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The Other Side of the Page · The Evening of the Picture Letters

The children's book, The Ox and the House (ages 6-8), on Spark & Anvil

This is the same evening as "The Ox and the House", the ninth book of "The Day Before". Inkling's grandad was not on the Green.

School started in nine days, and the child could not read her own name.

That was how her grandad put it to himself, sitting at the table by the window of the lake house with the light going orange over the water. He knew it was not quite fair. She was four and three-quarters. Nobody had asked her to read anything yet. But Inkling had been reading at four, or near enough, at this same table, with this same kind of pad.

Her grandad had a feeling about that which he could not argue himself out of. A child should walk into her first classroom and find her own name on a peg, and know it.

He had been to look at the school in the summer, when the child's mother was working and someone had to go to the open morning. There had been a row of pegs along the corridor, each with a coat hook and a laminated card, and on each card a name in neat round capitals. Some of the children had found their pegs straight away and hung up their coats. One small boy had walked up and down the row three times and then stood in the middle and cried, not loudly, just steadily, until a teacher came and found the peg for him. He had thought about that boy more than once since.

So he had a pad of lined paper and a thick black pen. He had written her name across the top in capitals, the way the school would write it. Then again underneath. Then a third time, bigger.

He said the letters as he wrote them. He said them again, pointing. The child said them back, some of them. She got the first one every time, because it was the first one, and she got the last one about half the time. The middle letters went past her like cars.

"Again," he said, kindly, and wrote it a fourth time.

Outside, a heron stood on the end of the jetty, the way herons do, as if it had been put there and forgotten. The child watched it through the window whenever he looked down at the pad.

He knew how this was done. You showed the letters and you said them, and you did it again, and one day they stuck. It had worked on Inkling, or he thought it had. He could not actually remember whether it had worked on Inkling, or whether Inkling had simply started reading one day while he was looking the other way.

The child had stopped saying the letters back. She was sitting very straight, the way children sit when they have decided to be good about something they are not enjoying.

He uncapped the pen for a fifth time. Bigger, he thought. Slower.

The back door opened, and Inkling came in from the Green.

She came in the way she did everything, slowly, looking first. She had been out since after school with her friend Lan, the baker's girl, and she had the expression she sometimes brought home from there: quiet, a little far off, as if she were still listening to something. She put her bag down and stood behind her cousin's chair and looked at the page.

"What are the letters for?" said Inkling.

He started to answer. "Well, you just have to learn them. They're the alphabet. Once you know them—"

And he stopped. Because the child, while he was talking, had turned the pad over and was drawing a cat on the back of it. It was not a bad cat. It had a great deal of whisker.

He did not know, in fact, what the letters were for, in a way a four-year-old would accept. He had been about to say because. He put the cap back on the pen.

Inkling sat down. She did not take the pen from him; she took a pencil from the jar on the table, the stub one with the chewed end, and she turned the pad back over to the side with the name on it.

Above the first letter, she drew a small picture. He leaned in. It was a leaf, with a stalk and a line down the middle.

"Lll," said Inkling, and made the sound, not the letter's name. "Leaf. Lll."

The child looked at the leaf and then at the letter under it.

Above the next letter, Inkling drew a little bottle with a blot beside it. "Ih," she said. "Ink. Like my name."

The child laughed at that, because it was true. Above the third letter, Inkling drew a nose, a quick curve and two dots. "Nnn," she said. "Nose." The child touched her own.

Her grandad sat with his hands on the table and did not say anything. He had the strong wish to explain that it was not quite right, that a letter's name was not its sound, that some of these letters would make other sounds in other words, and that the school would not have pictures on the pegs. All of that was true. He did not say any of it. The child was humming at the nose.

Above the last letter, Inkling drew an apple, round, with a stalk like the leaf's. "Ah," she said. "Apple."

It had taken her about five minutes.

"Now you say the pictures," said Inkling.

The child said the pictures, pointing, one after another. Then Inkling covered the pictures with her hand, and the child said the sounds anyway, slowly, Lll, ih, nnn, ah, and then, all at once, she said her own name, Lina, as if she had found it lying there.

She said it again, louder, and looked up at her grandad to make sure he had heard.

"I heard," he said.

Later, after the cousin had been collected and the plates were done, he found Inkling by the window, looking at the water.

"Where did you get that from?" he asked. "The pictures over the letters."

Inkling thought about it for a while, the way she thought about everything. "A girl with an ox," she said.

He did not ask which girl. He had learned that some of the things Inkling brought home from the Green came with a story, and some came without, and the ones without did not open up if you pushed.

He took the page with the pictures on it and pinned it to the fridge, at a four-year-old's height. Then he took the pad with his four rows of neat capitals, tore off the top sheet, folded it in half, and put it in the drawer with the takeaway menus.

Under the magnet, the leaf and the apple had the same stalk.

The question for your own table

When you are teaching someone something you learned so long ago that you have forgotten learning it, what do you skip that they still need?

Something to do

Next time a child is learning letters, let them draw a picture for each sound in their own name, and put it where they will see it.

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