Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [57]
Then suddenly, when Vinnie was twelve, her parents moved to the city. In her new school she was skipped a grade, and found that she had lost everything important to her in life and become a disadvantaged adolescent—an undersized, pimply, flat-chested, embarrassingly plain “grind.” The pain of this transformation is something she has never quite got over.
As it turned out, though, Vinnie didn’t have to relinquish childhood forever. No one really has to, she believes, and often declares. The message of all her lectures and books and articles—sometimes explicit, more often implied—is that we must, as she puts it, value and preserve childhood: we must “cherish the child within us.” This isn’t of course an original theme, but one of the basic doctrines of her profession.
The cloudy laundry overhead has thickened; the school building, a castellated structure of sooty Victorian brick, intercepts the declining sun. The skipping rope ceases to define its magical space, falls limp, becomes only a length of old clothesline. As the little girls prepare to leave, Vinnie consults with them to check on some of the textual variations she had heard; she thanks them, and writes down their names and ages. Then she puts away her notebook and follows the children’s route across the chilly, darkening playground, wrapping her coat closer, looking forward to her tea.
“Hey! Hey, missis.” The girl who has accosted her is standing against the smoke-stained, graffiti-scrawled brick wall of the narrow passage that runs past the school to the street. She is older than the children who were jumping rope—perhaps twelve or thirteen—skinny, and poorly dressed in a semi-punk style. A soiled once-pink Orion cardigan is pinned together over her school uniform skirt and a red-and-black T-shirt advertising some rock group. Her complexion is bad; her cropped hair has been dyed a nasty shade of pale magenta, and resembles the synthetic fur of those stuffed toys that are won—or more often not won—at Bank Holiday fairs.
“Yes?” Vinnie says.
“I got somethin’ to tell you.” The girl grabs a fold of Vinnie’s coat sleeve. “My sister says you’re wantin’ rhymes. Rhymes you wouldn’t tell the teachers.” She grins unattractively; her teeth are chipped and irregular.
“I’m collecting all sorts of rhymes,” Vinnie says, with a professionally friendly smile. “What I told your sister’s class was that there might be some they wouldn’t want to recite in public, because they weren’t very polite.”
“Yeh, that’s what I mean. I know a lotta those.”
“That’s nice,” Vinnie says, repressing her desire for tea. “I’d like to hear them.” The girl is silent. “Would you like to say some for me?”
“Maybe.” A precocious shrewdness twists the spotty unformed features. “How much you paying?”
Vinnie’s first impulse is to break off the conversation. No child or adult has ever before proposed to sell material to her; the very idea is unseemly. Folklore by nature is free, uncopyrighted—as a Marxist colleague says, it’s not part of the capitalist commodity system—and this for Vinnie is part of its glory. But it’s possible that this unpleasant little girl knows some interesting, even unique rhymes; and Vinnie has learnt in over thirty years never to turn down material, or judge the value of the text by an informant’s appearance. Besides, God knows the child looks as if she could use the money.
“I don’t know.” She laughs awkwardly. “How about fifty pence?”
“Okay.” The reply is animated, almost avid. Vinnie realizes she’s offered much more than was expected. She gets out her notebook and pen; then, noticing the child’s suspicious stare, she rummages in her purse. When she first came to England,