She scrambled up, almost knocking Major McAndrew over; he moved fussily away.
“I smelt burning,” he said. “You are dressed very early. But old men are allowed to get up and wander round their houses in the dawn.
“I always get up early. I’ve been writing a diary, but now I decided I ought to burn it. It was all about . . .”
She nodded her head towards the loch, grey on a grey day, neither storm nor sun. It, too, was betraying nothing.
“May I see?” he said.
She clicked the hoops together and passed him the folder; he sat on the bed and began to read. After a couple of lines he looked up and said, “Nice writing—I don’t need my glasses.” Then he read on, page after page, slowly, as though he were studying a book in a language he knew fairly well but hadn’t read for some time. He never changed his position, never said anything at all. At first Emma stood by the fireplace, moving from foot to foot and wondering what he was thinking. Later she sat down on the stool by her dressing-table, got out her mending-kit and sewed a patch on to the tear in her spare jeans which she’d ripped yesterday, sailing with Finn and Roddy. She sewed slowly and badly, but she’d almost finished when she heard him put the folder down.
“You mustn’t burn that,” he said.
“I thought I ought to. Your father did.”
“Old people aren’t always right. When Andy accused you of nearly drowning Poop, you didn’t say anything about my children nearly killing you two or three times.”
“It didn’t matter.”
“Um. Roddy seems to have behaved quite well in the cave.”
“He wouldn’t give up. He must have been just as tired and frightened as I was, but he wouldn’t be beaten.”
“But it was you who had to go back with Andy.”
“That’s not Roddy’s fault! He’s just like that!”
“So am I. I have to get air hostesses to help me down the steps from aeroplanes. They think it’s because they’re beautiful, but in fact it’s because I’m frightened.”
He picked up the diary again and began to leaf back and forth through it as though he were looking for the best bits to re-read. Emma stood there for a while, hoping.
“Do you mean I can take it back to school?” she said at last.
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think you can do that. But I’ll put it in the safe with the skull.”
He looked at her, then suddenly put his hand as if he were trying to remove the spectacles he hadn’t been using.
“That’s not good enough?” he asked.
Emma explained about Sarah Davidson and the School Prize. Major McAndrew got up while she was talking and looked out of the window. When she finished he laughed.
“There’s never enough to do in the mornings,” he said. “My beetles are too boring, even to me, for me to work on them more than a few hours a day. We’ll spend these early hours together, faking the record.”
“Oh,” said Emma. “Is that fair? I mean . . . I mean one of the things about my diary when we were inventing a creature was that . . . that I’d got the truth written down. Even if no one except a few teachers ever read it.”
“My dear Cousin Emma . . . I apologise—I must learn to call you Emma, and I wonder if you’re right about the effect of calling Poop Poop—where was I? Yes, you’ve got to fake a diary, or you will go back to school without one. I do not propose that it should contain any lies. I’ve had an odd life, and wasted most of it, but I’ve seen more places and people than twenty worthier citizens. For instance, I take it that these teachers of yours are interested in poetry. Would the name T. S. Eliot impress them?”
“Oh, yes!”
“I knew Tom Eliot pretty well at one time. Not only can I tell you about jaunts and jollities with him, but I’ve got a manuscript of his somewhere, an early draft of The Coming of the Magi, with lines in it that aren’t in the printed version. We could take a photostat of that and stick it in—do you think that might score a few marks?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Then there’s nature—flora and fauna. I’ve always been too lazy to produce a proper catalogue of the plants in this valley, but some of them are pretty rare, and I think I can definitely disprove all the current theories about the re-vegetation of Western Scotland after the Ices Ages. I ought to have written it up into a paper years ago, but now you can do it instead.”
“Are you sure,” said Emma, “that your plants don’t prove that the valley was never properly iced over, because of the hot springs?”
“Ah,” he said. “Yes, there’s that. What a mercy I never wrote that paper. Never mind, we’ve plenty of fauna which are almost as interesting. I’ll try and show you a golden eagle.”
“Can we start now?”
“I don’t see why not—there’s forty minutes till breakfast. Let’s start with the day Goering tried to hire me to assassinate Churchill. We’ll invent a picnic, during which I hold all hearers enthralled with this absurd misunderstanding; that means that on the way up we’ll have been able to watch a pine-marten—there aren’t many of them left now. Don’t look at me like that, Cous—like that, Emma. I’ll show you a pine-marten this evening, to make it true. Are you ready? Right. ‘Today we went up Ben Goig for a picnic. The hills were all brown, with mauve shadows in the clefts and folds . . .’”
“I can put in those bits,” said Emma rather stiffly.
“Please,” she added.
About the Author
Peter Dickinson OBE is the author of more than fifty books, including many books for children and young adults such as Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creatures, Kin, Eva, The Dancing Bear, andThe Seventh Raven. He is a two-time winner of both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award and winner of the Guardian and Horn Book Awards. He spent seventeen years working at the magazine Punch. He lives in England and is married to the novelist Robin McKinley. Find out more at peterdickinson.com.
Big Mouth House publishes books for readers of all ages and is an imprint of Small Beer Press
Peter Dickinson, Earth and Air: Tales of Elemental Creature
“Mining folklore for ideas is routine in modern fantasy, but not many can add the surprising twists and novel logic that Peter Dickinson does. These are beautiful stories, deft, satisfying, unexpected. They deserve to become classics of the genre.”—Tom Shippey, Wall Street Journal, Best Fiction of 2012
Peter Dickinson, The Seventh Raven
Phoenix Award Winner from the Children’s Literature Association
“This steady, sober hostage story is not quite a thriller . . . but anyone . . . can be engaged by the argument and enveloped in Dickinson’s carefully textured citadel.”—Kirkus Reviews
Joan Aiken, The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories
Now available in paperback | A Junior Library Guild Pick | Smithsonian Magazine’s Notable Book
“A spectacularly good treasury in the British tradition of practical magic. . . . You can’t do better than to get your fantasy-reading child hooked on Aiken’s playful, witty magic.”
—Parent Central.ca, The Toronto Star
Holly Black, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories
A Junior Library Guild Pick | Audiobook Available From Brilliance
“Sly humor, vivid characters, each word perfectly chosen: These stories deserve reading again and again.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Lydia Millet, The Fires Beneath the Sea: a novel
A Junior Library Guild Pick | Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011
Abc Best Books for Children
“An intriguing mix of everyday activities and the otherworldly, The Fires Beneath the Sea pulls readers in. . . . A well-done beginning, with some riveting moments and frightening escapes, to what should prove to be a popular series.”
—School Library Journal
Lydia Millet, The Shimmers in the Night: a novel
A Junior Library Guild Pick
“Nicely serious eco-fantas
y. . . .”—Kirkus Reviews
Delia Sherman, The Freedom Maze: a novel
Norton, Prometheus, & Mythopoeic Award Winner | Kirkus Reviews Best of 2011 | Ala Best Fiction For Young Adults | Audiobook Available From Listening Library | Paperback Available From Candlewick
“Ambitious . . . vividly evokes two historical settings, turning a glaring light
on the uncomfortable attitudes and practices of earlier eras.”
—Jonathan Hunt, The Horn Book
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Emma Tupper's Diary Page 19
