Diana Jones - The Homeward Bounders

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. Also by the Author Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. About the Publisher Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

Have you heard of the Flying Dutchman? No? Nor of the Wandering Jew? Well, it doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you about them in the right place; and about Helen and Joris, Adam and Konstam, and Vanessa, the sister Adam wanted to sell as a slave. They were all Homeward Bounders like me. And I’ll tell about Them too, who made us that way.

All in good time. I’ll tell about this machine I’m talking into first. It’s one of Theirs. They have everything. It has a high piece in front that comes to a neat square with a net over it. You talk into that. As soon as you talk, a little black piece at the back starts hopping and jabbering up and down like an excited idiot, and paper starts rolling over a roller from somewhere underneath. The hopping bit jabbers along the paper, printing out exactly the words you say as fast as you can say them. And it puts in commas and full stops and things of its own accord. It doesn’t seem to worry it what you say. I called it some rude words when I was trying it out, just to see, and it wrote them all down, with exclamation marks after them.

When it’s written about a foot of talk, it cuts that off and shoots it out into a tray in front, so that you can read it over, or take it away if you want. And it does this without ever stopping jabbering. If you stop talking, it goes on hopping up and down for a while, in an expectant sort of way, waiting for you to go on. If you don’t go on, it slows down and stops, looking sad and disappointed. It put me off at first, doing that. I had to practise with it. I don’t like it to stop. The silence creeps in then. I’m the only one in the Place now. Everyone has gone, even him – the one whose name I don’t know.

My name is Jamie Hamilton and I was a perfectly ordinary boy once. I am still, in a way. I look about thirteen. But you wouldn’t believe how old I am. I was twelve when this happened to me. A year is an awful long time to a Homeward Bounder.

I really enjoyed my twelve years of ordinary life. Home to me is a big city, and always will be. We lived in a really big, dirty, slummy city. The back of our house looked out on to a lovely cosy courtyard, where everyone came out and talked in fine weather, and everyone knew everyone else. The front of our house was our grocery shop, and all the neighbours shopped there. We were open every day, including Sunday. My mother was a bit of a sharp woman. She was always having rows in the courtyard, usually about credit. She used to say the neighbours expected to buy things for nothing just because they lived in the court, and she told them so to their faces. But no one could have been kinder than my mother when a neighbour’s daughter was run over by a brewer’s waggon. I often hope they were as kind to her over me.

My father was big and soft-spoken and kind all the time. He used to let people buy things for nothing. When my mother objected, he used to say, “Now, Margaret, they needed it.” And usually that stopped the argument.

The arguments my father couldn’t seem to stop were always over me. The main one was because I was in my last year at school. School cost money. My school cost rather more than my father could afford, because it had pretensions to grandeur. It was called Churt House, and it was in a dreary building like a chapel, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. We had all sorts of pretend-posh customs – like calling our teachers Dominies and a School Song – and that was why my mother liked it.

My mother desperately wanted me to grow up to be something better than a grocer. She was convinced I was clever, and she wanted a doctor in the family. She saw me as a famous surgeon, consulted by Royalty, so she naturally wanted me to stay on at school. My father was dead against it. He said he hadn’t the money. He wanted me at home, to help in the shop. They argued about it all the last year I was at school.

Me – I don’t know which side I was on. School bored me stiff. All that sitting and learning lists: lists of spelling, lists of tables, lists of History dates, lists of Geography places. I’d rather do anything else, even now, than learn a list. About the only part of school I enjoyed was the feud we had with the really posh school up the road. It was called Queen Elizabeth Academy, and the boys there wore shiny hats and learnt music and things. They despised us – rightly – for pretending to be better than we were, and we despised them just as much for the silly hats and the music. We used to have some really good fights on the way home. But the rest of school bored me solid.

On the other hand, the shop bored me almost as much. I’d always rather leave the shop to my brother Rob. He was younger than me. He thought it was the greatest treat on earth to count change and put up sugar in blue paper bags. My little sister Elsie liked the shop too, only she’d always rather play football with me.

Football was the thing I really loved. We used to play in the back alley, between our court and the one behind, our court stick the kids from the other one. That usually boiled down to me and Elsie against the two Macready boys. We were the ones who always played. We had to have special rules because the space was so small, and more special rules for washing days, because people’s coppers in the wash-houses on either side filled the whole alley with steam. It was like playing in fog. I was for ever landing the ball in someone’s washing. That made the other arguments my mother had that my father couldn’t settle. She was always having rows about what I’d done with the ball this time, or with Mrs Macready because I’d led her boys into bad ways. I never was a saint. If it wasn’t football, it was something else that was a laugh to do. My mother always tried to stick up for me, but it was a lost cause.

The other thing I used to love was exploring round the city. I used to do it on my way to school, or coming home, so that my mother wouldn’t know. This is where They come in, so don’t get impatient.

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