E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten
Dragt The Song of Seven
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78269-133-4
Verlag: Pushkin Children's Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78269-133-4
Verlag: Pushkin Children's Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Tonke Dragt writes and illustrates books of adventure, fantasy and fairy tales. She was born in 1930 in Jakarta. When she was twelve, she was imprisoned in a Japanese camp, where she wrote her very first book using begged and borrowed paper. After the war, she moved to the Netherlands with her family, and eventually became an art teacher. She published her first book in 1961, and a year later this was followed by her most famous story, The Letter for the King, which won the Children's Book of the Year Award and has been translated into sixteen languages. She was awarded the State Prize for Youth Literature in 1976 and was knighted in 2001.
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And now the story has begun
THIS IS ONE
It was boiling hot, even though the windows and the door into the corridor were all open. The children had been silent for an hour, but that probably had more to do with the heat than with the tongue-lashing their teacher had given them at the beginning of the afternoon. Now that they’d nearly all finished the dull grammar exercises he’d told them to do, the noise was creeping back, little by little – whispers, a cough, quiet giggles, feet shuffling, desks creaking, paper rustling.
Frans van der Steg, sitting at his desk on the platform at the front of the classroom, tutted and looked up. His stern look didn’t make much impression on the class though, perhaps in part because his spectacles had slipped down to the tip of his nose. But he didn’t say anything. He simply wasn’t in the mood.
In the class of first-years at the end of the corridor, the little ones were singing.
Do you know the Seven, the Seven,
Do you know the Seven Ways?
What a tedious tune, thought Frans van der Steg.
People say that I can’t dance,
But I can dance like the King of France.
This is one…
“Well, I know I certainly couldn’t dance at this tempo,” he said out loud. “By the time they get to seven, I could have counted to a hundred.”
The buzz and bustle in the classroom increased, but Frans banged his hand on the desk and put a stop to it before it became a din. Twenty-five pairs of eyes looked at him. Frans stared back and then pretended to go on marking the books in front of him. He looked at the red line he’d drawn beneath the title of Marian’s essay, THE SEKRIT TRESURE, and gloomily wondered why he tried so hard to teach his students to spell. As he glanced at his watch, he heard Maarten’s voice: “Sir?”
Frans van der Steg looked up again. He still wasn’t used to being called “sir”. He hadn’t been working in this village for long, and in town he’d just been “Mr Van der Steg”. What he should have said to Maarten was: “Did I give you permission to speak?” But instead he said, “What is it, Maarten?”
The chattering began again. The children could tell their teacher wasn’t really angry with them anymore, and besides…
“It’s twenty-five past three,” said Maarten.
Twenty-five past three was packing-up time, and Frans van der Steg’s group of ten- and eleven-year-olds could pack up faster than any other class. It had been like that almost since the first day back to school after the summer holidays. At first, the class had been very noisy when twenty-five past three came around, but that hadn’t lasted for long. Kai, one of the most boisterous boys in the class, had – accidentally on purpose – dropped a big box of coloured pencils, much to his classmates’ secret delight. Mr Van der Steg had just shaken his head and said with a serious look on his face, “Kai, Kai, you probably think there’s no harm done and it’ll be easy enough to pick up the pencils and tidy them away, but I’ve seen for myself the terrible consequences of such clumsiness. A friend of mine once did the same thing, only it wasn’t pencils he dropped, but two whole armfuls of lances and spears.”
Kai had just gaped at his teacher, but Maarten, who always spoke without being spoken to, had squawked, “Huh? Lances and spears? But how come?”
“Lances and spears,” his teacher had repeated, “with sharp iron points, which don’t break as easily as pencil points. It made such an incredible din! And it had to happen just as we were sneaking through the palace at night…”
“Palace? What palace?”
