While the kids were off at school collecting their stories for the lunch time table Pete and I were at our own little school. French lessons fours times a week for an hour and a half in the morning.

 

French lessons meant that we had to be up and organised, dressed and ready to go straight on to class after we dropped Poppy, hopefully with homework finished the night before. Not at the breakfast table in amongst the panic of wet shoes, clothes lost and bike tyres that had gone flat over night.

 

The lessons meant dropping Poppy five minutes earlier than we normally would so we could make our way into town, park at the railway station, and have enough time to walk to the huge square concrete building where our lessons were held.

 

When we arrived at the building we had the choice of taking the lift up to our floor. It was a tiny rectangle with a swinging door that fitted, at the most, three people in it. By the time we arrived at the building I was often freezing with my coat buttoned up to my neck and my scarf wrapped tight around that. The stairs were my final chance of warming up before I had to sit still for half an hour. Pete though, whose metabolism and body temperature works a lot better than mine, would take the lift, claiming enough exercise at the gym and saying that I was mad for feeling cold. He said the building was over heated and that if he walked up the stairs he’d be too hot to sit in the stuffy room which never had a window open. I thought that was because the snow would blow in, but he disagreed, saying it was due to a bad habit that Europe had of over heating.

 

The man who taught us French was a retired guy, I would guess somewhere in his early to mid sixties. Grey thinning hair, a neat round belly that popped out over the top his belt, and pants that I don’t think he wanted to admit had got too tight for him. Instead he would stand with his back to us writing on the board, occasionally reaching in and pulling his pants out of his bum. He was French not Swiss, this meant his accent was different to anyone else’s we’d met in Switzerland and that he spoke a hell of a lot faster.

 

The class wasn’t what you’d call huge. In fact it was tiny, just Pete and me. Perfect really you’d think, because of all the extra attention that you would get and all the extra questions you could ask. The thing we hadn’t considered though was that with only the two of us in the class there was nowhere to hide. No opportunity to slack off and if you forgot to do your homework, or as was sometimes the case, just didn’t want to do it, you couldn’t look over your neighbours shoulder and cheat. Well I guess Pete could have looked over mine, except that if he hadn’t bothered to do his homework, then really, that was his bad luck wasn’t it?

 

Months down the track it was probably going to be a good thing that our teacher spoke so fast. Probably going to mean that at some point, in this whole trying to speak French thing, we’d be able to understand anyone, including the speed speakers on the radio and TV. But in the early weeks it meant we understood close to nothing. Occasionally, Pete or I would stop the guy mid sentence and ask him what a particular word meant. His English was only a bit better than our French so it would mean shuffling through a dictionary to find the word. Then Pete and I would go, ‘ahhh’ the meaning of the word becoming clear but then we were completely confused by the meaning of the sentence.

 

We became really good at nodding and bobbing and reading body language. Well I did anyway, it wasn’t as easy for Pete. He’d sit there with this worried look on his face making it obvious that he wasn’t getting it at all. And then when we’d come out of class he’d and say to me, ‘You seemed to understand an awful lot in there.’ I was so good at the nodding and bobbing that it took me a while to convince Pete that I understood no more than him.

 

It was weird being in class together. We’ve known each other for a long time but our relationship doesn’t stretch back to our school days and we didn’t go to the same unis. I found out that Pete was the type of student who liked to arrive at class well prepared, knowing the answers to the questions before they were asked, which in the case of our French classes was impossible. Me? Well, I’m not so good on the preparation bit. Sure I do my homework and get most of it right, putting in the answers where I know they should be. But that doesn’t actually mean I’ve thought about it. It just means I’ve worked out the pattern that will give me the right answer (or looked in the back of the book at the answers if I couldn’t figure out a pattern).

 

While I had the advantage of knowing when to nod and bob, looking like I understood what was going on (yes, I was of course caught out time and time again when the questions were fired straight at me), Pete had the bigger advantage of a natural flare for the French accent. It impressed our teacher no end. He could roll his r’s, round the vowels that were meant to be round and flatten the ones that had to be squished. He only had to be told once that when there are two s’s together you say z and when there’s you say s, or is that the other way round? The teacher was so impressed by Pete’s pronounciation that with in three weeks our two person class was being directed completely at Pete.

