Sophie and the Code Word

It started at the kitchen table on a Sunday, with toast crumbs everywhere and Sophie swinging her legs under her chair.

"We need a code word," said Mum. "A word that only you, me and Dad know. If I ever have to send someone else to collect you, they will know the word. If they don't know the word, they were not sent by me."

"Any word?" said Sophie.

"Any word. Make it a silly one. Silly words are easier to remember and harder to guess."

Sophie thought about it for exactly four seconds. "Pancake Horse," she said.

Dad laughed so hard he had to put his mug down. And that was that. Pancake Horse. Three people in the whole world knew it.

On Thursday it rained. Sophie waited under the school porch with her swimming bag, watching for Mum's blue coat in the crowd of umbrellas.

A woman came up to the railings. She was holding car keys and looking a bit rushed.

"Are you Sophie?" she said. "Your mum asked me to pick you up today. She's running late. Come on, I'm parked just round the corner."

Sophie felt confused, which is a different feeling from scared. It sounded real. The woman knew her name. She looked like someone's mum. She was even a bit annoyed about the rain, the way real people are.

And underneath all of that, quiet as a tap on the shoulder, was the wobbly feeling.

Sophie did not move away from the railings. She did not go round the corner. She stayed exactly where the teachers could see her, and she asked the question she had practised.

"What's the code word?"

The woman blinked. "The what, love?"

"My mum and me have a code word," said Sophie. "If she sent you, you'd know it."

"I don't know about any code word," said the woman. "Look, I'm just —"

But Sophie was already walking. Backwards two steps, then a turn, straight in through the double doors to Mrs Dutta, her teacher, who was holding the register.

"There's a lady at the gate who says my mum sent her," said Sophie, "and she doesn't know our code word."

Mrs Dutta went out with her umbrella and talked to the woman for a little while. Then Mum arrived, eight minutes late, with her hair stuck to her forehead.

It turned out the woman had muddled up two families. She had been asked to collect a different child, from a different class, whose name sounded a bit like Sophie's. She was embarrassed. She said sorry about four times.

"So she wasn't a bad person," said Sophie in the car, watching the wipers.

"She wasn't," said Mum. "And you still did it perfectly. That's the whole point of a code word — you don't have to work out whether someone is good or bad. You only have to find out one thing: do they know the word."

Sophie thought about that all the way home. It was a relief, actually. Working out whether a grown-up was telling the truth had always seemed like a very big job for someone who was seven.

Knowing one silly word about a pancake and a horse was a much smaller job.

"Can we change it every year?" she asked, as they pulled into the drive.

"Every birthday," said Mum. "You choose."