“The King of Torelore’s palace. We were caught like rats in a trap. We’d worked so hard to steal those spears from the armoury. And then that idiot let them go crashing to the floor! Well, of course, everyone woke up: the King of Torelore, the Queen of Torelore, and all their soldiers with their sabres. And then the fun really started…”
As the teacher continued his tale, you could have heard a pin drop. But when the bell went, the class exploded with questions. “And then? What happened next?!”
Their teacher couldn’t let them go home until they’d heard how he’d managed to escape from the deepest dungeon in the royal palace, where he was tied up with thick ropes and guarded by a hungry lion, could he? But Frans van der Steg had simply told Kai to pick up the pencils and sent them home with a promise to continue the story another day.
And he’d done exactly that. He’d been teaching the class for three weeks now and, at the end of every day, from twenty-five past three to half past, as they packed up, he told them a story, and on Saturday mornings, when the children also had lessons, the stories went on for much longer, sometimes for as long as three quarters of an hour.
His class had heard the tale of his adventures in the Kingdom of Torelore, and his account of his journey back home, complete with a shipwreck and a desert island. They knew all about his stay in the haunted castle, and about the time he’d faced the Abominable Snowman in the Himalayas.
“But it’s not true, is it?” Maarten sometimes said. “You’re just making it up.”
The other children knew that too, but that didn’t make them any less interested in their teacher’s tales. Somehow, in their imaginations, he was two people – one was just their teacher, Mr Van der Steg, but the other was a kind of fearless knight, with hair like flames, FRANS THE RED, a hero who could take on anyone.
And now the only thing that could save this hot, boring afternoon was a new adventure. Yesterday Frans the Red had returned safe and sound from an expedition to the rainforests of Urozawa, and he had a few minutes left today to set off on his next escapade.
Mr Van der Steg straightened his glasses, ran his fingers through his hair and then slowly shook his head.
“Um, chaps,” he said (he always called them that, even though there were girls in the class too), “I’m tired.” He knew he was disappointing his students, but he really had no idea what to tell them. “The thing is…” he continued, “I’m waiting for…”
“For what, sir?” (there’s no need to explain who asked that question).
“For a letter,” said the teacher. It was the first answer that came to him. “A very important letter,” he added. “It might arrive this evening. The sender is… something of an enigma… And I hope,” he concluded, “that it’ll be the beginning of a new adventure, with a mysterious and perilous mission.”
They’ll have to make do with that, he thought. When all the books had been handed in, it would be time to go home anyway. He leant back in his chair, stifled a yawn and absent-mindedly hummed along with the first-years, who were singing the Song of Seven again.
Phew, this weather! thought Frans van der Steg, as he cycled home. It didn’t get this hot all summer holiday. I really should have taken the class outside, instead of being annoyed with them for not doing their work properly.
When he got home, to the house where he rented a room, he found his landlady in the conservatory with a big pot of tea.
“Ah, there you are,” she greeted him. “I bet you could do with a nice cup of tea.”
“I most certainly could, Mrs Bakker,” he said. “You know just what a person needs after a hard day at work. Shall I get the deckchairs out of the shed? Then we can sit outside.”
“Oh no, don’t bother,” his landlady replied. “There’s a storm coming, and we’ll only have to bring everything back in.”
Frans opened his mouth to point out just how brightly the sun was shining today, but then he heard thunder rumbling in the distance, and he changed his mind.
“Once it starts raining,” his landlady said, “that’ll be the end of the summer.”
Frans looked out to see thick black clouds rolling towards the sun. He didn’t reply.
“Would you like a biscuit, Frans?” his landlady asked. She was old enough to be his mother, so he didn’t mind her calling him by his first name. When he spoke to her, he was always polite and called her “Mrs Bakker”, but whenever he thought about her, it was as “Aunt Wilhelmina”. He knew that was her first name, and he thought the title of “aunt” suited her. She was rosy-cheeked, plump and perky, and she was a wonderful cook.
“I’m going out this evening,” she told him. “The neighbours have asked me to go round and watch something on TV with them. Some kind of drama. It’s supposed to be good. So you can work at the big table in the dining room if you have lots of...
