All the children fell ill with scarlet fever except me, so nobody offered me the little treats they brought to the sick children.
But the sick children could hardly eat any of them anyway. They drank only a little tea. Nobody wanted a bread roll, nobody wanted an orange, nothing that was brought to help them regain their strength.
They would put all those things aside and forget about them, instead of giving them to me, the healthy one. I was healthy, so apparently I didn’t need anything.
One evening I took a whole piece of bread and hid it under my pillow, determined not to get up the following morning. I was going to say that I too had scarlet fever and was ill.
I ate as much bread as I could, enough to satisfy my hunger, and then I said: “I can’t eat lunch, I can’t eat breakfast.”
“What could you have, then?”
“I don’t want tea. Cold water.”
They touched my forehead and saw that I had no fever. They said: “No rash, no temperature — it must be something else. Don’t take her to the doctor.”
That evening my father came home.
“So you’re ill too! How did you get sick? What am I going to do now? Who is going to work?”
Then he asked: “What would you like me to bring you?”
I said: “I want cold water from the Jacenovo Spring.”
The water from that spring was colder than the water from the other spring, which was about three hundred metres closer to our house.2
It was already late in the evening and it was winter. He took a lantern and went to the spring. He brought me the water and I drank and drank and drank, although I could hardly force myself to swallow it. The water kept running down my neck because I was actually hungry.
Somehow I got through the night, and the next morning I got up and went to school as usual.
And I told them: “There, I got better without any of your treats — only with cold water from the Jacenovo Spring! That shows what you are like!”
And that really was true, because that was how people behaved.
If a child was truly ill, and everyone could see that the child was ill, then they recognised it and paid attention.
But if it was something passing: “No, just let the child rest.”
Then you would still get up at five the next morning to do whatever work had been assigned to you before going to school at nine.
Most often it meant looking after livestock: sheep for younger children, cows for the older ones.
What kind of life was that for a child who, from the very beginning, took life far too seriously and had to earn her own bread? Who had to do her share of the work before she could go to school?
That was what I kept thinking about all the time.