I didn’t want to go back home, home now being the confines of level two of the Moggy Mansion. The thought of driving instead into Germany and exploring it for a month before we moved onto Austria and then Norway and then Sweden was appealing, so much so that it was hard to turn the car around and head back in the direction of Yverdon.

 But with the helpful hindrance of fighting kids in the back of the car, the thought of travelling for months on end wasn’t quite so appealing. The thought of spending endless hours with them in the back while we tried to umpire from the front seat made even the Moggy Mansion seem appealing.

 

To our relief, when we got back to the house in Yverdon we didn’t spot a Moggy for a few days. It gave us enough time to settle back into the routine of dark school mornings and French lessons where I swore our teacher was looking at us thinking, ‘Yep, they’re still sitting there staring at me like stunned deaf mutes,’ for all we knew he could have even been saying this straight to our faces while we were nodding and bobbing like we did for most of the class, not understanding a word he said. Really though, what did he expect, we were, after all, only five weeks into this whole confusing French thing that masqueraded itself as some sort of simple way to communicate with other people.

 

The first point of worry on our list was ski camp for Kai. In the second week back Kai’s school was going on camp to where we’d stayed at Christmas for the week. We’d already paid the money and Kai was excited, he couldn’t wait. But as the week for Kai to go away got closer, Pete and I were getting more and more anxious. There were a couple of reasons for this, not the least of which was the fact that Kai had been struggling with sleepovers for a while. When we were back in Australia sleepovers had been a problem for him, we’d often get a call in the middle of the night to come and get him and that was with friends who he’d not only known for years but also spoke the same language as.

 

Pete and I had both had long conversations with Kai about whether he was sure he wanted to go on camp. We were keen for him to go on camp like we had been for Jack and Noah, for both the experience of the constant French and the snow, but also because we thought it would be good for him in the class group. We thought it would help to establish stronger friendships. Thought it wouldn’t hurt for him to be able to show off his skiing a bit, ‘I might not be able to talk the same as you but watch me ski,’ that sort of thing.

 

Our biggest concern though was his teacher. Kai himself was happy enough with the teacher, when we’d ask him at lunch or after school how he’s day had been he’d more often than not say he’d had a great day. He’d tell us how the teacher had been really busy with all the other kids so he’d been allowed to sit at his desk and drawer all day. Nice, maybe, but not so good for pushing Kai’s French along. He told us that the teacher had been a lot nicer to him since I’d come in and talked to him about how the French was very hard for Kai at the moment. Kai said the teacher spoke to him in English nearly all the time, which Kai said was good, but he was starting to understand a lot of the French that the teacher was saying to the rest of the class.

 

Kai told us about the maths tests that the class often had to do at the start of the morning and how he wasn’t allowed to do them because his teacher said he wouldn’t understand. Kai said that while the other kids were dong the test he was allowed to sit and drawer or look through a picture book that the teacher had given him. After a couple of weeks of missing out on the tests Kai decided he wanted to do them as well. Instead of telling his teacher, who he said was nice but a bit scary to talk to; he sat there and pretended to drawer while he did the test. When it came time to mark the test Kai got every one right, the kid sitting next to him got three out of ten.

 

‘You should tell the teacher,’ I said, ‘that you want to join in.’

 

Kai said no, said it was a better day, an easier day, when he didn’t have to talk to the teacher much.

 

Then there were the stretchy legs that Kai started to get on a regular basis. Nearly every lunch and most afternoons Kai would come home complaining that he’d had stretchy legs at school. The stretchy legs started when Kai’s teacher decided that he was ready to do a bit harder work. Kai would come home in tears saying his legs had been so stretchy it was impossible for him to concentrate. I asked him if he was worried about something, if he was worried that he was going to get in trouble. Kai said no, not exactly. He said it was just that the work was really hard and he hated not being able to do it and that his teacher got really upset when he couldn’t do it, not mad, but just upset and disappointed.

 

Then there was the day when Kai came home telling us how his teacher had screamed like a girl in class. A child had done a skit out the front of the class apparently making fun of someone; Kai thought it might have been the teacher’s girlfriend. Kai said the teacher got so upset that he went all red in the face and started screaming like a girl and pulling the kid by his ear until he had him out the classroom door. He said the teacher told him that he had to go home and wasn’t allowed to come back. Even though this sounded like an out of control rage incident there was small part of my mind that kept pleading for the teacher’s innocence. It was possible, I hoped, that because of Kai’s lack of understanding of French, he had got things a bit mixed up. Maybe it was all part of a skit or something.

