Anecdotes from a Yorkshire Primary School

On Thursday afternoon I took the bus to the Ebor Gardens Community Centre in order to spend a couple of hours with a crowd of small , costumed British people. The whole of the Thursday after school time is spent making crafts and playing games. Amazingly the children are content spending two hours gluing, cutting, sticking, coloring, and folding. Here are a few precious moments...

All of the children stare at me whenever I speak but one Caribbean-British girl of about seven years piped up in a clear Yorkshire dialect, 'Are you from America?' After, and because no doubt, I answered yes, she made me a paper bracelet of cut and pasted hearts. It caught on something on the bus ride home and tore off.

The incoherence runs both ways. Another of that group asked me, 'Do you ave un awbby?' That's either equestrian or marital, I thought; so I said 'um, yes!' 'Well, wha is it?'

One little girl, aptly dressed in a princess costume, was keen to fight with three very quiet sisters. She kept accusing them of writing things about her on their Easter cards. They all proceeded to pile their cards in my hands for approval and to my surprise they were letters of wild declaration to Stan, Randy (think about this name with a British accent), and Marshall. I didn't know how to handle this one, short of saying that they can write whatever they want because the cards are private. Fortunately for me another girl piped in, 'You all better stop talkin bout love!'

The cards were made of creased stock that was much larger than the envelopes provided. It was kind of amusing to me that each child only learned that the cards wouldn't fit when it came time to envelop their own card. I had to explain to fifteen kids that the cards were in fact too small. Most of them were content to fold their carefully made cards in half rather than do without envelopes.