TUESDAY 25TH SEPTEMBER 1979
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.
WEDNESDAY 26TH SEPTEMBER 1979
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.
SATURDAY 29TH SEPTEMBER 1979
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.
SUNDAY 30TH SEPTEMBER 1979
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.