Among Others

The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it’s perfect. It’s this whole world, this whole process of immersion, this journey. It’s not, I’m pretty sure, actually true, but that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it changes everything. I remember finishing The Hobbit and handing it to Mor and saying “Read it. It’s pretty good. Isn’t there another one of these around here somewhere?” And I remember finding it—stealing it from my mother’s room. When the door was open, the light from the corridor fell on the shelves R and S and T. We were always afraid to go further in, in case she was hiding in the darkness and grabbed us. She did that once, when Mor was putting back The Crystal Cave. When we took one of her books, usually, we ruffled the shelf so it wouldn’t show. But the one-volume Lord of the Rings was so fat that it didn’t work. I was terrified she’d see. I almost didn’t take it. But either she didn’t notice or she didn’t care—I think she might have been away with one of her boyfriends.

I haven’t said what I wanted to about the thing about it.

Reading it is like being there. It’s like finding a magic spring in a desert. It has everything. (Except lust, Daniel said. But it has Wormtongue.)

It is an oasis for the soul. Even now I can always retreat into Middle Earth and be happy.

How can you compare anything to that? I can’t believe Stephen Donaldson’s hubris.

Sunday 11th November 1979

I climbed out of the dorm window in the middle of the night last night and made a circle and burned the letters in it. Nobody saw me. I made the circle out of things that were lying around, leaves and twigs and stones, and I put in the oak leaf, my piece of wood, and my pocket rock, which comes from the beach in Amroth. I could feel it working, I felt as if I was under an umbrella. I read the letters first. I wanted to know what she’d said. I might as well not have bothered. The only thing she said about what I did was “You were always the one who was most like me,” which is—well, a snowman is more like a cloud than a lump of coal, but neither of them are much alike. I folded the letters into a pagoda and set them on fire. I didn’t look at the pictures, but I saw there were some.

I stirred the ashes, so there was nothing left at all. Then I took the pocket rock and held it up under the moon (a three-quarter moon, I don’t know if that’s right) and tried to make it a protection against bad dreams. I don’t know if it worked. I took the leaf and my piece of wood back.

I climbed back in and got into bed. Everyone else was asleep. The moonlight was on Lorraine’s face. She looked strangely beautiful, and also distant, as if she was dead, as if she’d been dead for centuries and she was a marble statue of herself on her tomb.

The only problem with this is that if she keeps sending letters, I’m going to have to keep burning them. But late at night is definitely safer, from a school point of view, than when people are around.

Deirdre gave me a bun—an iced bun from Finefare, really sticky and sweet. They come in a packet of six, so she gave them to quite a lot of people, but I really appreciated the gesture. It’s nice not to feel like a total pariah.

I wrote to Daniel about Callahan’s Place and Stephen Donaldson’s hubris. I wrote to Sam about Plato, and told him about ordering more. I told him about The Last of the Wine as well, because even if he doesn’t like novels usually he might like that. I wrote to Grampar about going through Abergavenny and about missing the mountains and about all the ball games they play here and how I’d enjoy them if I could run. I can remember running. My whole body remembers. It’s a kinetic memory, if that’s the word. It was a bit of a lie to say I’d enjoy the games. I enjoy sitting in the library reading, and I hate the way the games are so important to the girls while being totally trivial really. What I enjoy is throwing a ball and running and catching, not agonising about the score.

What is it with me and Anne McCaffrey and getting the second book first? Dragonsinger is the sequel to something I’ve never seen called Dragonsong! I read it anyway. It’s oddly light compared to the other two. It’s set in Pern, rather than being about Pern, if that makes sense. I would like a fire-lizard. Or a dragon, for that matter. I’d come swooping in on my blue dragon and she’d breathe fire and burn down the school!

Monday 12th November 1979

Deirdre’s poem has won the school level of the competition.