Jo Walton - Among Others

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.

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.

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.

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 known 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.