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

price. We were stupid. We assumed that because this is Iceland, the gender politics would be intelligent, and we didn’t see that what’s posing as feminism is just another way of saying that girls can’t cope and boys are violent. I am sure that these are errors we wouldn’t have made at home. We are so careful to be good foreigners, to suspend judgement, to believe that our views are culturally specific and therefore irrelevant, that we betray ourselves. And our children.

I phone the nice woman at the council and explain that things aren’t working with us and Hjallastefnan. Can she suggest an alternative? Oh, she says, but this method is very popular in Iceland, very popular indeed. Especially with writers and teachers like yourself. I know, I say, I’m sorry, it must be a cultural difference. Is there anything else, anything a little more – well, mainstream? Well, she says doubtfully, there is the state nursery at Lundaból, but it’s a long way for you to take him every day when you have no car.

It is about a mile, a pleasant enough walk through sleeping suburbia. There are gardens consisting of grass, rocks and rowan trees behind white picket fences. You can peer in through 1970s windows to see shiny wooden floors and tidy kitchens, and sometimes a dog barks. The nursery is on a slope from which you can see across the houses and over the top of IKEA to the mountains. There is a metal gate with a latch out of reach of toddlers, and then a tarmac playground with a spider’s-web climbing frame, surely the same model as in my local park in the early 1980s, and certainly of a kind long uprooted in England on health and safety grounds. There are swings, not baby swings with holes for the legs and a frame to hang onto but big swings of the sort that at home are considered unsuitable for the under-fives. The yard is busy with children pedalling tricycles up a concrete slope and freewheeling down, and the tricycles have platforms on the back so that one child can stand and hang onto the shoulders of the one peddling. No helmets. No knee-pads. There is a flight of concrete stairs off to the side of the slope. Anthony and I exchange glances and go round to the porch, where we knock a few times, wait, peer through a window, knock again.

You should have just come in, explains the teacher who eventually comes, conducting us past an electrician who is being watched by a group of four-year-olds as he works on the fire alarm. No signing-in book, nothing to stop people with samurai swords or guns coming in and taking the toddlers hostage, or indeed taking one away. When we lived in Oxford, I explain, the nursery had a video-entry system and two doors and the outer door was always answered by two members of staff together. Yes, she says. We hear that these things happen abroad. And now here is Katrin.

Katrin is the head, and she shows us around. Each room has areas for drawing and painting, for messy play, for playing with model farms and zoos and dolls’ houses, for building train track and Lego. They have singing every day, and a dance teacher comes once a week. The children spend at least two hours a day outside, no matter what the weather, so they must have proper winter clothes. The food is Icelandic, traditional Icelandic, no pizza or pasta or any of that, they eat far too much of that at home. Independence is important and children are expected to fasten and unfasten their own snowsuits, gloves, hats and scarves. (In the event, we discover, the children help each other, four-year-olds doing the zips for three-year-olds and three-year-olds putting two-year-olds’ boots the right way round.) All the other children attend 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week, but if we want a different arrangement that is certainly possible. And here is Herdis, who would be Tobias’s keyworker. She’s Icelandic and has just returned from a year studying child development in Germany with her own young son, so she knows about being a temporary foreigner. This is Tobias, I say, because that is what it says on his birth certificate, and although we’ve called him Tolly from birth we’d always agreed he’d be Tobias when he went to school. No, I’m Tolly, he says. Tolli is an Icelandic name, Herdis tells him. That’s me, he says, Tolli. Having re-named himself an Icelander, our son sits down with Herdis and the toy farm and doesn’t want to leave. It doesn’t take him long to learn to climb the spider’s web and sit crowing on the top, higher than I can reach, or to learn to ride one of those tricycles, or to ask Herdis in Icelandic to push him ‘as high as the sky’ on a swing. After the first couple of weeks, he begins to use Icelandic words at home. I try to reply in Icelandic, to help him name his bath, his cup, his book, but his pronunciation is better than mine, and three weeks later he stops speaking Icelandic at home and stops speaking English at nursery. By Christmas, he is bilingual, and sounds like an Icelandic child speaking Icelandic, getting the grammar and syntax right. I try not to ask him, my three-year-old, to translate for me at the pool and shops when I’m embarrassed by my own linguistic inadequacy. He comes to terms with Icelandic food, and when Anthony tries to collect him after lunch, according to our special arrangement, he howls in protest. He wants to stay for kaffitími, coffee-time. We extend his hours, but not much, not to Icelandic levels, because we still know best.

By the end of August, term is about to start for me too. I think you could feel the seasons turning in a university without knowing anything at all about students