Jo Walton - Among Others

Still on the subject of eating, we don’t have our own plates, or our own knives and forks or cups. Like most of what we use, they’re communal, they’re handed out at random. There’s no chance for anything to become imbued, to come alive through fondness. Nothing here is aware, no chair, no cup. Nobody can get fond of anything.

At home I walked through a haze of belongings that knew, at least vaguely, who they belonged to. Grampar’s chair resented anyone else sitting on it as much as he did himself. Gramma’s shirts and jumpers adjusted themselves to hide her missing breast. My mother’s shoes positively vibrated with consciousness. Our toys looked out for us. There was a potato knife in the kitchen that Gramma couldn’t use. It was an ordinary enough brown-handled thing, but she’d cut herself with it once, and ever after it wanted more of her blood. If I rummaged through the kitchen drawer, I could feel it brooding. After she died, that faded. Then there were the coffee spoons, rarely used, tiny, a wedding present. They were made of silver, and they knew themselves superior to everything else and special.

None of these things did anything. The coffee spoons didn’t stir the coffee without being held or anything. They didn’t have conversations with the sugar tongs about who was the most cherished. (We always felt they might at any moment.) I suppose what they really did was psychological. They confirmed the past, they connected everything, they were threads in a tapestry. Here there is no tapestry, we jangle about separately.

Another letter. I haven’t opened it. I really notice it though, because of this stuff. It’s pulsing with significance—malign significance, but significance all the same. Everything else is muted around it.

Miss Carroll agreed to write a library letter without any hesitation. “I saw you were reduced to reading Arthur Ransome,” she said.

Actually, I like Arthur Ransome. I wouldn’t call it reduced. I’ve read them all before, of course, years ago, but I’ve been enjoying them. There’s something nice about out-and-out children’s books with no sex and a happy ending—Ransome, Streatfeild, that kind of thing. It isn’t very challenging, and you know what you’re getting, but what you’re getting is a nice wholesome story about children messing about in boats, or learning ballet or whatever, and they’ll have minor triumphs and minor disasters and everything will work out fine in the end. It’s cheering, especially after reading Chekhov yesterday. I’m so glad I’m not Russian.

Still, anything that’ll get me closer to a library ticket, so I just smiled. If only he ‘d send the form back, I could get one this weekend. I shouldn’t call him “he” that way. But it’s difficult to know what to call him. What do you call your father when you’ve only just met him? “Dad” would be ridiculous. But though it’s his name, it feels a bit odd to call him Daniel.

The letter from my father came first post, with ten pounds (!) and the form, signed. He says the money is to buy books, but I’m also going to buy some buns.

I had a talk with Sharon about Jewish food. She says it’s what God told them to eat, or not to eat, and it’s special but it wouldn’t harm anyone else. She says the trays she gets are nice. She gets lots of roast beef and fish, and it’s well cooked but always cold, because it can’t even be heated up with our food. She says the bread she gets is lovely, but always slightly stale because it comes all the way from Manchester. It seems like being Jewish is a lot of trouble, and I’d hate not being able to spend money on Saturdays, especially when it’s the only time we’re allowed out. But it might be worth it.

It was hard to get her to talk about it. She’s been teased about it a lot, and also she uses it as a kind of thing for other people to be afraid of, so she quite sensibly doesn’t want people to know too much. I had to tell her about my father’s Jewish father. She says that doesn’t make me Jewish at all, you can’t be part Jewish, and you get it through your mother. She says if I wanted to be Jewish, I’d have to convert.

I remember when a missionary came to Church and told us about converting the heathen. He said some of them pretended to convert for the free food, and then changed back to their old heathen gods as soon as there was some crisis. He called them “rice Christians.” I suppose I could be a rice Jew.

On the other hand, Grampar would have an absolute fit if he found out. My mother would be sure to tell him in the hope of making him have another stroke.

The weather has changed completely in the last week. Last Saturday was mild and sunny, autumn looking reluctantly back over its shoulder towards summer. Today it was wet and blustery, autumn barrelling forward impatiently into winter. The ground was slippery with dead leaves. Oswestry looked even less appealing than ever. Now Gill has pointed it out to me, I noticed the girls on the bus passing around a forbidden lipstick and giggling. They remind me of Susan in The Last Battle . I went off into a daydream about meeting C. S. Lewis, though I know he’s dead. Much too embarrassing to recount.

I went to the library, armed with my letter and my signed form, and was greeted by a friendly cheerful female librarian who I’m sure would have let me join without them. She hardly looked at them. I now have a little nested set of eight cards which will let me take out eight books at any time—or in fact, on any Saturday morning I can get into town before noon. Also, she told me that if I need anything they don’t have, interlibrary loans are free to people under sixteen. So I could order whatever I wanted to read and they’d get it for me. I only have to know author and title. So I started with all the Mary Renault books listed in The Charioteer that I’ve never heard of. I’m going to make a list of books listed in the front of other books and take it in next week. She said they can get anything published in Britain, ever, it doesn’t matter about out of print. She said they’d send me a card, but I said it was all right, they could save the stamp money to buy books, and I’d just come in every week and collect whatever they had.

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.

Libraries really are wonderful. They’re better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.

I then spent a happy hour among the stacks, which are like the school library in that they contain a few gems, but only a few. Also, the SF is shelved in with everything else, which makes things slower. With eight books weighing me down and rain slashing in my face, I considered going straight back to school and reading them in my own comfortable library. But I wanted to check the bookshop, and eight books sounds (and feels!) like a lot, but it isn’t as if they’ll last me all week. I normally read now in the early morning if I wake before the bell, for the three hours of compulsory games, during any boring classes, in prep after I’ve finished my prep, in the half-hour free time after prep, and for the half hour we’re allowed in bed before lights out. So I’m getting through a couple of books most days.

So I walked slowly down the hill to the bookshop. The wind was whipping the willow branches out across the water. Most of the yellow leaves were down and floating on the surface. There was no sign of the swans. But I could see that beyond the pond there were more trees.

I bought a couple of things. I wish I knew how long this ten pounds is supposed to last. Most books are 75p, with thick ones being more. I left a lot of books when I ran away. I could replace them, but I also want new things to read. Re-reading’s all very well. I bought a new Tiptree collection. This one has an introduction by Le Guin, so she must like him too! It’s lovely when writers I like like each other. Maybe they’re friends, like Tolkien and Lewis. The 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.