Among Others

He was there for lunch, overcooked roast beef with oversalted potatoes and carrots. I wish they’d let me cook. I can understand why they wouldn’t want me to cook Sunday dinner right off, but they could have let me make some scones. Three more days. This is as bad as school. Worse, because no book club and no library to disappear into.

I went for a walk after lunch, despite the rain and my leg, which actually isn’t too bad today, just grumbling, not screaming. It’s just like around school, not real countryside, just farms and fields and roads, no wild, no ruins and not a fairy in sight. I can’t think why anyone would choose to live here.

Monday 24th December 1979, Christmas Eve

The Russians have invaded Afghanistan. There’s a terrible inevitability to it. I’ve read so many stories with World War III that sometimes it seems as if it’s the inevitable future and there’s no use worrying about anything because it’s not as if I’ll grow up anyway.

Daniel brought home a tree and we decorated it, with brittle Christmas cheer. The decorations are all very old and valuable, mostly glass. They’re exquisite, and very magical. I was almost afraid to touch them. Even the lights are antique—Venetian glass lanterns that used to hold candles but they’ve been refitted for electric bulbs. Two of the bulbs had gone and I changed them. I miss our old Christmas decorations, which Auntie Teg will be putting on the tree even now. She’ll be doing it on her own, if they’re only letting Grampar out for the day. I hope she can get it to stand up all right. The trouble we’ve had getting trees to stand up! Last year we had to tie it to the cupboard door. But it’s better not to think about last year, the worst Christmas of all time. Of course, the good thing about that is that no matter how awful this is, it can’t even compete.

Our Christmas decorations are also old, mostly, though some of them are new, bought in our lifetimes. They’re mostly plastic, though the fairy that goes on the top is china. The Old Hall tree doesn’t have a fairy, which seems strange. It has Father Christmas on the top. Ours don’t match, except in being such a mixture they do match, and we have lots of tinsel, not thin silver strands, big thick twists of it. I hope it isn’t too much for Auntie Teg to do all on her own. I hope my mother doesn’t turn up there tomorrow like the bad fairy at the christening. At least that won’t happen here.

I have wrapped all my presents and put them under the tree. My paper’s nice, dark red with silver threads. We lit the lanterns when everyone had put their presents under—and another bulb went, and I changed it. Then we lit them again and admired it. I put my presents from Deirdre and Miss Carroll under it too.

Christmas is a time when people ought to be at home. If they have a home, which I suppose I don’t. But I wish I could be with Grampar and Auntie Teg, which is the closest I can get. When I’m grown up, I’ll never go anywhere for Christmas. People can come and see me if they want, but I’ll never go away anywhere.

They’re playing a record of Christmas carols down there now, I can hear them through the floor. What am I doing here?

But it’s worse in Afghanistan where the tanks are rolling.

Tuesday 25th December 1979, Christmas Day

This isn’t going to be the entry I thought it was going to be, which would have been a list of boring presents.

I was woken by the sound of carols, their record again, which is carols from a cathedral. It’s nice enough, I suppose, and I couldn’t help having a kind of excited moment thinking it was Christmas Day, even if I am here. I went down and we all ate breakfast, cold toast and boiled eggs just like any day. I don’t understand why they make toast that way. They make it in the kitchen and put it into a toast rack where it gets cold and crisp and disgusting. Toast needs butter right away.

After breakfast we went in and opened presents. They had a very fixed ritual about who opens what first, quite different from the way my family do it. We used to take turns opening one present each around a circle. They do it so each person opens all their presents and then the next person opens all theirs. I was last, because I’m the youngest.

They were pleased enough with their scarves, though I’d got the colours wrong and two of them swapped when they thought I wasn’t looking. I still can’t tell them apart. (Were Mor and I as alike as that? Would we still have been when we were forty years old?) They’d bought each other appointments for manicures and hair dos and that sort of thing. Daniel thanked me for The Mote in God’s Eye and for the jacket. They bought him whisky, some special kind, and more clothes.