Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bryson Bill

Author:Bryson, Bill [Bryson, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non Fiction
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2006-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

I WAS NOT A POPULAR PUPIL with the teachers. Only Mrs. De Voto liked me, and she liked all the children, largely because she didn’t know who any of them were. She wrote “Billy sings with enthusiasm” on all my report cards, except once or twice when she wrote “Bobby sings with enthusiasm.” But I excused her for that because she was kind and well meaning and smelled nice.

The other teachers—all women, all spinsters—were large, lumpy, suspicious, frustrated, dictatorial, and unkind. They smelled peculiar, too—a mixture of camphor and mentholated mints, and had the curious belief (which may well have contributed to their spinsterhood) that a generous dusting of powder was as good as a bath. Some of these women had been powdering up for years and, believe me, it didn’t work.

They insisted on knowing strange things, which I found bewildering. If you asked to go to the restroom, they wanted to know whether you intended to do Number 1 or Number 2, a curiosity that didn’t strike me as entirely healthy. Besides, these were not terms used in our house. In our house, you either went toity or had a BM (for bowel movement), but mostly you just “went to the bathroom” and made no public declarations with regard to intent. So I hadn’t the faintest idea, the first time I requested permission to go, what the teacher meant when she asked me if I was going to do number one or number two.

“Well, I don’t know,” I replied frankly and in a clear voice. “I need to do a big BM. It could be as much as a three or a four.”

I got sent to the cloakroom for that. I got sent to the cloakroom a lot, often for reasons that I didn’t entirely understand, but I never really minded. It was a curious punishment, after all, to be put in a place where you were alone with all your classmates’ snack foods and personal effects and no one could see what you were getting into, and where you could mug for the other pupils if you positioned yourself out of the teacher’s line of sight. It was also a very good time to get some private reading done.

As a scholar, I made little impact. My very first report card, for the first semester of first grade, had just one comment from the teacher: “Billy talks in a low tone.” That was it. Nothing about my character or deportment, my sure touch with phonics, my winning smile or can-do attitude, just a terse and enigmatic “Billy talks in a low tone.” It wasn’t even possible to tell whether it was a complaint or mere observation. After the second semester, the report said: “Billy still talks in a low tone.” All my other report cards—every last one, apart from Mrs. De Voto’s faithful recording of my enthusiastic melodic noise-making—had blanks in the comment section. It was as if I wasn’t there. In fact, often I wasn’t.

Kindergarten, my debut experience at Greenwood, ran for just half a day.

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