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Texas ISD School Guide
Texas ISD School Guide







Short Stories for Teachers

The Child in the Attic
By:Joy of Reading <stories4a@storiesforeveryone.com>

The Child in the Attic

I’m going to call him Walter, though that is not his real name. Walter began life in a family of modest means. He was a lively child, less than enchanted with school. Then suddenly, one day, Walter’s life turned upside down. His father walked out, leaving his mother with no marketable skills and three small boys to care for. Walter’s mother had to go to work because there was no child care system in place.

As summer approached, Walter’s mother worry increased. She was a good and caring mother who didn’t want her children running loose all day long. So when she heard about a farm outside of town where the farmer and his wife took children in for the summer to give them three months of fresh air and good food at no cost, she jumped at the chance.

The farmer was a stern taskmaster. He expected the children to work and work hard. Quite soon, Walter’s rebellious nature landed him in trouble. Punishment was called for. And the punishment the farmer decreed was to be locked up alone in the gloomy attic of the old farmhouse.

The farmer has also exiled to the attic Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Milton. Walter takes down a dusty volume, carries it to the window, and begins to read.

There is something so evocative about that image—the lonely, misunderstood, despised child, exiled to an attic. Perhaps that is why fiction writers have chosen to present this im¬age as well. The most famous fictional child in an attic is, probably, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Sara Crewe in A Little Princess.

Captain Crewe has raised Sara like a little princess in British-occupied India. Although the Indians in the story are beloved servants, they are still servants. And the fortune that comes to Sara at the end of the story is from colonial Africa in the form of diamond mines, and today we know all too well who worked those mines and under what unspeakable conditions. Becky, the scullery maid at Miss Minchin’s school, is rescued in the end by Sara, but rescued not to be Sara’s adopted sister but to be Sara’s personal maid, which would have been considered the highest possible happiness for one who was, after all, a member of the serving class. There are, of course, a lot of elements in this book that we don’t find justifiable.

Once Captain Crewe dies and Miss Minchin realizes that Sara is penniless, she turns her into an unpaid servant, feeling quite smug that she has not, after all, turned her into the street. She sells all the beautiful things in what had been Sara’s luxurious suite and sends her to live in the bare, heatless attic.

At first Sara is disconsolate. She is mourning for her father and unable to adjust to her radically changed circumstances. But Sara is a great reader of fiction and nonfiction alike. Although Miss Minchin has confiscated her library, she cannot confiscate what is in Sara’s mind and heart. Sara knows history. She decides to pretend that her attic is a cell in the Bastille where she is being kept a prisoner. She makes friends with the other prisoner—Becky, the scullery maid—and with a rat, remembering that prisoners in solitary confinement in the Bastille often tamed rats. Pretending, when she is in the attic, that she is imprisoned in the Bastille is just one step from her other imaginative coping device. She begins to pretend that she is a princess. “I can be a princess inside,” she tells herself.

A book can give a child a way to learn to value herself, which is at the start of the process of growing a great soul. It is why I struggle so against the idea that characters in novels should be role models. Role models may inspire some children — but they didn’t inspire any child that I ever was. They only discouraged me. Whereas that awful, bad-tempered, selfish Mary Lennox — who could admire her? Who could love such an unlovable creature? Yet she was given the key to a secret garden. Not because she deserved it, but because she needed it. When I read The Secret Garden, I fell in love with Mary Lennox. She was my soul mate. And because I loved her, I was able to learn to love myself a bit.

But let us go back to what happened to Walter, the child we left reading in the attic. He went back to the city and back to school.

Walter graduated from college and took an M.B.A. from Harvard. He became an innovative and successful businessman and, more important, a devoted husband, father, and then grandfather — a man not only of intelligence but of wisdom, compassion, and delightful good humor. Despite a full and busy life, Walter still reads widely and voraciously. Books saved him.

Suppose there had been no books in that attic. What would Walter’s story have become? I ask this question because in our world, our states, our towns, our schools, there are many children whose young lives are hard, whose spirits are starved, who are isolated, angry, and fearful and whose attics aren’t furnished with books.

There are many both in government and education who feel that the deprivation of these attic children will be alleviated by just getting them wired onto the Internet. But surfing the Internet does not compare with wrestling with a book.
Today, when a child behaves aggressively at school, the routine solution is expulsion. At the very time when a child is most vulnerable, most reachable, he is further isolated. Often he goes home to an empty house and spends time with violent video games or on the Internet, desperately seeking out connections, and whom does he make connections with? All too often with other desperate, isolated, self-hating individuals who confirm his belief that all his hatreds are justified and that violence is the only way to relieve his mortal pain.

Access to the Internet is not the answer for these attic children. They need much more than that. They need much more even than access to good books. Fortunately, what they need is precisely what you can give them—and that is yourself. Every child said needs a connection with a caring adult.

For me the most important thing is for the word to become flesh. I can write stories for children, and in that sense I can offer them words, but teachers are the word become flesh in the classroom. Society has taught our children that they are nobodies unless their faces appear on television. But by caring, by showing them how important each one of them is, teachers become the word that I would like to share with each of them.

What I want to say to that isolated, angry, fearful child in the attic is this: You are not alone, you are not despised, you are unique and of infinite value in the human family. I can try to say this through the words of a story, but it is up to each of you, teachers, to embody that hope — you are those words become flesh.

Katherine Paterson
The Invisible Child
New York, Dutton Children’s Books, 2001
(adapted)






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