The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it’s perfect. It’s this whole world, this whole process of immersion, this journey. It’s not, I’m pretty sure, actually true, but that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it changes everything. I remember finishing The Hobbit and handing it to Mor and saying “Read it. It’s pretty good. Isn’t there another one of these around here somewhere?” And I remember finding it—stealing it from my mother’s room. When the door was open, the light from the corridor fell on the shelves R and S and T. We were always afraid to go further in, in case she was hiding in the darkness and grabbed us. She did that once, when Mor was putting back The Crystal Cave. When we took one of her books, usually, we ruffled the shelf so it wouldn’t show. But the one-volume Lord of the Rings was so fat that it didn’t work. I was terrified she’d see. I almost didn’t take it. But either she didn’t notice or she didn’t care—I think she might have been away with one of her boyfriends.
I haven’t said what I wanted to about the thing about it.
Reading it is like being there. It’s like finding a magic spring in a desert. It has everything. (Except lust, Daniel said. But it has Wormtongue.)
It is an oasis for the soul. Even now I can always retreat into Middle Earth and be happy.
How can you compare anything to that? I can’t believe Stephen Donaldson’s hubris.
Sunday 11th November 1979
I climbed out of the dorm window in the middle of the night last night and made a circle and burned the letters in it. Nobody saw me. I made the circle out of things that were lying around, leaves and twigs and stones, and I put in the oak leaf, my piece of wood, and my pocket rock, which comes from the beach in Amroth. I could feel it working, I felt as if I was under an umbrella. I read the letters first. I wanted to know what she’d said. I might as well not have bothered. The only thing she said about what I did was “You were always the one who was most like me,” which is—well, a snowman is more like a cloud than a lump of coal, but neither of them are much alike. I folded the letters into a pagoda and set them on fire. I didn’t look at the pictures, but I saw there were some.
I stirred the ashes, so there was nothing left at all. Then I took the pocket rock and held it up under the moon (a three-quarter moon, I don’t know if that’s right) and tried to make it a protection against bad dreams. I don’t know if it worked. I took the leaf and my piece of wood back.
I climbed back in and got into bed. Everyone else was asleep. The moonlight was on Lorraine’s face. She looked strangely beautiful, and also distant, as if she was dead, as if she’d been dead for centuries and she was a marble statue of herself on her tomb.
The only problem with this is that if she keeps sending letters, I’m going to have to keep burning them. But late at night is definitely safer, from a school point of view, than when people are around.
Deirdre gave me a bun—an iced bun from Finefare, really sticky and sweet. They come in a packet of six, so she gave them to quite a lot of people, but I really appreciated the gesture. It’s nice not to feel like a total pariah.
I wrote to Daniel about Callahan’s Place and Stephen Donaldson’s hubris. I wrote to Sam about Plato, and told him about ordering more. I told him about The Last of the Wine as well, because even if he doesn’t like novels usually he might like that. I wrote to Grampar about going through Abergavenny and about missing the mountains and about all the ball games they play here and how I’d enjoy them if I could run. I can remember running. My whole body remembers. It’s a kinetic memory, if that’s the word. It was a bit of a lie to say I’d enjoy the games. I enjoy sitting in the library reading, and I hate the way the games are so important to the girls while being totally trivial really. What I enjoy is throwing a ball and running and catching, not agonising about the score.
What is it with me and Anne McCaffrey and getting the second book first? Dragonsinger is the sequel to something I’ve never seen called Dragonsong! I read it anyway. It’s oddly light compared to the other two. It’s set in Pern, rather than being about Pern, if that makes sense. I would like a fire-lizard. Or a dragon, for that matter. I’d come swooping in on my blue dragon and she’d breathe fire and burn down the school!
Monday 12th November 1979
Deirdre’s poem has won the school level of the competition.
Despite the fact that I wrote it, I am mortified. Everyone expected me to win, and I expected it myself. What was wrong with my poem? I suppose Miss Gilbert is a traditionalist. Nobody has said anything, and I congratulated Deirdre with everyone else, but I feel publicly humiliated. (On the other hand, I did actually write it, and Deirdre at least knows that.)
Tuesday 13th November 1979
Deirdre came up to me after prep and dragged me out into the grounds where we could talk without being heard. She started crying and being incoherent almost at once, but what she wanted, I think, was to say that I shouldn’t have given her my best work. Well, I didn’t. But she thinks I did because it won. It’s the first time she’s ever won anything. I don’t think she’s ever earned a house mark before, except maybe for scoring a goal. I told her she deserved it. She sat right next to me at breakfast and nobly offered me her sausage, which I accepted, not because it would have been an insult but because I was hungry.
Wordsworth are jolly proud of her. Sandra Mortimer, the House Captain of Wordsworth, a redhead whose eyes are pink-rimmed and watery, personally spoke to Deirdre, who almost died of the honour.
Reading The Shockwave Rider, Brunner. It’s very good, but it isn’t Stand on Zanzibar. I wonder what it’s like to have written your masterpiece, and to know you’ll never do it again?
Wednesday 14th November 1979
This is the true and complete story of how Deirdre and I each got an order mark this morning.
We were in the shower, which is a long trench of tile with a dozen showerheads, with fairly feeble pressure and variably warm water. Give me a bath any day. There’s hot water, meaning water that isn’t icy cold, between seven and eight in the morning, and between seven and eight at night. There are also showers in the gym, which are obligatory after games, but they’re cold and mostly the girls just run through them and splash off any mud. Any serious washing gets done first thing in the morning or last thing at night. It must be lesbian paradise then, because there are always acres of female flesh jiggling about.
There were probably fifteen girls in there this morning, competing for the limited water. Deirdre and I had a showerhead and were relying on my leper status to keep it to ourselves. I saw Shagger casting a few glances towards us, as if she might be repenting her shunning. As I stepped out of the water flow to shampoo my hair, Deirdre said, laughingly, “You’re getting breasts.”