he headmaster was always asking parents to send their children to school at Tomoe in their worst clothes. He wanted them to wear their worst clothes so that it wouldn't matter if they got muddy and torn. He thought it a shame for children to worry about being scolded if their clothes got dirty or to hesitate joining in some game because their clothes might get torn. There were elementary schools near Tomoe where the girls were dressed in sailor-suit uniforms and the boys wore high-collared jackets with shorts. The Tomoe children came to school in their ordinary clothes, and they had their teachers' permission to play to their hearts' content without giving their clothes a thought. Trousers in those days weren't made of anything durable like today's jeans, so all the boys had patches on their trousers and the girls wore skirts or dresses made of the strongest material available.

Totto-chan's favorite pastime was crawling under the fences of other people's gardens and vacant lots, so it suited her very well not to have to think about her clothes. There were a lot of barbed-wire fences in those days, and some of them had wire right down to ground level. In order to get under one like that you had to burrow like a dog. No matter how careful she was, Totto-chan would always manage to catch her dress on the barbs and tear it. Once, when she had on an old muslin dress that was really quite threadbare, the whole thing got shredded from top to bottom. Although it was old, she knew Mother was very fond of that dress, so Totto-chan racked her brains about what to say. She hadn't the heart to tell Mother she had torn it on barbed wire. She thought it would be better to think up a lie that would make it sound as if she couldn't help tearing it. She finally hit on the following story.

"As I was walking along the road," she lied, on arriving home, "a lot of children I didn't know threw knives at my back. That's why my dress got torn like this." But as she spoke she wondered how to answer further questions her mother might ask.

Thankfully, all her mother said was, "It must have been awful!"

Totto-chan heaved a sigh of relief. Mother obviously realized that under chose circumstances she couldn't help getting Mother's favorite dress torn.

Naturally, Mother didn't believe her story about the knives. Knives thrown at her back would have injured her as well as tearing her dress, and Totto-chan didn't seem at all frightened by the incident. Mother realized at once it was a fabrication. However, if was unusual for Totto-chan to go to such lengths to make up an excuse. She realized Totto-chan must have felt badly about the dress and that pleased her. But there was something Mother had wanted to know for some rime, and this seemed a good opportunity to find out.

“I can see how your dresses can pet torn by knives and things like that," said Mother, "but how do you manage to tear your panties too, day after day!"

Mother could never understand how Totto-chan's lace-trimmed panties got torn every day around the rear. She could see how panties could get muddy and worn thin by going down slides or falling on one's bottom, but how did they get torn to shreds?

Totto-chan thought about it for a while, then said, "You see, when you burrow under a fence you can't help catching your skirt as you go through, and your panties when you back out, and you have to do an 'Excuse me, may I come in!' and a 'Well, goodbye then from one end of the fence to the other, so your panties and things are bound to tear.”

Mother didn't really understand, but it sounded rather amusing.

"Is it fun?" she asked.

"Why don't you try it?" said Totto-chan, astonished at the question. "It's great fun and you'll tear your panties, too!"

The game that Totto-chan liked so much and found so thrilling went like this.

First you had to find a large vacant lot surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. "Excuse me, may I come in?" consisted of lifting up the spiked wire, digging a hole, and crawling under. Once inside you lifted up a neighboring bit of barbed wire and dug another hole, this time backing out saying, "Well, goodbye then." It became quite clear to Mother how Totto-chan's skirt got drawn up as she backed out causing her panties to catch on the barbed wire. The process would be repeated over and over again—burrowing under the wire with an "Excuse me, may I come in?" and then backing our through a fresh hole with a "Well, goodbye then," tearing skirt and panties every time. Totto-chan happily zigzagged back and forth burrowing under the barbed-wire fence from one end to the other. No wonder her panties got torn.

To think that a game like that, which would only tire a grown-up and not be amusing at all, could be such fun to a child! Watching Totto-chan, with dirt in her hair and fingernails and even in her ears, Mother couldn't help feeling a little envious. And she couldn't help admiring the headmaster. His suggestion that the children wear clothes they could get as dirty as they liked was just another example of how well he understood them.