The Girl Who Couldn't Smile (6 page)

‘Are you saying that maybe the rabbits wear clothes when we can’t see them?’ I asked Jeffrey.

He nodded, beaming.

‘Well, that’s possible,’ I said. ‘What do the rest of you think?’

This conversation continued to and fro. The idea of a colony of intelligent rabbits living nearby was just too delicious for any of them to pass up. I was just about to introduce the group to Beatrix Potter and her world of animals when I noticed that Tammy had gone – her chair was empty. I waited until Tush was discussing the myth about rabbits favouring carrots (they generally prefer lettuces and brassicas and will leave carrot crops largely untouched), then handed the book to her and made my way into the kitchen. Sure enough, through the still partly open door I could see the child sitting on the table munching a scone. She had her back to me, and was so involved in cramming the food into her mouth that she didn’t hear me enter the room.

‘You know, those are much better hot, with butter and jam,’ I said, pulling out a chair and sitting down near her. I didn’t want to get too close – her eyes were those of a cornered animal. ‘Would you like me to pop one into the microwave and put some on it for you?’

She just eyed me and did not respond, which I decided to interpret as ‘Yes please, Shane,’ so I took one, put it on a plate and stuck it in to heat.

‘I bet you’d also like some milk to drink,’ I said. I poured some into a plastic cup and put it on the table next to her. She swiped it up and gulped half of it down without pausing. As she drank the rest I took the scone from the oven and spread it with butter and jam. When I had cut it up into
bite-sized
chunks I sat down and watched her eat. I didn’t have to watch for long – the entire plate was empty within thirty seconds. ‘You’re pretty hungry, Tam,’ I said.

She nodded. I had to fight the urge to punch the air and whoop – she was, in her way, talking to me.

‘Like some more?’

The nod again. Pleased beyond words that I had opened even this basic line of communication, I got up and prepared another scone for her.

‘Did you have any breakfast this morning?’ I asked, as she scarfed it down.

She looked at me with eyes that almost held offence. Then, tentatively, she shook her head.

‘Do you ever get breakfast?’ My heart went out to her – she was so small, such a tiny little soul, but so self-sufficient, so tough. She paused, considering the question. Her head lolled from one side to the other as she thought about how to answer. I helped her: ‘Sometimes?’

She shrugged in an exaggerated manner.

‘But hardly ever,’ I said, and she nodded firmly. I almost laughed. Tammy, although she chose not to speak, was a gifted communicator. ‘Would you like it if I sorted it out for you to have some breakfast when you got into Little Scamps every day?’

An expression of fear came over her face, and she shook her head.

‘Suppose I fixed it so nobody knew things were tough at home.’

She stopped eating and thought for a moment, studying the piece of scone in her hand as if it held the secrets to the universe. Then she gave me an expression that was certainly not a smile – I was beginning to think she didn’t know how to smile – but involved a slight turning up of the corners of her mouth, a twitching of her eyes. Later I learned that this was her expression for pleasure and satisfaction.

‘So we have a deal,’ I said, reaching out and patting her shoulder. She froze momentarily when I touched her, and I made a mental note to keep such displays of affection to a minimum. She got over the paroxysm quickly though, and I felt a rush of fondness for the sad, silent child. It was an affection I would have to remind myself of often in the coming months.

As I had begun to explain to the group, the first project I had planned was based around Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories. I had been a huge fan of her tales as a child. I realize now that this seemingly quaint Victorian lady, with her amazingly detailed paintings and succinct text, was actually ploughing a deceptively dark and complex furrow through the consciousness of her youthful readers.

While her stories deal with funny animals that generally walk on their hind legs, wear clothes and engage in very human activities, there is still a sense that they live in a world where death and injury are just around the corner. The children at Little Scamps reminded me of Potter characters. They seemed small, cute and helpless, yet there was a well of resourcefulness and guile in each of them, and although they were very much at the mercy of the adults about them, each had a finely tuned survival instinct.

After a break for play outdoors, I read
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
aloud to the kids. I’d had full colour enlargements of the pictures made so they could all see them, and Susan held them up one by one. The story is simple: Peter Rabbit, his sisters, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail, and his mother live in a
rabbit hole under a fir-tree. Mother Rabbit has forbidden her children to enter the garden of Mr McGregor, a local
small-holder
, because their father had met his untimely end there and become the main ingredient of a pie. However, while Mrs Rabbit is shopping and the girls are collecting blackberries, Peter, rebellious soul that he is, sneaks into the garden. There, he gorges on vegetables until he gets sick, and is chased by Mr McGregor. When Peter loses his jacket and shoes, Mr McGregor uses them to dress a scarecrow. Eventually Peter escapes and returns to his mother, exhausted and feeling ill. She puts him to bed with a dose of camomile tea while his sisters (who have been good little bunnies) enjoy bread and milk and blackberries for supper.