 

I did start to get worried however when Kai came home and said all the kids had been laughing at him in class. He said the teacher had been standing up the front of the class talking about ski camp when he said Kai’s name in the middle of all the French, that was when the kids had laugh. The teacher said Kai’s name again, but the second time the kids weren’t only laughing, they had all turned around in their seats to look at Kai. Kai was a bit upset when he got home but by no means devastated. He said it had been embarrassing and he wished he’d known what the teacher had said. I told him I was sure the teacher was had been telling the kids how different school camp must be in Australia. Saying how when Kai goes on school camp back in Australia he would go swimming, not skiing. I reassured him that the kids in the class would find this funny because they probably hardly ever went on holidays to go swimming. Kai was happy to believe this and go back to school the next day without thinking any worse of the teacher or the kids, I wasn’t so happy to send him.

 

I was becoming more and more concerned about Kai going away for a week with his teacher. But Kai was as keen as ever to go. So the only choice left was to start a mini investigation.

 

I had a long conversation with a parent from Kai’s class about the teacher. She spoke English well so I was confident I wasn’t gong to miss out on any important details. She was lovely woman, softly spoken with four kids, a rarity over here. She couldn’t speak highly enough of the teacher. She did say that when he first came to the school a couple of years back a few of the parents hadn’t been happy because he was so strict. He insisted that kids arrived on time (or before time if he saw fit to close the door five minutes early) and he was strict with their work. The kids would get in trouble if homework wasn’t done, if they weren’t keeping up. But she said it had been good for the class. She felt it was good for kids to be pushed along. She also said there was another side to him, a side that was fun. She said if the kids were doing what they were supposed to he loved to have a game with them and would often buy them an iceblock in summer.

 

OK, so it sounded like all was good if you could hang out until summer for the iceblock and your kid did what he was supposed to do and found it easy to keep up. I still wasn’t convinced, but it was better than hearing that all the parents thought the guy was a monster and were running a serious campaign to get rid of him.

 

Next port of call was the school nurse. We had an appointment with her for nothing more than a hello and a get to know you. She’d said on the phone in her thick French Canadian accent that the appointment wasn’t necessary, but it was a nice way to get to know each other. I was happy to go along, it was someone else I could drill about the teacher and how the school camps ran over here for the younger age groups.

 

Unfortunately though the Nurse didn’t know the teacher well. I asked her if she’d heard any complaints against the guy but she said she hadn’t. She did reassure me though that with the camp it wouldn’t just be him there, he had to take other teachers with him, probably up to four other people to out with the kids.

 

That was a good start; Kai would have a choice of other people that he could go to besides the teacher, if he needed to. More importantly, the teacher would have piers present that would be watching.

 

With tummies tingling and a sense of apprehension that wouldn’t let us be happy with our decision we decided to let Kai go on camp. Kai was happy and said he couldn’t wait even though it made his legs twitch and his stomach feel sick when he thought about it.

 

The morning of ski camp I volunteered to take Kai to the train station. Everything was packed neatly into one suitcase, labelled exactly as it had been instructed in the notes home and not one thing forgotten, everything had been double checked. And after re reading the note five times I was sure I had the place and drop off time right.

 

Kai gave everyone big hugs and kisses goodbye with a huge grin on his face. He was so proud that he was going off to camp just like Jack and Noah had.

 

It was a mild morning when we pulled up at the relatively empty car park at the train station; the brusque chill of winter seemed to be giving in to the early pull spring. The snow had started melting in the mountains, although I’d been assured that there would be enough snow for Kai and the kids at school to ski. There was a small group of women gathered around a van which skis were being piled into and there were several small groups of kids standing around laughing and talking.

 

All of the kids were wearing ski gear with snowshoes. I felt sick. I was certain that I’d read every note carefully and nowhere had I read, or interpreted turn up in your full ski clobber. Kai had on his jeans and jacket with sneakers. Worse still, we’d managed to forget his snowshoes; they were sitting outside the front door all neatly labelled and ready to go. I could feel a heat burning on the back of my neck and had to stop the words shit, shit, shit that were cursing through my head from coming out of my mouth.

