Sophia Waugh: School Days Ukrainians under siege – in our schools

Just before I got married, my soon-to-bemother-in-law gave her son some advice. ‘Whatever you do, always be kind to her,’ she said.

He reported this to me with tears of laughter. ‘Isn’t that the oddest thing you’ve ever heard?’ he asked.

It wasn’t, really. It was rather wise and very touching. It was his laughter at the very idea that stayed with me.

I was reminded of this on talking to the deputy head at a local school this week. I have some Ukrainians living with me and the older of the two children, a girl, had come to me with a problem.

It transpired that at the secondary school there was a culture of bullying the Ukrainian children. The locals (for want of a better word) were lying in wait for the Ukrainians and pretending to shoot them. They tripped them up, pushed them over, jeered at them and told them that the best Christmas present they could have would be all the Ukrainians’ being sent home. This had been going on for months.

Our little town has been fantastically hospitable to the refugees – we have taken in so many that we were given a royal visit of congratulation and encouragement – so it seemed not only shocking but rather odd. How could so many parents be welcoming and so many children be foul?

The adult among my Ukrainian guests speaks very little English. So all conversations, however important, have to be with the daughter and I feel very much in loco parentis.

I rang the school and asked to speak to the person in charge of the welfare of the refugees. I left three messages, with no response, until I used the magic word ‘safeguarding’.

The deputy head was particularly horrified that the pupils had not gone to her because they felt it would make matters worse, and assured me that the school was full of ‘nice kids’.

Well, of course it is, but I was not concerned with the ‘nice kids’. I was interested in the brutes terrorising children who had already seen more

‘To tell the truth, all along I thought Noah was just one of those climatechange nuts’ horror than (please God) they ever will in a lifetime.

My own Ukrainian family comes from Bucha, and on arrival here they looked with wonder at the quietness of this town.

Finally, the teacher promised an assembly on ‘kindness’. I have watched so many children yawn their way through assemblies on kindness that I know how very little effect they have.

The problem is that everything has to be sugar-coated. Why can’t we sometimes go in at the dirty end and point out evil, rather than maundering on soppily about the good?

Ideally, I would give an assembly for all the children except the Ukrainians. I would show footage of bombed blocks of flats and exhausted soldiers. I would ask them to imagine the fear that you would never see your father or your home again.

I would shock them and I would shake them. I would not ask them to be kind. I would educate them.

I am convinced kindness would follow. Because, yes, most of these ‘kids’ are ‘nice’. They just need to be reminded that kindness does not always begin and end at home. It needs to be extended to the stranger every bit as much as to the friend.

Quite Interesting Things about … books

A single human being’s DNA contains as much information as 50 novels.

Bill Gates reads 50 books a year.

Ten per cent of Britons do not own a single book. Among 18-24-year-olds, it’s 20 per cent.

Google has a database of 25 million books that nobody is allowed to read.

Books banned in Texas prisons include Freakonomics, The Color Purple and

Monty Python’s Big Red Book, whereas Mein Kampf is on the approved list. About 4,000 books are written about the Holocaust each year.

The Iliad covers only four or ve days of the ten years of the Trojan War.

The Republic was Plato’s anti-democratic manifesto. The Domesday Book is full of people complaining.

In 2016, 181 books published in Britain had the word F*** in the title: three times as many as in 2015.

In 2018, a librarian in Hong Kong was arrested for fraudulently reporting people’s library cards as lost, so they have would have to return books she wanted to read.

The word ‘she’ appears in The Hobbit only once.

When David Bowie was on tour, he took a mobile library of 1,500 books. Among his ‘100 most influential’ was The Beano.

The world’s rst physics textbook, written by Galileo and published in 1638, was sold in Paris in 2017 for €727,919.

Colonel Gadda ’s favourite book was The Outsider by Colin Wilson.

Many medieval texts come down to us only in fragments, with the pages used as stu ing for the leather covers of later books.

JOHN LLOYD

222 QI Answers to Your Quite Ingenious Questions is out now

For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia

My late cousin once looked up at her large and impressive Scottish baronial stronghold – with its turrets, spiral stone staircase, huge roof and windswept hall – and sighed, ‘There are times when I wish I lived in a cell.’

The maintenance of such a house is a permanent headache. Like many people at some point in their lives, I think she was longing for the freedom that is the consequence of the shedding of possessions. She was the most upright woman imaginable, but not religious. So I was surprised that she yearned for a cell. She must have been very hardpressed at the time.

Cells vary. Mine has a view of beech trees surrounding a wide, open field where hares hold boxing matches and dance. It is lovely and always a pleasure to get back to.

Not every cell is as delightful, but even the most rudimentary and least attractive is, for a Carmelite, ‘an enclosure within an enclosure, where, above all she may be alone with God’.

A monastic cell is supposed to be