Among Others

that’s not a full-time job for three people. They pay my father to manage the estate and the money, so they don’t do that. They’re rich, reasonably rich, I think, but they don’t go anywhere or do anything, they just sit there eating awful scones and talking with real enthusiasm about the time Scott won the Cup. I’m not sure exactly how old they are, but they were born before 1940, so they’re at least forty, and they still care about a stupid house they were in at school. They weren’t just pretending, so as to be interesting to me. I can tell the difference. They were talking to each other far more. Why do they stay there? And why didn’t any of them get married? Maybe they hate children. They certainly seem to find me a trial, but that doesn’t count; if they’d wanted to they could have had nice upper-class English children of their own and trained them not to be surly.
    Daniel has Glory Road and Waldo and Magic, Inc. , which he says are both Heinlein fantasies. He has also lent me Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword . I’m still reading the Callahan stories, which are amazingly sweet, not much like Telempath , but I’m enjoying them.
    Tomorrow church, then lunch with the aunts, then back to school, dammit.
    M ONDAY 5 TH N OVEMBER 1979
    I remember how far away school felt from the labyrinth, but the second I got back it was totally pervasive and as if I’d never been away.
    It’s funny how insignificant the reportable parts of my half term are. It was only a week, but so much happened in it compared to a school week that it might have been a year. But when I was asked about it in French Conversation first period this morning I could only say “ Je visite mon grandpere dans Londres et je visite mon autre grandpere dans Pays de Galles. ” Two visits to grandfathers, that’s all, and all Madame said was that it should be en not dans . I sink into school as into a warm bath, and it closes over my head. Even if I could tell them about Halloween and Glorfindel and the dead I wouldn’t.
    Glory Road is deeply disappointing. I hate it. I stopped reading it and read Gill’s book of Asimov science essays in preference, that’s how much I hate it. I love Heinlein but he clearly doesn’t get fantasy. It’s just stupid. And nobody saying “Oh, Scar” would be heard as “Oscar,” it’s not even plausible. It’s almost as bad as its cover, and that’s saying something, as the cover is so bad that Miss Carroll raised her eyebrows at it from her librarian desk on the other side of the room. It’s funny how Triton , which is all about sex and sociology, has a cover of a spaceship exploding, while Glory Road , which does mention sex here and there but is actually a stupid adventure story, has a cover like that.
    There’s some poetry competition thing. Everybody seems to think I’ll win it as a foregone conclusion.
    I miss the mountains. I didn’t miss them before, except in thinking how unattractively flat it was here. But now I have been home and had them around me for a while, I miss them actively, more than my living family, more than being able to shut the toilet door. It’s not really flat here, it rolls, and I can see the mountains of North Wales in the distance when it’s clear. But I miss having the hills tucked up around me.
    T UESDAY 6 TH N OVEMBER 1979
    Fireworks and a bonfire last night in the school grounds. I saw some of the fire-fairies clustering. Nobody else saw them. You can only see them if you already believe in them, which is why children are the most likely to. People like me don’t stop seeing them. It would be insane of me to stop believing in them. But lots of children do when they grow up, even though they’ve seen them. I’m not a child any more, though I’m not grown up either. I have to say I can’t wait.
    But my cousin Geraint, who’s four years older than me, saw the fairies when playing with us in the cwm. He was eleven or twelve, and we were seven or eight. We told him he should close his eyes and when he opened them he’d see them, and he did. He was amazed by them. He couldn’t talk to them, because he only spoke English, but we translated what he said, and what they said. We must have been eight, because I remember freely translating what they said into purest Tolkien, and we didn’t read The Lord of the Rings until we were eight. At that point, when we were about that age, we were always looking for someone else to play with, and preferably a boy,