Among Others (6 page)

T
HURSDAY
4
^TH
O
CTOBER
1979

Nine Princes in Amber
and
The Guns of Avalon
are absolutely brill. I’ve done nothing but read them for the last two days. The concept of Shadow is amazing, and the Trumps too, but what makes them so good is Corwin’s voice. I have to read more Zelazny.

A letter from Auntie Teg came today, sounding very relieved to know I am well. She sent me a pound note, inside the letter. There’s lots of family news. Cousin Arwel is starting a new job with British Rail in Nottingham. Auntie Olwen is on the list for a cataract operation. Cousin Sylvie’s having another baby—and Gail’s not two yet! Uncle Rhodri’s getting married. She doesn’t say anything about my mother. I didn’t expect her to. I didn’t either. I didn’t tell her about abandoning art for chemistry. She teaches art; she wouldn’t understand. Chemistry and physics and Latin are my three favourite subjects, though my very highest marks are in boring old English, as usual. We’re reading
Our Mutual Friend
, which I secretly call
Our Mutual Fiend
. You could re-write it with that title to make Rogue Riderhood the one they all know.

F
RIDAY
5
^TH
O
CTOBER
1979

My grandfather’s father was French. He came from Rennes in Brittany, and his mother was Indian, from India. He was very dark-skinned, from all accounts, and my grandfather and his sisters were also quite dark—all dark-haired and dark-eyed, and with skin that tanned browner than any European skin. My mother was the same. Grampar despised our skins for burning in the sun. Alexandre Rennes changed his name to Phelps when he married my great-grandmother Annabelle Phelps, because she wouldn’t marry him on any other terms. He worked in the mines. She was one of eight children, had seven children herself, of whom five survived to adulthood, lived to be ninety-three, and was a tyrant all her life. She died the year before I was born, but I grew up on stories of her.

Because Alexandre was French, they spoke English at home, unlike my grandmother’s family, who always spoke Welsh by choice. Their five surviving children all married and had children of their own.

The eldest boy, Alexander, married on the eve of the Great War, and left his new wife pregnant when he went to the trenches. He never came back, and they had a telegram saying he was missing in combat. His young wife, my Auntie Bessie, moved in with her parents-in-law, had the baby, my Uncle John, and was generally, along with Auntie Florrie, treated as my great-grandmother’s unpaid servant. Then, years later, in 1941, a young woman got off the bus in Aberdare with two solemn-eyed little boys, my uncles Malcolm and Duncan. She went to my great-grandmother’s house, claiming to be the widow of her son Alexander. He hadn’t died at all, he’d stayed in the army and gone off to India, where he’d married again without the formality of a divorce from Auntie Bessie.

His second wife, Lillian, was English, had grown up in India and had a little money of her own. She was used to living in a hot country and having servants. My great-grandparents took her in, which some people thought very good of them in the circumstances, but she found living with them very difficult. After a while, she talked to Auntie Bessie, who had a small widow’s pension, and they discovered that between the two of them they could afford a tiny house of their own. By the time I was born the scandal was old news—I knew that they were both the widows of the same man, but what could you say? He was dead, after all. The two widows got on very well. They spent the war knitting socks for soldiers, then after the war opened a wool shop in their front room, where they sold wool and home-knitted items. It had a strange animal smell, which they tried to hide with bowls of dried lavender from Auntie Florrie’s garden, the first potpourri I ever saw.

My grandfather had three sisters, who all married and had children. One, Auntie Maudie, disgraced herself by marrying a Catholic and going off to live in England, where she had eleven children, the last a Mongol, and adopted four more, two of them African. I do not regard this as shocking, if she could care for them all, which she could. She had been my grandfather’s favourite sister, but now they couldn’t be together without quarrelling. She was a lot like her mother. I didn’t see what was so utterly shocking about being a Catholic, compared to being a bigamist, which everyone forgave dead Alexander, or a lesbian, like Auntie Olwen, which people didn’t talk about but quietly accepted.

Auntie Bronwen had three sons and a daughter, and her husband worked in the pit. Auntie Florrie lived very near us and we saw her all the time—my grandmother used her for babysitting. Her husband, who had been a miner, died in the war. She had two little boys, my Uncle Clem, who went to prison for forgery, and Uncle Sam, who never seemed to come home. She had seen the devil in her house one day and chased it upstairs with a prayerbook and shut it in the box room. Afterwards, she asked my grandfather to brick up the door to the box room so the devil couldn’t get out. Years later, after she died, he unbricked the door and we went in, consumed with curiosity, to find a printing press. He threw it out, but not before we helped ourselves to a number of blank calling cards and some of the leaden letters.

My grandfather, Luke, was the youngest, and he married my grandmother, Becky, and they had two children, Elizabeth and Tegan. My mother, Liz, married my father and had us. Auntie Teg never married anyone, because she was always busy helping to bring us up. In most ways she was more like a much older sister than an aunt.

I miss her a lot, and Grampar too.

S
ATURDAY
6
^TH
O
CTOBER
1979

Beautiful day today, best day since I got here.

I got into town before the library closed and tried to join it. They wouldn’t let me. I was remarkably restrained and didn’t cry or raise my voice or anything. They said they needed a parent’s signature, and they needed proof of residence. I told them I was at Arlinghurst, as if they couldn’t see that for themselves from the uniform. When outside we have to wear a navy gymslip, a navy blazer, a school raincoat (if raining, but it’s always raining, except today the sun was shining) and a school hat. The winter hat is a beret. There’s a straw boater for summer. The hat is entirely penitential for me; it always wants to fall off my head when I move.

The librarian, who was a man, quite young, said that if I was at Arlinghurst I should use the school library. I said that I did, and that it was inadequate to my needs. He actually looked at me then, pushing his glasses up his nose, and for a moment I thought I’d won, but no. “You need a parent’s signature on this form, and a letter from the school librarian saying you need to have the use of the library,” he said. Behind him were all these shelves of books, stretching out. He wouldn’t even let me in to browse.

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.

S
UNDAY
7
^TH
O
CTOBER
1979

Finished
Triton
. It’s amazing. But the more I think about it the less I understand why Bron lied to Audri.