Wrong Bus, No Phone, and a Map With Two Circles

In September 1979 an American family arrived in Florence with two daughters, aged nine and seven, and a working theory that children can manage anything if it has been rehearsed.

The school, which is now the International School of Florence, was two buses away. For a week their mother rode with them, pointing out the stop, the change, the second stop. Then she let them go alone.

The flat had no telephone. The nine-year-old had no Italian to speak of. The plan was that none of this would matter, and for the first bus it did not.

The second bus was the right number going in the wrong direction, which still happens to grown adults in Florence today. The older girl noticed when the Arno failed to appear. The bus kept going until it reached the end of the line and stopped.

What she found in her bag is the reason this story is worth telling. Her mother, who could not phone and could not follow, had folded a map of the city into it with two circles drawn on. One said home. One said school.

She had not been able to follow them, so she had sent a map in their place.

The nine-year-old found a street sign, found the street on the map and worked out that both circles were a long way off, with the river in between. She took her sister’s hand and walked. They crossed the Arno on foot. They reached home, and she burst into tears at the door.

Then her mother did the thing I could never have done. She hugged them, gave them something to eat, let the crying finish, put their coats back on and walked them to the bus stop. They went to school that day. They arrived late, with a note.

I have put a child on public transport alone exactly once. It was the eldest, aged twelve, on a single tram in Brussels, four stops, with a phone, a charged phone, a spare charged phone and an app that showed me his position as a small blue dot. I followed the dot for all four stops, standing in the kitchen, and when it paused at a red light I put my coat on.

He arrived. He texted “here”. I texted back eleven times.

My husband says the difference between me and a 1979 mother in Florence is not technology but nerve. I disagree. The difference is the map. She trusted two circles in pencil.

I have since made the youngest a map with two circles on it, for emergencies. She has added a third circle. It says “ice cream”, and it is in Antwerp.