 

Kai, who was still smiling, got out of the car hesitantly and stayed by my side. I put on best smile and produced the word Bonjour with the least possible Australian accent to anyone who looked my way. I took Kai’s bag and put it in the back of the car that was taking all the bags up and then I placed his skis and ski boots (yes very different foot wear to snow shoes) in the line of skis that were waiting to be put in the back of the van. Kai was still standing next to me.

 

I bent down and smoothed his hair away from his face. ‘Do you want to go and play with the kids?’

 

‘Yeah, but it’s hard,’ he said, laughing nervously.

 

‘Brian’s over there, you could go over with him and the other kids there. That’s Teebald with him isn’t it? Has he had all his hair cut off?’ Last time I saw this kid he had hair down past his waist and I could have sworn he was a girl. Kai had been so confused that he’d come home from school one day and said, ‘You know that kid who’s really nice to me at school and always gives me lollies? Well she’s a boy, not a girl?’ I asked him how he knew and he said, ‘When we went swimming he went into the boys change room. At first I thought she’d made a mistake but he had a penis!’

 

Kai after a few minutes drifted off and stood on the outside of the group that Brian was in, looking awkward. I took my opportunity to go and talk to the teacher.

 

I started off in English not wanting to get anything mixed up or wrong. I told him that I’d forgotten Kai’s snowshoes and asked if there was time for me to race home and get them. Even though he spoke very good English he answered me in loud French that made sure all of the other mothers standing around could hear. He laughed and I was probably being paranoid, but it felt like he was laughing at me. He said in French that there wasn’t enough snow to be worried about snow boots. He said it in a way that made me feel like he was saying, but we couldn’t we expect you to know that could we, you come from Australia and he said it in a way that had all the other mother’s laughing along. Exactly, no doubt, what Kai had been through in class. I held my ground and willed my face not to blush. I opted to stay with the English now for the reason of not wanting to stumble in front of the audience we had.

 

‘What about his ski clothes? Does he need to put them on? They’re in his bag, I can get them out and get him changed.’

 

He answered me again in French, not making eye contact.

 

‘C’est bien, c’est bien.’ Then he wandered off to talk to someone more important than me.

 

Kai hugged me and kissed me goodbye. I told him that I loved him and he told me the same back. There were no tears; there were no last minute mind changes, just a big smile and a wave from Kai as he walked off with the other kids. It was beyond me how someone so young could be so brave.

 

Pete and I sweated our way through the first two nights, sure that we would be getting a phone call in the middle of the night. But when there was no call by the second night, we had conceded that Kai might be doing all right.

 

The week Kai was away was busy like all of them had been since we arrived in Switzerland. There was plenty to keep our minds distracted, the endless French lessons, school drop off and pick up times for Poppy and helping out with homework that we struggled to get our heads around. And there was of course the Moggy monster down stairs.

 

Back at Moggy Mansion, the kids, every time they went outside were being told they were too noisy. Madame would appear, saying she had a headache and how was it possible for children to make so much noise and what on earth would the neighbours be thinking of such a racket? One time she complained that the children were up on the roof stomping on her tiles, Jack with a smile on his face swore they weren’t. Another time, Mr Moggy stopped Noah when he was riding his bike along the road and held up a queue of traffic while he yelled at Noah about closing the garage door, telling him that he wasn’t closing it and that on the rare occasion he did he was letting it slam. And then there was Jack’s missing skateboard. He swore Madame Moggy had stolen it because she didn’t want him rolling it on her sand coloured tiles or her driveway. He said she’d taken it back to cash converters to sell.

 

Madame Moggy had tried to squirm her way back into the top level of Moggy mansion to have a squiz around and see what sort of damage we were doing. But Pete, who I had elected Commander in Chief of project Moggy, had refused entry.

