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CHAPTER 1

I ought to tell you at the beginning that I am not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine. I will make this clear at once because I have noticed that if things seep out slowly through a book the reader is apt to feel let down or tricked in some way when he eventually gets the point.

I am not, I am glad to say, mad, and there is so far as I know no hereditary madness in my family. The thing that sets me apart from other girls of my age — which is to say thirteen — is that when I was nine a man came to our school — it was a private kindergarten sort of school where you could go from five upwards but most girls left when they were eleven unless they were really stupendously dumb — to talk to us about becoming writers. There weren't many of us who had really given a lot of thought to it — to writers at all, let alone to becoming them, and certainly not me, not in actual words and thoughts, that is. I had for a considerable number of years written things. There was always a lot of paper lying about in our house, my father being a schoolmaster; and I can't really remember a time when I didn't pick pencils up and write on it. It's funny but even now I don't think I could actually buy paper. It always seems to me as if it ought to be free. It's like parsons' children and collection. I steal paper sometimes when I'm not thinking.

Well this man came, and we all filed into the biggest classroom and the little ones sat down cross-legged upon the floor and the big ones lounged on chairs behind and then we were told to shush and the door opened and this terribly tired-looking man came in behind the Headmistress. 'Girls,' she said, 'this is Mr. Arnold Hanger and he has come a very, very long way to talk to you on the subject of Becoming a Writer. Now I don't really need to intro duce you, Mr. Hanger, because we all so love your books that we really (beam, beam) feel that we know you already.'

Then she said 'Mr. Hanger' again rather sharply because he had his chin on his chest and looked as if he was dropping off. 'Mr. Hanger,' she said, 'we feel that you are one of our very oldest friends.'

Everyone clapped like mad and biffed everyone else's knee and pushed at everyone else's elbow and snuffled, though keeping straight faces because of course NOBODY had ever heard of the man before except I suppose the Headmistress. I'm sure none of the other teachers had because they were all either too old to read anything at all any more or they hadn't started learning. It was a fairly peculiar sort of school.

The man looked as if he knew it too, and he just slowly lifted his eyelids up as the Head sat down and arranged herself, all powdery, with a modesty-vest and a very low, loose top half and looked up at him all hopeful. It was terribly funny somehow, and the girl sitting next to me and I collapsed and I nearly as anything had to go out. And I suppose my whole life would have been different if I had.

However.

Arnold Hanger got up with a deep sigh and looked all round us, and then his face broke into a great, lovely smile all over and he began to talk. And he was absolutely marvellous. Even the Top Form, the really ghastly ones who just sat about yawning all day and were going to do nothing when they left school but sit about yawning all day — it was a posh sort of school — even they sat up and listened.

He had a lovely voice and he had brought a lot of books with him with bits of paper stuck in to mark the place, and he kept picking up first one book and then another and reading bits out — long, long bits and sometimes very short bits. Poetry and all sorts.

Well, I was only nine and I wasn't really far off fairy tales. They had had a job getting me started reading at all actually, because I was always wandering about, making these scrawls on my father's foolscap, pressing my face against windows and so forth; WASTING TIME, as they all kept saying. He kept on — book after book after book that I'd never even heard of, poems and stories and conversations and bits of plays, all in different voices. And I sat so still I couldn't get up off the floor when it was over, I was so stiff.

The Head thanked him (beam, beam and BEAM) and he suddenly looked sad and tired again and went padding off after her to the door with his head down, while we clapped and clapped. He stood in the door with his back to us for a moment and then he turned round and stared at us; and suddenly he put up his hand and we were quiet.

'Thank you,' he said. 'I'm glad you enjoyed it. If there is anyone here this afternoon whom I have convinced that books are meant to be enjoyed, that English is nothing to do with duty, that it has nothing to do with school — with exercises and homework and ticks and crosses — then I am a happy man.' He turned away, but then he turned back again and he suddenly simply shouted, he bellowed. 'To hell with school,' he cried. 'To hell with school. English is what matters. ENGLISH IS LIFE.' The Head grabbed him and led him off to her sitting-room for tea, not looking too thrilled, and we were let out and I went flying home.

I got every one of my writings out of my desk and went tearing back again to the school gates — it was miles — but just as I got there I saw the station taxi creaking off and Mr. Hanger's hat through the back window. I turned round and went flying off home again, through our garden and out the back to the railway line, and I looked both ways and ran across to the other side and along through the allotments on the railway bank until I came to the slope that led up to the platform, and I ran along it.

I was there before him and I had to wait until he came over the bridge.

