by Jo Walton
That’s where I always went wrong with it. I wanted it to work in a magical way. I expected it to work like it did in the books. If it’s like books at all, it’s more like The Lathe of Heaven than anything. We thought the Phurnacite would crumble to ruins before our eyes, when in fact the decisions to close it were taken in London weeks before, except they wouldn’t have been if we hadn’t dropped those flowers. It’s harder to get a grip on than if it did work the way it does in stories. And it’s much easier to dismiss, you can dismiss all of it if you have a sceptical turn of mind because there always is a sensible explanation. It always works through things in the real world, and it’s always deniable.
My mother’s letter is like that too, in a way. It’s barbed, but with barbs that wouldn’t really show if I showed it to someone else. She offers to send me pictures of Mor after I write back. She says she misses me but it was my father’s turn to look after me for a while, which is a construction of the situation that makes me want to strangle her. And the envelope is neatly addressed in her inimitable writing to Morwenna Markova, which means that she knows the name I am using.
I am frightened. But I would like the pictures, and I am fairly sure I am out of her reach.
SATURDAY 22ND SEPTEMBER 1979
Raining today.
I went into town, Oswestry, not much of a town, and bought shampoo for Sharon. She can’t use money on Saturday, because of being Jewish. I found a library, but it shuts at noon. Why would you have a library that shuts at noon on Saturdays? That’s just so English, honestly. There’s no bookshop, but there’s a Smiths with some books, just bestsellers but better than nothing.
I came back and spent the rest of my free afternoon in the library, being shocked at The Charioteer. It hasn’t struck me before that the men in Renault’s ancient Greek books who fall in love with each other are homosexuals, but I see now that of course they are. I read it furtively, as if someone would take it away from me if they knew what it was about. I’m amazed it’s in the school library. I wonder if I’m the first person to actually read it since 1959, when they bought it?
SUNDAY 23RD SEPTEMBER 1979
We are supposed to write home on Sunday afternoons. I have been writing to my father, Daniel, fairly long letters all about books except for a cursory hope that he and my aunts are well. He has written back in similar style, and sent me a parcel of the one book I really didn’t need, a hardcover three-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings. The paperback one I have was a present from Auntie Teg. He also sent me Dragonflight, which was “Weyr Search” and what happened immediately afterwards, Le Guin’s City of Illusions and Larry Niven’s The Flight of the Horse. It’s okay, but not as good as Ringworld or A Gift From Earth.
Today I composed a letter to my mother. I said I was well, and that I am enjoying lessons. I gave her my marks and class standing. I told her how my house is doing in hockey and lacrosse. It was a model letter, and in fact it is modelled on the letter my Irish friend Deirdre, who finds writing laborious, has written to her parents. I let Deirdre, whom I never call Dreary, copy my Latin translation in return. She’s actually very sweet—not very bright, and always using the wrong word, but very kind. She’d have let me copy her letter without any compensation, I think.
TUESDAY 25TH SEPTEMBER 1979
My letter brought results, by almost the next post. As she promised, she sent a photograph. It is one of the two of us on the beach, building a sand castle. Mor has her back to the camera, patting down the sand. I had been looking at the camera, or at Grampar who had been holding it, but you could no longer see anything but my silhouette, because I have been carefully burned out.
WEDNESDAY 26TH SEPTEMBER 1979
School, as normal. Top of class in everything except maths, as normal. I went down to the ditch to look for fairies, because horses, stable doors, but didn’t see anything. The elms are still dying. Reading Out of the Silent Planet, which isn’t a patch on the Narnia books. Another awful letter. Stomach cramps.
SATURDAY 29TH SEPTEMBER 1979
You can never be sure where you are with magic. And you can never be sure if you’ve really done anything or if you were just playing. And in any case, I shouldn’t do anything at all like that, because it will draw her attention and I have too much of it already.
Mor and I would go out on a summer day when it wasn’t raining and play. We’d play that we were knights, making desperate last stands to save Camelot. We’d play that we were on a quest. We’d have long conversations with the fairies where we knew we were saying both parts. It would be perfectly possible to edit the fairies out of these memories—though not of course Mor so I still couldn’t talk about them. I can’t talk about my childhood at all, because cannot say “I” when I mean “we,” and if I say “we” it leads to a conversation about how I have a dead sister, instead of what I want to talk about. I found that out in the summer. So I don’t talk about it.