 

I’d ask a question and the teacher would answer looking at Pete. The teacher would direct most of his questions to Pete, the occasional one coming my way. When it came to reading out loud it was simply easier on the ear to let Pete do most of it. The fact that a few dirty jokes, slowly explained in French, were thrown in the middle, didn’t help to make me feel included. But it wasn’t all plain sailing for Pete either. The teacher’s decision to ignore me as much as possible put the pressure on Pete to have the answers, to look like he was understanding and actually progressing. Pete would spend his time in class sweating, concentrating so hard that you could almost see the words smacking up against his forehead trying to get inside, while I doodled and got crankier and crankier.

 

Don’t get me wrong, in amongst all this there was a lot of learning and a bit of fun, and there was a definite love of the language growing for both of us. It felt like we were slowly decoding an ancient secret, I had the feeling that we were about to be let in on a world we’d never even knew existed. But to say we were thrilled to go to French class every morning would be a bit of an over kill. To say we didn’t dream about holing ourselves up in a smoky café and drinking stale coffee as we walked hunched against the cold wind to our lessons, would be a lie. But not once did we turn around and head back towards the city, away from the dull grey rectangle building where we knew we were going to have to sit for an hour and half and strain our ears and brain to understand the odd word or two.

 

There were a couple of reasons why we didn’t opt for the smoky café. One of them, of which I’m well known for, is sheer bloody determination, Pete’s pretty good at this too. We both have that belief that once you say you’re going to do something, then you do it, unless the thing you were about to do has somehow been swallowed up by a sudden unexplained hole in the earth. In this case, there was no sudden unexplained holes. Another reason was that we really, really, really, really wanted to get this whole French thing. We wanted to crack it, to be able to understand it, to be able to speak it. Pete had so many more sensible reasons for cracking the language than I did. He’d grown up with French all around him but had never been able to understand a word. He’d visited Switzerland and stayed with family that he loved, his dad always there as the interpreter. The thought of breaking of the code, being able to have in depth conversation with people you’d known all your life but couldn’t quite reach, was more enticing than any stale coffee in a smoky café. And me? Well my motives were much more simple than that and quite childish really. I’ve wanted to speak another language since I can remember. I’ve always loved the idea of having my own secret words that no one else could understand. Yeah I know, playground stuff, but lots of fun all the same.

 

And there was of course the fact that everyone in Switzerland, all Pete’s family, knew we’d come to learn French. Right at the beginning of the trip they told us how we’d all be fluent by the time we went home. They had no doubt that we’d succeed and they showed us that by speaking only French to us very early on. They were extremely patient with stumbling conversations that they no doubt understood as little of as we did. Even then though we could have claimed it was all just too hard, could have said that we were too old and too set in our ways with brains that refused to let the words in. But the problem with that was that all of them, except for maybe one or two, spoke two, three or even four languages. And at least two of them were currently learning a second or a third language. So how do you turn around to all these people and say ‘Oh, sorry, it was all a bit too hard, think we might stick to English after all if that’s OK with you.’

 

One of the biggest motivators was our strong sense of competition. Pete will tell you it’s not true, that he’s not competitive at all, but he’d be lying. The biggest fear for both of us, the thing that made us listen hard in class and do our homework, was the fear of getting left behind. What if Pete got it and I didn’t? What if at the end of the trip he was interpreting all the French back into English for me? Ick! I like to think I’ve got a few humble attributes hidden away somewhere, but that I just would not cope with, and obviously, in reverse, it would be even worse for Pete. After all it’s his family, the last that he would want is me interpreting for him.

 

And there was of course the kids. How on earth could we say, with everything that they were going through at school, ‘Yes, I’m sorry, you have to go to school, but this whole language thing is all a bit too hard for us, we’ve decided on the café option instead.’ It made a difference, us sitting at the dinner table with them in the afternoon. Them doing their homework, us doing ours. Made it all seem fair, made it easier to convince them that they should go through the school door the next morning.

 

So in this way of both wanting to and not wanting to, of enjoying and hating, we continued on with our fast speaking French man. There were days of revelation when we left on high, thinking a light had turned on and that we were definitely heading in the right direction. These light shining bright days were always closely followed by the days when we felt like the biggest dumb arses in the world.

 

So when our French man told us he was going away to India for three weeks, (hang on a second, didn’t we tell you we only here for six months and to get this nailed? Couldn’t you have at least timed it with school holidays?), the temptation to take a deep breath and three weeks holiday, piggy backed onto the two weeks school holiday that was looming was tempting. Instead though, we took a deep breath and asked him to find someone to replace him while he was away.

