THE WILDEST OF THEM ALL - a Peaky Blinders fanfiction
IN WHICH all sorts of things happen, at home and outside, every day, but Darcy doesn't recall having ever thought that in the life she had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's a...
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Darcy was a terrible, dazzling girl from the moment she set foot in Birmingham.
But to her classmates, Darcy was only terrible. From first grade to fifth, she was—because of the principal and partly also because of Mrs Jones—the most hated child in the school and the neighborhood. At least twice a year the principal had the classes compete against one another, in order to distinguish the most brilliant students and consequently the most competent teachers. Mrs Jones liked this competition. Their teacher, in permanent conflict with her colleagues, with whom she sometimes seemed near coming to blows, used Darcy and Winnie as the blazing proof of how good she was, the best teacher in the neighborhood elementary school. So she would often bring the two girls to other classes, apart from the occasions arranged by the principal, to compete with the other children, girls and boys.
Usually, Winifred was sent on reconnaissance, to test the enemy's level of skill. In general, she won, but without overdoing it, without humiliating either teachers or students. She was a pretty little girl with blond curls, happy to show off but not aggressive, and she gave an impression of delicacy that was touching. If then she was the best at reciting poems, repeating the times tables, doing division and multiplication, at rattling off the Ben Nevis, Cairn Gorm, and Slieve Donard, the other teachers gave her a pat anyway, while the students felt how hard she had worked to memorize all those facts, and didn't hate her.
In Darcy's case it was different. Even by first grade, she was beyond any possible competition. In fact, the teacher said that with a little application, she would be able to take the test for second grade and, not yet seven, go into third. Later the gap increased. Darcy did really complicated calculations in her head, in her dictations there was not a single mistake, she spoke in a strong Italian accent, but, when necessary, came out with a bookish English, using words like "accustomed," "luxuriant," "willingly." So that, when the teacher sent her into the field to give the moods or tenses of verbs or solve math problems, hearts grew bitter.
Darcy was too much for anyone. Besides, she offered no openings to kindness. To recognize her virtuosity was for them, children to admit that they would never win and so there was no point in competing, and for the teachers to confess to themselves that they had been mediocre children. Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite. And there was nothing in her appearance that acted as a corrective. She was disheveled, dirty, on her knees and elbows she always shad scabs from cuts and scrapes that never had time to heal. Her large, bright eyes could become cracks behind which, before every brilliant response, there was a gaze that appeared not very childlike and perhaps not even human. Every one of her movements said that to harm her would be pointless because, whatever happened, she would find a way of doing worse to you.
The hatred was therefore tangible; Darcy was aware of it. Both girls and boys were irritated by her, but the boys more openly. For a hidden motive of her own, in fact, Mrs Jones especially enjoyed taking them to the classes where the girl students and women teachers could not be humiliated so much as the males. And the principal, too, for equally hidden motives, preferred competitions of this type. Later, Darcy thought that in the school they were betting money, maybe even a lot, on those meetings of theirs.