We would go out along one of the dramroads, talking and singing and playing, and when we came close to one of the ruins we’d sneak up on it, as if that gave us a better chance of catching them. Sometimes the one we called Glorfindel would be peeping around the ruins to catch us out, and we’d have a glorious game of chase with them. Other times they’d want us to do things. They know a lot, but they can’t do much, not in the real world.
It says in The Lord of the Rings that the elves have dwindled and are living in secret. I don’t know if Tolkien knew about the fairies. I used to think so. I used to think he knew them and they told him the stories and he wrote them down, and that would mean it was all true. Fairies can’t exactly lie. But whether or not, they don’t speak his elvish languages. They speak Welsh. And they’re not as human-looking as his elves, mostly. And they never told us stories, not real stories. They just assumed we knew everything, that we were part of everything, like they were.
Until the end, knowing them brought us nothing but good. And in the end, I don’t think they understood. No, they did. They were as clear as can be. It was we who didn’t understand.
I wish magic was more dramatic.
SUNDAY 30TH SEPTEMBER 1979
On the horse/stable door front, I wrote to Auntie Teg today.
My family is huge and complex, and perfectly normal in all ways. It’s just—no. If I think about trying to explain it to somebody well-meaning who doesn’t know anything about it, I’m daunted in advance.
My grandmother didn’t have any brothers or sisters, but she was brought up by her Auntie Syl because her mother died. Actually it’s even more complicated than that. I should start in the generation before if I want this to make sense. Cadwalader and Marion “Mam” Teris moved from West Wales, where they left a great deal of family, and came to Aberdare. There he worked in the mines and she ran a Dame School and they had five children, Sylvia, Susannah, Sarah, Shulamith and Sidney. I feel sorry for poor Shulamith, but what could they do, once they’d started with a series of matching names like that and had so many girls?
Sylvia never married, and brought up all of everyone’s children.
Susannah married a man who was a Bad Lot. He was a miner. He beat her and she ran away from him, taking both her daughters with her. In those days it was the running away that was considered a disgrace, not the beating, so she left her daughters Gwendolen and Olwen with Auntie Syl and went off to London to go into service. Auntie Gwennie grew up to be appalling, and to marry Uncle Ted and have two daughters and five grandchildren who were, to hear her talk about them, so perfect you couldn’t help but hate them. Auntie Olwen became a nurse, and lived with another nurse, Auntie Ethel, from the nineteen-thirties on. They were just like a married couple and everyone treated them like one.
Sarah married a clergyman called Augustus Thomas. This was a social step up for her. They met when he was a curate in St. Fagans, which was our local church, but they married when he acquired a living on the Gower, near Swansea. He took Sarah off there, and there she had a son, also called Augustus, but always kno
wn as Gus, who his father brought back to Auntie Syl to bring up after poor Sarah died. Uncle Gus was a hero in the war, and he married an English nurse called Esther who didn’t like any of us. He was my grandmother’s favourite cousin, and she never saw as much of him as she’d have liked.
Shulamith married Matthew Evans, who was a miner. She was my grandmother’s mother, and she was a teacher before she married, like her mother before her. It was actually illegal to be a proper teacher after you were married, but it was all right to keep a Dame School where the children came to learn in your house. She had a baby who died, and then my grandmother, Rebecca, and then died herself.
Sidney kept a draper’s shop in the village, and later became Mayor. He married a woman called Florence, who died giving birth to Auntie Flossie. Auntie Flossie herself had three children and then her husband died of the Black Death, which he caught from a rat. Auntie Flossie then went back to teaching 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.
TUESDAY 2ND OCTOBER 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.
THURSDAY 4TH OCTOBER 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.
FRIDAY 5TH OCTOBER 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 tyrant all her life. She died the year before I was born, but I grew up on stories of her.
