you agree?" Mum asked sternly.
"Mostly, yes, Abdel is rather terrible, we have all learned how to say 'move over' and 'No!' in Arabic to make him behave. and Madam Stare is such a nosey parker! And Fatma always have to look after him and Mohammad, it's not fair!"
"Life is not fair, Susan. And you are not allowed to hang laundry on the fence ever again, but you can bring Fatma and her terrible twos in the back yard when you're alone. You can play there too, as long as you all say 'Get off!' or 'No!' in your best Arabic if Abdel starts tampering with anything there."
"Thanks, Mum." Susan said "I knew you would understand, you always tell us about when you were small and gathrered firewood or went fishing or swimming or punting in the creek with your siblings, and no grown ups watching! Those were the days, I bet!"
"Oh Susan!" Mum said shaking her head.
***
Susan sat in the small room in the attic, she was impatient, Linda sat at the other chair in the room, alternately granulating an old biscuit and playing with the mocha cups on the table. The small cups belonged to Susan, but they were kept up here to keep them out of harm's way, and everybody had forgotten that the cups were really Susan's. They were given to her by the old aunt, Cleo, who told people's fortunes and had a gigantic cat. She had been visiting her aunt together with one of her cousins, who she also was the aunt of. And they had drunk coffee - more milk than coffee and lots of sugar - from those beautiful, semi translucent cups, stroking the cat, and generally putting on their best manners.
Aunt Cleo was a rather avuncular woman, big-boned with coarse hair, cheroot-smoking and apt to cuss over happenings and people not to her liking. She loved having the cousins visiting her and on some occasions she gifted them with the cups from which they had drunk. She regularly gave away things, she said that she loved to see people's joy over receiving the gift, and she would not see this when she had died. Susan was a bit afraid of aunt Cleo, but at the same time she was fascinated by her. She was self reliant in the extreme, fed her cat chocolate from a chipped plate, held her husband, sons and nephews - Susan was not quite clear on who of the gangling young men were her sons and who were other relatives, but aunt Cleo could handle them all, even at family gatherings, where everybody were boisterous and loud, Aunt Cleo could make them stop their prancing and sit down and eat. She was a great, if a tad intimidating, lady, Susan thought to herself.
***
Susan awoke from her reverie by a roar from inside the big room, where her father and some guests played billiards. A pair of the guests were a local hotelier and his exotic wife, they were both good at billiards, and used to winning.
Susan gave it up: "Come on, Linda, let's go down again. They're not going to leave that billiards table before it's too late for us to see anything up there."
They got up and left the small room, and went down two flights of stairs, first the narrow, steep attic one, then through the old door, then down the winding stairs to the living rooms. They went into the spacious living room, Susan turned on the Television, but the programme was boring. A German murder mystery, with lots of people talking, interrupting and coming and leaving the court room, and in the end an angry junkie interrupting the trial, and vindicating the detective. She turned off the television again, and Linda sat down at the piano. She began playing, and Susan grabbed a guitar and accompanied her. "I always wanted a metronome for this piece," Linda said, it's hard keeping time, and even if you're good at it, it's still not good enough."
"No, I agree," Susan said 3/8 are hard to play. We need more practice. Let's try the serenade instead. It is in sensible 3/4 time."
They played for some time until it was getting late and Susan remembered that she had some homework for the next day. "Oh, man!" she exclaimed, "I still miss that stupid homework. We have to look through a questionnaire, and exemplify different groups of respondents. I just hate statistics!"
***
Susan looked despondently at the papers on her tables. Even though they had been Xeroxed, and thus were a huge improvement over the old hand cranked, smelly ones produced by the spirit duplicator, they could have been written in Chinese for all Susan understood of them. Statistics were her least favourite subject in school, closely followed by PE, where Miss Hansson were trying to teach them the Foxtrot.
Susan read through the questions once more. "Identification of respondent groups." Their teacher in Social studies Mrs. Smidt was fixated on grouping people according to income or salary or other to Susan equally useless variables. But this questionnaire, made by Susan and her class mates only contained information on whether the respondents had been to the cinema during the last two months. And if they had, had they seen the movies The Klan, or Freewheelin' Franklin, or Nuclear Apocalypse? And then a bevel of questions on candy. Not a word on income levels or social classes. But wait, only rich kids went to the movies more than once a month or so - maybe she could make three distinct groups, non-movie goers, one time movie goers, and repeating movie goers. And then correlate to their candy consumption. There might not be a correlation, or there might be, and Mrs. Smidt would not be happy anyway. There actually was a not surprising positive correlation between movie going and candy consumption. Susan quickly wrote some paragraphs on this and packed the papers into her school satchel.
As she brushed her teeth rather quickly - mum and dad were still in the attic partying - er eyes fell on a tube of zinc liniment for babies' bums. This reminded her of her experience with babysitting. She had plastered the smallest child's bum with lots of said liniment, to the great amusement of her bigger sister, who liked the white colour. Their mother had been less than amused as the liniment was everywhere on baby's clothes and on the carpet in the living room. When Susan had had the audacity to ask for her money she was only given half the amount, the rest was going to pay for the cleaning of the carpet. And that had been the end of Susan's baby-sitting days.