 

She had tried all sorts of ploys to get past him. The first was the BBQ that was sitting out on the tiny deck. After she’d smelt us cooking on it a couple of times and had no doubt lost sleep over the fact that we might wreck it she said she needed it to BBQ some pork, could her and her husband come in and get it? ‘I don’t think so,’ Pete said and told her he’d get it for her. She said she’d help him carry it out. He said no. She said her husband would help him carry it out. Pete said no and closed the door so that the only option she had if she wanted to come in was to open the door. Pete, Commander in Chief, said that would be good, because then he would be calling the police and talking to them about trespassing. The moggy wasn’t that game though. She didn’t try and open the door, she waited for Pete outside and then grinned her big cheesy grin of thanks when he carried the very clean BBQ past her and put it on her blonde tiles.

 

The next attempt at entry was the curtains. She said they needed to be taken down and washed. We’d been there for a whole two months now so it of course made sense that the curtains would need washing. She said she would come in and get them one morning while we were out so she didn’t get in our way. Yeah right, Commander in Chief, Pete, didn’t fall for that one either.

 

‘I’ll do it,’ he said to her in English instead of French, because he was sick of being the one who always made the effort to be understood. Madame Moggy didn’t even bother to slow her fast paced Italian accented French down. ‘I’ll give them to you tomorrow.’ Again the door was closed, prohibiting entry.

 

So now we couldn’t BBQ on the deck and we had no curtains. The neighbours if they wanted could see straight in and watch us as if we were one of those reality TV shows.

 

The next thing to go was the telephone line. When we’d first moved in there was a big rectangular plastic box with a telephone handset, numbers for dialling and a spot for faxes to be sent. Madame Moggy had said it was for us to use, and then had gone onto say that because she didn’t have a landline downstairs, (you’re kidding us aren’t you? You knew you were going to be holed up in a dungeon for six months and you didn’t put a landline in?), she would have to come in and check the messages on the machine; particularly on a Sunday when her family would be calling from Italy. But Commander in Chief, Pete (who at that early stage in the operation didn’t even realise he was in charge) put an end to that by simply saying, ‘No, that won’t be happening.’

 

Within a couple of weeks of being there the big box phone thing was broken. Moggy said we did it. She rang up a friend of hers who spoke good English, told her to tell me, the lucky one that happened to home when the Mogster knocked on the front door with mobile phone in hand, that we’d broken the phone and would have to pay for it to be fixed. Some of Commander in Chief Pete had rubbed off on me. I told the woman at the other end of the line while smiling at the Mog monster, who was grinning back at me as if nothing in the world could be better, that we hadn’t broken the phone and there was no way we would be paying for it to be fixed. I handed the phone back to The Moggy. She got the translation from her friend and didn’t once stop smiling while she was receiving the news that we wouldn’t be giving her a cent for her dud phone.

 

So we were phoneless. Commander in Chief went out and bought a twenty franc phone which, when we plugged it into the now empty landline, worked beautifully. For a short time we were connected to the rest of the world without having to trek to a phone box and stand with our teeth chattering while we tried to hear people on the other side of the world down a line full of echo because we’d mistakenly bought a cheap phone card. With all the curtains down though it was easy for the Mogster to see what was going on inside level two. One lunchtime I was on the phone to my mum, laughing away at something or other when the Moggy walked down the footpath that ran along the side of the house. She looked straight through the kid’s bedroom window at me standing in the entry foyer with the phone pressed up against my ear. Our eyes locked for a second and then she looked straight ahead and kept walking. I knew the phone was gone. The next morning the line was dead and there was nothing that Commander in Chief could do about it.

 

The bike chained to golden down pipe was probably the incident that tipped the scale for me. The thing that made me stop talking to the Mogster, start avoiding her and led me to make definite plans to getting the hell out of there.

 

The kids were under strict instructions to lock their bikes up. The bikes had been borrowed from Jean-Paul so the last thing we wanted after he’d been so good to us, was to have to ring him and say, ‘Ummm, sorry, but the bikes seem to have gone missing.’

 

Noah thought the golden down pipe running down from golden gutter to the blonde tiles was a good place to chain his bike up. He chained it there for a week without us taking much notice. Yeah, I know, we should have realised the importance of golden down pipes, but with everything else going on it had failed to register on the ‘Warning! Warning! Mogster attack approaching,’ radar.