Because Alexandre was French, they spoke English at home, unlike my grandmother’s family, who always spoke Welsh by choice. Their five surviving children all married and had children of their own.
The eldest boy, Alexander, married on the eve of the Great War, and left his new wife pregnant when he went to the trenches. He never came back, and they had a telegram saying he was missing in combat. His young wife, my Auntie Bessie, moved in with her parents-in-law, had the baby, my Uncle John, and was generally, along with Auntie Florrie, treated as my great-grandmother’s unpaid servant. Then, years later, in 1941, a young woman got off the bus in Aberdare with two solemn-eyed little boys, my uncles Malcolm and Duncan. She went to my great-grandmother’s house, claiming to be the widow of her son Alexander. He hadn’t died at all, he’d stayed in the army and gone off to India, where he’d married again without the formality of a divorce from Auntie Bessie.
His second wife, Lillian, was English, had grown up in India and had a little money of her own. She was used to living in a hot country and having servants. My great-grandparents took her in, which some people thought very good of them in the circumstances, but she found living with them very difficult. After a while, she talked to Auntie Bessie, who had a small widow’s pension, and they discovered that between the two of them they could afford a tiny house of their own. By the time I was born the scandal was old news—I knew that they were both the widows of the same man, but what could you say? He was dead, after all. The two widows got on very well. They spent the war knitting socks for soldiers, then after the war opened a wool shop in their front room, where they sold wool and home-knitted items. It had a strange animal smell, which they tried to hide with bowls of dried lavender from Auntie Florrie’s garden, the first potpourri I ever saw.
My grandfather had three sisters, who all married and had children. One, Auntie Maudie, disgraced herself by marrying a Catholic and going off to live in England, where she had eleven children, the last a Mongol, and adopted four more, two of them African. I do not regard this as shocking, if she could care for them all, which she could. She had been my grandfather’s favourite sister, but now they couldn’t be together without quarrelling. She was a lot like her mother. I didn’t see what was so utterly shocking about being a Catholic, compared to being a bigamist, which everyone forgave dead Alexander, or a lesbian, like Auntie Olwen, which people didn’t talk about but quietly accepted.
Auntie Bronwen had three sons and a daughter, and her husband worked in the pit. Auntie Florrie lived very near us and we saw her all the time—my grandmother used her for babysitting. Her husband, who had been a miner, died in the war. She had two little boys, my Uncle Clem, who went to prison for forgery, and Uncle Sam, who never seemed to come home. She had seen the devil in her house one day and chased it upstairs with a prayerbook and shut it in the b
ox room. Afterwards, she asked my grandfather to brick up the door to the box room so the devil couldn’t get out. Years later, after she died, he unbricked the door and we went in, consumed with curiosity, to find a printing press. He threw it out, but not before we helped ourselves to a number of blank calling cards and some of the leaden letters.
My grandfather, Luke, was the youngest, and he married my grandmother, Becky, and they had two children, Elizabeth and Tegan. My mother, Liz, married my father and had us. Auntie Teg never married anyone, because she was always busy helping to bring us up. In most ways she was more like a much older sister than an aunt.
I miss her a lot, and Grampar too.
SATURDAY 6TH OCTOBER 1979
Beautiful day today, best day since I got here.
I got into town before the library closed and tried to join it. They wouldn’t let me. I was remarkably restrained and didn’t cry or raise my voice or anything. They said they needed a parent’s signature, and they needed proof of residence. I told them I was at Arlinghurst, as if they couldn’t see that for themselves from the uniform. When outside we have to wear a navy gymslip, a navy blazer, a school raincoat (if raining, but it’s always raining, except today the sun was shining) and a school hat. The winter hat is a beret. There’s a straw boater for summer. The hat is entirely penitential for me; it always wants to fall off my head when I move.
The librarian, who was a man, quite young, said that if I was at Arlinghurst I should use the school library. I said that I did, and that it was inadequate to my needs. He actually looked at me then, pushing his glasses up his nose, and for a moment I thought I’d won, but no. “You need a parent’s signature on this form, and a letter from the school librarian saying you need to have the use of the library,” he said. Behind him were all these shelves of books, stretching out. He wouldn’t even let me in to browse.