He came very slowly. He had a brown pork-pie hat on and a long tweed coat, rather oldish. He stopped in the middle of the bridge to watch the train come in and look down the funnel and get covered in smoke like my father and I used to do when I was small, before my brother was born. And then very slowly, as if he didn't care whether he caught it or not, he tramped down the wooden steps of the footbridge towards the carriages. 'Come along now,' the porter shouted, holding a third-class door open, 'look alive laddie,' and I rushed up just as he stepped in.

'Could you look at these?' I said. I pushed in front of the porter and flung all the bits of paper at him. 'Now then!' the porter said. There was a lot of waving and whistling and I could see Arnold Hanger scrabbling about on the floor inside, and then fighting with the leather strap that let the window down. He only got his head out as the train sailed off the end of the platform, but I managed to keep trotting alongside down the slope and he took off his hat and waved it very courteously, just missing the signal. 'Indeed yes. And where shall I return them?' he shouted, and I yelled back, 'I've put my name and address in.' (Actually in those days I was apt to put my name and address on everything I wrote. I used to put it on all kinds of other things — particularly on my arms and thighs. I have noticed that this is a characteristic of children of that age.)

When I had had a bit of a to-do with the porter, and been shown out of the luggage entrance I calmed down a little and began to feel silly. I didn't tell anybody what I'd done and oddly enough nobody at school said much about the talk and neither did I. I watched the post for a day or two and then I rather forgot about it all, which is another thing that happens when you are eight or nine. Just as well because it was months and months later before I heard any more, right in the middle of winter. As a matter of fact it was on the day when we had to leave our house and go to live on the other side of England —'in the vilest part of it', according to mother — because my father had decided to stop being a schoolmaster and to become a curate.

We were in the station taxi and mother was crying and Rowley, my brother, was crying too — he was still extremely young and it was about all he ever did — and my father was talking to the taxi man about whether there was going to be a war or not and trying not to look back at the house which still had all our curtains hanging in the windows, and the garden seats on the lawn, and even the swing in the pear tree because the house belonged to the school and most of the things had to be left for the next housemaster and his family.

I said, 'We ought to have taken the swing down. It'll rot if it's left out all winter,' and father said, 'Oh the Eaveses will take it down tomorrow. Great fellow, Eaves. He'll paint it and oil it and then store it in the loft. And he'll have the garden seats painted next spring I wouldn't wonder.'

'I like the garden seats peeling,' I said and then I started crying, too, and my father yelled, 'Great Scot! What's the matter with you all? Willy' (he always knows everyone's name), 'Willy, get your oars. Your taxi's afloat,' and he got his handkerchief out and blew his nose very loudly and then dusted the nostrils violently east to west until his eyes watered.

As he put the handkerchief away he said, 'Here, Jessica, I forgot to give it to you. There was a letter for you today,' and as the taxi stopped he put into my hands a long, fat envelope typewritten in bright blue and addressed to me.

I opened it straight off in the little alley where we had to queue up for our tickets and dropped a whole lot of things that I was supposed to be carrying because mother had Rowley and the baby-bag and a lot of parcels (she is a terrible packer). 'Jessica,' she said. 'Must you read now?' and I didn't answer but just looked because there were all my writings again and on the top of them Mr. Hanger had pinned a piece of paper and in bright blue typewriting he had said:

JESSICA VYE YOU ARE A WRITER BEYOND ALL POSSIBLE DOUBT!

This experience changed me utterly, like Heaven, 'in the twinkling of an eye', and I believe is the reason for the next point I have to make clear before getting on with the story. Which is that I am not really very popular. Some people in fact do not really like me at all. In fact if you really want to know quite a lot of people absolutely can't stand me.

I'm not just saying it and trying to cadge sympathy like they say eldest children do when they are displaced in their parents' affections by the birth of a second child. I'm not in the least bit jealous of Rowley. You couldn't be jealous of him. He's sweet although he's terribly spoilt and gets away with everything they used to go for me like anything for (I am fond of putting prepositions at the end of sentences, as in fact was Shakespeare).

The thing I can't understand though about being unpopular is that people often start by liking me very much. You can see. For instance when we moved from father's school to this place, Cleveland Sands, and I was sent to the High School at Cleveland Spa I was terribly popular. I was chosen as form captain my very first term and even rounders captain although I'm hopeless, and everyone wanted me for their partner in team games and skipping and train-line. Then it slowly all faded away and they seemed to start hating me as much as they had liked me. It was awful. You could see them curling their lips and turning away and sniggering. I didn't know what to do about it. I even got three bags of toffees — it was before rationing — and handed them round everyone saying, 'Take two, I've got heaps,' but they all just looked at me as if I were mad and said, 'Thank you,' watching me while they dipped their hands in, and I heard them all laughing about it afterwards. Florence Bone — she's my friend — said, 'Why do that?' and I didn't say anything. Then I said, 'Why does everyone hate me so?' and she said, 'They don't. What's the matter with you? Calm down.' She is very calm and steady, Florence Bone, and terribly good at Mathematics and very truthful as a rule.

