School for Jack and Poppy was good. Jack’s teacher was the, ‘To Sir with Love,’ type except instead of being a gorgeous six foot Negro, he was a slight framed Yugoslavian. 

The background of a war torn country not only gave him an empathy that most of us only dream of achieving in a lifetime, but also a self assuredness that not even the biggest rebels in Jack’s class were prepared to come up against. As a consequence, even though Jack’s class was full of kids from all over the world, a lot of them from places where you would have to be street wise to survive, like Chad, Brazil, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Congo and Bosnia, the class ran along smoothly.

 

Jack only had good things to say about his teacher and the last thing he wanted was to let him down. So homework, even though sometimes a drama for Jack because of how many times he needed to open the dictionary, was never something we had to make him do. He was always organised well in advance, the fear of loosing his teachers respect a much bigger threat than any of the so called ‘psychs’ that Noah’s French teacher was prone to throw.

 

Most of Jack’s school days were spent in the welcome class. The only time he went into a so-called ‘normal’ Swiss class was for sport. In this class he was careful to make sure he wore his Australian Socceroos shirt so everyone knew he was soccer mad like the rest of Europe.

 

The Socceroos shirt also instantly gave away the fact that Jack could speak English; immediately Jack was novelty. The kids who all had to learn English at school and were as enthralled as the rest of the world with American culture were keen to test out their English on Jack. He spent his first few lessons fielding stilted English phrases and questions like, ‘My name is Jack. What is yours?’ The kids thought it was appropriate to change their name to Jack because after all, that must be a good English name. And there was the ‘Come here Jack,’ Jack would go there, then, ‘Go there Jack,’ as they tested out their directions. And of course the hundreds of questions wondering what Jack liked, ‘You like ice-cream Jack?’

 

The ultimate excitement for Jack’s sports class though was when Noah, who was both late and lost for his own sports class, wandered into Jack’s sports class change room by mistake. This particular day Jack was one of the first ones to be dressed and was waiting out in the gymnasium for class to start. Back in the change rooms a couple kids from Jack’s class, noticing Noah was lost, had started talking to him. Noah didn’t have a clue what they were saying so he said, ‘Je suis desolate, Je ne comprende pas, Je parle Anglais.’

 

‘Anglais? Anglais? Ou est Jack?’

 

A couple of kids ran off to the gymnasium with much excitement to find Jack. When they found him, one of them grabbed Jack by the arm and started pulling him back towards the change rooms.

 

‘Viens avec nous Jack. Nous avons anoutra personne qui peut parler Anglais. Tu peut parle Anglais avec lui.’

 

Jack followed them back into the change room and found Noah there with a group of kids standing around him. The kids that had brought Jack back to the change room pushed him into the middle with Noah and said in broken English. ‘Now you speak English.’

 

Jack said he felt like him and Noah were monkeys at the zoo, expected to put on a performance. The whole class stood around them, no one speaking, waiting to see what would be said. No one in the sports class had a clue that Jack and Noah were brothers and Jack was not about to give it away.

 

He grabbed Noah by the arm without looking at him and said, ‘Come on, I’ll show you where your class is,’ and then pushed through the circle of kids that were around them, ignoring the disappointed grumbles that the show had finished before it had even started.

 

When Jack and Noah were telling us this story at home they saw it as just another funny school story to tell. There were no tears or embarrassment, just a lot of laughter. They thought it was hilarious that the kids here in Switzerland were that desperate to see English being spoken in real life.

 

Noah’s welcome class, the class where he spent most of his school day learning French, was a completely different story to Jack’s. The short stocky woman that was his teacher didn’t have the same charms as ‘To Sir with Love’. She continued to have the famous ‘psychs’ that Noah would report on everyday. He’d managed to get his count of ‘psychs’ down from ten a day to about three or four, and said on average everyone else in the class received five ‘psychs’ a day give or take a few. I repeated my question to Noah that I’d asked him when he first started in the class if her yelling and screaming was upsetting him, but he just laughed and said how could it upset him when he didn’t have a clue what she was saying? He said he just sat there and nodded his head and said, ‘Oui, oui, oui,’ until she was finished. It must have been having a bit of an impact on him though because I noticed that if he was having trouble with his homework or forgot to do it, an edge of panic would set in, no doubt fear of what level ‘psych’ he was going to receive the next day.

