Twelve Small Chairs and the Graduation I Did Not Think We Would Reach

When my mother died she left me her house in Germiston, a face-brick place with a big yard and a lemon tree that drops more than anyone could ever use. My brother wanted to sell it and split the money. I understood him, he has his own family and his own needs, but I could not do it. I had spent my childhood in that yard. So I bought out his share with money I did not really have, and then I sat in the empty house wondering what on earth I was going to do with a four bedroom home and a mortgage I had taken on out of sentiment.

I had worked with small children for years, in other people's crèches, always for a wage that did not match the work. People in my neighbourhood were forever asking me if I knew somewhere good and affordable to leave their little ones while they worked. The answer, usually, was no, not really, not that they could afford. One morning, standing in my mother's empty lounge with the light coming through the burglar bars, the two problems met each other in my head and became a single idea. I would open a nursery school. Here. In her house.

Starting with almost nothing

I had enthusiasm, a teaching qualification, and almost no capital, because every cent had gone into buying my brother out. The registration and the safety requirements were a mountain I will not bore you with. But the thing that surprised me, the thing nobody warns you about, was how much of running a place for small children comes down to furniture, and how quickly furniture can swallow money you do not have.

Children need somewhere to sit. It sounds obvious. But a chair for a three year old is not a small version of an adult chair you can pick up anywhere, and I had a lounge, a dining room, and two bedrooms to fill with seating for children who would climb on it, stand on it, tip it over, spill juice on it, and occasionally be sick on it. I priced wooden chairs made for crèches and nearly cried. For the number I needed, it was more than the first three months of fees I could realistically collect.

I was telling this to a woman at church, half complaining, and she looked at me as if I was being slow and said, why not just get them a proper plastic chair, the little moulded ones, they last forever and you can wipe them clean. I had been so fixed on the idea of a Serious School with Serious Wooden Furniture that I had skipped over the obvious. Plastic. Light enough for a small child to carry, tough enough to survive being thrown, cheap enough that I could actually afford the number I needed, and washable, which when you are dealing with a room full of toddlers is not a luxury but a survival strategy.

The chairs that actually worked

I found a company that did plastic chairs for sale in child sizes and in colours, and I ordered twelve of them in the brightest primary colours they had, because small children are drawn to bright things and because my mother's house was beige throughout and needed waking up. When they arrived I sat on one myself, the way you do, and it held my full grown weight without so much as a creak, which told me everything I needed to know about whether they would survive the children.

They were a revelation. The little ones could pick up their own chairs and carry them to the mat for story time, which meant they were learning independence while they thought they were just moving furniture. When one got dirty, and they all got dirty, I wiped it down in seconds and it was ready again. When the numbers grew, as they did faster than I expected, I simply ordered more to match. Four years on, those first twelve chairs are still in daily use. Not one has broken. I have replaced upholstered things, torn mats, a cupboard that gave up, but the chairs simply go on, scratched and faithful.

I became, I will admit, slightly evangelical about them. When other women in the area talked about starting something similar I would tell them the same thing the woman at church told me, do not spend your rent on wooden furniture, get a good plastic chair and put the money you save into the children. The right chair is not where you prove your school is serious. The children and what you do with them is where you prove that.

The year we reached the graduation

The thing I did not let myself believe, in that first year of mortgage panic and registration paperwork, was that we would last long enough to have a graduation. The older children, the ones who were five and heading to proper school the next year, I wanted to send them off properly. A little ceremony, in caps I would make myself out of card, with their parents watching and photographs taken. In the townships and suburbs around us these graduations are a real event, a first milestone, and the families take them seriously.

But I could not have twenty parents and grandparents sitting on little plastic toddler chairs with their knees around their ears, and I did not own twenty adult chairs. For a few weeks I worried about this the way I worried about everything, quietly and at two in the morning.

Then I remembered how the children's chairs had solved a problem I thought needed money I did not have, and I went looking again. For the grown ups, for one special day a year, I wanted something that felt like an occasion, not a plastic garden chair borrowed from a neighbour. I found that the same world of moulded plastic included proper event seating, elegant Tiffany chairs in a clear crystal look that photograph beautifully and cost a fraction of hiring the real thing. I bought a modest set of them, enough for the parents, and I stored them flat in the garage for the rest of the year.

What the furniture taught me

That first graduation nearly undid me emotionally. Twelve little ones in paper caps, sitting on the bright plastic chairs they had carried themselves for a year, and their families behind them on the elegant clear chairs, in my mother's old lounge with the light coming through the burglar bars she had chosen. My mother never knew the house became a school. I like to think she would have approved of a place full of children's noise far more than a sold house and a split cheque.

I have thought a lot about why the furniture looms so large in my memory of starting the school, when the real work was all the teaching and the loving and the endless administration. I think it is because the chairs were where I first learned the central lesson of running something with no money. You do not need the expensive version of a thing to do the thing properly. You need the version that works, that lasts, that frees up your money for what actually matters. The children do not remember whether their chairs were wood or plastic. They remember whether someone was kind to them, whether the days had shape, whether they felt safe enough to learn.

The twelve bright chairs are still here. A new group of small hands carries them to the mat every morning. And the clear chairs come out of the garage once a year, for the one day when the families gather and I hand out paper caps and try not to cry, in my mother's lounge, which turned out to have one more purpose in it after all.