 

He found us a woman in her mid sixties with steel grey hair and smooth skin that creased only in apology around her eyes and the corners of her mouth. She spoke English, (did that mean if I asked her for an explanation of some obscure grammatic rule I actually had a hope of understanding the answer?), Flemish, German and of course French. Flemish was her first language, then English which she’d learnt in South Africa when she was thirteen. Her French came a bit later, but as our teacher, who was all of a sudden worried that he was leaving us in the lurch, (a bit late for that), assured us, her French was perfect. Personally I didn’t care if it was or it wasn’t, her smile was soft and within the first ten minutes of meeting her we were laughing, we’d found someone in the middle of Switzerland who understood our dry sarcastic Australian sense of humour.

 

French lessons with our new found teacher all of a sudden became fun. Our teacher encouraged us not to take our selves so seriously and to remember what the goal was, to be able to converse with our family here in Switzerland, not to engage in a political debate. She helped us to keep it in perspective, took the pressure right off and as a consequence our learning seemed to double.

 

Our French lessons, particularly with our original teacher, had given me a lot of insight into what the kids were going through at school, the only difference being it was so much more intense for them. We were only in the classroom for an hour and a half, they were there all day with just a short at lunch-time to come home and recharge.

 

Jack and Poppy were still fairing the best at school. Not because of the other kids in their class, I mean the kids in their classes were OK. Jack had the one friend the one who’d wanted to take him to New York. The kids as far as I could tell in Poppy’s class, were making an effort to include her. It was the teachers though that made the real difference. ‘To sir with love,’ Jack’s teacher had continued as he started. Jack still had the upmost respect for him and was determined to improve quickly in his French so he could impress the guy.

 

Poppy, who’d had so many tears those first weeks, had really needed the hands of someone gentle. The teacher she had couldn’t have been more perfect, it was hard to imagine her yelling or saying a cross word to any of the kids. Poppy adored her, which was lucky because I think it would have been close to impossible to get her through the classroom door every morning if she hadn’t. Poppy was painfully shy with the other kids. When I glanced through the classroom windows in the afternoon before home time Poppy would often be by herself doing a jigsaw or a drawing, or if for some reason she was with the other kids she would be sitting with her arms hugged across her chest biting her bottom lip, her eyebrows bunched. She needed the kindest teacher on offer to get her through, luckily her teacher was just that.

 

Noah’s class continued much the same, with him bringing home lunch-time stories of the other kids and Madame kick shins, but Noah himself seemed to be getting on fine. He seemed to have worked out a strategy to get on the right side of Madame kick shins. The reported number of psychs against him per week were consistanly decreasing as the weeks went by.

 

Kai though was a different story. Neither Pete or I were happy with his teacher. We’d begun to feel that the teacher’s attitude towards Kai was starting to effect his ability to make friends with the kids in the class, starting to effect Kai’s confidence and perhaps (we weren’t sure) subtly sway the kids against him. Slowly, slowly, Kai going to school was breaking my heart. Kai out of all the kids had been the one who couldn’t wait to get to school in Switzerland. When we were staying at the chalet for Christmas Kai would say to me at night when I tucked him into bed, ‘I can’t wait to start school, how many days to go now?’ When I’d tell him he’d smile and hug me, squeezing me tight telling me that it was getting closer. He missed having other kids around to hang out with and he missed the learning. He’s one of those unusual kids who gets a real gets a genuine thrill out of maths homework and spelling.

 

I remember the first days of his new school in Switzerland, he was so excited and a bit scared too. For the first few weeks on his way to school he’d tell me before he got out of the car how his belly was all tingly, a big smile on his face while he laughed and told me how strange it was that he had a tingly belly because he really wanted to go. I don’t think Kai ever had a thought in his head that things might not work out at school for him, that the teacher might be mean or the kids hard to make friends with. I guess that’s what made it all the more heart breaking when it became obvious that there was going to be an unavoidable problem.

 

At home Kai wouldn’t let us say anything mean about his teacher. He’d always have an excuse for him, tell us that he was a bit stressed that day or that he really was a nice person, it was just the way he said somethings  that sounded a bit funny. But things started to change a few weeks after the ski camp. Kai started to come home in tears every now and then. He said the kids weren’t including him in the playground. He said that he thought they were his friends, but now they didn’t seem to like him anymore. He said they were being mean to Teaball, and he didn’t like it when they were mean to him, it meant Teaball had no one to play with and Kai said that wasn’t fair. Slowly, after the stories about the kids in the playground, the stories about his teacher started to come.

