Free Candied Crime by Dorte Hummelshoj Jakobsen

2 . Grammy
     
    During most of fourth form
Martha Gramstrup was our German teacher. Grammy was the thin and
nervy type, a walking skeleton with rattling necklaces and
bracelets. And her four weekly German lessons in fourth form hardly
made things better.
    Grammy´s hair had been coloured
red once in a distant past. She was the cardigan type, mousy grey
and crap brown in any odd combination.
    “Grammy is the incarnation of
German grammar,” Tommy claimed. Tommy had red freckles and jutting
ears so he had learned early that attack is the best form of
defence.
    I am sure Grammy was well
prepared, but more often than not she lost the thread. The boys
would draw talentless caricatures of her on the blackboard, they
sent letters to each other and peeled apples with their pocket
knives right in the middle of her efforts at stuffing an irregular
verb or two into our hormone-ridden brains. We girls were mostly
knitting or doodling; we were far too old to participate in the
boys´ pranks, but we couldn´t be bothered to learn German.
    “ Where were
we?” she would ask from her desk while the bracelets whisked around
the thin arms in a panic.
    “Wir sollen schrauben wollen,”
Joe suggested helpfully. Stifled titter from pupils who were still
awake.
    Her cheeks
turned pink, but usually she didn´t seem to realize that the whole
class was mocking her.
     
    ********************
     
    ”Martha´s husband is dead!” Lisa
whispered her message as loudly as she dared while she rushed into
the classroom three seconds ahead of Grammy.
    “Martha who?” Bewildered, we
stared at her until the penny dropped.
    A subdued Grammy, dressed in
black, came in with the worn satchel under her arm. She sat down on
the chair, and in an atmosphere of embarrassing silence we crammed
verbs and vocabulary for once.
    “I heard it was heart failure,”
Betty informed us during the break.
    “ Small
wonder, he must´ve been in his late forties.” Lisa´s parents used
to play bridge with Grammy and her husband so she made short thrift with Betty´s know-all
attitude.
    For a couple
of days we remembered to be kind to Grammy. Jane left red apples
for her on the desk, and our compassion lasted until the winter
holiday began a week later.
     
    *******************
     
    ”Grammy has had a haircut.
Look!”
    Yes, indeed. The wisps had
turned into a smart, reddish-brown hairdo.
    The
transformation did not take place overnight, but during
t he spring a new Grammy appeared. She put
on a few kilos and changed her style. One day she appeared in
jeans, and she gave Tommy a regular bollocking for sending a paper
plane through the classroom.
    We watched in amazement, not
quite certain how to react to our new German teacher. Unfortunately
the change lasted for three months only; then the police came into
our class and picked her up just when we were conjugating the verb
“sterben”.
     

3 . Mushrooms and Toadstools
     
    He bought it for an old song in
the cosy little antiquarian bookshop in Whitechapel. A gorgeous old
book about British mushrooms and toadstools. A few of the pages
looked the worse for wear, but it was still a really fine book.
Such a treasure for a few pounds.
    Back home in his study he let
his hands slide down glossy plates in four-colour print and was
fascinated by this new world of all the various fungi in their
natural habitats. He read about gill and boletes mushrooms. He
learned about mycelium, spawn, spores and fruiting bodies. The
foreign words appealed to him. Like the former owner he dwelled on
certain pages and learned the detailed descriptions by heart.
    Sometimes he even ventured into
the woods accompanied by his book. Tricholoma pardinum,
Chlorophyllum molybdites, Inocybe erubescens and Amanita
phalloides. Those marvellous names nearly made him drool.
    Now and then
his wife would interrupt his absorbing studies. “Arnold, dinner is
on the table.” “Arnold, your tea is getting cold.” But most of the
time Mildred left him to his book.