Among Others

I think I’ll buy as many Ordnance Survey maps as I can. They’re arranged in logical squares. I could collect the set and get the whole country, eventually. Then I’d always be able to find my way, and know where places are in relation to other places. Though they wouldn’t do me much good if they were at home when I happened to be somewhere. I’ll just have to be organised and put the map for where I’m going, and the maps around it maybe, into my bag when I go out.

Shrewsbury is where we bought my uniform. It’s a town, not a city, and it all seems to be built of the same rose-pink-coloured stone.

We went back to the Old Hall for high tea. It’s afternoon tea if you have tea and cakes and scones and little sandwiches, but high tea if there’s something hot and substantial as well. In this case it was a hot dish with pasta and cheese and ham, but everything else was cold. The sandwiches were tuna and cucumber, ham and parsley, and cheese and pickle. I liked them a lot. The scones were as dry as the Kalahari. They also fell to crumbs when you put butter on them. I could make better scones when I was four. I didn’t say so, but maybe next time I’ll tell one of the aunts (I still can’t tell them apart) that I’d like to have a try at making some. It seems the sort of thing they might approve.

They talked about nothing but school, and expected me to contribute with current news about teachers and how the houses are doing. They were in Scott, all three of them, and they care a lot more about it than I do. I don’t understand them one bit. They’re grown up and they have their own house—and it’s a jolly nice house too. But they don’t do anything. They don’t read, and they don’t work and they don’t make anything. They organise jumble sales for church. Gramma used to do that, and she was teaching full time as well. They keep the house nice, but that’s not a full-time job for three people. They pay my father to manage the estate and the money, so they don’t do that. They’re rich, reasonably rich, I think, but they don’t go anywhere or do anything, they just sit there eating awful scones and talking with real enthusiasm about the time Scott won the Cup. I’m not sure exactly how old they are, but they were born before 1940, so they’re at least forty, and they still care about a stupid house they were in at school. They weren’t just pretending, so as to be interesting to me. I can tell the difference. They were talking to each other far more. Why do they stay there? And why didn’t any of them get married? Maybe they hate children. They certainly seem to find me a trial, but that doesn’t count; if they’d wanted to they could have had nice upper-class English children of their own and trained them not to be surly.

Daniel has Glory Road and Waldo and Magic, Inc., which he says are both Heinlein fantasies. He has also lent me Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword. I’m still reading the Callahan stories, which are amazingly sweet, not much like Telempath, but I’m enjoying them.

Tomorrow church, then lunch with the aunts, then back to school, dammit.

Monday 5th November 1979

I remember how far away school felt from the labyrinth, but the second I got back it was totally pervasive and as if I’d never been away.

It’s funny how insignificant the reportable parts of my half term are. It was only a week, but so much happened in it compared to a school week that it might have been a year. But when I was asked about it in French Conversation first period this morning I could only say “Je visite mon grandpere dans Londres et je visite mon autre grandpere dans Pays de Galles.” Two visits to grandfathers, that’s all, and all Madame said was that it should be en not dans. I sink into school as into a warm bath, and it closes over my head. Even if I could tell them about Halloween and Glorfindel and the dead I wouldn’t.

Glory Road is deeply disappointing. I hate it. I stopped reading it and read Gill’s book of Asimov science essays in preference, that’s how much I hate it. I love Heinlein but he clearly doesn’t get fantasy. It’s just stupid. And nobody saying “Oh, Scar” would be heard as “Oscar,” it’s not even plausible. It’s almost as bad as its cover, and that’s saying something, as the cover is so bad that Miss Carroll raised her eyebrows at it from her librarian desk on the other side of the room. It’s funny how Triton, which is all about sex and sociology, has a cover of a spaceship exploding, while Glory Road, which does mention sex here and there but is actually a stupid adventure story, has a cover like that.

There’s some poetry competition thing. Everybody seems to think I’ll win it as a foregone conclusion.