Day 4: The Leaking Roof

An old proverb says that a stitch in time saves nine.

Somebody should have told that to the school roof.

Dear Grandmother,

It rained again in the night, and when I unlocked the classroom this morning there was a puddle under the window by the map and a slow drip falling onto Sofia's desk. By nine there were three drips. By ten there were five, and the children had stopped looking at me and started looking at the ceiling.

We moved the desks. We put out every bucket and pan I could find, and the big cooking pot from Dora's kitchen. The noise was the worst part: a different note from every pot, all morning. Then I remembered something you did once in your flat, when the pipe under the sink leaked. You tied a piece of string from the drip down into the bowl, so the water ran quietly down the string instead of falling. I tried it with garden twine and drawing pins. It worked. The drips slid down the strings without a sound, and Yuri said it looked as if the classroom was knitting.

Kostya put himself in charge of the buckets. Every half hour he walked round the room, looked into each one with great seriousness, and emptied the fullest into the yard. Sofia sat at a dry desk by the stove and did her sums with her coat round her shoulders, saying she did not mind, in the voice of someone who minded very much.

At lunch Mr Okafor sent a carpenter. He arrived in a blue van with ladders on the roof, wiped his boots carefully on the mat, and said, "Tomas Brandt. You have a hole." I said I had several. He looked up at the strings and the buckets for a moment, and then he almost smiled.

He was on the roof all afternoon. We could hear him through the ceiling, a few steps, a pause, a knock, a few more steps, like someone moving about upstairs in an old house. The children were very good at pretending to do sums while listening. Mila was the best at it. She kept her eyes on her page the whole time, but she told me later, without my asking, that the man on the roof was her dad.

So that was how I found out. I had not connected them. She has his straight eyebrows, now that I know to look.

When he came down it was nearly dark. He said three slates had slipped and the wooden battens under them had gone soft. He had put in new battens and new slates and would check the rest when it was dry. I offered him tea, because that seemed right, and he drank it standing up by the stove, with Mila leaning against his side. He did not talk much. He said the roof had probably been leaking a little for years and nobody had looked.

Before he left he stood in the doorway and looked back at the ceiling, at the pale patch where the stain had been, the way you look at a cake through the oven door to see if it has risen. Then he nodded once, more to himself than to me, and said goodnight.

Here is a short aside I learned from him, because I asked why the classroom door had been sticking all week. Wood takes in water from damp air and swells, a little across the grain and hardly at all along it. In wet autumn weather a door can grow just enough to rub on its frame, and when the stoves are lit in winter and the air dries, it shrinks back. That is why old doors stick in October and swing freely in January. He said not to plane it down yet. "Wait for the frost," he said. "It might fix itself."

After they left, I took the strings down and emptied the buckets into the yard. The classroom smells of new timber now, a clean, sharp smell, like a fresh loaf when you first cut it open.

I thought about the proverb on the walk back to the house. A stitch in time saves nine. Nobody made the stitch in time, so today it took five buckets, eleven children and one carpenter. But it is mended now. A thing mended late is still mended. You used to say that about socks, and you were right.

Vera

Day 5: Apples on the Windowsill

An old proverb says that the apple never falls far from the tree.

Today there were apples everywhere, so the saying was hard to avoid.

Dear Grandmother,

It is apple week in the lake town. Nobody told me that, but every child arrived this morning with apples: in pockets, in bags, in one case in a hat. Ida brought red ones from her grandfather's tree. Sami brought small sour green ones and said they were for cooking, not eating, in the voice of someone who had been told so many times. Bea brought one enormous yellow apple and would not let anybody touch it.

We lined them up along the classroom windowsill, from smallest to largest, and then by colour, and then we counted them. Forty-three. Then we drew them, which was harder than counting, because an apple is not round when you really look.

Ida wanted to know why apples have a star inside. So I cut one across the middle instead of from top to bottom, and there it was: five little rooms for the seeds, in the shape of a star. The whole class went quiet. Pip said he had eaten hundreds of apples and nobody had ever told him.

At lunch Dora came over from the kitchen with her sleeves rolled up, looked at the windowsill and said, "Not in the sun. They'll go soft." She took half of them away to the cool shelf in her pantry, and the rest she cut up for an apple crumble, which the children ate standing round the stove with their spoons. She makes the topping with oats and a pinch of salt, and she would not tell me how much butter.

She did tell me how to keep apples through the winter, and I tried it tonight with the bag Ida's grandfather left at my door. You wrap each apple separately in a sheet of newspaper, not tightly, and lay them in a box in a cool, dark place, one layer, not touching. Then you look at them once a week and take out any that are turning. That is all. Dora says her mother kept apples like that until March. My box is in the little hall by the back door, because that is the coldest corner of the house.

Here is the aside, because I asked Dora why one bad apple matters so much. A ripening apple gives off a gas, too faint to smell, that tells the fruit around it to ripen too. An apple that has gone soft gives off a great deal of it, and the apples beside it ripen faster and soften in turn. That is why you wrap them, and why you never let them touch. The paper is not really for warmth. It keeps each apple from hurrying its neighbours.

Kostya stayed after school to help me sweep up the crumbs, and he told me his grandmother's apple tree is older than his grandmother. I said that was possible. He said she had told him that a teacher, long ago, used to leave a basket of apples on the windowsill every autumn for anyone who came to school hungry. I asked him which teacher. He shrugged. "The old one," he said. "Before all the other ones." He said it as if it were a name, like the old oven or the old road, something that had simply always been there.

I do not know if it was you. I would like it to be you.

Tonight I cut one of Sami's sour green apples into a pan with a spoonful of sugar and a little water, the way you used to for me when I was ill as a child, and cooked it until it fell apart. The house smells of it now. It tastes exactly like being seven and sitting in your kitchen with a blanket round my shoulders.

The proverb says the apple never falls far from the tree. People say it about children who turn out like their parents. I have always thought of myself as my mother's daughter, sensible and quick. But here I am in your town, in your house, teaching in your classroom, with a box of apples wrapped in newspaper by the back door. Perhaps some apples roll a little further than the others, all the way back to the grandmother's tree.

Your Vera