Nation

horizon, a ship coming to rescue her.
    Much later on, she was able to read the names of the groups of islands: The Bank Holiday Monday Islands, All Souls Island, The Rogation Sunday Islands, The Mothering Sunday Islands, The Hogmanay Islands…it seemed that the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean had been navigated not with a compass and a sextant but with a calendar.
    Her father had said that if you knew where to look, you could find Mrs. Ethel J. Bundy’s Birthday Island, and loaned her a large magnifying glass. She spent long Sunday afternoons lying on her stomach, minutely examining every necklace of dots, and concluded that Mrs. Ethel J. Bundy’s Birthday Island was a Father Joke, i.e., not very funny but sort of lovable in its silliness. But now, thanks to him, she knew the island chains of the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean by heart.
    She had wanted, there and then, to live on an island that was lost at sea, and so small that you weren’t sure if it was an island or just that a fly had done its business on the page.
    But that wasn’t all. There was a map of the stars at the back of the atlas. For her next birthday she’d asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: “Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify the constellation of Orion just isn’t paying attention!” And when she started asking him complicated questions, he took her along to lectures at the Royal Society, where it turned out that a nine-year-old girl who had blond hair and knew what the precession of the equinoxes was could ask hugely bearded famous scientists anything she liked. Who’d want a pony when you could have the whole universe? It was far more interesting and you didn’t have to muck it out once a week.
    “Well, that was a good day,” said her father when they were coming back from one meeting.
    “Yes, Papa. I think Dr. Agassiz is certainly providing evidence for the Ice Age theory, and I shall need a bigger telescope if I am to see Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.”
    “Well, we shall have to see about that,” said her father with hopeless parental diplomacy. “But please don’t let your grandmother know you shook hands with Mr. Darwin. She thinks he is the devil.”
    “Gosh! Is he?” The prospect had seemed quite interesting.
    “As a matter of fact,” said her father, “I believe he is the greatest scientist who has ever lived.”
    “Greater than Newton? I don’t think so, Papa. Many of his ideas were first voiced by other people, including his own granddad!”
    “Aha? You’ve been in my library again. Well, Newton said that he stood on the shoulders of giants.”
    “Yes, but…well, he was just being modest!” And they had argued all the way home.
    It was a game. He loved it when she assembled her facts and pinned him down with a cast-iron argument. He believed in rational thinking and scientific inquiry, which was why he never won an argument with his mother, who believed in people doing what she told them, and believed it with a rock-hard certainty that dismissed all opposition.
    In fact there was always something a little naughty about going to the lectures. Her grandmother objected to them on the grounds that they “would make the girl restless and give her ideas.” She was right. Ermintrude was already pretty good at ideas, but a few more are always welcome.
    At this point the racing line of life speeds up, to get past some dark years she never remembered except in nightmares and whenever she heard a baby crying, and leaps ahead to the day when she first knew she would see islands under new stars….
    Her mother was dead by then, which meant that things at the Hall were now run entirely by her grandmother, and her father, a quiet, hardworking man, didn’t have much spirit left to battle with her. The wonderful telescope was locked away, because “a well-brought-up young lady has no business looking at the moons of Jupiter, whose home life was so different from that of our own dear king!” It didn’t matter that her father very patiently explained that there were at least thirty-six million miles of difference between Jupiter, the Roman god, and Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. She didn’t listen. She never listened. And you put up with that or you hit her over the head with a battle-axe, and her father didn’t do that sort of thing, even though one of his