Virginia: Charlotte of the Uk

Our newest friend is Charlotte and it’s fortunate for her that she is our friend, considering what she put us all through. She moved into the house down the road from me and it was a big to-do. I had never heard of a to-do before but Charlotte told us all about them. Her family encounters a lot of to-dos, I think. ‘Encounters’ is one of this week’s spelling words and I think it’s great. 

After Charlotte’s family was settled, our group decided to go introduce ourselves, as we had seen that there was a girl about our age moving in and we are usually very curious about girls who are about our age. When we got to her front door, we saw a sign that said: The WINSTONS of The UK. 

Suzanne asked where in the world was Uk (she said it like "uck" which is how we all thought it should be said), and we all agreed we’d never heard of such a place before, and that it really sounded made-up. We could imagine a girl about our age coming up with such a ridiculous sounding place, but the fact that her family had hung a whole sign beside their front door that said “UK” on it made us think that perhaps her parents were a little ridiculous too. Malorie said that maybe people from Uk are eccentric, which I thought was a very show-off thing to say since it hasn’t even been one of our spelling words yet, and Caroline asked if we couldn’t just go play in her treehouse instead of meeting the girl about our age and we all thought that was probably an exceptional idea. 

We didn’t think much about the new girl who was about our age again until Monday when she showed up to our classroom, and none of us could even believe what she had on. It was a navy shirt with white letters on it and it said: I ❤ UK, just like the I ❤ NY shirt I got on vacation last summer. She came right in and sat down at the open desk and we all noticed that her notebook had a big tower with a clock on it and the words BIG BEN. Apparently, people from Uk name their clocks, which I thought was ridiculous at first, but then I remembered that people from Uk might be crazy (I won’t be a show-off and use ‘eccentric’ until we’ve had it for a spelling word) and that to them naming clocks might be normal. 

Our group remembered how curious we were about the new girl who was about our age and after we found out her name was Charlotte and not something ridiculous, we invited her to eat lunch with us. She had a lunchbox with a very strange looking red bus-thing on it, but she told us those were very normal in the city where she used to live. When she opened her lunchbox she had a water bottle with lemon wedges and a sandwich that she told us was called “watercress,” which sounds terribly wet for a sandwich, and an apple. The rest of us all bring things like chocolate milk and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, except for Suzanne whose mother is on the Atkins diet, so she never brings a sandwich but just things like ham and cheese rolled up in lettuce or peanut butter and jelly in a bowl without the bread which I think is unfortunate, and Juliet has to bring chocolate soy milk since she’s lactose intolerant but we’re used to that. 

We decided it was high time (Charlotte told us about "high time" and I like the way it sounds so I’ve started using it in sentences) to find out what kind of unfortunate or crazy place Uk is, so we just came out and asked her. Suzanne, who is usually the bravest of us all said, “So where is Uk anyway?” and Charlotte just looked at her like she wasn’t speaking English. Charlotte herself has an accent that I thought sounded like the narrator on Winnie the Pooh, but I didn’t want to say anything about it. She probably couldn’t help it. 

Charlotte asked Suzanne whatever did she mean by Uk and that she herself had never heard of such a curious place, and that was the first time I’ve ever heard of a place being curious. I was pretty sure that only people could be curious about things, but maybe  in a place like Uk even things can be curious. Then Charlotte said that surely we weren’t all so dull as to think that the letters “UK” were meant to be sounded out, and none of us knew what she meant by people being dull so we just looked at her and waited for her to go on. She laughed at us all behind her handkerchief (which we had no idea that people outside of stories actually use) for a good two minutes before deciding it was high time to explain to all of us jolly dull children that “UK” stands for the United Kingdom, just like US stands for the United States, and “UK” has never before been pronounced as Uk unless it’s by other dull American children in other barbaric places in the country. 

By this point we’d all figured that dull probably meant dumb and none of us were very happy about being called dumb by a girl who sounded like she was from the Hundred Acre Wood and drank water with pieces of lemon floating in it and was happy about eating a water sandwich. Juliet told her she might as well just shut up and stop laughing about us, and Margo mentioned that the UK, wherever it was, was obviously not a very well-known place so she could hardly blame us for not knowing where on earth it was, and I said that a place called the United Kingdom sounded almost as made up as Uk, which I admitted to her did sound kind of silly even to us. 

Well, that all seemed like the wrong things to say because Charlotte just kept laughing at us and nearly spilled her fancy lemon water and and choked on her watercress sandwich and told us that we’d all better jolly well stop talking before she fainted dead away from amusement. I have no idea where all of her jolly-ness comes from, but she “jolly well” wasn’t sharing it with us. Suzanne pulled her hair which got her attention and made her stop laughing and instead she started saying things like she couldn’t believe her father had moved her family to such a primitive place and that why on earth did children here ignore the existence of their mother country and that as soon as she could regain her composure she would give us a all a lesson in manners and geography because it was high time we knew something about life. Then she started to cry very quietly and dab her eyes with her handkerchief and say things like “bother” because she had promised her mother she would be a model of English propriety at school today and here she had gone and jolly well fudged the whole thing. 

I noticed two things from what she said while she was crying: the first was that she said the word English, which I knew had to do with England, and the second was that I had no idea what ‘propriety’ meant and would have to remember to look it up in the dictionary. So I asked her if she was English and said of course she was and that was a jolly dull question to ask considering that she had just gone through the whole ordeal of telling us that she was from the UK, and that naturally England was part of the UK and didn’t all of us know anything about our heritage? Caroline said that we talk about England every year right before the Thanksgiving play at school, and that duh, we all know that the pilgrims came from England and then Malorie asked her why she didn’t just say she was from England in the first place instead of making such a big deal and crying because nobody had ever heard of the UK. Juliet asked her if all people from the UK sound like Charlotte does and Charlotte was about to start laughing and calling us dull again, but then Suzanne pulled her hair which didn’t make her cry this time but did make her shut up about none of us knowing much about England outside of the pilgrims. 

The rest of the day was pretty exceptional after Charlotte just accepted the fact that none of us knew much about our mother country. She said she would teach us all about it if we’d promise not to make such a to-do about what she brings for her lunch, and that if we’d like to broaden our palates she’d be happy to bring us all watercress sandwiches for lunch one day. But we were all jolly happy with our palates as they were, whatever she means by that, and decided we’d stick with our regular lunches, except for Suzanne who said that as long as Charlotte would promise to bring the watercress on bread, she would be very happy to trade her some lettuce roll-ups.