Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

Students with flowing hair strew seed across the new-born hill, to stabilise the bare ash and reduce the likelihood of a landslide, but some of the mountain is still too hot. On fast-forward now, houses emerge, the cemetery reappears, its population unchanged, though in nine months some of the old people must have died and been buried on the mainland. Birds sing. A dusting of green is seen on the ash above town, where the foreigners’ seeds have germinated.

4

Back to School

It’s almost the beginning of term. Max is going to the International School. If we decide to stay permanently in Iceland, he can move into their bilingual stream, but for now it seems more important to minimise his immediate sense of alienation than to maximise his chances of eventual integration. The other children, and most of the staff, sound (but are not) American; we still haven’t learnt that International English is not the same as the language we speak at home.

Icelandic children start school aged six, and stay in the same school until they are sixteen, when they move to a college, which takes four years to prepare them for university, or into vocational education. Childhood and adolescence have a different shape here. Fifteen-year-olds are in the same category as seven-year-olds, both children, both part of that tribe old enough to go around without adults but not old enough to drive, the only people who walk and take the bus, while nineteen-year-olds, although able to drive, vote and drink alcohol, share their daily space with sixteen-year-olds. We hear no-one demonising older children here, nothing akin to the English fear and loathing of teenagers. When I tell a group of students about the high-pitched sounds played to stop ‘yobs’ congregating outside English shops, they don’t believe me. What kind of country would allow businesses to control children’s freedom of movement?

The International School is housed in the local state school, and the buildings, so new that the swimming pool is finished as term begins, look more like those of a new art gallery or the headquarters of a particularly avant-garde corporation than a state institution. The classrooms are all open-plan, widening off light-filled spaces too broad and curvy to be corridors. The children skid in socks around pieces of sculpture, trees in pots, fish-tanks and glossy wood-fronted kitchen areas, complete with ovens for baking classes and coffee pots for the teachers. It isn’t just the obvious expensiveness that’s exciting, but the way the architecture suggests an entirely novel idea of childhood. The library and many of the classrooms have glass walls over the sea, as if it matters that the children should be able to see the horizon. There are no doors, no way of shutting people in or out, as if children and adults together could be trusted to move or be still. There are no stalls for the children’s toilets – the part of looking round schools in England that always makes me think about home education again – but single bathrooms used by staff and students and kept clean by all concerned. There is nothing to stop a child wandering off and fiddling with the cookers or pulling boiling coffee off the counter, but they don’t. And most importantly, there is nothing to stop anyone entering or leaving the building at any time. No fences, no gates, no boundaries, and the spinning doors open to all. English schools, Max says after a few weeks, are like prisons. They think they have to lock the children in.

Max sets off uncertainly in clothes of his own choosing and returns with tales of his six classmates, each bearers of at least two passports. Two embassy children, one Norwegian and one American. Two girls with Russian mothers and Icelandic fathers, girls who, Max recounts, take ages after swimming to put their make-up on and rearrange their hair. The daughter of a Filipina mother and a Polish father, and the son of a Finnish academic researching economic collapse. The builders are still finishing off the play equipment in the first week of term. There is nothing delineating ‘school grounds’, nothing to keep anyone in or out. Children play on the log climbing frames, swings and stepping-stones after school and at weekends just as during the school day. Adults use the basketball courts in the evenings. (I remember the CCTV cameras trained on the perimeter fence of Max’s primary school at home.) That land, those facilities, belong to everyone. And because most children make their own way to and from school, there isn’t exactly a moment of departure, nor a ‘school gates’ culture among parents. We learn about Max’s classmates’ families only via the gossip of seven-year-olds, at least until a sequence of birthday parties shows us all quite how foreign we are to each other. Only the British, it seems, do birthday cards. The Americans send out for pizza for the birthday tea. The Norwegian version of ‘Happy Birthday’ has more verses than the British national anthem, and the Icelanders at the International School do children’s birthday presents on a scale I have not previously imagined (although we have an unrepresentative sample here: Garðabær-dwellers are regarded by the rest of the city as vulgar and nouveau riche, the footballers’ Cheshire of Iceland, and within that group the International School hosts those whose families have spent time abroad or who plan to do so very soon – a discordant blend of academics, diplomats and ‘entrepreneurs’ with Russian connections). School-children’s days seem largely disconnected from their parents’ movements. They finish their lessons and move out to the playground, and after a while adjourn to the beach or the pool. No particular need to go home, for parents are still at work. The streets of suburbia belong to the children, who make perfectly sensible citizens.

Nevertheless, we have trouble letting Max go. What are you worried about, asks his new friend’s Icelandic mother, when we want to escort Max and her son to the play-beach