Among Others

and gave her children to Auntie Syl as a new generation to bring up, so my cousin Pip, who was only six years older than me, born in 1958, was the last of Sylvia’s babies, when the first of them, Auntie Gwennie, was already sixty, born in 1898.
    You’d think there was a terrible lot of dying going on, and you’d be right, but they were Victorians, and they didn’t have antibiotics or much in the way of sanitation and they only just had the germ theory of disease. However, I think in a way they must have been sickly, because you’ve only got to look at the Phelps family to see the difference. I’ll write about them another day. My Auntie Florrie, my grandfather’s sister, blamed it on all the education the Terises went in for. I don’t see how it can have killed them—and Auntie Syl, who was as educated as any of them, lived into her eighties. I remember her.
    It seems so more complicated written down than it really is. Maybe I ought to draw a diagram. But it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to remember who these people are. All I really want to say about them is that when you belong to a big family like that, where you know everyone and you know all the stories about everyone, even the stories that happened long before you were born, and everyone knows who you are and knows the stories about you, then you are never just Mor but “Luke and Becky’s Mor” or “Luke Phelps’s granddaughters.” And also, when you need someone, someone will be there for you. It might not be your parents, or even your grandparents, but if you have a catastrophic need for someone to bring you up, someone will step in, the way Auntie Syl did. But she was dead before my grandmother died, and when I needed someone, somehow that net of family that I counted on to be there for me, the way you might bounce down to a trampoline, disappeared, and instead of bouncing back I hit the ground hard. They wouldn’t admit what was wrong with my mother, and they’d have had to do that to help me. And once I had to use social services to get away from her, they couldn’t do anything, because to social services an auntie you have known all your life is nobody compared to a father you haven’t even met.
    He has a family too.
    T UESDAY 2 ND O CTOBER 1979
    Actually, James Tiptree, Jr.’s Warm Worlds and Otherwise gives The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Vol II a run for its money. I’d say the Le Guin is still ahead, but it’s not as clear-cut as I thought it was. The other two books in the package from my father today are both Zelazny. I haven’t started them yet. Creatures of Light and Darkness was awfully peculiar.
    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