The Lion I Drew in Year Four Finally Looked Back at Me

The Drawing in the Biscuit Tin

I teach Year Four at a small Jewish girls' school in north Manchester, and every September I set the same assignment. Each girl draws the place she most wants to see before she grows up. They bring in rainforests, the Kotel, Disneyland, their grandmother's flat in Antwerp. I pin them along the back wall and leave them there until the summer.

Last year a girl called Tova handed me a lion. It was orange and enormous and slightly cross-eyed, standing in grass that she had coloured so hard the paper had gone shiny. She told me, very seriously, that she was going to see one when she was big.

I said that was wonderful. Then I went home, took a biscuit tin down from the top of my wardrobe, and found my own lion. Year Four, 1999. Orange, enormous, standing in shiny grass. I had written "MRS GOLD WILL TAKE ME" along the bottom, because my teacher at the time was called Mrs Gold and I had assumed teachers could do anything.

I was thirty-four years old, sitting on my bedroom floor in my coat, and I had never been further than Jerusalem and a cousin's wedding in New York.

All the Reasons I Had Collected

I want to be honest about why it took so long, because I do not think I was unusual.

I keep Shabbat. I keep kosher, properly, not the "I will have the fish" kind of kosher. Every time the idea of Africa had come up over the years, my mind went straight to the list. What would I eat for ten days? Where would I be on Friday night? Would I be the awkward woman in the jeep asking whether the sandwich had been made on a separate board? Would I spend the whole holiday living on crackers and tinned tuna I had packed in my suitcase, apologising to strangers?

There was also the fact that I am a single woman of a certain age in a community where most of my friends travel as families. I did not fancy being the lone adult at someone else's family holiday, cutting up a stranger's child's schnitzel.

So the lion went back in the tin, year after year, and I told myself that safaris were for other kinds of people. People with fewer rules.

What Tova's Mother Said at Parents' Evening

At parents' evening in November, Tova's mother stopped by the back wall to look at the lion. I told her, half laughing, that I had drawn the same picture at the same age and never gone.

She looked at me as if I had said I had never tried chocolate. Her husband's brother, it turned out, had gone two years before with a group, and had come home talking about nothing else for a month. She said the whole thing had been arranged as a Kosher Safari, with the meals and Shabbat already thought about by somebody else, so he had not had to think about it once. "He said the hardest part was getting up at five," she told me. "He's not a morning person."

I nodded politely and changed the subject to Tova's spelling. But that night I sat at my kitchen table with my laptop and typed in the words I had been too embarrassed to type for twenty-five years.

The Spreadsheet I Made Instead of Booking

I am a teacher. I did not book anything. I made a spreadsheet.

I had columns for dates that fell inside the school holidays, for flights from Manchester, for how many Shabbatot each option would include, for what I would need to bring. I emailed two different people with long lists of questions about kashrut supervision and what happened to the food in the bush, and about whether there would be a minyan, which I did not strictly need but liked the idea of. I read reviews late into the night. I went back and forth about whether a group would feel like a school trip in reverse.

What surprised me most was how ordinary the answers were. Nobody treated my questions as strange. People who had been on a Kosher Tour wrote about the food the way you would write about any meal, which was a relief in itself. Somebody mentioned the challah. Somebody mentioned a cholent on a Shabbat morning in the middle of nowhere and said it was the best they had eaten outside their own mother's kitchen. Nobody wrote about crackers.

I booked in February, for the summer holidays, and then did not tell anyone at school for three weeks in case I lost my nerve and had to un-tell them.

Five in the Morning

Tova's uncle was right about the mornings.

The first day, someone knocked on the door of my tent while it was still completely dark, and I lay there for a moment with no idea where I was. Then I heard something I had never heard in my life, a long low sound that seemed to come up through the ground rather than through the air. I found out at breakfast that it was a lion calling, a long way off. I had been on the continent for less than a day and I had already heard one.

We davened in a small huddle by the vehicles, the men a little apart, while the sky went from black to grey to a kind of pale orange I have never seen over Manchester. Then there was coffee and rusks, and then we drove.

I had expected to feel like a tourist. I did not expect to feel so small. The grass went on and on, and there were giraffes standing in it as if they had been placed there by a set designer who had lost all sense of proportion. The woman beside me, a grandmother from Melbourne travelling with her son, cried quietly at the first elephant. I pretended not to notice, and then I cried at the second one.

The Lion

It happened on the fourth day, in the late afternoon, when everybody was a bit sleepy and sunburnt.

Our guide stopped the vehicle and turned off the engine and pointed, without saying anything, at a patch of grass that looked exactly like every other patch of grass. I could not see it. Nobody could see it. And then the grass moved, and a male lion lifted his head and looked straight at the vehicle with an expression of complete boredom.

He was not orange. That was the first thing I thought, absurdly. He was a dusty, faded gold, the colour of old straw, and his mane was darker and scruffier than in any picture. He yawned, and I saw his teeth, and the whole vehicle went silent.

I did not take a single good photograph. My hands were shaking too much. What I have instead is the memory of him looking at us, and then looking away, as if we were not worth the effort, and lying back down in the grass.

I thought about a cross-eyed crayon lion in a biscuit tin, and about Mrs Gold, who had not taken me, and about the fact that I had finally taken myself.

Shabbat Under a Thorn Tree

People ask me about the animals, and I tell them. But what I talk about when I am honest is the Friday night.

We lit candles in the late afternoon with the sun sliding down behind a line of acacia trees. Someone had brought a small silver cup from home. The tables were laid with white cloths and there was challah, real challah, warm, and I stood with a group of people I had known for less than a week and sang the same songs I sing every Friday at home. There were people from London and Johannesburg and Toronto and Melbourne, and every family had a slightly different tune for Shalom Aleichem, and somehow we all ended up in the same one.

Then, in the dark, while we were eating, a hyena laughed somewhere beyond the fence. Everyone stopped, and then everyone laughed back.

I had spent twenty-five years assuming that my way of life and a place like this could not fit together. I sat there with soup in front of me and stars I could not name above me and realised that I had been the only thing standing in the way.

Back on the Back Wall

I came home brown and tired with a suitcase full of red dust that I am still finding in the seams of my clothes.

In September, on the first day of term, I took my old drawing out of the biscuit tin and pinned it on the back wall next to the new class's pictures. The girls wanted to know whose it was. I told them it was mine, from when I was their age, and that it had taken me a very long time.

"Did you go?" one of them asked.

I said yes. I told them about the lion who could not be bothered with us, and the hyena who laughed at dinner, and the challah under the thorn trees. They wanted to know whether I had been scared, and whether lions eat Jewish people, and whether I had brought them anything. I had brought them a photograph of a giraffe, blurry, because my hands had still been shaking.

Tova is in Year Five now. She stopped me in the corridor last week to tell me that her family was talking about going on one of those Kosher Safaris her uncle went on, maybe when she turns twelve. She said it the way children say things they believe completely.

I told her to make sure she gets up at five, and that the lion will probably not be orange, and that it does not matter at all.