***
Next morning Susan awoke, as she always did, the moment their father left the house. She quickly dressed and went to the bathroom where she looked out of the window. She did that every morning. Across the yard, on the wall separating their backyard from the backyards of the people in the next street, a vine was growing. It was very old, the stem near the ground was thicker around than Susan's leg. And always something happened in the vine, many birds lived there, and ladybirds, bumblebees, and earwigs. In autumn the leaves went red, and the man living on the other side of the wall peeled all the growing branches off his workshop windows - skylights, and let the branches hang dangling and wilting down Susan's backyard wall. Then Susan's father hurried out with a ladder and shears and snipped off all the hanging branches before they pulled down the rest of the vine. Susan's father said a lot of angry words while snipping and hauling down the vine branches, but as the man with the workshop did this every Autumn because his workshop had a flat top roof with skylights and the vine slowly covered these, Susan's father could do nothing but cut off the thrown over branches and swear to cut them earlier next year; which he always forgot. But this morning the vine was shining green and thriving, stretching its green tendrils up towards the sun and eventually the workshop windows.
She brushed her teeth more thoroughly than the evening before, reminding herself to write a tube of her favourite brand of toothpaste on the shopping list. Unlike Linda and their Dad she did not like the taste of Colgate, it was too strong.
She hurried downstairs, put the kettle over for tea and crammed her schoolbooks into her satchel. Mum arrived bleary-eyed and began making tea and preparing their lunch-packets and breakfast.
Linda arrived too, and ate a bowl of oatmeal with milk and sugar. Susan preferred toast with butter and honey. While putting on socks and shoes and braiding her hair in front of the mirror in the hall she kept an eye on Mum. Honey and toast with a note of liver pate was awful, indescribably awful. But today Susan avoided that fate, ate her toast and gulped the hot tea. Then she and Linda grabbed their school satchels and ran out of the door. School would begin in only four minutes.
***
Susan hated clogs. Her mother insisted that they were good for the feet. Every time she said that, Susan replied: "Not for my feet, I always kick myself on that knobbly bone at my ankle. It hurts! a lot!"
"You'll get used to it!" Mum answered.
"Get used to it," Susan mumbled, almost slamming the door on her way out, The weather was lovely, it was Saturday, and the street slowly filled with children. At first Susan sat in her garden, reading last week's Mickey Mouse, Linda went to the neighbours, who had just gotten a new guinea pig. But then Fatma, the girl from across the street and her brothers came out. She had long, black hair, braided in a long, long braid. She did not use any hairband.
"How is it, that your hair never ever unravels itself?" Susan asked, "I would like my hair to do the same, then I could maybe keep Mum happy by not losing my hairbands every day."
The girl said: "Well my hair has never ever been cut. My Mum says it helps it not to unravel. And then it's curly." Susan sighed. Her hair was straight and boring blonde, and Mum insisted on having it cut at regular intervals at the hairdresser next to the grocery store. She so loved Fatima's long black braid.
"Do you want to skip a rope with me," Fatima asked, "I just learned how to do double swings, my eldest brother's wife showed me how to."
"I'd love to," Susan answered with yet another sigh, but I can't jump in these clogs, the rope often as not snatches underneath. It''s no fun."
"Take them off," Fatima said. "Or can't you skip barefoot!"
"Genius!" Susan exclaimed, hugged the smaller girl, and hurried in after her rope and some other playthings.
All the long morning they jumped, skipped, played wall ball, keep away, and sevensies. Just before lunch Susan put her feet in the clogs, and had just put them on when Mum came out and called them in to eat. Susan looked at her socks, they were dirty and not in one piece any more. Quickly she went to the primitive bathroom in the cellar, washed her hands and feet and hid the socks in the laundry basket.
After lunch she found a new pair of socks and went playing. This time they played in Susan's garden. They played freeze tag, hide and seek and more rope skipping, this time with a long rope and everybody taking turns. Susan was not very good at this, Linda was better, and Fatima too, even Fatima's younger brother was better actually. But they had loads of fun. Much more fun than in school, where Susan's class mate always made her swing the rope forever, because she was not good at jumping.
Two of her class mates, Fatima's youngest elder brother and his friend Jens, came and joined in the jumping as well. Susan's clogs stood forgotten in the driveway. Jens had a Pogo-stick. It was a new craze, and they all took turns trying it. It was fun, heaps of fun.
"Wonderful!" Susan said as she returned from her trip to the corner of the street and back and gave the Pogo-stick back to the waiting Jens. "My birthday is soon, I'd like a Pogo-stick. It is really fun."
"You did very well," Jens said, his surprise showing. I did not think you were good at jumping, you always fumble at the rope skipping, but you were the one doing best on the Pogo!" Susan went a bit red, but she was happy. Soon, far too soon the sun sank behind the houses, and the mothers came put, calling their children home for dinner. "See you tomorrow!" they called, as they drifted off in twos or threes.
Once again Susan put her holey and dirty socks deep inside the laundry basket. But laundry baskets are not good at keeping secrets, and mummies are not stupid.
Some days later, Susan's Mum caught Susan in the door as she returned home from school. "Susan. What on earth is happening to your socks?"
"My socks?" Susan asked innocently. "Why?"
 |
| 'Susan' from an old school photo Notice the "duckfeet" and the hairbands with blue balls. |
"Oh!" Susan said. "It just happened. Fatima asked me if I wanted to skip together with her, but I could not skip with those, those ... idiotic clogs on." Susan knew better than to swear around her mother. "I fell over the rope. Then I tried without them, and it was just perfect, wonderful to be skipping again."
"Susan!" Mum said, "If you pull off your clogs, then please pull off your socks as well. But I think I won't buy you any more clogs after this."
Mum saw Susan's smile and added. "Don't be too happy. I'm going to buy you a pair of those natural shoes, they should be healthy for your feet as well!"
This time Susan was careful to hide her smile. She loved running barefoot, and "duckfeet" as those shoes were jokingly called after their ugly looks was almost as good - at least according to the two flower power girls in her class.
No more clogs!
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