 

It was Pete that they cornered late one afternoon, not just Madame Moggy but Mister Moggy as well. Hands were flying everywhere and the French was coming thick and fast, with a lot of pointing at the golden down pipe where Noah’s bike was sitting neatly chained up. By the time I made the unfortunate mistake of going out the front door to get Poppy from Poppy from school Mister Moggy was red in the face. I said ‘Bonjour,’ and he smiled a twisted smile as if he was in severe pain but determined not to show it. Then Madame Moggy came over and grabbed my arm and led me to the golden down pipe. ‘Regarde ici, regarde ici,’ she said pointing to the chained up bike.

 

She leant down and pointed at a tiny chip on the golden down pipe. ‘Respect madame,’ she said, ‘respect s’il vous plait. Vous et vos enfants, respect s’il vous plait.’

 

‘Oui, oui,’ I said, not looking at her or the down pipe. I turned and walked away ignoring the French that was hammering the back of my neck.

 

‘You right to deal with the mad cow,’ I said to Pete ‘and all this drama?’ I know it was rude, all be it gutless because she couldn’t understand a word of English, but by this stage I was well and truly over it, and the word respect had really irked me. One, because I’d gone out of my way to try and do the right thing by her, and two, she’d shown no understanding of what the word meant when it came to how she treated us.

 

I left the Chief in Commander of operation Moggy to deal with it and went and got Poppy. By the time I got back the Moggy’s were gone and all four bikes had been moved from the back of the house down into the garage. Pete said the diatribe about the bikes had gone on to include the dirt that the bikes were putting everywhere, especially all over the precious sand coloured tiles. My eyes, which I admit aren’t very well trained to pick up dirt, couldn’t see a skerrick of dirt on the sand coloured tiles. Then there had been the clanger accusation that the kids and their bikes had broken the solid concrete wall of the house, put a big crack down the middle of it. Pete at this stage of the attack had thought the best strategy was the words, ‘Je n’compronde pas,’ repeated over and over The Mogster put on her Cheshire smile and retreated.

 

Madame Moggy had made one thing obvious; it was impossible to stay living where we were. With the help again of Christine, Pete’s cousin who had been so wonderful to us, we started searching for a new place. By the end of the week Christine had found a house for us in small village ten-minutes drive from Yverdon. The house was centuries old and part of a bed breakfast that was run on a dairy farm. There would be fresh milk, fresh eggs, baby chicks and kittens. Best of all though was the landlady. She was divine. She loved kids, understood their noise and agreed with my philosophy that kids come before mess. We could move in in six weeks. That meant we had four weeks left with the Moggy’s before we took off to Paris for two weeks. The kids were thrilled and we couldn’t wait to tell Kai when he got back from camp. Out of all the kids he’d struggled the most with the Moggy’s.

           

Kai got back from camp late on the Friday afternoon. This time the car park for the station was packed and it was hard to find a spot. The same crowd of mothers were there all waiting for their kids, this time with a few fathers as well. There was a lot of laughter among the parents and even though I couldn’t eves drop into French conversations yet I caught the gist of the conversation, simple, normal parent talk. There’d been no phone call from little Johnny (or in this case little Pierre), so he must have gone OK. And the guessing of how many times teeth had been brushed.

 

Pete and I waited along with all the other parents, wondering if we should be waiting over at the station or not, but deciding in the end it was better to follow suit and do what everyone else was doing. We had one awkward French conversation with a woman who I knew spoke English well. The last time I’d spoken to her I’d said ‘From now on we’d have to speak French.’ Unfortunately she’d taken me seriously, and neither Pete nor I understood a word she said. When she left we looked at each other and asked ‘Any idea?’ Both of us coming up with the same answer, ‘Nope.’ And even though I didn’t see her shaking her head I was convinced she would have been thinking, ‘Bloody Australians, come all the way over here and think they can speak our language, as if.’ Paranoia I’m sure, but all the same, hard to shake.

 

There was movement among the parents and a bit of finger pointing in the direction of the station, the kids had been spotted.

 

‘There here,’ I said to Pete, squeezing his hand tight.

 

He put his arm around my shoulders. ‘OK, lets walk slow and try not to squeal, you know, for Kai’s sake.’

 

‘Yeah, yeah, very funny,’ I said, thinking to myself, I’m not going to cry, I’m not going to cry.

 

For perhaps half a minute Kai didn’t see us. We were able to watch him without him knowing we were there. He was smiling and laughing with a couple of boys, walking along with his backpack slung over his shoulder. His hair looked longer and he looked taller. He looked like he’d gone from being a little boy to a big all in the space of a week.

