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I?”
    I had turned my head away.
    “No.”
    “Go down the hall to Matron’s office and she’ll tell you all you need to know. You’ll eat your meals with the nurses. She’ll let you know where you sleep. Just try not to get a cold. I don’t suppose you have any experience with tuberculosis?”
    “Well I’ve read—”
    “I know. I know. You’ve read
The Magic Mountain
.” Another trap sprung, and he seemed restored. “Things have moved on a bit from that, I hope. Here, I’ve got some things I’ve written out about the kids here and what I was thinking you might try to do with them. Sometimes I’d rather express myself in writing. Matron will give you the lowdown.”
    I had not been there a week before all the events of the first day seemed unique and unlikely. The kitchen, the kitchencloakroom where the workers kept their clothes and concealed their thefts, were rooms I hadn’t seen again and probably wouldn’t see. The doctor’s office was similarly out of bounds, Matron’s room being the proper place for all inquiries, complaints, and ordinary rearrangements. Matron herself was short and stout, pink-faced, with rimless glasses and heavy breathing. Whatever you asked for seemed to astonish her, and cause difficulties, but eventually it was seen to or provided. Sometimes she ate in the nurses’ dining room, where she was served a special junket, and cast a pall. Mostly she kept to her own quarters.
    Besides Matron there were three registered nurses, not one of them within thirty years of my age. They had come out of retirement to serve, doing their wartime duty. Then there were the nurse’s aides, who were my age or even younger, mostly married or engaged or working on being engaged, generally to men in the forces. They talked all the time if Matron and the nurses weren’t there. They didn’t have the least interest in me. They didn’t want to know what Toronto was like, though some of them knew people who had gone there on their honeymoons, and they did not care how my teaching was going or what I had done before I came to work at the San. It wasn’t that they were rude—they passed me the butter (it was called butter but it was really orange-streaked margarine, colored in the kitchen as was the only legal way in those days) and they warned me off the shepherd’s pie which they said had groundhog in it. It was just that whatever happened in places they didn’t know or to people they didn’t know or in times they didn’t know had to be discounted. It got in their way and under their skin. They turned off the radio news every chance they got and tried to get music.
    “Dance with a dolly with a hole in her stockin’ …”
    Both nurses and aides disliked the CBC which I had been brought up to believe was bringing culture to the hinterlands. Yet they were in awe of Dr. Fox partly because he had read so many books.
    They also said that there was nobody like him to tear a strip off you if he felt like it.
    I couldn’t figure out if they felt there was a connection between reading a lot of books and tearing a strip off.
    Usual notions of pedagogy out of place here. Some of these children will reenter the world or system and some will not. Better not a lot of stress. That is testing memorizing classifying nonsense
.
    Disregard whole grade business entirely. Those who need to can catch up later on or do without. Actually very simple skills, set of facts, etc., necessary for Going into the World. What about Superior Children so-called? Disgusting term. If they are smart in questionable academic way they can easily catch up
.
    Forget rivers of South America, likewise Magna Carta
.
    Drawing Music Stories preferred
.
    Games Okay but watch for overexcitement or too much competitiveness
.
    Challenge to keep between stress and boredom. Boredom curse of hospitalization
.
    If Matron can’t supply what you need sometimes Janitor will have it stashed away somewhere
.
    Bon Voyage
.
    The numbers of children who