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Oct. 13th, 2010 09:56 am
There was bread and jam for lunch. Her mother said: 'The teachers are coming to town today. You can go, if you've done your chores.'
Tiffany agreed that, yes, there were one or two things she'd quite like to know more about.
'Then you can have half a dozen carrots and an egg. I dare say they could do with an egg, poor things,'said her mother.
Tiffany took them with her after lunch, and went to get an egg's worth of education.
Most boys in the village grew up to do the same jobs as their fathers or, at least, some other job somewhere in the village where someone's father would teach them as they went along. The girls were expected to grow up to be somebody's wife. They were also expected to be able to read and write, those being considered soft indoor jobs that were too fiddly for the boys.
However, everyone also felt that there were a few other things that even the boys ought to know, to stop them wasting time wondering about details like 'What's on the other side of the mountains?'and 'How come rain falls out of the sky?'
Every family in the village bought a copy of the Almanack every year, and a sort of education came from that. It was big and thick and printed somewhere far off, and it had lots of details about things like phases of the moon and the right time to plant beans. It also contained a few prophecies about the coming year, and mentioned faraway places with names like Klatch and Hersheba. Tiffany had seen a picture of Klatch in the Almanack. It showed a camel standing in a desert. She'd only found out what both those things were because her mother had told her. And that was Klatch, a camel in a desert. She'd wondered if there wasn't a bit more to it, but it seemed that 'Klatch = camel, desert' was all anyone knew.
And that was the trouble. If you didn't find some way of stopping it, people would go on asking questions.
The teachers were useful there. Bands of them wandered through the mountains, along with the tinkers, portable blacksmiths, miracle medicine men, cloth pedlars, fortune-tellers and all the other travellers who sold things people didn't need every day but occasionally found useful.
They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travellers, and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words, like 'corrugated iron'. They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the maths teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woods and fell into bear traps.
People were usually quite pleased to see them. They taught children enough to shut them up, which was the main thing after all. But they always had to be driven out of the villages by nightfall in case they stole chickens.
-The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
This is a reread. I own two copies of this book, the first North American edition (got it as soon as I could, read almost all of it in the mall food court right after), and the illustrated edition that has spent almost all of its time lost, found, then lost a day later so I haven't seen any of the illustrations yet.
The Wee Free Men is the first in the Tiffany Aching series, one of Terry Pratchett's kids books. It's about a nine year old girl whose little brother gets kidnapped, and suddenly she has a bunch of six inch Scottish-like 'pictsies' (The Nac Mac Feegle, who love drinking, fighting, and stealing) doing her bidding and calling her a witch. Since she wanted to be a witch when she grew up, this works out.
Then the adventure happens.
I'm about halfway through right now on my reread, and it's just as good as the first time. But man, what happened to poor old Mrs. Snapperly, and anytime Tiffany reflects on her grandmother, I get all teared up.
It's funny, sad, and thinky, and I'm debating giving my friend Bernie an edited copy with Feegle translation because he (probably because English isn't his first language) couldn't parse what the Feegles were saying at all.