THE CORRECTED PRIMER

Silence at the Back

A child comes to me a swamp. I do not say it unkindly; I say it as a man of science. It comes to me full of its mother's nonsense and its grandmother's worse — that the ground sings before it gives, that you must tell the bees, that a mile is however long it feels, that the Goose cannot be beaten — a whole bog of superstition where a mind ought to be.

And I drain it. That is my trade. I drain the swamp and I lay down, in its place, good firm facts — the correct dates, the true miles, the King's proper titles, the map as the Committee has it. It is hard, wet, thankless work, and the children fight me at every ditch, and their parents fight me worse, and I win, in the end, one dry fact at a time, because I am patient, and I am right.

Each entry: The Error · The Correction · The Difficulty — the Difficulty being, without fail, the child.

1On the Singing of Ground

The Error. That certain ground "sings" — hums, they say — before it will not hold your weight. The Correction. Ground does not sing. Ground is soil. Soil is silent. I have told them so, with diagrams. The Difficulty. Little Effie Muckle informed me, with pity, that the west field sings on a Tuesday and I was not to walk it. I marked her insolent and walked where I pleased.

2On the Telling of Bees

The Error. That one must go to the hives and tell them the news, or they take offence and leave. The Correction. A bee has no ear for English and no interest in your grandmother's passing. It is a pagan hangover and I will not have it in my schoolroom. The Difficulty. The whole class stopped speaking to me for a week after I said so, out of respect, they told me, for the bees.

3On the Length of a Mile

The Error. That the Seventh Mile is "really five," that distances "argue," that the milestone lies. The Correction. A mile is a mile. It is eight furlongs. It is fixed by law and does not change to suit the walker. The Difficulty. They asked me, then, to walk the Seventh Mile and time it, and I declined, on grounds of dignity, which they wrote down.

4On the Winning of Geese

The Error. That the Haver Goose "cannot be beaten," having won every year since 1672, including against itself. The Correction. Any goose can be beaten. It is a goose. There is no goose in nature that a determined child could not, in principle, outrun. The Difficulty. No child has volunteered to demonstrate the principle. They know something. They will not say what.

5On the Grading of Hope

The Error. That "just about" is a measurement — a proper grade of hope, filed under Saint Tarry, meaning not yet, but any moment. The Correction. Hope is not a measurement. You cannot grade a feeling. There is no unit of "just about." The Difficulty. The parish grades everything by it, from the harvest to my own prospects, and I am, apparently, "just about," which is not the compliment I first took it for.

6On the Reading of Bells

The Error. That a bell tells more than the hour — that this one means weather, that four of them mean a thing no one can name, that a deaf man reads them best. The Correction. A bell tells the time. That is the whole of a bell. The Difficulty. They rang the changes at me, slowly, as at a foreigner.

7On What I Have Achieved

The Error. — The Correction. — The Difficulty. Thirty years I have drilled the true facts into the young of this parish, and thirty years they have said "yes, sir," and copied them fair, and gone home, and I have every reason to believe the swamp is, at last, very nearly drained.

8On the Girl Who Pulled Me Back

The Error. Mine, I begin to fear, and only mine. The Correction. There may not be one. The Difficulty. Every error I have drilled out of these children is a true thing this parish learned the hard way and set, for safekeeping, in the only vessel a child will carry a lifetime — a rhyme, a custom, a piece of "nonsense." The singing ground is a warning. The told bees are a grief with somewhere to go. The lying mile is an honest account of a dishonest country. And they nod, and say "yes, sir," and keep the true thing anyway, under my very corrections, because they are not fools, whatever I have written in the margin. Effie Muckle — whom I caned for the singing field — took me by the collar off that exact field this last wet March, the moment before it took my leg, and was not, I noticed, in the least surprised to be right. I marked it a coincidence. I have marked a great many things a coincidence. I am beginning to suspect I have spent thirty years correcting the answers, and that the children have spent thirty years, gently, and with real kindness, letting me.