The children listened, transfixed. I love telling stories, and find myself getting lost in them just as much as the children. Storytelling should be a performance, and I make a point of giving each character a different voice and the occasional gesture – children have a remarkable memory for such features, pointing out to me on repeat tellings if I get a voice wrong.

I chose
Peter Rabbit
as our first ‘big’ story because I know that children can identify with him. He is inherently a good soul, just a bit excitable and naughty, but not in a malicious way. He steals the contents of Mr McGregor’s garden, but he is a rabbit, and
is
only doing what he is programmed to do.

Despite walking upright and wearing his blue jacket, the images of him in the book are all anatomically correct – he is clearly a wild rabbit, just like the ones my audience saw almost every day, and that eased things, too. This was not a story about trolls or goblins or even lions and tigers: it dealt with things that the kids had only to look outside their kitchen windows to see.

When I was finished, I put the book down, but Susan and I laid the pictures out in sequence on the floor, so the children could follow them as a kind of photo-essay while we talked.

‘Do you think Peter is a good rabbit?’ I asked.

‘No, not good,’ Jeffrey said flatly. ‘Bold boy.’

‘Why do you think he’s bad?’ I asked.

‘Mammy say,’ Jeffrey was puffing and panting with the effort of expressing what he wanted to articulate, ‘no steal.’

‘If I was a rabbit,’ Lonnie said, ‘and I passed a garden full of lovely fresh veg, I think I’d find it very hard not to go in and take some.’

‘Berries,’ Jeffrey said.

‘That’s right,’ I agreed. ‘His sisters went out and picked blackberries, didn’t they? So there was food that could be taken without having to steal.’

‘And his mammy worried about him goin’ in that garden,’ Gus said.

‘Why did she worry, Gus?’ Tush asked.

‘Because Peter’s dad had an accident in there,’ Gus said.

‘What kind of accident, do you think?’ Susan asked.

The group sat quietly, thinking about that.

‘Well, in the story, it says his daddy ended up in a great big pie,’ Mitzi said. ‘How could that have happened?’

‘Mr M’Gregor,’ Ross said. ‘He kilt ’im, I’d say.’

‘Why would he want to do that?’ I asked.

‘Peter robbin’ the veg’ables,’ Rufus said.

‘So do you think Mr McGregor is right to try and kill Peter, and to kill and eat his father?’ I asked.

I was met with a resounding silence. This was far too complex a moral dilemma for the group. The problem was clear: it was naughty of Peter to steal the vegetables because stealing is wrong and therefore should be punished. Yet Peter was a nice rabbit, and the children felt a strong sense of
solidarity with him. How then was it all right for anyone to kill either Peter or members of his family, even to eat them for dinner?

Arga was looking at the picture of a Peter who, having lost his clothes and believing himself to be trapped in the garden, is crying bitterly. The image seemed to have stirred something in the child, who had begun to speak loudly in Polish. She was pointing at the picture, and Gilbert, who was, as usual, beside her, placed a hand on her arm.

‘Arga, honey, I don’t know what you’re trying to say,’ I said.

‘
Arrrrgaaaa
!’ she said angrily, rolling those
r
s for me (our constant mispronunciation of her name irritated her greatly), then continued to talk rapidly.

Lonnie hopped off his chair and went over to her. In quiet tones he spoke to her: ‘
Co się stało, kochanie?
’ I later learned this was Polish for ‘What’s wrong, sweetheart?’

At what sounded like a hundred miles per hour Arga rattled something back.

‘
Powoli
,’ Lonnie said, patting the air rhythmically with his hand: slowly.

‘
Został pozostawiony sam sobie
,’ Arga said, tears streaming down her face now.

I waited with bated breath – this was wholly unexpected. It was as if Lonnie had just produced a rabbit from a hat.

‘She says that he has been left all alone,’ Lonnie translated.

‘Do you speak Polish?’ I asked disbelievingly.

He turned to look at me with a halfway grin on his face. ‘And the prize for asking the most obvious question imaginable goes to the long-haired gentleman. Yes, I speak a bit of Polish.’

