Jo Walton: Among Others

It wasn’t that we didn’t know history. Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people. We’d been taught about cavemen and Normans and Tudors. We knew about Greeks and Romans. We knew masses of personal stories about World War II. We even knew quite a lot of family history. It just didn’t connect to the landscape. And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one. In ignorance, we played our way through what the elves and giants had left us, taking the fairies’ possession for ownership. I named the dramroads after places in The Lord of the Rings when I should have recognised that they were from The Chrysalids .

It’s amazing how large the things are that it’s possible to overlook.

School is awful, as expected. For one thing, as I’d known from all the school stories, one of the most important things about boarding schools is the games. I’m not in any shape to be doing games. Also, all the other girls are from the same background. They are almost all English, from not too far away, products of the same landscape as the school. They vary a little in size and shape, but most of them have the same voice. My voice, which was posh for the Valleys and immediately marked my class origins to everyone there, here brands me an outlander barbarian. As if being a crippled barbarian isn’t bad enough, there’s also the fact that I was coming late for the year into a class that has known each other for two years already, with enmities and alliances drawn up across lines I know nothing about.

Fortunately, I figured this out quickly. I’m not stupid. I’ve never gone to a school before where everyone didn’t already know me, or know my family, and I’ve never gone into a new school as a singleton, but I’ve just been through three months of the Children’s Home, and this can’t possibly be any worse. Using the clue of voice, I identified the other barbarians, one Irish (Deirdre, called Dreary) and one Jewish (Sharon, called Shagger). I do what I can to befriend them.

I glare at the other girls when they try to tease me or patronise me or pick on me, and I’m glad to see that my glare works as well as ever. I get called names a lot, “Taffy” and “Thief” and “Commie,” as well as slightly more justified things like “Crip” and “Suck-up.” Commie is because they think my name is Russian. I was wrong in thinking it would mean nothing to them. They pinch me and thump me when they think they can get away with it, but there’s no real violence. It’s nothing, absolutely nothing, after the Home. I have my stick and my glare, and soon I started to tell ghost stories after Lights Out. Let them fear me as long as they leave me alone. Let them hate me as long as they fear me. It’s a pretty good strategy for boarding school, however it worked out for Tiberius. I said this to Sharon, and she looked at me as if I was an alien. What? What? I’ll never get used to this place.

I quickly rose to the top of the class in everything but maths. Very quickly. More quickly than I’d expected. Perhaps these girls are not as clever as the ones at the grammar school? One or two there gave us some competition, but here there doesn’t seem to be any of that. I soar above the others. My popularity, bizarrely, goes both up and down slightly because of the marks. They don’t care about lessons, and they hate me for beating them, but you get house points for exceptional marks, and they care a lot about house points. It’s depressing how much boarding school is just like Enid Blyton showed it, and all the ways it’s different are ways it’s worse.

The chemistry class, with a different set of girls, is a lot better. It’s taught by the science master, the only male teacher in the school, and the girls seem a lot more engaged by the subject. It’s the best thing on the curriculum, I’m really glad I fought for it. I don’t care that I miss art—though Auntie Teg would care. I haven’t written to her. I’ve thought about it, but I don’t dare. She wouldn’t tell my mother where I am—she’d be the last person to do that—but I can’t risk it.

Then yesterday I found the library. I’ve got permission to spend time here when I’m supposed to be on the playing field. Suddenly, being crippled starts to feel like a benefit. It’s not a wonderful library, but it’s so much better than nothing that I’m not complaining. I’ve finished all the books my father lent me. (He was right about the other half of Empire Star , but Empire Star itself is one of the best things I’ve ever read.) On the shelves here there’s The Bull From the Sea and another Mary Renault I’ve never heard of called The Charioteer , and three adult SF novels by C. S. Lewis. It’s wood-panelled and the chairs are old cracked leather. So far it seems to be deserted by everyone except me and the librarian, Miss Carroll, to whom I am unfailingly polite.

I’ll have a chance to keep up my diary now. One of the worst things here is how impossible it is to be alone and how people ask you all the time what you are doing. “Writing a poem” or “Writing in my diary” would be the kiss of death. After the first couple of days I stopped trying, even though I really wanted to. They already think I’m weird. I sleep in a dorm with eleven other girls. I’m not alone even in the bathroom—there are no doors on the toilet or shower cubicles, and of course they think lavatory humour is the height of wit.

Out of the library window I can see the branches of a dying elm. Elms are dying all over the place, it’s Dutch elm disease. It isn’t my fault. I can’t do anything about it. But I keep thinking maybe I could, if the fairies told me what to do. It’s the kind of thing where there might be something that would make a difference. The dying trees are very sad. I asked the librarian and she gave me an old copy of New Scientist , and I read more detail about it. It came from America on a load of logs, and it’s a fungal disease. That makes it sound even more as if it might be possible to do something. The elms are all one elm, they are clones, that’s why they are all succumbing. No natural resistance among the population, because no variation. Twins are clones, too. If you looked at an elm tree you’d never think it was part of all the others. You’d see an elm tree. Same when people look at me now: they see a person, not half a set of twins.

After prep and before supper, we have a free half-hour. Yesterday it wasn’t raining, so I went out in the dusk. I walked down to the bottom of bounds, the edge of the school grounds. There’s a field there with black-and-white cows in it. They stared at me apathetically. There’s also a ditch and a straggle of trees. If there are any fairies here, this looked like where they’ll be. It was chilly and damp. The sky was losing colour without any noticeable sunset.

It’s hard enough to find fairies on purpose even when you know where they are. I’ve always thought fairies are like mushrooms, you trip over them when you’re not thinking about them, but they’re hard to spot when you’re searching for them. I hadn’t brought my key ring, and everything I was wearing was new and had no connections, so I couldn’t use that. But my cane was old, and wooden, and might work. I tried to think about the elm trees and whether I could help. I tried to calm my mind.

I closed my eyes and leaned on my cane. I tried to ignore the pain, and ignore the huge hole where Mor ought to be. The pain is hard to put aside, but I knew it would scare them off like nothing else. I remembered them scattering and bounding away like startled sheep when I cut my hand up behind Camelot that time. The normal pain in my leg is in two parts, a sharp tug and a slow grind. If I stand still and balanced the grind goes down to an ache, and the tug doesn’t come unless I shift my weight, so I tried that and got it down. I tried to think of what would we do if we wanted to call them. I opened my mind. Nothing happened. “Good afternoon?” I said, tentatively, in Welsh. But maybe fairies in England would speak English? Or maybe there aren’t any fairies here. It’s not a landscape with much room for them. I opened my eyes again. The cows had wandered away. It must have been milking time. There was a bush and a little stunted mountain ash and a hazel tree on the school side of the ditch. I put my left hand on the smooth bark of the hazel, not really hoping for anything now.