Six Years Old, and He Rejected the Letter A

In a village school at Villalonga, in Galicia, a class of beginners was copying the vowels. A, e, i, o, u, in a row, then as many of each underneath as would fit.

One boy was doing beautifully with the o. The o is a generous letter. You go round, you arrive back where you started, you stop.

Then the a. You go round, as with the o, and then there is the extra bit at the side: the little tail. And the tail would not come. It went too long. It went the wrong way. It wandered off the circle. He rubbed it out until the paper went grey.

So he put down his pencil, walked to the teacher’s desk and announced that he was not doing that one.

His teacher, who still told the story years later, asked him why. That question is the whole story. He pointed back at his worksheet and said, in Galician, that he did not like that little tail at all.

He was not refusing to learn to write; he was refusing to sign off on a letter he considered overdesigned.

Most of us accept the alphabet as delivered. We copy for years before it occurs to us to object, and by then we have no standing. This boy had been on the alphabet for about a week and had already found a defect.

I recognise the tone of the complaint, because I have used it on every piece of flat-pack furniture I have ever assembled. The eldest’s wardrobe in Copenhagen had a component, part F, that served no purpose and could not be fitted. My husband said every part has a purpose. I said not part F. Part F is still in the drawer under the oven, five years and three countries later, and I take it out sometimes to make my point.

The boy learned the a in the end, of course. Everyone does. The tail is part of the deal. But I like to think his teacher understood that he had done something genuinely rare for a six-year-old with a pencil: he had looked at the whole system and filed a complaint with management.

She still sees him, I gather, on her walks: a grown man now, who stops to say hello. She does not mention the tail.

The youngest is currently learning cursive. She has objected to the capital Q, on the grounds that it “looks like a 2 fell over”, and she has drafted a letter of complaint to her school.

She has not been able to post it. She will not write the Q in the address.