Seebühl on Lake Bühl · Summer camps are like beehives · A bus bringing twenty new girls · Ringlets and braids · May one child bite off another child’s nose? · The King of England and his astrological twin · How do you get laughter lines?
Do you know Seebühl? The mountain village of Seebühl on Lake Bühl? No? Are you sure you don’t? How strange – whoever you ask, no one knows Seebühl! Perhaps Seebühl on Lake Bühl is the kind of place known only to the people youdon’t ask? I wouldn’t be surprised. These things happen.
Well, if you don’t know Seebühl on Lake Bühl, then you won’t know the summer camp in Seebühl on Lake Bühl either, the well-known camp for little girls. That’s a pity, but never mind. Summer camps are as like each other as two large loaves or two dog violets; when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. And if you walk past any of them, you might think it was a gigantic beehive. Those summer camps buzz with laughter, shrieking, whispering and giggling. They really are beehives full of happiness and merriment, and however many there are, there can never be enough of them.
In the evening, to be sure, the grey dwarf Homesickness sometimes sits on the beds in the dormitory, takes his grey arithmetic book and his grey pencil out of his bag, and with an earnest expression on his face he counts the tears of the children all around him, the tears that have been shed and the tears that haven’t.
But by morning, you may have noticed, he has always left. Then there’s a clattering of cups of milk and a chattering of little mouths, each trying to talk louder than the next child. Then hordes of little girls run back into the cool, bottle-green lake to bathe, splashing, shouting, screeching with delight, crowing and swimming, or at least trying to look as if they are swimming.
It’s just like that in Seebühl on Lake Bühl, where the story that I am going to tell you begins. It is a rather complicated story, and you will have to concentrate hard if you’re to understand everything properly, exactly as it happened. At the beginning, however, everything is still quite easy. It doesn’t get complicated until the later chapters. Complicated and rather exciting.
So for the time being, all the girls are bathing in the lake. Playing more wildly than anyone else, as usual, is a little girl aged nine with her hair tumbling down her back in ringlets. Her name is Luise, Luise Palfy, and she comes from Vienna in Austria.
Then the sound of a gong booms out from the house. The gong is struck again, and then a third time. Those of the children and the supervisors who are still bathing climb out on to the shore of the lake.
‘The gong means everyone has to come in!’ calls Miss Ulrike. ‘Even Luise!’
‘Just coming!’ shouts Luise. ‘An old man like me isn’t an express train.’ But then she comes out of the water as well.
Miss Ulrike drives her cackling flock into the hen-house – sorry, I mean into the dining room. It will be lunchtime at twelve noon on the dot. And then the girls will be looking forward to the afternoon, full of curiosity. Why the curiosity, you may ask?
Because twenty new girls are expected in the afternoon. Twenty little girls from southern Germany. Will there be any stuck-up children among them? A couple of chatterboxes? Perhaps some dignified old ladies of thirteen or even fourteen? Will the
