Flamingo Boy. Michael Morpurgo

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       CHAPTER 9

       Fly, Flamingo, Fly

      “I was never more miserable than in the days that followed. At school, our teacher, Monsieur Bonnet – I still hate the sound of his name – was picking on me and punishing me continuously. He kept telling me in front of the whole class that I was an ignorant child, a stupid gypsy child, a wicked heathen child. In the playground, some of the children in my class – Joseph and Bernadette were always the ringleaders – began to gang up on me. They told me to my face that they had decided from now on that no one would speak to me, because I was a “gyppo girl”, who dressed in rags, they said, who couldn’t even read. They did not speak to “dirty gyppos”, they said. Joseph would grab at my skirt, and Bernadette would pull my hair!

      There was only one teacher I liked, Madame Salomon. She would come over and talk to me sometimes when no one else would. She wasn’t my class teacher, but I wished she was. But then one day Monsieur Bonnet told us that Madame Salomon had left the school and would not be coming back. “A good thing too,” he said. “We don’t need her kind here.” I had no idea what he meant. Not then.

      I ended every day at that school feeling I was utterly alone in the world. I begged Maman and Papa to let me stay home with them, to help them every day on the carousel, like I did in the evenings and at the weekends, but they were adamant. They had never learned to read or write, or to do their sums, they said, but the world was changing. Everyone needed school these days. The old ways were going, like it or not. Roma children had to learn just like other children, or else everyone would think we were ignorant. I had to go to school: that was all there was to it. I argued, I cried, I threw tantrums. Nothing would change their minds.