I.

            Flora was the granddaughter of our neighbors from downstairs. She was visiting for the Christmas holidays, and we were together all the time at our flat or her grandparents’. Her hair was short, but she said it would grow out even longer than mine in no time. I showed her all my toys, books and collections. We watched telly. Flora didn’t speak English yet, so I explained what my favourite programmes were about. She wanted the exact same Barbie doll I had begged my parents for since summer and they kept telling me to write to Father Christmas for it: the Singer-Superstar with the glitter strap dress and the diamond necklace. Flora’s grandmother took us shopping and bought it for her. Flora’s grandfather was the Ambassador of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria in London.

            When the holidays were over, my mother told me Flora was going to be in my class.

            “You’ll have a Bulgarian friend to go to school with now,” mum sounded enthusiastic. “You’ll introduce her to everyone and help her with the schoolwork because she’s new.”

            Fox School was rectangular and beautiful, with a garden on the roof where every class planted flowers in old pots. It was close to where we lived on Kensington Park Road, and either mum or dad would walk me there every morning, then pick me up in the afternoon. We’d go to Hyde Park to feed the ducks at the Serpentine, stop by Wimpy’s for a take-away hamburger or by the sweet shop for a snack. But when I started going to school with Flora, her grandfather’s chauffeur would drive us there in the black Mercedes, then wait for us after school and drive us home.

            All my friends and teachers thought Flora was my sister because we spoke Bulgarian to each other and because her grandmother had bought her stretch jeans and multi-coloured leg-warmers like mine. I explained that she had just come to London and was my neighbour from downstairs, and that her grandfather and my dad worked together at the Bulgarian Embassy. Then everyone said they always thought I was British.

            Every morning at assembly, Flora sat beside me on the floor, silent, as I sang along with the whole school. Our teacher, Miss Simpson, called me aside one day.

            “Sophia, why doesn’t your friend sing like everybody else?”

            “She doesn’t know the songs yet,” I explained.

            “Then maybe it’s a good idea for you to take a book home and sing them together after school. Flora’s English has really improved thanks to you, so now please help her learn the songs because the Easter concert is coming up,” Miss Simpson smiled and handed me a copy of Songs of Praise.

            Every afternoon, after we finished our homework, I would make Flora sing with me.

Oh Mary, Oh Mary

Oh, what will you do

With your ointment so rich and so rare?

“I’ll pour it all over the feet of the Lord

And I’ll wipe it away with my hair,”

She said.

“And I’ll wipe it away with my hair.”

            The head of Flora’s grandfather sprang through the door of her room, which we had left slightly ajar one evening.

            “What are you two singing?” he asked without smiling.

            “We’re getting ready for the Easter concert at school, granddad,” Flora said. “Sophia is helping me learn the songs.”

            “Splendid. Run along, now, Sophia, your parents are waiting for you, it’s late.”

II.

         After the Easter concert, dad announced I would be moving to a new school. Fox is very small, he told me, and I wouldn’t have any Bulgarian friends there anymore since Flora was going back to Bulgaria for good in the summer. So, in autumn, I was to go to a bigger and nicer school in Chelsea, where all of the Bulgarian children from the Embassy went. I’d be picked up from our house in a mini-bus, then driven back in the afternoon. Dad had seen the school already, he promised me I would love it.

            “Daddy, I have my English friends at Fox, and I was supposed to play the xylophone at the Christmas concert this year.”

            “It’ll be better, you’ll see. And it’ll be easier for me and your mum, we won’t have to take you to school every day.”

            I cried to my mother.

            “I liked it better when you or dad would pick me up after school and we’d walk home. Why can’t it be that way again when Flora leaves?” I appealed, realizing how suffocating the flesh-coloured leather interior of the Mercedes was.

            “Darling!” Mum’s laugh sounded forced. “You’re ten years old! You can’t cry about things like that, you’re not a baby anymore.”

            That was the last my parents would hear of it. Soon it was May, and I walked slowly down the stairs of Fox School of Kensington, fingering the cool, glossy brick walls for the last time.

III.

            Dad was right, I liked Marlborough School of Chelsea. It looked like a castle from the days of knights and fairies. The entrance had a curved stone staircase, at the top of which “Est. 1898” was engraved on a circular stone ornament. The playground was big. One part was a football square, where the boys scraped pale knees raw at soccer, the other had hopscotch squares painted on the asphalt for the girls.

            On the first day, Miss Freeman, my teacher, smiled at me.  There was a large aquarium in the classroom with a chunk of see-through jelly in it, evenly dotted with something that looked like black lentils.

            “Those will become tadpoles soon,” Miss Freeman said to the class. “The dots will grow tails and then legs, so in spring we’ll take them to the pond in Hyde Park.”

            At assembly, I sat cross-legged on the floor with my new classmates. Halfway through the first song, I was gently tapped on the shoulder and summoned over by a teacher. She lead me to a classroom where all the Bulgarians I had come to school in the mini-bus with were busy reading books, playing games and sitting around talking.

            “You know almost everybody in here, don’t you, Sophia,” the teacher said. “The girl over there is Anna, and her brother Sergei. They’re from the Soviet Union. And that’s Yaroslav from Czechoslovakia. I’m Miss Skelton, and I’ll be over there.”

            I blinked around the room. Alexander, a tall and skinny thirteen-year-old Bulgarian, came over to me.

            “We wondered where you were,” he sneered. “But you’re new here, we might have known you’d wandered off to assembly.”

            “Why aren’t we at assembly with everybody else?” I asked.

            “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Alexander. “We come from a communist country, we can’t be singing songs of praise, silly.”

            The school was singing in the distance. They were practicing for the Christmas concert. I sat alone in a strange chair and wondered if they had a xylophone at Marlborough.

We three Kings of Orient are

Bearing gifts we traverse afar

Field and fountain, moor and mountain

Following yonder star.

            Miss Skelton walked us back to our respective classrooms after assembly.

            Dinner was served in the hall, and we got strawberry jam tarts for dessert. My new classmate, Sadie, who had waist-length hair of yellow gold, the exact same colour as her freckles, told me:

            “You’ve got red on your nose, you have!”

            She giggled and handed me a tissue.

IV.

            At home-time, I stood by Marlborough School’s stone fence on Chelsea Avenue with the rest of the Bulgarian children, waiting for the mini-bus from the Embassy. Alexander pulled my ponytail and I told him he was a stupid bloody twit, but otherwise I didn’t really talk to anyone. I watched the double-deckers go by in opposite directions. Huge, flying smears of scarlet red.