 

The first time Kai got really upset with his teacher was maybe three weeks after ski camp. He came home saying that when he had to shake the teacher’s hand to say bonjour and au revoir the teacher wouldn’t look him in the eye. He said he would always looked up at the ceiling and speak to him in a funny slow voice. Kai felt like the funny slow voice was the teachers way of saying, ‘Oh, great, you again.’

 

Kai cried when he was telling me all this. I hugged him and tried to make excuses for the teacher, ‘He’s probably just busy, or a bit distracted with what he needs to plan for the class,’ I said, all the time thinking what a bastard. If a nine year old can pick up on your body language and the tone of your voice that you don’t want him there, then you’re being pretty obvious about it.

 

The excuses of his teacher being busy or distracted didn’t wash for Kai this time though. He was starting to see through this teacher that he’d tired so hard to love as much as he’d loved his teacher at home.

 

The next time Kai came home upset was after a morning game of charades at school. Kai said there had been a container with folded up pieces of paper in it passed around the classroom. The name of the charade you had to perform was written on the piece of paper. When the container got to Kai he said the teacher called out in front of the whole class, ‘Oh no, not you Kai, they’re all too hard for you. Pass it on to the next person.’ Kai said the whole class had laughed and he had felt so embarrassed. Then he had to sit there watching while they did charades. Kai said he knew the answers to a few of them but wasn’t sure if he was allowed to put his hand up or not. He said even if he had been allowed he wouldn’t have wanted to answer because he would have been too scared of getting it wrong and everyone laughing again.

 

The final straw was when Kai came home one lunch-time. Pete had gone to pick Kai and Poppy up while I working at the internet café. When they came back to get me Kai was unusually quiet.

 

‘What’s up?’ I said to him pulling him close and pushing the off button on the computer.

 

‘Nothing,’ he said, all glumness. Kai never says nothing, his like Jack, needs to tell you every second of his day.

 

‘Don’t believe that for a second,’ I said kissing him on the cheek. ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

 

‘The teacher put my bag over my head ,’ he said looking down at his feet, ‘in front of the whole class. Everyone laughed. I wanted to run away and never go back.’

 

I pulled Kai away from me holding his shoulders tight so I could look straight into his eyes, everything inside me was shaking. ‘He did what?’

 

‘He put my bag over my head.’

 

‘Tell me exactly what happened.’

 

‘Well, he asked me to get my book out of my bag, my agenda, you know, the one that’s really, really important?’

 

‘Yeah I know the one.’

 

‘Well, I pulled it out and it was all dirty, and you know how the teacher really doesn’t like dirty things? Well he started to get really, really angry.’

 

‘What sort of dirty?’

 

Then Kai started to cry. I hugged him to me again. ‘It’s OK, you can tell me.’

 

‘Well I had an old pear in my bag that I’d forgotten about. I didn’t even know it was there. I didn’t know it had gone all squishy and smelly. There was all this horrible black smelly stuff all over the front of my agenda.’

 

The bad mother award of the year announcement was ringing in my head, ‘Not only had she not put the pear in a lunch box but she hadn’t even bothered to look in his bag for a week, giving the fruit enough time to fester. Can you imagine?’

 

‘The teacher started going all red in the face and then yelling at me. He got so mad and then he put the bag over my head. It stunk so much I thought I was going to vomit.’

 

‘What do you mean over your head Kai? Show me with your hands.’

 

Kai lifted his hands up as if he was holding onto a bag and then tipped them up showing a bag coming down over his head.

 

I pulled him into my arms again. ‘Well that’s it then isn’t it,’ I said more to myself than to Kai.

 

‘What’s it?’ Kai said, his face buried in my neck, his tears wet on my skin.

 

‘You don’t have to go back.’

 

He pulled back from me his arms still looped around my neck, tears still on his face but now a big grin was now letting his two front teeth poke out, ‘Really?’

 

‘Yep, really.’

 

‘Really?’ He said, skipping a bit in front of me, ‘never?’

 

‘Never.’

 

‘I can’t believe it!’ Then the poor kid laughed and hugged me again.

 

Pete who’d been sitting opposite us logged in on his computer, down loading and sending mail, looked up and saw Kai hugging me excitedly, ‘What’s going on?’

 

‘I just told Kai he doesn’t have to go back to his school.’

 

‘What for today?’

 

‘No, forever.’

 

‘What?’

 

‘The guy put Kai’s back pack over his head in front of the whole class.’

 

‘You’re kidding?’

 

‘No I’m not kidding.’

 

Kai who was now so relieved that he didn’t have to face the teacher again laughed. ‘He did dad, and it stunk because there was a wrotten pear in there.’

