by Jo Walton
However, I found a bookshop, and a little bit of wild ground. The shopping bit of Oswestry is basically two streets with a market cross at the top, with a market. The library, which is a typical Victorian library building, is just off there. Last time, that’s all I saw—the bus stops at the bottom of the hill and the library is essentially the top of it. But there’s a road that curves down to the left and I thought it might go around to where the bus stop is. It didn’t, and it got very residential and I thought I was going to have to go back, but then there was another curve and a pond, with mallards and white swans on it and trees around, and on the other side of the road, a little parade of shops, and one of them a bookshop.
I bought Samuel Delany’s Triton. I don’t know if my father has it already, I don’t care. It was 85p. The lady in the bookshop was really nice. She doesn’t read SF, but she tries to keep a good selection. It was nothing to a really good selection like Lears in Cardiff, but it wasn’t bad at all. I’m going to ask my father for pocket money so I can buy books. I’m also going to ask him to sign the library form. I’m pretty sure he will. I’m not so sure about Miss Carroll writing a letter.
Next door to the bookshop is a junk shop with three shelves of secondhand books, all of them old and battered. I bought Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle for 10p. I liked her Dalmatians books, especially The Starlight Barking, or “Klothes that Klank” as Mor used to call it. I didn’t know she’d written any historical fiction. I’ll keep it until I’m in the mood for a good siege.
That left me with 5p. There wasn’t anything there for 5p. The third little shop in the row is a bakery and cafe. I went in, because Sharon had asked me to buy buns. Now this is a thing people do. The way it works is that you buy the buns yourself, or get someone to buy them for you. Then you give the bag to the kitchen staff with instructions, and they get sent to the designated recipients after lunch on Sunday. The rule is you have to buy at least two, you can’t just buy for yourself. Popular girls have whole piles of different buns every week. Usually I don’t have any. Deirdre doesn’t have much money, and Sharon’s Jewish. But Sharon’s doing it this week, because she’s nice. I mean, it’s especially nice of Sharon to do it because she can’t even eat them. Jewish people have to have special food. Sharon’s special food seems much nicer than our school food. It comes on trays. I wonder if they’d give it to me if I told them I was Jewish? But what if I’m not Jewish enough and it killed me or made me sick? I should talk to Sharon about it before trying it. Anyway, Sharon wanted me to buy buns for me and Deirdre and Karen, who’s her other friend. So I bought buns, and they were 10p each or four for 35p, so I bought four, using my own fivepence. They were honey buns, and they were still warm from the oven and I walked over by the pond and ate one. It was absolutely delicious.
There’s a bench by the pond, and grass growing around it, and willows by the water, dipping down over it. The leaves on the trailing branches are turning yellow. I always think weeping willows is a good name for them, but then so is “sally willows.” Willows love water and alders hate water. There’s a road over Croggin Bog called Heol y Gwern, the Alder Road, because people planted alders along it to make a safe dry path. Neolithic people, they think. Certainly it was there before the Romans. It was a shock, reading the history of the valley. When I go back, I don’t know if I’ll be able to take it for granted the same way.
I sat on the bench by the willows and ate my honey bun and read Triton. There are some awful things in the world, it’s true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn’t all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I’d like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin.
I only just caught the bus back to school. I could see it at the bottom of the hill, and I wanted to run to catch it, I remember how it feels to run full pelt, and I wanted to do that, to lean down and just take great running strides. I almost did take one step like that, but when I put my weight on my leg wrong it feels like being stabbed. The bus driver saw me coming and recognised the uniform and waited. Lots of other girls from the school were on the bus, most of them from other forms. They nearly all know, or think they know, that I walk with a stick because my mother sticks voodoo pins into a doll. I got a seat to myself, but then Gill Scofield, who’s in my chemistry class, came and sat by me.
“What have you been doing to make you late?” she asked.
“Reading,” I told her. “I forgot the time.”
“Not meeting boys?”
“No!”
“Don’t sound so shocked, that’s what half the other girls on this bus have been doing. More than half. Look at them.” I look. Lots of them have the skirts of their gym slips folded down, and their lips are suspiciously red.
“That’s so tacky,” I said.
Gill laughed. “I want to be a scientist,” she confided.
“A scientist?”
“Yes. A real one. I was reading the other day about Lavoisier. You know?”
“He discovered oxygen,” I said. “With Priestley.”
“Well, and he was French. He was an aristocrat, a marquis. He was guillotined in the French Revolution, and he said he’d keep blinking his eyes after his head was off, for as long as he had consciousness. He blinked seventeen times. That’s a scientist,” Gill said.
She’s weird. But I like her.
SUNDAY 7TH OCTOBER 1979
Finished Triton. It’s amazing. But the more I think about it the less I understand why Bron lied to Audri.
I used today’s letter writing time to send a “Good Luck” note to cousin Arwel Parry and a congratulations note to Uncle Rhodri.
Why did Bron lie to Audri?