 

This woman’s iron fist rule didn’t work on Noah’s class that was full of a similar nationality to mix to Jack’s. From what Noah said the kids didn’t have a lot of respect even though there was fear and there was certainly a lot more nastiness between the kids in the class than what there was in Jack’s class.

 

Noah, for instance, had started to be picked on for the accent he had in his French. Everyday they had to do reading out loud in front of the class and the kids who sat next to him and behind him would quietly, (so Madame up the front couldn’t hear), poke fun at his accent, mimicking him, asking him to repeat things. It got to the point where Noah, who rarely comes home from school upset, either here or in Australia, came home in tears one day. He wouldn’t tell us why at first, just sat on his bed sobbing saying everything was fine. Eventually though, after a lot of coaxing, he told us that Carlos Cry-baby, Edwierdo, and Daniel Dickhead (yes I know, but like I said before, not my choice of name), had been paying him out about his accent.

 

We sat on the bed and talked for ages telling Noah that his accent was fantastic, that it left Pete and mine for dead. Pete and I sat there giving Noah examples. We tried to pronounce words that had lots of rrrrrs in them that needed to be rolled around on our tongues, and words with vowels that needed our lips puckered so tight we couldn’t even manage to suck the tiniest bit of air into our mouth’s. There were all sorts of weird noises and spit going everywhere. We kept it up until Noah was laughing so hard that he had to hold onto his stomach. Then, when he’d got his breath back, we made him say the words that we’d been trying to say. He said them like a kid who’d grown up in Paris.

 

‘See,’ Pete said, ‘no one would ever know you’re a true blue ocker.’ Noah smiled and finally came out of his bedroom and joined everyone for lunch.  All was OK for now but Pete and I knew that we’d have to go in and talk to ‘psych’ woman, and see if she could get the kids to lay off. Not an easy conversation when you’re struggling to comprehend everything that is said in between the Bonjour and Au revoir.

 

As luck would have it though, when Pete was swimming that afternoon, he bumped into Noah’s maths teacher at the swimming pool. Noah’s maths teacher was the woman we’d met at the first interview, a lovely soft-spoken lady who had been willing to listen when I’d suggested that maybe the kids needed to go into a normal Swiss class instead of the welcome class.

 

She asked Pete how Noah was going, the perfect opening. So Pete, realising he’d been offered an option to avoid ‘Psych’ woman, launched straight in and told her how Noah had been having a bit of trouble with the kids in his class teasing him for his accent. Pete said it all in French, while he was talking Noah’s math’s teacher’s face got redder and redder. So red that Pete started to wonder if he had all his French completely upside down and back to front and was actually saying something very rude or inappropriate, like ‘Gee your boobs look nice in that cossie,’ not that Pete would ever say anything like that of course.

 

When he finished, there was a slight gap, a tutting of her tongue and then Noah’s teacher galloped off in French. Pete said he kept up with her at the start when she was saying how well Noah was doing in class, and that his French accent was actually perfect. He understood the part where she said that the problem was that most of the other kids in Noah’s class spoke Portuguese so they had a strong Portuguese accent in their French which they thought was normal. She said because of this they didn’t realise how much better Noah’s accent was than theirs. Pete said after that he lost her even though she spoke for another ten minutes or so while he nodded and shook his head where he thought he was supposed to, watching the fire in her cheeks burn.

 

Two days later Noah came home from school at lunchtime, sat down at the table and said, ‘You’ll never guess what happened today?’

 

Everyone was busy buttering bread and grabbing ham before it was all gone, even Jack hadn’t started on his ritual school morning story yet.

 

‘What happened Noah?’ Pete said smacking the back of Jack’s hand as it went in for his third piece of ham.

 

‘Well, you know how you saw my maths teacher at the pool the other day?’

 

‘Mmm,’ Pete said through a mouthful of white bread.

 

‘Well we had maths today and they all started up again.’

 

‘Who started what?’

 

‘You know Carlos cry-baby, Daniel Dickhead, Edwierdo and that girl I have to sit next to everyday. They all started teasing me about my accent again.’

 

‘In front of Madame Chatigny?’

 

‘Oui, in front of Madame Chatigny.’

 

‘Ahhh, a big mistake, I’m thinking. What happened?’

 

‘You should have seen her dad. She went off like a cracker stuck in a BBQ, it was unreal. She stomped her feet and went all red in the face. She told them my accent was actually better than theirs and if she ever, ever heard them teasing me again she would write such horrible things home to their parents that she doubted they would ever be allowed out of the house again. Well something like that anyway, I didn’t really understand all of it but I knew exactly what she was saying.’

