Two Girls Carried Their Teacher Down the Corridor, Singing

A girl in Telšiai, in Soviet Lithuania, spent her early school years jealous of her older brother. Not of him. Of his class teacher.

The teacher was young, well dressed and tireless. She took her class camping, with tents, mosquitoes and songs by a lake. Once, after some offence the brother never fully explained, his class apologised by standing under her windows one evening and singing.

A teacher whose discipline problems can be resolved by serenade is a teacher worth envying.

Then the town built a new secondary school and moved pupils across to fill it. On the first morning the girl found that her new class teacher was the woman from the serenade. Children are told that wishing does not work. Occasionally it does.

So what do you do with the teacher you have wanted for years? On her birthday, you carry her.

The girl and her best friend made the seat that children make for carrying each other, hands crossed and wrists linked, and offered it to their teacher in the corridor as a throne.

She sat. A grown woman, in a good skirt, on her birthday, looked at two eleven-year-olds and their shaking forearms and decided to trust them.

It is one thing to offer your teacher a throne, and another to discover you are also the transport.

They carried her down the corridor, singing the long-life song that ends every Lithuanian birthday, and all three of them started laughing and could not stop. Doors opened. Other classes looked out. Nobody in authority happened to pass, which the teacher, years later, said was just as well.

I tried to carry my husband once. It was our tenth anniversary in Madrid, and I had seen a couple do it at a wedding, and I said, in a romantic moment in the kitchen, that I could carry him over the threshold of the living room.

I got him about forty centimetres off the ground. The forty centimetres lasted a second and a half. We went down together into the laundry basket, which was full, and the youngest, who was four at the time, came in, looked at us and asked whether this was “the birthday game”.

It has been the birthday game ever since. Every birthday, the youngest asks to be carried. Every birthday, we oblige. She is now nine and getting heavier, and last week she asked whether, for her tenth, she could be carried down the corridor at school, singing.

I have said yes. I have started going to the gym.