Tom All Alone 14 (v)

After that first day, Tom felt more relaxed about going to school, and soon got into the routines of the day. Lining up in the playground when the bell rang. The register and assembly. The different lessons. The play times. Milk time. Mum meeting him at the gate at lunchtime, then later at 4 o'clock, when he could go home at last and watch his programmes before dinner. Adam Ant, Blue Peter, Vision On, Animal Magic, The Magic Roundabout. And his favourite show now, Batman, with Adam West and Burt Ward. Then, after dinner, the wash in the sink and pyjamas on before the evening programmes, when nan would come up and join them - Crossroads and Coronation Street. Then bed. And then, on Friday, a whole two days off when he could do what he liked again, and could stay up a bit later on Friday and Saturday evenings. That was his favourite part of the week.

He mainly played with Desmond at playtime and during the games periods, as neither of them really had any other friends. Desmond had a tennis ball, and sometimes they played a game of batting it to one another with their hands. Or they'd play Hide 'n' Seek sometimes - though the hiding places began to get easier to find. Most of the time, though, they'd just stand and talk - about what they were watching on the telly, or what they were doing at home. They seemed to like most of the same things, and dislike most of the same things, too.

"Do you like football?" Tom asked one day, as they stood by the plane trees watching the older boys playing.

"Not really. My dad watches it on the telly sometimes, though."

The older boys looked so much bigger than they were. They looked tougher, too. The smaller children never dared to go into their play area. Tom and Desmond had wandered over by mistake once, and a boy shouted at them, holding up a fist.

"Stay down your own end, or else."

Tom didn't enjoy all of the lessons, especially Music and Movement and PE. He always felt clumsy and self-conscious during those, and didn't like being looked at. He also struggled with the Numbers lessons, even though he knew numbers very well. Miss Newman showed them how to do adding and taking away and multiplying ('times-ing' she called it), writing the sums up on the blackboard. He could usually get the right answer, but couldn't always understand the way she showed them - borrowing numbers, paying them back, carrying numbers, adding noughts. They were taught to use abacuses, too, but it still didn't help. And then they did dividing, which Tom could do in his head just like the other sums. 100 divided by 4 equals 25. But Miss Newman did it using a drawing like an L turned on its side, and he couldn't understand the way she did it - breaking it down and carrying numbers. It was easier just to think of 100 being made up of 4 lots of 25 - that's how he'd learned to do it before starting school.

With words, though - reading and spelling, and the alphabet - he was ahead of the others in the class. The class had reading books they had to work through, and each had a different colour, starting with The Big Red Book, which was the easiest. Then there was a yellow one, a green one, a blue one, an orange one. The last one, and the hardest, was The Big Black Book. Tom was the first in the class to finish The Big Black Book. He was standing beside Miss Newman at her desk, reading through it to her as she ran her finger along and down each line. When he'd finished the last page, she made a small cry of delight and gave him a hug.

"Well done, Tom," she said. She turned to the class. "Everyone... give Tom a big clap."

All faces turned to him. Everyone clapped. Tom stood back behind Miss Newman to try to hide. He didn't like being looked at in that way. He felt pleased with himself, though.

Every afternoon, when everything else was done and before everyone went home, Miss Newman would get everyone sitting quietly and would read them a story from one of the books. Tom always looked forward to this because he liked hearing the stories, and it also meant that it wasn't long before he could go home. His favourite was always the Milly Molly Mandy stories, and there would be total silence in the class as Miss Newman read a new adventure about a little girl called Milly Molly Mandy, whose real name was Millicent Margaret Amanda, and who always wore a pink-and-white striped dress. She lived in a village, in a nice white cottage with a thatched roof, like the cottage nan said she was born in in the country, and like the cottages they had seen when they went on holiday to Cornwall. The stories all involved Milly and her friends, like Billy Blunt and Little-Girl Susan, and a girl called Jessamine, whose mum and dad were rich. Milly Molly Mandy also had a black-and-white cat called Topsy and a black-and-white dog called Toby. Tom enjoyed listening to the stories, but could never remember them or what they were about. He thought Milly Molly Mandy was nice, though, and he thought it would be nice to be friends with her, so they could talk about the things they liked. He wondered if she was real, and if they might see her one day when they went to the country. It sounded like she always had such a lot of fun with her adventures. And he liked that she had a cat, which always made him think of Bobby. He thought it would be especially good to have a friend who was a girl instead of a boy. All the girls in class, though, seemed to play with one another and not be friends with any of the boys. There was a girl on Tom's table, at the other end, called Kim. He liked Kim because she looked a little bit like the picture of Milly Molly Mandy. Kim, like Tom, was very shy and would blush a lot. He sometimes looked to see if he could see her in the playground at play time, but he never could - though he knew he would never be able to speak to her, anyway.