 

‘Kai,’ I called out to him. His eyes turned and found Pete and me. His smile spread into a big toothy grin. He lifted up his hand self-consciously and waved to us, then said goodbye to the kids he was walking with and came over. I bent down and gave him a huge hug, lifting him off the ground, burying my nose into his hair, smelling the musty smell of hair that hadn’t been washed for a week. He didn’t wiggle or squirm, didn’t say ‘Aw mum,’ or ‘put me down.’

 

‘So how was it?’ I asked him, lowering him back down to the ground and letting Pete get in for a hug.

 

‘It was fantastic; I’ve had so much fun. But the first two nights were really hard. I missed you both so much but I really didn’t want to go home. I wanted to be like Jack and Noah. I wanted to say I’d been on ski camp too. So do you know what I did?’

 

‘No, what?’

 

‘I got Tiger boots to hop into bed with me and a couple of my other animals and they tickled me and made me laugh and cuddled me and stopped me from feeling lonely and sad that I couldn’t cuddle you and then I was OK. After the first two nights I didn’t need them so much, I sort of got used to being away.’

 

Tiger Boots is Kai’s imaginary pet tiger who has come in handy more times that once over here.

 

‘We’re so proud of you Kai. You really are one of the big kids now aren’t you?’

 

Kai didn’t answer. He just smiled and nodded his head.

 

‘We’d better go and say goodbye to your teacher. You need to say thanks and shake his hand.’

 

We joined the circle of other parents that were waiting to thank the teacher. We waited until we could shuffle up to the front. When we were standing right in front of him he found as many other people’s hands that he could to shake before he shook ours and then it was a handshake without eye contact while he was talking to the person behind us. Kai shook his hand and got a, ‘A Lundi,’ See you Monday.

 

Maybe the guy could be excused because of all the coming and going of the moment, but after the week with the Mogsters I was in no mood for excusing anyone.

 

Kai gave us all the stories on the way home, what they’d had for dinner, the movies they’d been allowed to watch, how he skied faster than most of the kids except for two of them and how there was one kid in particular that didn’t like the fact that Kai skied so fast so he kept insisting on going in front of Kai everyday, ‘Even though he was a slower skier mum.’ He told us about a disco they’d had on the last night and how he’d danced until really, really late. And he told us how one night, when he’d been showing one kid he could count to twenty in French, the kid had told the teacher and the teacher had made him stand up at the dinner table and count out loud in front of the whole class. He told us how the whole class had cheered, he said he didn’t tell them that he could actually count to one hundred because that would have taken too long and been too embarrassing. He told us about the train trip home and how there were kids from another school that were teasing him because he spoke English. And he told us how Teaball, the kid he’d thought was a girl stood up for him and told them to go away. The other kids had said they would go away if Teaball told them Kai’s name, so Teaball did and then the rest of the way home the kids chanted Kai’s name in a silly song.

 

Maybe now was the time I was meant to cry and never let my kids go out in to the real world again?

 

‘Did that upset you?’ I asked

 

‘No, I didn’t care, I just ignored them. The worst part on the train though mum was the other kids from our school. On the way home in the train they started asking me if I liked Teaball if I liked to play with him or not. First they were asking me if he was a girl or boy. And I by accident said girl, you now how I always say it back to front? I felt really bad and said boy straight away. But then when they started asking me if I liked to play with him I said, ‘Je n’compronde pas,’ because I knew if I said yes they wouldn’t like me anymore, but if I said no Teaball would be upset and besides, it wouldn’t be true, because I do like to play with him.’

 

Far out, the politics of being eight. How can you be so together and know what the right answer is when you’re only eight and you’re having to juggle everything in another language?

 

When we got home all the kids were excited and wanted to hear all the stories over again that we’d heard in the car. Kai didn’t stop talking for a good few hours. It was funny to see Poppy and Kai. They hugged and kissed and hugged, sitting next to each other for the rest of the evening telling each other how much they’d missed each other. Kai told me that while he was away all he’d wanted to do when he got home was to play soft toys with Poppy.

 

It was lovely watching all four of them chat away on the couch, lovely to be all back together again. The best part though was that the hardest part of our time in Switzerland was over, or so we thought. 

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