Among Others

bookshop has a new biography of all the Inklings, by Humphrey Carpenter who wrote the Tolkien biography. It’s in hardcover. I shall order it from the library.
    After the bookshop, I checked out the shelves in the junk shop and bought a couple of things there too. I had so many books I could hardly walk at this point, and of course my leg was terrible. It always is when it rains. I didn’t ask to have my good leg replaced by a creaky rusty weathervane, but then I suppose nobody does. I would have made much greater sacrifices. I was prepared to die, and Mor did die. I should think of it as a war-wound, an old soldier’s scars. Frodo lost a finger, and all his own possibility of happiness. Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn’t supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn’t care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo. But that doesn’t matter. My mother isn’t a dark queen who everyone loves and despairs. She’s alive, all right, but she’s trapped in the nets of her own malice like a spider caught in its own web. I got away from her. And she can’t ever hurt Mor now.
    I went into the bakery and sat down on one of the tables by the window and ate a Cornish pasty and a honey bun and played with a pot of tea. I don’t like tea, and coffee is worse, it smells fine but it tastes disgusting. In fact I only drink water, though if I absolutely have to have something I can drink lemonade. I prefer water. But a pot of tea is fiddly and nobody can tell if you’ve finished it, especially if you haven’t drunk any, and it gives you an excuse to sit and read and rest for a while.
    So I did that, and then I bought four honey buns to go, with my own money this time. One for Deirdre, one for Sharon, though of course she won’t be able to eat it so I’ll get that one too, one for me, and one for Gill. Last week I had Sharon’s bun, and this week she’ll have mine. It’s more for the symbol than the actual bun, though goodness knows the actual buns are nice. I’m not buying one for Karen, because Karen calls me Hopalong, which I hate more than any of the other names. Commie’s almost affectionate, and Taffy’s inevitable, but using Crip or especially Hopalong means hostility.
    Then I asked the bakery girl about the pond. “Is it a park?”
    “A park, love? No, it’s the edge of the estate.”
    “But there’s a bench by the pond. A park bench.”
    “Council put that there for people to sit, like. By the road, that belongs to the council, so I suppose it might be a park, but not a proper park with flowers. But what you see behind, those trees and that, that’s part of the estate, and you’d find a No Trespassing sign before long, reckon, because there are pheasants. We hear them banging away over there in August.”
    So it’s an estate with a country house, managed and with game keepers and things, but left half-wild for the pheasants. I bet there are fairies all over it.
    S UNDAY 14 TH O CTOBER 1979
    I got a telling-off after lunch, and an Order Mark, my first. Apparently it’s not done to give buns to girls not in your house or form, unless they’re a relation. And Gill, while she is in my chemistry class, isn’t in my house or form, so I’m not supposed to be friendly with her, and my giving her a bun is considered deeply suspicious, and possibly lesbian. I think from the way some of this got said that Gill may well be a lesbian. Fine. I have no problem with that. I’m not one, but I’m definitely with Heinlein and Delany on this.
    Even Deirdre and Sharon thought I shouldn’t have given Gill the bun. Deirdre tried to make excuses for me, saying I didn’t understand because I hadn’t been here long enough, and maybe all the chemistry had addled my brain.
    I will never understand this place.
    M ONDAY 15 TH O CTOBER 1979
    I didn’t write back again. But she keeps on writing to me and sending photographs like that. I get one or two every week. I am so desperate for the glimpses of Mor that I keep opening the letters, and I can never quite not read them. I save them until I am in the library, because I can’t bear everyone to see me reading them. Then today Lorraine Pargeter had a bad cold and came into the