Where Shall We Run To? by Alan Garner

Author:Alan Garner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

(Madelaine)

Miss Turner made everything interesting. On the twelfth of March 1945 we were allowed to write the date in our workbooks as ‘12.3.45’, because that couldn’t happen for another hundred years. And she didn’t have any favourites. I sat at the back of the classroom, and once I was so tired of not being chosen when she asked a question I was lying along my desk with my arm on the wall, not bothering to put it down, and walking my fingers along the bricks and staring out of the window. Miss Turner told me to sit up straight and stop fidgeting. She could see I was there, she said, and I was to put my hand up only if I didn’t know the answer. But another time she let me draw the cross-section of a volcano on the blackboard in different-coloured chalks, just as I remembered it from The Children’s Encyclopaedia. I got chased for that afterwards at playtime.

Every fortnight a van from Chester brought a crate of books to the school for us to choose to borrow and take home. We were supposed to have one each, but Miss Turner let us have as many as we liked, and Madelaine and I both read five a week.

In Miss Turner’s class we started to have tests as practice for the Eleven Plus exam. One day, she set us an Intelligence test, and she said if we got the answers right the first letters of each answer, put together, would be the clue to a prize.

I finished the test before everyone else, and read the first letters downwards from the top. They were COALSCUTTLEINSTAFFROOM

I ran from my desk, out down the corridor past the other classrooms, up the stairs to the staffroom. By the fire there was a coal scuttle full of coal. I got hold of it with both hands and lifted it off the hearthstone onto the carpet, but I had to put it down. It was too heavy to carry, so I humped it across the floor, onto the staircase, and banged it backwards down a step at a time, holding the handle in my elbows. Then, at the bottom, I dragged the scuttle along the stone corridor towards the classroom to get my prize.

The scuttle made a screeching noise on the stone, and I was sweating and hurting.

When I was nearly at the classroom Madelaine came out, jumped over the scuttle, ran off down the corridor and up the stairs. I shouted to her to come back because I’d got it. She took no notice. I dragged it on towards the door.

Madelaine and I arrived back in the classroom at the same time. I had the coal scuttle clue, and Madelaine had the bar of Cadbury’s Bournville Plain Chocolate prize that was under it.

Miss Turner said very good; well done. And now take the scuttle back, please.

We knew when the war was ending, because all the soldiers left and we watched the Spitfires and the Hurricanes

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