MONDAY 8TH OCTOBER 1979
On the one hand, Gramma and Grampar never mentioned sex at all. They must have done it, or they wouldn’t have had Auntie Teg and my mother, but I don’t think they did it more than twice. Then there’s the way they talk about sex in school and in church. And there’s no sex, hardly any love stuff at all, in Middle Earth, which always made me think yes, the world would be better off without it. Arwen’s just a sop to propriety. Or just a vessel for future half-elven High Kings of Gondor and Arnor. A prize. It would have been better for him to have married Eowyn—who was a hero, after all, in her own right—and just let the Numenoreans dwindle. (After all, look at us now!) So sex, necessary evil to produce children. That’s normal.
And when you look at those girls on the bus, and my mother and her boyfriends, and the girls who creep into each other’s beds at night and, well, ach y fi.
But on the other hand, I do have sexual feelings. And Triton, and Heinlein, and The Charioteer have made me think that actually sex itself is neutral, and it’s society demonizing it that makes it icky. And the whole sex-change thing in Triton, there must be a sort of spectrum of sexuality, with most people somewhere in the middle, drawn to men and women, and some off on the ends—me at one end and Ralph and Laurie at the other. One of the things I’ve always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you’d never have thought about before.
From now on, I’m going to be positive about sex.
WEDNESDAY 10TH OCTOBER 1979
If the school was going out of their way to try to detach us from magic, they couldn’t organize things better. I wonder if that was someone’s original intention. I’m sure nobody here now knows a thing about it, but Arlinghurst has been running like this for more than a hundred years.
We do no cooking, we’re completely cut off from the food we eat, and the food is incredibly awful. Yesterday, for instance, dinner was spam fritters, totally tasteless mashed potatoes, over-boiled cabbage. For pudding, we had a dish of set custard with a half walnut in the middle, between six people. That’s called Hawaiian Delight. There’s a similar o
ne we have at least once a week called Hawaiian Surprise, which is set custard with a half glace cherry. I don’t like glace cherries or walnuts, so I’m marginally popular for a moment whenever it’s served for not joining in the squabble over who gets it. I don’t like custard either, but sometimes I’m hungry enough to eat it. You couldn’t get worse food, or food more detached from nature, if you tried. If you have an apple, you’re connected to an apple tree. If you have a dish of set custard and half a glace cherry you’re not connected to anything.
Still on the subject of eating, we don’t have our own plates, or our own knives and forks or cups. Like most of what we use, they’re communal, they’re handed out at random. There’s no chance for anything to become imbued, to come alive through fondness. Nothing here is aware, no chair, no cup. Nobody can get fond of anything.
At home I walked through a haze of belongings that knew, at least vaguely, who they belonged to. Grampar’s chair resented anyone else sitting on it as much as he did himself. Gramma’s shirts and jumpers adjusted themselves to hide her missing breast. My mother’s shoes positively vibrated with consciousness. Our toys looked out for us. There was a potato knife in the kitchen that Gramma couldn’t use. It was an ordinary enough brown-handled thing, but she’d cut herself with it once, and ever after it wanted more of her blood. If I rummaged through the kitchen drawer, I could feel it brooding. After she died, that faded. Then there were the coffee spoons, rarely used, tiny, a wedding present. They were made of silver, and they knew themselves superior to everything else and special.
None of these things did anything. The coffee spoons didn’t stir the coffee without being held or anything. They didn’t have conversations with the sugar tongs about who was the most cherished. (We always felt they might at any moment.) I suppose what they really did was psychological. They confirmed the past, they connected everything, they were threads in a tapestry. Here there is no tapestry, we jangle about separately.
Another letter. I haven’t opened it. I really notice it though, because of this stuff. It’s pulsing with significance—malign significance, but significance all the same. Everything else is muted around it.
THURSDAY 11TH OCTOBER 1979
Miss Carroll agreed to write a library letter without any hesitation. “I saw you were reduced to reading Arthur Ransome,” she said.
Actually, I like Arthur Ransome. I wouldn’t call it reduced. I’ve read them all before, of course, years ago, but I’ve been enjoying them. There’s something nice about out-and-out children’s books with no sex and a happy ending—Ransome, Streatfeild, that kind of thing. It isn’t very challenging, and you know what you’re getting, but what you’re getting is a nice wholesome story about children messing about in boats, or learning ballet or whatever, and they’ll have minor triumphs and minor disasters and everything will work out fine in the end. It’s cheering, especially after reading Chekhov yesterday. I’m so glad I’m not Russian.
Still, anything that’ll get me closer to a library ticket, so I just smiled. If only he’d send the form back, I could get one this weekend. I shouldn’t call him “he” that way. But it’s difficult to know what to call him. What do you call your father when you’ve only just met him? “Dad” would be ridiculous. But though it’s his name, it feels a bit odd to call him Daniel.
FRIDAY 12TH OCTOBER 1979
The letter from my father came first post, with ten pounds (!) and the form, signed. He says the money is to buy books, but I’m also going to buy some buns.