On Friday afternoons, after the story and before they went home, Miss Newman did the Fingernail Competition. Everyone had to put their hands palm-downwards on the table in front of them and she would come around and look at the fingernails. The boy and girl with the cleanest fingernails got to come up afterwards and have a chocolate from the tin of Quality Street Miss Newman kept on the top of one of the cupboards. Tom always wanted to win the competition, so mum always gave his nails a good scrub with the brush before he went to school on Fridays. But the last session on Friday afternoon was always Games, and he always played with the Plasticine with Desmond, and it always got underneath their fingernails. He tried cleaning them afterwards, but could never get it all out. So he never won the competition, and nor did Desmond.

Tom enjoyed playing with Desmond, who was still his only friend. Although he didn't play with any of the other children in the class, he soon got used to seeing them and didn't feel so shy amongst them. He got to know all their names from the register, and what they were like. He was most familiar with the ones on his table: Janet and Christopher and Stephen and Gillian and Kim. Stephen was bigger than most of the other boys in class and was always getting told off for talking. He was a bit of a bully, too, and called some of the other children names. Tom sometimes spoke to Christopher, who was quieter, but he always used to play football at playtime with some of the others.

There were some other children in the class who he noticed more than the others, too - mostly because they were the first to put their hands up to answer questions, and were nearly always right. They often got chosen, too, to be milk monitors and give out the milk cartons after play time, or wipe off the blackboard for Miss Newman, or read out aloud from books for the whole class to hear - things that Tom was always too shy to do. One of them was a tall girl called Elizabeth, who had long dark pigtails on either side of her head, and who could speak words in French because her mum came from France. Tom had never heard another language spoken like that before, and it made no sense to him when she spoke it - something that Miss Newman often asked her to do. She said things that sounded like 'Bonzhur, mezamee' and 'Oreevwar', and 'Seevooplay' and 'Mercybowcoo'. Miss Newman showed them France on the big world map that was stuck to the front wall. She explained that people in France spoke French. She pointed to other countries, too, and said their names, and that they all spoke their own languages, too. Germany and Spain and Greece. The only ones Tom could really remember, though, were Britain - which he knew from the maps at home - and Italy, because it was shaped like a boot, and America and Africa because they were so big, and Australia and New Zealand because they were near the bottom and were easy to see. It confused him that they spoke different languages in so many of these countries, but they spoke English in America and Australia and New Zealand. Why couldn't everyone speak the same language to make it all easier?

There was a girl at the next table who was very shy and who nobody spoke to very much. She used to stay in the classroom a lot during play time. Whenever she spoke, it was very quietly and sounded a bit strange - a bit like the way Elizabeth sounded when she said the French words. She had long brown hair and her skin was a darker colour than everyone else's - though not brown like Roshina, or black like Desmond. Tom decided she might be from China, because her face looked like the pictures he'd seen of Chinese people. Her name was Valli, which sounded like 'valley' but was spelt differently. One day, when they were in a lesson, someone on Valli's table suddenly cried out

"Euuuuurrr!"

Everyone looked up. It was Elizabeth.

"Miss! Valli's wet herself. Look."

They all turned to see. Valli was sitting in her chair crying, and there was a puddle of wee on the floor under her chair. It was running down the chair leg. Miss Newman got up and took Valli by the arm, then took her outside to the toilet.

They didn't see Valli any more after that.

"Valli's gone to a new school now," Miss Newman said. "She's happier there."'

(continued)