 

‘And what did they do after that?’

 

‘They were all very quiet and did their work.’

 

‘Did you have to speak French again after?’

 

‘Yep, and there wasn’t a word from the gangster crew.’

 

‘And after class?’

 

‘Nope, nothing. Madame Chatigny can be pretty scary when she wants to be.’

 

‘Well she really likes you Noah, and thinks you’re great at French.’

 

‘Yep,’ Noah said putting the piece of ham Jack was trying to claim as his on his plate with a slab of white bread.

 

After the accent debacle Noah came home with a couple of great stories, always starting with the same words, ‘You’ll never guess what happened today mum.’

 

The first one was about ‘Psych’ woman whose name was changed permanently after the story was told.

 

‘Well this morning, when we got to school, Madame was sitting at her desk. We all had to line up and show our homework from the night before. She did the whole tick, tick, cross thing and if someone hadn’t done it she’d ask for their agenda so she could write one of her nasty French notes home to their parents. It’s amazing how upset some of these kids get when she says “agenda,” there’s tears and they start begging and all sorts of stuff, “please, no Madame, not the agenda, please not the agenda. I’ll be good, I’ll be good.” There must be some gnarly parents out there for these kids to care that much about a note home. I mean what if I got a note home? You guys aren’t going to go all crazy and psyche out at me are you? So I forgot to do my homework for one night, what’s the big deal?’

 

‘Well you don’t know Noah,’ I said, ‘maybe the parents of these kids have made huge sacrifices to come to this country, so their kids can have the chance to do well, the chance to have a better life than what they would have had back in their home country. It might be really important to their parents that they’re doing their homework, trying hard at school.’

 

‘Yeah, guess; anyway, back to the story.’

 

‘Mmm.’

 

‘You know how cold it was this morning? So cold that I thought my fingers were going to snap off when I first picked up my pen to write. It snowed at school you know?’

 

‘No, really? It didn’t snow here.’

 

‘Well it did there,’ Noah said. ‘There were big white flakes floating down past the window. They didn’t stay on the ground or anything but it was sort of like having a Christmas cartoon out your classroom window. Everyone was all hyped and excited, didn’t want to sit down after their homework had been checked. Madame saying, “Asseoir! Asseoir!” Anyway, Carlos Cry-baby got everyone of his answers wrong and Madame did her usual psych, telling him he’d have to do better or there would be a note home in his agenda. On his way back to his seat Carlos asked Ewierdo if he could copy his work. Edwierdo said no. Carlos cry-baby whinged and complained for a while and then gave Edwierdo a hard kick in the shins.’

 

‘What’d Edwierdo do?’

 

‘Nothing, just laughed.’

 

‘Didn’t it hurt him?’

 

‘Dunno, don’t think so, all the Portuguese kids are always kicking each other in the shins, think they’re sort of used to it. Anyway I was sitting at my desk by this stage watching them both and I could see Madame, she was marking someone else’s work, and she was going faster and faster with her red pen. She kept looking up at Carlos and Edwierdo then back down again at the sheet she was marking, then back up again. When she finished she slammed her pen down on the book and pushed her chair back so hard that it fell over. Then she shoved past a couple of kids in her hurry to get to Carlos. She stops right in front of him and slapped him across the cheek.’

 

‘You’re kidding?’

 

‘Nope, serious,’ Noah said with an incredulous grin on his face, as if to say, “I couldn’t believe it either and I was sitting right there.”

 

‘So what did Carlos do?’

 

‘Well he sort of stood there with this funny look on his face, half smile, half smirk. Almost as if his face had frozen in place. But it got worse. She kicked him, really hard with her pointy shoe in the shin. The whole time she was yelling away at him in French about how you can’t walk around kicking people in the shins and how did he like it when he got kicked in the shins, she went on and on.’

 

‘You’re kidding! What were the rest of the class doing?’

 

‘I dunno everyone was staring, a bit stunned. After she finished her ranting and went back and sat down at her desk everyone started going up to Carlos and asking him if he was OK. He said he was fine but you could see that it had really hurt.’

 

‘Were you scared or worried for yourself?’

 

‘Nah, not for my self, I felt a bit sorry for Carlos even though he is a pain in the neck and a cry-baby.’

 

‘Well she’ll be gone; there’s no way she’ll be there tomorrow after his parents have complained. You know if anyone ever does anything like that to you Noah, lays so much as a finger on you we’ll have the Australian embassy down on them.’

