We grew up playing freely in the ruins and had no real sense of this history. It was a wonderful place for children. It was abandoned and grown over and ignored, and once you slipped away from the houses it was wild. You could always go up the mountain into real countryside, which had rocks and trees and sheep, grey-coated from coal dust and unappealing. (I can’t understand how people are sentimental about sheep. We used to shout “Mint sauce!” at them to get them to run away. Auntie Teg always winced at that and told us not to, but we kept on doing it. They’d come down into the valley and knock over dustbins and destroy gardens. They were the reason you had to keep gates shut.) But even down in the valley, running through everything were the seams of trees and ruins. They were everywhere, through and under and parallel to the town. It wasn’t the only landscape we knew. We went to Pembrokeshire on holiday, and up to the real mountains, the Brecon Beacons, and to Cardiff, which is a city, with city shops. The Valleys were home, they were the landscape of normality, and we never questioned it.
The fairies never said they built the ruins. I doubt we asked, but if we had they’d just have laughed, as they did at most of our questions. They were just inexplicably there or, some days, inexplicably not there. Sometimes they would talk to us, and other times flee from us. Like the other children we knew, we could play with them or without them. All we really needed was each other and our imagination.
The places of my childhood were linked by magical pathways, ones almost no adults used. They had roads, we had these. They were for walking, they were different and extra, wider than a path but not big enough for cars, sometimes parallel to the real roads and sometimes cutting from nowhere to nowhere, from an elven ruin to the labyrinth of Minos. We gave them names but we knew unquestioningly that the real name for them was “dramroads.” I never turned that word over in my mouth and saw it for what it was: Tram road. Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open. Tram to dram, of course. Once there had been trams running on rails up those dramroads, trams full of iron ore or coal. So empty and leaf-strewn, used by nobody but children and fairies, they’d once been little railroads.
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.
TUESDAY 18TH SEPTEMBER 1979
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.