Among Others

and three adult SF novels by C. S. Lewis. It’s wood-panelled and the chairs are old cracked leather. So far it seems to be deserted by everyone except me and the librarian, Miss Carroll, to whom I am unfailingly polite.
    I’ll have a chance to keep up my diary now. One of the worst things here is how impossible it is to be alone and how people ask you all the time what you are doing. “Writing a poem” or “Writing in my diary” would be the kiss of death. After the first couple of days I stopped trying, even though I really wanted to. They already think I’m weird. I sleep in a dorm with eleven other girls. I’m not alone even in the bathroom—there are no doors on the toilet or shower cubicles, and of course they think lavatory humour is the height of wit.
    Out of the library window I can see the branches of a dying elm. Elms are dying all over the place, it’s Dutch elm disease. It isn’t my fault. I can’t do anything about it. But I keep thinking maybe I could, if the fairies told me what to do. It’s the kind of thing where there might be something that would make a difference. The dying trees are very sad. I asked the librarian and she gave me an old copy of New Scientist , and I read more detail about it. It came from America on a load of logs, and it’s a fungal disease. That makes it sound even more as if it might be possible to do something. The elms are all one elm, they are clones, that’s why they are all succumbing. No natural resistance among the population, because no variation. Twins are clones, too. If you looked at an elm tree you’d never think it was part of all the others. You’d see an elm tree. Same when people look at me now: they see a person, not half a set of twins.
    W EDNESDAY 19 TH S EPTEMBER 1979
    After prep and before supper, we have a free half-hour. Yesterday it wasn’t raining, so I went out in the dusk. I walked down to the bottom of bounds, the edge of the school grounds. There’s a field there with black-and-white cows in it. They stared at me apathetically. There’s also a ditch and a straggle of trees. If there are any fairies here, this looked like where they’ll be. It was chilly and damp. The sky was losing colour without any noticeable sunset.
    It’s hard enough to find fairies on purpose even when you know where they are. I’ve always thought fairies are like mushrooms, you trip over them when you’re not thinking about them, but they’re hard to spot when you’re searching for them. I hadn’t brought my key ring, and everything I was wearing was new and had no connections, so I couldn’t use that. But my cane was old, and wooden, and might work. I tried to think about the elm trees and whether I could help. I tried to calm my mind.
    I closed my eyes and leaned on my cane. I tried to ignore the pain, and ignore the huge hole where Mor ought to be. The pain is hard to put aside, but I knew it would scare them off like nothing else. I remembered them scattering and bounding away like startled sheep when I cut my hand up behind Camelot that time. The normal pain in my leg is in two parts, a sharp tug and a slow grind. If I stand still and balanced the grind goes down to an ache, and the tug doesn’t come unless I shift my weight, so I tried that and got it down. I tried to think of what would we do if we wanted to call them. I opened my mind. Nothing happened. “Good afternoon?” I said, tentatively, in Welsh. But maybe fairies in England would speak English? Or maybe there aren’t any fairies here. It’s not a landscape with much room for them. I opened my eyes again. The cows had wandered away. It must have been milking time. There was a bush and a little stunted mountain ash and a hazel tree on the school side of the ditch. I put my left hand on the smooth bark of the hazel, not really hoping for anything now.
    There was a fairy up in the branches. It was wary. I’ve always noticed how much more fairies are like plants than anything else. With people and animals you have one standard pattern: Two arms, two legs, one head, a person. Or four legs and wool, a sheep. Plants and fairies, though, there are signs that say what they are, but a tree might have any number of branches, growing out anywhere. There’s a kind of pattern to it, but one elm tree won’t look exactly like the next, and might look completely different, because they’ll have grown differently. Fairies tend to be either very beautiful or absolutely hideous. They all have