But she wasn't being truthful then. I knew they didn't really like me and except for Florence there wasn't any one of them I really liked either, so I don't know why I cared. 'I can't see why you expect so much,' Florence said. 'We like you all right. What on earth do you want?'

But she was telling lies. There is this other thing I have to explain about myself which will show that she was telling lies: and that is that I have this power of knowing what people are thinking. I'm not boasting about it. Honestly, it is just something I was born with. As a matter of fact it's not all that uncommon. I have met one or two other people who can do it. I met one last year and you will hear about her and much good will it do you because she was the ghastliest woman ... But that is not the point at the moment.

The point is this — in three parts. Tripartite. Viz:

1. I am not quite normal

2. I am not very popular

3. I am able to tell what people are thinking. And I might add

4. I am terribly bad at keeping quiet when I have something on my mind because

5. I ABSOLUTELY ALWAYS AND INVARIABLY TELL THE TRUTH.

I am honestly not being conceited about this (No. 5). It is something I cannot help. There is nothing good about doing a thing if you can't help it. It is more like an illness than anything. Florence Bone says that really I ought to see a psychiatrist about it and I even asked my father if he thought so too. All he did though was snort like mad and say that I needed a psychiatrist less than anyone he'd ever met.

Incidentally this business of having to tell the truth has absolutely nothing to do with my father being a curate.

When I had been at Cleveland Spa for simply ages and was twelve years old I thought it would be a good idea to do something at the end of the term, like going out to tea or something. There was a tea shop called Elsie Meeney's on the corner of Ginger Street which we passed every day on the way from the station (Cleveland Spa is ten miles from Cleveland Sands). It was a very dark shop with a glass canopy outside it over the pavement, held up with posts. Before the war there had been baskets of flowers hanging between the posts, giving it all an air, and you could still see the metal baskets hanging though there were no flowers in them. The canopy thing had had the glass taken out because of air-raids and was boarded up.

The windows in this shop had slanting cake-shelves in them with circles of paper at intervals where cakes should have been. There was a notice saying 'Weddings a Speciality' and two oldish teacakes lying in a corner. Already, though the war had only been on a bit more than a year, cake shops were beginning to look much too big.

'Do they do teas?' Helen Bell asked. 'They don't look as if they do anything.'

'Yes they do,' I said, 'I found out. I went in one dinner hour and I asked. I said, "Do you serve afternoon teas?" and they said, "Well I suppose so," and there's a notice inside pinned up actually saying "teas".'

The three of them — there were Helen Bell, Florence Bone and this peculiar girl, Cissie Comberbach — looked as if they would believe it when they saw it and we all filed into the shop and rested our shoe bags and gas masks and satchels on the floor, putting our report envelopes in our mouths while we did it. There was a thin woman behind the counter in a lavender overall reading a magazine. Now and then she gave a colossal great sniff and turned a page. Florence gave me a push. 'Go on then,' she said. I coughed.

The woman didn't look up. She turned a page and flexed her feet and I coughed again.

'Excuse me,' I said, 'may we have some tea?'

'Eh?' she said.

'Tea,' I said.

'Tea?' she said.

'Yes,' I said. 'Like it says.'

'Well I don't know,' she said. She looked hard at the card. It was pinned to an archway where two long red plush curtains were caught back in the middle at the top of the three steps.

'It does say tea,' Florence said, not to the woman though, just to the air round about.

'Oh well I dare say it says tea,' she said and sniffed. She turned over a page of the magazine and flexed her feet round and round.

'Well I did ask and it says tea and we're going in,' I said.

We stamped in under the archway up the steps and sat down in a small round room with a stained glass window in the back with strips of brown sticky paper stuck all over it in a lattice in case of bombs. It was a very stuffy room and there were only two tables in it. One was a big round table with a dirty cloth on it and the other was a little table with a clean cloth on it and a notice saying 'Reserved'. We sat down at the dirty table. Helen and Cissie looked at each other and Cissie sniggered.

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Excerpted from "A Long Way from Verona"
by .
Copyright © 1971 Jane Gardam.
Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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