The Homeward Bounders. Diana Wynne Jones
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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.
That year I was taking a new bit of the city every week and going round it till I knew it. Then I’d move on. I told you a city is Home to me. Most of it was just like it was round our court, crowded and cheery and grimy. But I used to love the market. Everyone shouting like mad, and oranges to nick off every barrow, and big gas flares over all the stalls. I saw one catch fire one time. Then there was the canal and the railway. They used to go out of their way to criss-cross one another, it always seemed to me. Trains were clanking over the water every hundred yards, or else barges were getting dragged under iron bridges – except for one bit, where the canal went over the railway for a change on a line of high arches like stilts, with houses packed underneath the arches. Near that was the smart bit with the good shops. I used to love the smart bit in winter in the dark, when there were lights all wriggling down into the wet road, and posh people in carriages going up and down. Then there were the quiet bits. You’d come upon them suddenly, round a corner – grey, quiet parts that everyone seemed to have forgotten.
The quiet bit that was the end of me was right near the centre. It was round behind the smart bit, almost under the place where the canal went up on its stilts. I came at it through a sort of park first. It was a private park. I wasn’t particular about trespassing. I suppose you’d call the place a garden. But I was really ignorant in those days. The only other grass I’d seen was in a park, so I thought of this place as a park when I came over the wall into it.
It was a triangular green place. Though it was right in the heart of the city, it had more trees – and bushes – in it than I’d ever seen all together in those days. It creased down to a hollow in the middle, where there was grass, smooth mown grass. The moment I landed over the wall, the quiet shut me in. It was peaceful in a way, but it was more like going deaf. I couldn’t hear so much as a whisper from the railway or the roads.
Funny! I thought, and looked up to make sure the canal was still there. And it was there, striding across the sky in front of me. I was glad, because the place was so strange that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find the whole city had vanished.
Which goes to show you should always trust your instincts. I didn’t know a thing about Them then, or the ways of the worlds, but I had got it right. By instinct.
What I should have done was climb back over that wall at once. I wish I had. But you know a bit what I was like by now, and I don’t think you would have gone away either. It was so strange, this silence. And there seemed no harm in it. I knew I was scared stiff, really, but I told myself that was just the way you feel when you’re trespassing. So, with my back like a mass of soft little creeping caterpillars, I went down through the trees to the mown grass at the bottom.
There was a little white statue there. Now I’m not artistic. I saw it was of a fellow with no clothes on – I always wonder why it’s Art to take your clothes off: they never put in the goose pimples – and this fellow was wrapped in chains. He didn’t look as if he was enjoying himself, and small wonder. But the thing that really interested me was the way the artist had managed to carve the chains out of stone, all linked together in one piece, just as if they were real chains. I moved one to see, and it was just like a real chain, only made of stone. When I lifted it, I found it was fastened to the same place as all the other chains, down at one side, into the ring of what looked like a ship’s anchor, and this anchor was carved half buried in the white stone the statue was standing on.
That was all I noticed, not being artistic, because by that time I could see a stone building up among the trees at the wide end of the park. I went there, very softly, hiding among the trees and bushes. My back was still creeping, but I’d got used to that by then.
When I got there, I found it was quite a big building, like a small castle, built out of pinkish grey stone. It was triangular, like the park. The part I was looking at was the pointed end. It had battlements along the top, and some quite big windows in the ground floor. You could see it had been modernised. I slithered round until I could look in one of the big windows. I couldn’t get close, because there was a neat gravel terrace running round it under the windows. So what I did see was sort of smeary and dark, with the reflections of trees over it. I thought that was because I was ten feet away. I know better now.
I saw a fellow inside who seemed to be wearing a sort of cloak. Anyway, it was long and greyish and flowing, and it had a hood. The hood was not up. It was bunched back round his neck, but even so I couldn’t see much of his face. You never do see Their faces. I thought it was just the reflections in the window then, and I craned forward to see. He was leaning over a sort of slope covered with winking lights and buttons. I knew it was a machine of some sort. I might have been ignorant, but I had climbed up into the signal box on the railway under the canal arch, and I had been shown the printing press in the court up the street, so I knew it must be a kind of machine I didn’t know, but a bit like both and a lot smoother looking. As I looked, the fellow put out a hand and very firmly and deliberately punched several buttons on the machine. Then he turned and seemed to say something across his bunched hood. Another fellow in the same sort of cloak came into sight. They stood with Their backs to me, watching something on the machine. Watching like anything. There was a terrible intentness to the way They stood.
It made me hold my breath. I nearly burst before one of Them nodded, then the other. They moved off then, in a cheerful busy way, to somewhere out of sight of the window. I wished I could see. I knew They were going to do something important. But I never saw. I only felt. The ground suddenly trembled, and the trees, and the triangular castle. They sort of shook, the way hot air does. I trembled too, and felt a peculiar twitch, as if I’d been pulled to one side all over. Then the feeling stopped. Nothing more happened.
After a moment, I crept away, until I came to the wall round the park. I was scared – yes – but I was furiously interested too. I kept wondering what made that twitch, and why everything had trembled.
As soon as I was over the wall again, it was as if my ears had popped. I could hear trains clanking and traffic rumbling – almost a roar of city noise – and that made me more interested than ever. I dropped down into the side street beyond the wall and went along to the busy street where the front of the castle was. On this side the castle was blacker looking and guarded from the pavement by