This would have left quite a blank in their lives, although they had often pretended to themselves and to each other that they hated housework. But now that Mother had no writing and no housework to do, she had time for lessons. And lessons the children had to do. However nice the person who is teaching you may be, lessons are lessons all the world over, and at their best are worse fun than peeling potatoes or lighting a fire.
On the other hand, if Mother now had time for lessons, she also had time for play, and to make up little rhymes for the children as she used to do. She had not had much time for rhymes since she came to Three Chimneys.
There was one very odd thing about these lessons. Whatever the children were doing, they always wanted to be doing something else. When Peter was doing his Latin, he thought it would be nice to be learning History like Bobbie. Bobbie would have preferred Arithmetic, which was what Phyllis happened to be doing, and Phyllis of course thought Latin much the most interesting kind of lesson. And so on.
So, one day, when they sat down to lessons, each of them found a little rhyme at its place. I put the rhymes in to show you that their Mother really did understand a little how children feel about things, and also the kind of words they use, which is the case with very few grownup people. I suppose most grownups have very bad memories, and have forgotten how they felt when they were little. Of course, the verses are supposed to be spoken by the children.
Peter
I once thought Caesar easy pap—
How very soft I must have been!
When they start Caesar with a chap
He little knows what that will mean.
Oh, verbs are silly stupid things.
I’d rather learn the dates of kings!
Bobbie
The worst of all my lesson things
Is learning who succeeded who
In all the rows of queens and kings,
With dates to everything they do:
With dates enough to make you sick;—
I wish it was Arithmetic!
Phyllis
Such pounds and pounds of apples fill
My slate—what is the price you’d spend?
You scratch the figures out until
You cry upon the dividend.
I’d break the slate and scream for joy
If I did Latin like a boy!
This kind of thing, of course, made lessons much jollier. It is something to know that the person who is teaching you sees that it is not all plain sailing for you, and does not think that it is just your stupidness that makes you not know your lessons till you’ve learned them!
Then as Jim’s leg got better it was very pleasant to go up and sit with him and hear tales about his school life and the other boys. There was one boy, named Parr, of whom Jim seemed to have formed the lowest possible opinion, and another boy named Wigsby Minor, for whose views Jim had a great respect. Also there were three brothers named Paley, and the youngest was called Paley Terts, and was much given to fighting.
Peter drank in all this with deep joy, and Mother seemed to have listened with some interest, for one day she gave Jim a sheet of paper on which she had written a rhyme about Parr, bringing in Paley and Wigsby by name in a most wonderful way, as well as all the reasons Jim had for not liking Parr, and Wigsby’s wise opinion on the matter. Jim was immensely pleased. He had never had a rhyme written expressly for him before. He read it till he knew it by heart and then he sent it to Wigsby, who liked it almost as much as Jim did. Perhaps you may like it, too.
The New Boy
His name is Parr: he says that he
Is given bread and milk for tea.
He says his father killed a bear.
He says his mother cuts his hair.He wears goloshes when it’s wet.
I’ve heard his people call him “Pet”!
He has no proper sense of shame;
He told the chaps his Christian name.He cannot wicket-keep at all,
He’s frightened of a cricket ball.
He reads indoors for hours and hours.
He knows the names of beastly flowers.He says his French just like Mossoo—
A beastly stuck-up thing to do—
He won’t keep cave, shirks his turn
And says he came to school to learn!He won’t play football, says it hurts;
He wouldn’t fight with Paley Terts;
He couldn’t whistle if he tried,
And when we laughed at him he cried!Now Wigsby Minor says that Parr
Is only like all new boys are.
I know when I first came to school
I wasn’t such a jolly fool!
Jim could never understand how Mother could have been clever enough to do it. To the others it seemed nice, but natural. You see they had always been used to having a mother who could write verses just like the way people talk, even to the shocking expression at the end of the rhyme, which was Jim’s very own.
Jim taught Peter to play chess and draughts and dominoes, and altogether it was a nice quiet time.
Only Jim’s leg got better and better, and a general feeling began to spring up among Bobbie, Peter, and Phyllis that something ought to be done to amuse him; not just games, but something really handsome. But it was extraordinarily difficult to think of anything.
“It’s no good,” said Peter, when all of them had thought and thought till their heads felt quite heavy and swollen; “if we can’t think of anything to amuse him, we just can’t, and there’s an end of it. Perhaps something will just happen of its own accord that he’ll like.”
“Things do happen by themselves sometimes, without your making them,” said Phyllis, rather as though, usually, everything that happened in the world was her doing.
“I wish something would happen,” said Bobbie, dreamily, “something wonderful.”
And something wonderful did happen exactly
