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, because in books that’s the group you have to have to go into another world. We thought the fairies would take us to Narnia, or Elidor. Geraint seemed like a good candidate. He saw the fairies, and he was awed by them. He liked them, and they liked him. But he lives in Burgess Hill, near Brighton, and he only spent summers in Aberdare, and the next summer he couldn’t see them, he said he was too old to play, and he remembered what had happened as if it had been a game where we’d been pretending to be fairies. All he wanted to do was play football. We ran away and left him in the garden with his stupid ball, disconsolate, but he didn’t tell the grownups we’d abandoned him. He said at dinner that he’d had a very nice day playing. Poor Geraint.
I had a letter this morning, which I haven’t opened, and also a letter from Sam. He asked how I liked the Plato, and if I’d found any more, and he writes just the way he speaks. I’ll write back on Sunday. There isn’t any Plato in the school library. I asked Miss Carroll, and she says they don’t teach Greek so there’s no call for it. I might have a problem with interlibrary loan, as I don’t know translators, or even all the titles. But I can order the ones listed in The Symposium of course, so I’ll do that.
Penguin are the best of any publisher about listing other titles, even if they didn’t publish them. I have a whole pile of things to order on Saturday, because Up the Line has a whole long list of Robert Silverbergs. Also, I am going to order Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains. Sylvia Engdahl wrote this totally brilliant book called Heritage of the Star, and Puffin, who are Penguin, brought it out and I read it. It’s about people living with lots of superstitions but also some technology they think is magic, and they’re oppressed by Scholars and Technicians and anyone who thinks wrongly is called a Heretic. And actually they’re colonists on another planet but they don’t know, and it’s just brilliant. In the story, there’s a promise that when they can know, when everything will be all right, they’ll go “Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains,” and there’s a sequel with that title, but I’ve never seen it anywhere, though I’ve been looking for a long time.
The poetry competition is nationwide. Everyone in Arlinghurst has to write a poem, then they’ll pick the best from each form to send in. I can’t believe people really think I’ll win. All right, realistically, I’d win out of Lower VC, or even all of Form V, probably, because the academic standards here are not especially high. But out of all the fifteen-year-olds in the whole country? No way. The best one in the school is going to be awarded fifty house points. That’s made everyone as keen as mustard. The best hundred in the country are going to be published in a book, and the best one wins a hundred pounds and a typewriter. I’d really like a typewriter. Not that I can type, but you have to send typewritten submissions to magazines.
Deirdre came sidling up to me at lunch, and sat down one seat away from me, as if casually, but doing it so badly that lots of people noticed. She looked frightened, poor dab, but resolute. “My mother told me I should stick up for you,” she whispered.
“Good for your mother,” I said, in a normal tone.
“Will you help me with my poem?” she asked.
So I’m going to help her write a poem at prep, which will probably mean writing it. I haven’t written mine yet, though there’s plenty of time, I have until Friday.
Thursday 8th November 1979
I wrote Deirdre’s poem, and I was quite pleased with it. But yesterday as I was sitting here reading Waldo and Magic, Inc. (which are two quite different novellas), Miss Carroll came over with a pile of modern poetry books, which she said she thought I might like to look at.
It seems poetry has moved on since Chesterton. Who knew? Clearly not Gramma, and nobody in any schools I’ve been to. I’d seen one stanza of one poem by Auden, that Delany quoted, and not even heard T. S. Eliot’s name, or Ted Hughes’s either. I got quite drunk on Eliot and was late for Latin and got an order mark. I got revenge by translating Horace just like Eliot, and she couldn’t say anything, because it was also accurate.
I’ve written a poem for the competition. I don’t feel very confident of it. I’ve mastered the Chestertonian, I really have, but I don’t feel as if I’ve had time to master this. It’s about nuclear war and Dutch elm disease and how we should actually be getting into space while we can.
There’s apparently a long T. S. Eliot poem called Four Quartets which the school doesn’t have. I’ll order that on Saturday as well. According to Miss Carroll, T. S. Eliot worked in a bank when he was writing The Waste Land because being a poet doesn’t pay.
“Oh dark, dark, dark ... those are pearls that were his eyes ... With these fragments have I shored up my ruins.”
Friday 9th November 1979
It doesn’t seem so terrible that the elms are dying when it’s autumn and all the trees seem dead.
Another letter. I’m going to have to burn them again. I almost want to know if she’s said anything about what I did. I’d like to have confirmation. Though I know it worked.
I handed my poem in. Miss Lewes looked at it but didn’t say anything. Miss Gilbert, who teaches English to the Sixth Form, will be judging.
I’m hoping there’ll be some books waiting for me at the library tomorrow, because I’m almost through with what I have. I’m reading Nine Princes in Amber again.
I keep dreaming about Mor. I dream she’s drowning and I don’t save her. I dream I push her in front of the car instead of trying to pull her away. It hit both of us. I have a reminder of that in every step I take, but not in my dreams. I dream I’m burying her alive in the centre of the labyrinth, throwing earth down on top of her while she struggles and it gets in her hair.
It was a year ago today. I’ve been trying not to think about it, but it keeps ambushing me.
Saturday 10th November 1979
Going into town on the bus, the anticipation of the library filled me with delight. It almost made the wet grey streets nice, but not quite. It was drizzling, and the sky was very low and flat.
The librarian, the man, was a little startled at how many books I wanted to order, but he just gave me a pile of blanks and had me fill them in myself. Lots of books were waiting for me! Then I went down to the bookshop and bought Four Quartets, Ted Hughes’s Crow and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsinger. I also bought a box of matches.
I did not buy a book called Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen Donaldson, which has the temerity to compare itself, on the front cover, to “Tolkien at his best.” The back cover attributes the quote to the Washington Post, a newspaper whose quotations will always damn a book for me from now on. How dare they? And how dare the publishers? It isn’t a comparison anyone could make, except to say “Compared to Tolkien at his best, this is dross.” I mean you could say that even about really brilliant books like A Wizard of Earthsea. I expect Lord Foul’s Bane (horrible title, sounds like a Conan book) is more like Tolkien at his worst, which would be the beginning of The Silmarillion.