 

Pete looked crankier and crankier as I told him the whole story of what had happened. When I finished he said, ‘I’m going to go and see the guy and tell him no one touches my kids, no one, not me, not him.’

 

Kai was watching with his eyes wide.

 

‘Yeah maybe,’ I said, ‘but not just yet, lets see what we have to do first.’

 

‘Yeah, guess,’ Pete said, ‘but one things for sure Kai, no matter what, you never have to go back again.’ Kai gave Pete the same big squezzy hug that he’d given me.

 

The plan was to extricate ourselves from Kai’s school as quietly as possible. Both Pete and I thought about the option of an official complaint to illustrate clearly to the teacher that what he had done was wrong, and to make sure he couldn’t get away with treating other kids the way he had Kai. In the end though we decided against it. We’d our fair share of battles over the years with four kids. Battles where we’d had to go into bat, it was never easy and that was in our own country where the language was a snack. We decided in the end that it was up to the other parents in the class to complain they were the ones that had the teacher for the long run. We were the interlopers, who were we to say what was right or wrong for a class that had already existed before we came and would continue to do so after we left.

 

We decided to ring the school nurse first. She’d been friendly when we’d met her the first time and had made the mistake of saying that if we needed anything all we had to do was call.

 

The nurse was great. She sat and listened to Kai’s story as we explained it to her in slow broken French interrupted by a multitude of English words. Her English was good enough and her patience long enough to understand what we were talking about.

 

When I asked her if the teachers in Switzerland were allowed to touch the kids she didn’t say an out right no like I would have got if we were in Australia, but instead she said it depended on what type of touching they did. Certain touches were OK, it seemed hard for her to be specific or it could have been just our poor French letting us down. She was very clear though that public humiliation was definitely not on. She was horrified that Kai’s teacher had put his bag over his head and made the whole class laugh at him.

 

We explained that we didn’t want to make an official complaint, that we’d much rather just pull out quietly. We told her that we were moving house after the holidays, which was now only four days away, and said that maybe we could just use the simple excuse of it being easier for Kai to go to a school closer to home.

 

She half got it I think, but I don’t think she really got the point that we didn’t want to make a complaint. She kept saying that we were doing the right thing and that it was important for these sorts of things to go down on records so that if another parent had a problem they could look back on the record and see it wasn’t the first time there had been a problem. We talked for a while trying to get across exactly what we wanted which was for Kai to simply change schools. She seemed to understand but wasn’t sure how we should go about it.

 

The end result was that the nurse said she would ring the directress of the schools in the region and get an appointment with her for us. The nurse said that the directress was a lovely woman and would want to hear Kai’s story. She was sure that she would be more than helpful with finding us another school. There appeared to be no way of making it clear that we didn’t want to tell our story any further than the nurses office.

 

The nurse shook our hand as we left, apologising for the teacher’s behaviour and saying that she would call us over the next day or so to let us know when we could go and see the directress. She said that hopefully we’d be able to have everything organised before the school holidays started.

 

A couple of days went by and we heard nothing. I was feeling anxious because as soon as the holidays started we were heading off for two weeks. I really something sorted out before we left. So we knew what was happening but more importantly so Kai knew that he had a school to go to when we got back. We’d told him if worst came to worst he could stay at with us for the rest of the holidays and we’d look at him going to stay with Christine on the days that she had her grandkids so he could keep going with his French. He thought all that was an OK idea but what he really wanted was a school where he could laugh and play with the kids, where he could keep learning his French and do the maths that he so much loved.

 

When I hadn’t heard anything after two and a half days I started to get anxious. The school holidays were only a matter of days away and if at all possible I wanted the problem sorted before hand. I decided to ring the nurse myself. It took her a few seconds to figure out who I was and then she broke into her stilted English saying she was so glad I’d rung. She’d been trying to ring us but hadn’t been able to get through.

 

It turned out that the directress wasn’t one bit interested in Kai’s story, she didn’t want meet us and she didn’t want to hear of any complaint. When the nurse told her we were moving she said ‘well they shouldn’t be at that school at all then should they.’ In other words, ‘it’s not my problem.’ The nurse was very apolegetic and said over and over again how surprised she was at the directresses reaction, how she’d been so sure the directress would see us and want to file an official complaint. In the end the only bit of help she could give us was to say we had to approach two of the secretaries. One from the region which we were leaving, Yverdon and the other from the region we were going to, Grandson. One had to give us permission to exit and the other permission to enter.

 

I thanked her and hung up feeling an anger boiling in my belly which displayed itself in hot tears on my cheeks.

