He stooped to the dusty asphalt and picked up a little iron ring. It was a washer, another name he didn't know. He put it with the other bits of rusty metal in his left hand.
As he stood up he noticed that a boy was watching him. He walked away because this was a boy he didn¡¦t like. It was the big boy in one of the higher grades who had spoken to him a few days ago. ¡§What does your father do?" the boy had asked him.
"He goes to work," Bobby had said.
"Where does he work?"
"At work," Bobby had simply replied. He imagined Work as a big building where fathers go instead of going to school. He had no idea what they did there, but then neither did he know what he himself would be doing in the first grade next year. And second grade was just too far ahead to be worth thinking about at all.
The boy had laughed. So he didn't like that boy. And he decided if anyone ever asked him again what his father did he would not answer.
He had gathered up enough odds and ends now to start on today's invention. He sat on a wooden bench and placed his little pile on the seat next to him. He bent towards it, picking up a hairpin and a metal tip. Carefully, so it would not snap, he threaded the hairpin through one of the holes in the tip, twisting the prong around to secure it. He pushed another hairpin through the opposite hole. Between them, he threaded a black rubber band, looping it over the ends of the hairpins. He added a piece of string from the pile, then more hairpins and some paper-clips, until most of the items had been used up. He put the rest in his pocket and stood up, tucked his shirt into his short pants, and, with the fragile unfinished invention in his left hand, walked to the dusty ground near the swings and continued the search for new parts.
When the bell rang for the end of lunchtime, he lined up with the other pupils, the completed article in his pocket. Miss Thorne came out and the little boys and girls in the lowest grade of the school marched quickly into the classroom.
Miss Thorne was the teacher. She was the first teacher Bobby had ever had, and he had learnt already that a teacher is a lady who looks after a crowd of children, tells them stories out of books, and smacks your hand if you hum while she is telling them.
Bobby had learnt a lot from Miss Thorne. He had learnt that the world is round, like an orange. Bobby could see with his own eyes that the world is flat, but, because what adults say must always be true, he managed to fit the two ideas together. He thought of the world as a hollow ball, the lower half filled with earth and the upper half coloured blue, this being the sky. He imagined that the outside of the ball was painted like a map, like Miss Thorne's globe of the world, with its blue and red and many other colours. He did not question how the people inside the world, living on the flat surface, could know about the coloured patterns on the outside. Adults just knew these things.
Sometimes Miss Thorne talked about topics closer to his own life than the shape of the earth. One time the grade had a lesson about boats. They saw pictures of yachts sailing on the ocean. The thing that stuck in Bobby¡¦s memory was that sometimes these boats can blow over in a strong wind. The only boats Bobby knew about were the ferries on the still waters of Lake Wendouree. The next time his father took him on a picnic to the lake, he refused to go out on the ferry for fear that it would turn over.
Every day, after lunchtime, there was a time when the children could come out into the middle of the floor and show or tell the class something of interest. It was generally something of interest to the child doing the showing or telling rather than to the rest of the grade, most of whom were waiting eagerly for their own turn in the limelight. Bobby had his hand high in the air, hoping to be one of the chosen ones.
"All right, Robert," said Miss Thorne. "What do you have to show us this time?"
Bobby walked into the big space in the middle of the room and took the little mass of metal and rubber bands out of his pocket. He placed it on the floor in front of the class.
"I've got to wind it up first," he said, and started twisting a hairpin on the end of a rubber-band round and round, until the rubber-band was too knotted to turn any further. He let go, squatting back a little to give it room, and to let the class see. The rubber-band unwound a little and then stopped, still twisted, and nothing else happened.
"That's nice, Robert," said Miss Thorne, a little wearily. She had seen his inventions before.
"But it didn't work properly that time," said Robert. "I have to try it again."
The teacher let him wind it up again, although she knew it would be the same result. The machine would lie on the floor, completely useless, a bundle of hairpins and shoe-tips tied together awkwardly, doing nothing.
"What is it supposed to do?" she asked, as Bobby wound the hairpin for the second time.
"No, I've got to show you," he said, not really sure what it should do. He expected something to happen, but whatever it was would be as much a surprise to him as to the rest of the grade.
He released the hairpin, and this time gave a little push.
Nothing happened.
"It must be broken," he said, half to himself. "I'll fix it at playtime."
"Thank you, Robert," said Miss Thorne. "Rosemary, I think it's your turn now."
Bobby returned to his place on the mat, crossed his legs like the other children, and examined the toy in his hand. He put it in his pocket. It was no good. He knew he couldn¡¦t fix it. It would have to be thrown away.
But he wasn't discouraged. Tomorrow he would make another one, a better one. When he wound it up it would crawl across the floor, swaying from side to side, bigger and neater looking than the useless one in his pocket. It would make a buzzing sound as it moved, and perhaps turn corners. He tried to listen to what Rosemary was saying about her pet cat, but at the back of his mind there remained the image of the wonderful invention, the shiny new toy that really worked, that he would show everybody tomorrow.