found. I thought she scorned him utterly.
At the back of the room, Brian Wentworth wrote, sighing, Timetables just run away with me, that is my problem. During Geography, I planned a bus journey from London to Baghdad via Paris. Next lesson I shall plan the same journey via Berlin.
Nan Pilgrim meanwhile was scrawling,
This is a message to the person who reads our journals. Are you Miss Cadwallader, or does Miss Cadwallader make Mr Wentworth do it?
She stared at what she had written, rather taken aback at her own daring. This kind of thing happened to her sometimes. Still, she thought, there were hundreds of journals and hundreds of daily entries. The chances of Miss Cadwallader reading this one had to be very small – particularly if she went on and made it really boring.
I shall now be boring, she wrote. Teddy Crossley’s real name is Harold, but he got called Teddy out of the hymn that goes ‘Gladly my cross I’d bear.’ But of course everyone sings ‘Crossley my glad-eyed bear.’ Mr Crossley is glad-eyed. He thinks everyone should be upright and honourable and interested in Geography. I am sorry for him.
But the one who was best at making his journal boring was Charles Morgan. His entry read,
I got up. I felt hot at breakfast. I do not like porridge. Second lesson was Woodwork but not for long. I think we have Games next.
Looking at this, you might think Charles was either very stupid or very muddled, or both. Anyone in 2Y would have told you that it had been a chilly morning and there had been cornflakes for breakfast. Second lesson had been PE, during which Nan Pilgrim had so much amused Theresa Mullett by failing to jump the horse, and the lesson to come was Music, not Games. But Charles was not writing about the day’s work. He really was writing about his secret feelings, but he was doing it in his own private code so that no one could know.
He started every entry with I got up. It meant, I hate this school. When he wrote I do not like porridge, that was actually true, but porridge was his code-word for Simon Silverson. Simon was porridge at breakfast, potatoes at lunch, and bread at tea. All the other people he hated had code-words too. Dan Smith was cornflakes, cabbage and butter. Theresa Mullett was milk.
But when Charles wrote I felt hot, he was not talking about school at all. He meant he was remembering the witch being burnt. It was a thing that would keep coming into his head whenever he was not thinking of anything else, much as he tried to forget it.
He had been so young that he had been in a pushchair. His big sister Bernadine had been pushing him while his mother carried the shopping, and they had been crossing a road where there was a view down into the Market Square. There were crowds of people down there, and a sort of flickering. Bernadine had stopped the pushchair in the middle of the street in order to stare. She and Charles had just time to glimpse the bone-fire starting to burn, and they had seen that the witch was a large fat man. Then their mother came rushing back and scolded Bernadine on across the road.
“You mustn’t look at witches!” she said. “Only awful people do that!” So Charles had only seen the witch for an instant. He never spoke about it, but he never forgot it. It always astonished him that Bernadine seemed to forget about it completely. What Charles was really saying in his journal was that the witch came into his head during breakfast, until Simon Silverson made him forget again by eating all the toast.
When he wrote Woodwork second lesson, he meant that he had gone on to think about the second witch – which was a thing he did not think about so often. Woodwork was anything Charles liked. They only had Woodwork once a week, and Charles had chosen that for his code on the very reasonable grounds that he was not likely to enjoy anything at Larwood House any oftener than that. Charles had liked the second witch. She had been quite young and rather pretty, in spite of her torn skirt and untidy hair. She had come scrambling across the wall at the end of the garden and stumbled down the rockery to the lawn, carrying her smart shoes in one hand. Charles had been nine years old then, and he was minding his little brother on the lawn. Luckily for the witch, his parents were out.
Charles knew she was a witch. She was out of breath and obviously frightened. He could hear the yells and police whistles in the houses behind. Besides, who else but a witch would run away from the police in the middle of the afternoon in a tight skirt? But he made quite sure. He said, “Why are you running away in our garden?”
The witch rather desperately hopped on one foot. She had a large blister on the other foot, and both her stockings were laddered. “I’m a witch,” she panted. “Please help me, little boy!”
“Why can’t you magic yourself safe?” Charles asked.
“Because I can’t when I’m this frightened!” gasped the witch. “I tried, but it just went wrong! Please, little boy – sneak me out through your house and don’t say a word, and I’ll give you luck for the rest of your life. I promise.”
Charles looked at her in that intent way of his which most people found blank and nasty. He saw she was speaking the truth. He saw, too, that she understood the look as very few people seemed to. “Come in through the kitchen,” he said. And he led the witch, hobbling on her blister in her laddered stockings, through the kitchen and down the hall to the front door.
“Thanks,” she said. “You’re a love.” She smiled at him while she put her hair right in the hall mirror, and, after she had done something to her skirt that may have been witchcraft to make it seem untorn again, she bent down and kissed Charles. “If I get away, I’ll bring you luck,” she said. Then she put her smart shoes on again and went away down the front garden, trying hard not to limp. At the front gate, she waved and smiled at Charles.
That was the end of the part Charles liked. That was why he wrote But not for long next. He never saw the witch again, or heard what had happened to her. He ordered his little brother never to say a word about her – and Graham obeyed, because he always did everything Charles said – and then he watched and waited for any sign of the witch or any sign of luck. None came.
It was next to impossible for Charles to find out what might have happened to the witch, because there had been new laws since he glimpsed the first witch burning. There were no more public burnings. The bone-fires were lit inside the walls of gaols instead, and the radio would simply announce: “Two witches were burnt this morning inside Holloway Gaol.” Every time Charles heard this kind of announcement he thought it was his witch. It gave him a blunt, hurtful feeling inside. He thought of the way she had kissed him, and he was fairly sure it made you wicked too, to be kissed by a witch.
He gave up expecting to be lucky. In fact, to judge from the amount of bad luck he had had, he thought the witch must have been caught almost straight away. For the blunt, hurtful feeling he had when the radio announced a burning made him refuse to do anything his parents told him to do. He just gave them his steady stare instead. And each time he stared, he knew they thought he was being nasty. They did not understand it the way the witch did. And, since Graham imitated everything Charles did, Charles’s parents very soon decided Charles was a problem child and leading Graham astray. They arranged for him to be sent to Larwood House, because it was quite near.
When Charles wrote Games, he meant bad luck. Like everyone else in 2Y, he had seen Mr Crossley had found a note. He did not know what was in the note, but when he looked up and caught Mr Crossley’s eye, he knew it meant bad luck coming.
Mr Crossley still could not decide what to do about the note. If what it said was true,