 

‘What?’ Pete said coming around and putting his hand on my shoulder, ‘what did she say?’

 

‘They’re not interested in a complaint at all. I think the directress woman just thinks we’re Australians here causing trouble.’

 

‘Well we never thought they would listen to a complaint, that’s half the reason we didn’t want to complain in the first place.’

 

‘Yeah I know.’

 

‘What did she say about Kai moving school?’

 

‘We have to tell the secretary of Yverdon that we’re moving and then approach the secretary of Grandson to try and get him a position in a school in that region.’

 

Pete smoothed my hair back from my face and pulled it into a ponytail with his hands. ‘Well that doesn’t sound too hard.’

 

‘No, except that means they’ll know we’ve moved and from what the nurse is saying the kids have to go to a school in their region. So that means they’ll probably want us to move Poppy as well, maybe even Jack and Noah.’

 

The last thing I wanted was to pull Poppy out of a class in where she loved her teacher. It had taken such a long time for her to get happy and feel confident walking up the stairs to her school.

 

Pete dealt with the uncertaintity and his anger at Kai’s teacher by going and giving Kai’s teacher a good rev. He did it in English so there could be no question of who had the upper hand. Still, the teacher denied everything said Kai was being very sensitive and over exaggerating. When it got to the bit about the pear in the bag Pete said the teacher went ‘See, see!’ The teacher said as if to say his point had just been proven and now Pete could see there was a completely justifiable reason for why he went off, dirt, not only dirt but smelly dirt, in his class room.

 

I dealt with the phone call from the nurse by ringing my mum in Sydney at an hour that any normal person would have told me to piss off and call again at a more reasonable time. I cried more tears than I had in months and then spent the next hour discussing my options. We didn’t come to any effective conclusions except for the ones I already knew, but I needed to be told by someone else that we’d done the right thing by pulling him out of school and that we weren’t over reacting. Mum made me feel better, like she always does, by saying we could keep him at home with us and put him into a few after school activities, those combined with a couple of days with Christine, she reassured me, would push his French along and give him the contact he so desperately wanted with other kids.

 

Our answer to Kai’s school dilemma and whether we should declare that we were moving or not came from our new French teacher.

 

With our substitute teacher French class for Pete and me had become fun, something we looked forward to. We laughed a lot while we were there, at ourselves, at the language we were struggling to grasp and sometimes just at silly little things that had nothing to do with anything at all. The lessons always started in the morning with our teacher asking us how we were. We had to give as detailed a response as possible in French. One morning when my answer was ‘Je suis fatigue,’ my teacher asked me why. I looked across the table at Pete and raised my eyebrows, he shrugged his shoulders as if to say why not, then I launched into Kai’s story in fast English, my brain was too revved to find even one French word.

 

Our teacher listened without a word while I spoke, tears building in her eyes. When I finished she was incredulous. Told me she couldn’t believe someone would treat a child like that, that there was nothing worse than humiliating someone in front of his piers and here in Switzerland, of all places she said. She said the country was supposed to be the most the democratic in the world, a place of opportunity and fairness. She ended by wanting to know what she could do to help.

 

That first day I said it was very kind of her to offer to help but said we would be fine, not wanting to drag her into the mess that was simmering around us. She made me promise to ask if I thought of anything, even if it was simply coming along to a meeting with us and interpreting.

 

Pete and I stewed over the school dilemma for another few days before we decided we would ask our teacher for help. We were getting desperate, trying to keep in one place while moving Kai, we thought perhaps she knew of some door that could be opened that we couldn’t see.

 

As it turned out it was the best decision we’d made since telling Kai he didn’t have to go back his school. When we told our teacher we wanted to get Kai into a school in the Grandson region but wanted Poppy to stay in the school she was already in at Yverdon, our teacher said she thought she knew the director of Grandson. She said she was almost one hundred per cent sure that she had sat next to him at a dinner party a month or so back. She was sure enough to be happy to put in a call.

 

In the end we left the question of Kai’s future schooling in Switzerland with our teacher while we took off on holidays. She told us over and over again that it wasn’t a big deal, and that we should stop worrying, that she wouldn’t be helping if it was going to cause her grief. She told us it was a simple phone call and that if she needed us she would call us on our mobile. She told us we should go and enjoy our adventure for the next two weeks and not worry about such mundane things as school.

 

In the end the only energy I had left was to accept what she was saying, thank her profusely and then pack our bags, not only ready for our next vacation but also for the escape from Moggy Mansion. 

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