 

‘Don’t worry she won’t touch me; I think she sort of likes me in some weird way. But if she ever did decide to kick me I’d just kick her back twice as hard and walk out.’

 

We got the follow up to the story the next day. Madame Kick Shins, as she was now known, had been there in class and it was as if nothing had happened. Carlos had turned up for school like normal without any ranting or raving parents.

 

‘How was his shin?’ I asked Noah.

 

‘Yeah, he lifted his jeans to show us and it was purple and blue with a huge lump where you could see it had been bleeding.’

 

‘And there’s been no complaints?’

 

‘Nope, nothing. But the real weird thing is mum that him and Madame Kick Shins seem to be getting on better than they were before.’

 

I spoke to Sandrine about all of this, Christine’s daughter who’s been a teacher in Switzerland for almost fifteen years. I told her what had happened to the kid in Noah’s class, asked her if it was OK for teachers to touch kids here, to use corporal punishment. She said no, definitely not. She said if she did that in her classroom she’d be sacked on the spot and marched off the premises. But, the difference was that the kids she taught were mainly from Switzerland. The kids in Noah’s class were from other countries, and mostly poorer European countries. In no way was she saying that it was OK for these kids to be kicked or hit. But, she said, if a teacher was inclined to loose their temper or to want to use physical punishment, it would be easier to get away with it with these kids than with the kids who knew the system. Also, it tended to be harder for the parents of these kids from other countries to complain because often they didn’t speak the language. And besides all that, a lot of the time, the parents saw nothing abnormal about physical discipline in schools because of where they’d come from. Sandrine thought the behaviour of Noah’s teacher had been appalling, but she doubted very much that anything would be done.

 

The next story Noah brought home made me laugh.

 

‘Well,’ Noah got one word out and then started laughing and slapping his thigh, having to take deep breathes before he could go on. ‘This is the best one yet, you’re going to love it.’

 

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Jack mumbled through a mouthful of sandwich unhappy that someone else was talking instead of him, ‘just get on with it.’

 

‘So,’ Noah said straightening up in his seat, smoothing his shirt over his bony chest, a silly smile still on his face. ‘This morning after home ec we were all walking up the stairs back to our normal class when I decided I needed to do a pee. The toilet’s right next to our classroom so it was no big drama. In I went and did my usual thing of making sure I pee’d straight on the blue soapy thingy.’

 

‘Blue soapy thingy? What do you mean, blue soapy thingy?’ I asked, naïve to the way of urinals.

 

‘You know mum, the thingy they have in the toilet?’

 

‘No, what thingy?’

 

‘Down on the floor, the blue soapy thingy.’

 

‘Oh, OK, you mean in the urinal.’

 

‘Ah, duh.’

 

‘Well I don’t go into urinals do I?’

 

‘Anyway, back to my story. I pee’d all over this blue soapy thingy, pulled my up pants and then turned around to see that half the class had followed me in. Edwierdo’s there, with Daniel dickhead and Carlos Cry-baby. They did their pees, nowhere near the blue soap and then Edwierdo got all excited. He leant down to the urininal trough and reached in his fingers!’

 

Noah opened his mouth as if he wanted to give us a perfect example of the phrase ‘and his jaw dropped’ and then turned the palms of his hands up as if to say, ‘Can you believe that?’ We all made appropriate ‘ew, how icky’ noises and then Noah went on.

 

‘And then he pulls out the little soap, the one I’d just peed all over! I couldn’t believe it! Then he dropped it down on the floor as if it was some sort of tennis ball or something, and started kicking it back and forth to Daniel, wee splashing all around their feet.’

 

Everyone by this stage around the lunch table was in hysterics.

 

 

‘Wait, wait,’ Noah said putting his hands up for us all to listen. ‘There’s more. Well there’s not much space in the toilets, so they had take it out into the hall where they kicked it back and forth as if they were having some sort of serious soccer match. Then, Edwierdo called out to Carlos who’d already gone into the classroom, and kicked it through the classroom door to Carlos’ feet. Carlos got it and slammed it back out through the door just as Madame Chatigny arrived. The blue soapy thingy collided with her shin, wee splatter everywhere! She was furious, you should have seen her, and Carlos, who hadn’t really done anything, had to pick up the blue soapy thingy in his bare hands and put it back in the urinal!’

 

Jack and Kai were giggling so hard that there were tears rolling down their cheeks.

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