‘Umm … when were you going to tell me that fascinating little nugget of information?’

‘When were you going to tell me you had a child here who speaks Polish fluently but has not one word of English?’

I stopped for a moment. ‘I thought I had.’

Lonnie shook his head impatiently, then turned back to Arga. ‘
Znasz jego mammy znajduje
go.’ You know Peter’s mammy finds him.

‘
Może nie na długo,’
Arga said.
‘I on będzie smutny i przestraszony
.’

‘But maybe too late,’ Lonnie relayed to us. ‘And he will be cold and frightened.’

Lonnie spoke to her, turning her to face him. I saw a kind of relief spread across Arga’s face: someone finally understood her and was taking the time to reassure and comfort her.

‘
Nie chciałbym do tego dopus´cić do ciebie, kochanie. Jesteś bezpieczny, teraz
.’ I wouldn’t let that happen to you, sweetheart. You’re safe, now.

The child threw her arms around Lonnie’s neck and hugged him tightly, sobbing loudly. He hugged her back, then picked her up in his powerful arms and went back to his chair, Gilbert following them like a lapdog. As he settled back into his place, I saw that tears were running down his cheeks, too. Lonnie sat for the rest of the session with Arga on one knee, and Gilbert perched on the other, the latter obviously uncomfortable with the physical contact, but determined not to leave his friend.

It was not until I got home that evening and pondered the events of the day – and it would prove to be a long and eventful one – that I realized just how much Arga and Lonnie had in common: she an abandoned, semi-feral child; he a modern-day and very real fairy-tale character, whose family had, in a slightly more benign way, abandoned him, too. He had been locked in the attic room when his mother died and his aunt, finding the body, had died of shock. It had been
days before a workman had called and found Lonnie, terrified and half starved in his prison. I thought about them both, that night, as I lay in the darkness and felt the hours tick away: unloved children in a difficult, cruel world. And wondered if there was anything anyone could ever do other than extend friendship and hope for the best.

It is a question to which I do not think I have ever received an answer.

Another question without an answer was Tammy: she was by far the hardest of the children to read. Milandra was the firebrand; Gus the joker; Julie the vulnerable waif. Who, then, was Tammy?

It took hours of close observation to grasp that she did not really have a role, other than that of outsider. The other children (who barely had time for one another as it was) ignored her, and she generally behaved as if they weren’t there either, unless she wanted something – a toy or book, usually – that someone else had. Then her violence could be truly shocking. Children can be cruel, and rough-and-tumble is a daily occurrence in any crèche, but Tammy’s assaults on her peers could border on the psychotic.

She thought nothing of using weapons, and the other kids had become adept at getting out of her way when they saw her coming –
if
they saw her coming. Tammy never spoke and hardly ever cried out in anger or pain, but she also moved with little or no sound. I once watched her running from one end of the playroom to the other when the other children were out in the yard; I interpreted it as a rare physical expression of joy, but knew in my heart that she was just as likely to be burning off energy. During this outburst of activity she never made a single noise. Had I not been watching her closely, I wouldn’t have known she had budged an inch.

The absence of sound was mirrored by a complete lack of emotional response. Tammy never seemed angry or frightened, happy or sad, amused or bored. She just …
was
. I knew from observing her that she liked books and favoured the book corner above all other spaces in Little Scamps, simply because that was where she went when not directed to go anywhere else, but truth be told, she displayed as much contentment sitting at the table doing art, or standing in the corner of the yard outside or hanging about in the kitchen waiting for one of us to give her lunch.

Her reticence made forming a relationship with her extremely difficult. We base our own emotional responses on the feedback we receive from those about us. When we interact with another person, all our perceptions of how that communication is developing are rooted in what we feel our counterpart is projecting at us. When that reference point is removed, we have very little to go on, and this causes discomfort.

I’m not ashamed to admit that a large part of me initially balked at trying to bond with Tammy. If she didn’t want to be friends with me, why should I make any effort with her? Almost as soon as these thoughts drifted through my mind, I recognized how childish and selfish they were. And I began to ask some important questions.

Why would anyone go to such lengths to isolate themselves from their fellows? The only answer that presented itself was that such a person must have been so cruelly and harshly rejected that they harboured a deep-rooted terror of experiencing such pain again, and went to extremes to be unapproachable. As a childcare worker, it was very much my duty to break through this crust of antagonism and forge some links.

It was unlikely to be an easy proposition.