Enrolment Day, and the Six-Year-Old Filed a Full Report

In a village in Lower Austria, in the early 1970s, a father took his six-year-old daughter to enrol for her first year of school. This was usually a mother’s job, but the mother was busy with a baby, so the father put on his good jacket and went.

The daughter took in the teacher the way six-year-olds take in adults, from the bottom up. Shoes. A dress. Blonde hair. Earrings, large ones. The earrings were approved first, the teacher second, and by the time anyone mentioned reading the matter was settled: school could begin whenever it liked.

At home, she made her report standing in the kitchen. She was looking forward to school. The teacher was lovely. The teacher had earrings.

Then the supplementary finding, in the same bright voice:

“Papa likes her too!”

Six-year-olds are the only truly objective reporters in any family, and that is why nobody lets them near the press. She was not making a point. She had observed something and was filing it, with pride, as a fact about a nice day. The silence that followed was the adults’ contribution.

The sentence went into the family’s permanent collection, to be told for decades afterwards, and the father, presumably, never quite lived it down.

I have been on the receiving end of a six-year-old’s report, and I was not the father.

When the youngest started school in Brussels I took her to the first meeting with her teacher, a cheerful Flemish woman with a remarkable laugh. On the way home the youngest asked why I had laughed at everything the teacher said, “even the bits about the toilets”.

I denied it. She then did an impression, in the back of the car, of me laughing at the bits about the toilets. It was very good. It was so good that my husband, who was driving, had to pull over.

At dinner she gave the full report to her siblings, with the impression. The eldest asked for an encore. The middle one asked whether Mummy “has a crush on the teacher”. My husband said that was not a nice thing to say about Mummy, and then went out to the balcony and laughed for four minutes.

At the next parents’ meeting, I was very serious. I did not laugh once, not even at the teacher’s jokes, which were good. Afterwards the teacher asked my husband, gently, whether everything was all right at home.

The youngest has offered to explain.