I had a talk with Sharon about Jewish food. She says it’s what God told them to eat, or not to eat, and it’s special but it wouldn’t harm anyone else. She says the trays she gets are nice. She gets lots of roast beef and fish, and it’s well cooked but always cold, because it can’t even be heated up with our food. She says the bread she gets is lovely, but always slightly stale because it comes all the way from Manchester. It seems like being Jewish is a lot of trouble, and I’d hate not being able to spend money on Saturdays, especially when it’s the only time we’re allowed out. But it might be worth it.
It was hard to get her to talk about it. She’s been teased about it a lot, and also she uses it as a kind of thing for other people to be afraid of, so she quite sensibly doesn’t want people to know too much. I had to tell her about my father’s Jewish father. She says that doesn’t make me Jewish at all, you can’t be part Jewish, and you get it through your mother. She says if I wanted to be Jewish, I’d have to convert.
I remember when a missionary came to Church and told us about converting the heathen. He said some of them pretended to convert for the free food, and then changed back to their old heathen gods as soon as there was some crisis. He called them “rice Christians.” I suppose I could be a rice Jew.
On the other hand, Grampar would have an absolute fit if he found out. My mother would be sure to tell him in the hope of making him have another stroke.
SATURDAY 13TH OCTOBER 1979
The weather has changed completely in the last week. Last Saturday was mild and sunny, autumn looking reluctantly back over its shoulder towards summer. Today it was wet and blustery, autumn barrelling forward impatiently into winter. The ground was slippery with dead leaves. Oswestry looked even less appealing than ever. Now Gill has pointed it out to me, I noticed the girls on the bus passing around a forbidden lipstick and giggling. They remind me of Susan in The Last Battle. I went off into a daydream about meeting C. S. Lewis, though I know he’s dead. Much too embarrassing to recount.
I went to the library, armed with my letter and my signed form, and was greeted by a friendly cheerful female librarian who I’m sure would have let me join without them. She hardly looked at them. I now have a little nested set of eight cards which will let me take out eight books at any time—or in fact, on any Saturday morning I can get into town before noon. Also, she told me that if I need anything they don’t have, interlibrary loans are free to people under sixteen. So I could order whatever I wanted to read and they’d get it for me. I only have to know author and title. So I started with all the Mary Renault books listed in The Charioteer that I’ve never heard of. I’m going to make a list of books listed in the front of other books and take it in next week. She said they can get anything published in Britain, ever, it doesn’t matter about out of print. She said they’d send me a card, but I said it was all right, they could save the stamp money to buy books, and I’d just come in every week and collect whatever they had.
Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.
Libraries really are wonderful. They’re better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.
I then spent a happy hour among the stacks, which are like the school library in that they contain a few gems, but only a few. Also, the SF is shelved in with everything else, which makes things slower. With eight books weighing me down and rain slashing in my face, I considered going straight back to school and reading them in my own comfortable library. But I wanted to check the bookshop, and eight books sounds (and feels!) like a lot, but it isn’t as if they’ll last me all week. I normally read now in the early morning if I wake before the bell, for the three hours of compulsory games, during any boring classes, in prep after I’ve finished my prep, in the half-hour free time after prep, and for the half hour we’re allowed in bed before lights out. So I’m getting through a couple of books most days.
So I walked slowly down the hill to the bookshop. The wind was whipping the willow branches out across the water. Most of the yellow leaves were down and floating on the surface. There was no sign of the swans. But I could see that beyond the pond there were more trees.
I bought a couple of things. I wish I knew how long this ten pounds is supposed to last. Most books are 75p, with thick ones being more. I left a lot of books when I ran away. I could replace them, but I also want new things to read. Re-reading
’s all very well. I bought a new Tip-tree collection. This one has an introduction by Le Guin, so she must like him too! It’s lovely when writers I like like each other. Maybe they’re friends, like Tolkien and Lewis. The bookshop has a new biography of all the Inklings, by Humphrey Carpenter who wrote the Tolkien biography. It’s in hardcover. I shall order it from the library.
After the bookshop, I checked out the shelves in the junk shop and bought a couple of things there too. I had so many books I could hardly walk at this point, and of course my leg was terrible. It always is when it rains. I didn’t ask to have my good leg replaced by a creaky rusty weathervane, but then I suppose nobody does. I would have made much greater sacrifices. I was prepared to die, and Mor did die. I should think of it as a war-wound, an old soldier’s scars. Frodo lost a finger, and all his own possibility of happiness. Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn’t supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn’t care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo. But that doesn’t matter. My mother isn’t a dark queen who everyone loves and despairs. She’s alive, all right, but she’s trapped in the nets of her own malice like a spider caught in its own web. I got away from her. And she can’t ever hurt Mor now.
I went into the bakery and sat down on one of the tables by the window and ate a Cornish pasty and a honey bun and played with a pot of tea. I don’t like tea, and coffee is worse, it smells fine but it tastes disgusting. In fact I only drink water, though if I absolutely have to have something I can drink lemonade. I prefer water. But a pot of tea is fiddly and nobody can tell if you’ve finished it, especially if you haven’t drunk any, and it gives you an excuse to sit and read and rest for a while.
