Artistic Discoveries in European Schoolyards

It happened when I was 9 years old...

MICHAELA ZAKUTANSKA Playwright, Slovakia

It happened when I was 9 years old. I was attending the little village school in the village, where I grew up.
This particular week I was on classroom duty. This means I had to clean the blackboard, to water the flowers, to check if the desks in the classroom were in a straight line, etc. As a child I was very responsible and I stayed after the last class in school and did my duty. When I finished, maybe after one hour, I wanted to go home. But I found out, there was nobody else in school and that the school was locked.
I was thinking about all the worst consequences of this and I started to cry. I’ll have to stay in school all night long and sleep on the bench, my parents will think I’d been killed. Then I tried to open all the doors in the first floor, because I wanted to jump out the window. But they were all locked. And the windows in the big hall were barred.
I decided that even if I had to die I would have to see boy toilets first. So I went to the toilets. And there was a small window on the top of the wall. I climbed the radiator and got to the window. First of all I threw away my school bag. The window was two times higher than I was at that time. I jumped out of the window and twisted my ankle, but I was so happy and I ran home. Next day in school, nobody wanted to believe me when I told them what had happened.