Witch Week. Diana Wynne Jones

either Nan Pilgrim or Charles Morgan had ever spent at Larwood House. It did not begin too badly for Charles, but Nan was late for breakfast.

      She had broken her shoelace. She was told off by Mr Towers for being late, and then by a prefect. By this time, the only table with a place was one where all the others were boys. Nan slid into place, horribly embarrassed. They had eaten all the toast already, except one slice. Simon Silverson took the slice as Nan arrived. “Bad luck, fatso.” From further down the table, Nan saw Charles Morgan looking at her. It was meant to be a look of sympathy, but, like all Charles’s looks, it came out like a blank double-barrelled glare. Nan pretended not to see it and did her best to eat wet, pale scrambled egg on its own.

      At lessons, she discovered that Theresa and her friends had started a new craze. That was a bad sign. They were always more than usually pleased with themselves at the start of a craze – even though this one had probably started so that they need not think of witches or birds. The craze was white knitting, white and clean and fluffy, which you kept wrapped in a towel so that it would stay clean. The classroom filled with mutters of, “Two purl, one plain, twist two . . .”

      But the day really got into its evil stride in the middle of the morning, during PE. Larwood House had that every day, like the journals. 2Y joined with 2X and 2Z, and the boys went running in the field, while the girls went together to the Gym. The climbing-ropes were let down there.

      Theresa and Estelle and the rest gave glad cries and went shinning up the ropes with easy swinging pulls. Nan tried to lurk out of sight against the wall-bars. Her heart fell with a flop into her gym shoes. This was worse even than the vaulting-horse. Nan simply could not climb ropes. She had been born without the proper muscles or something.

      And, since it was that kind of day, Miss Phillips spotted Nan almost at once. “Nan, you haven’t had a turn yet. Theresa, Delia, Estelle, come on down and let Nan have her turn on the ropes.” Theresa and the rest came down readily. They knew they were about to see some fun.

      Nan saw their faces and ground her teeth. This time, she vowed, she would do it. She would climb right up to the ceiling and wipe that grin off Theresa’s face. Nevertheless, the distance to the ropes seemed several hundred shiny yards. Nan’s legs, in the floppy divided skirts they wore for Gym, had gone mauve and wide, and her arms felt like weak pink puddings. When she reached the rope, the knot on the end of it seemed to hang rather higher than her head. And she was supposed to stand on that knot somehow.

      She gripped the rope in her fat, weak hands and jumped. All that happened was that the knot hit her heavily in the chest and her feet dropped sharply to the floor again. A murmur of amusement began among Theresa and her friends. Nan could hardly believe it. This was ridiculous – worse than usual! She could not even get off the floor now. She took a new grip on the rope and jumped again. And again. And again. And she leapt and leapt, bounding like a floppy kangaroo, and still the knot kept hitting her in the chest and her feet kept hitting the floor. The murmurs of the rest grew into giggles and then to outright laughter. Until at last, when Nan was almost ready to give up, her feet somehow found the knot, groped, gripped and hung on. And there she clung, upside down like a sloth, breathless and sweating, from arms which did not seem to work any more. This was terrible. And she still had to climb up the rope. She wondered whether to fall off on her back and die.

      Miss Phillips was beside her. “Come on, Nan. Stand up on the knot.”

      Somehow, feeling it was superhuman of her, Nan managed to lever herself upright. She stood there, wobbling gently round in little circles, while Miss Phillips, with her face level with Nan’s trembling knees, kindly and patiently explained for the hundredth time exactly how to climb a rope.

      Nan clenched her teeth. She would do it. Everyone else did. It must be possible. She shut her eyes to shut out the other girls’ grinning faces and did as Miss Phillips told her. She took a strong and careful grip on the rope above her head. Carefully, she put rope between the top of one foot and the bottom of the other. She kept her eyes shut. Firmly, she pulled with her arms. Crisply, she pulled her feet up behind. Gripped again. Reached up again, with fearful concentration. Yes, this was it! She was doing it at last! The secret must be to keep your eyes shut. She gripped and pulled. She could feel her body easily swinging upwards towards the ceiling, just as the others did it.

      But, around her, the giggles grew to laughter, and the laughter grew into screams, then shouts, and became a perfect storm of hilarity. Puzzled, Nan opened her eyes. All round her, at knee-level, she saw laughing red faces, tears running out of eyes, and people doubled over yelling with mirth. Even Miss Phillips was biting her lip and snorting a little. And small wonder. Nan looked down to find her gym shoes still resting on the knot at the bottom of the rope. After all that climbing, she was still standing on the knot.

      Nan tried to laugh too. She was sure it had been very funny. But it was hard to be amused. Her only consolation was that, after that, none of the other girls could climb the ropes either. They were too weak with laughing.

      The boys, meanwhile, were running round and round the field. They were stripped to little pale-blue running shorts and splashing through the dew in big spiked shoes. It was against the rules to run in anything but spikes. They were divided into little groups of labouring legs. The quick group of legs in front, with muscles, belonged to Simon Silverson and his friends, and to Brian Wentworth. Brian was a good runner in spite of his short legs. Brian was prudently trying to keep to the rear of Simon, but every so often the sheer joy of running overcame him and he went ahead. Then he would get bumped and jostled by Simon’s friends, for everyone knew it was Simon’s right to be in front.

      The group of legs behind these were paler and moved without enthusiasm. These belonged to Dan Smith and his friends. All of them could have run at least as fast as Simon Silverson, but they were saving themselves for better things. They loped along easily, chatting among themselves. Today, they kept bursting into laughter.

      Behind these again laboured an assorted group of legs: mauve legs, fat legs, bright white legs, legs with no muscles at all, and the great brown legs of Nirupam Singh, which seemed too heavy for the rest of Nirupam’s skinny body to lift. Everyone in this group was too breathless to talk. Their faces wore assorted expressions of woe.

      The last pair of legs, far in the rear, belonged to Charles Morgan. There was nothing particularly wrong with Charles’s legs, except that his feet were in ordinary school shoes and soaked through. He was always behind. He chose to be. This was one of the few times in the day when he could be alone to think. He had discovered that, as long as he was thinking of something else, he could keep up his slow trot for hours. And think. The only interruptions he had to fear were when the other groups came pounding past him and he was tangled up in their efforts for a few seconds. Or when Mr Towers, encased in his nice warm tracksuit, came loping up alongside and called ill-advised encouragements to Charles.

      So Charles trotted slowly on, thinking. He gave himself over to hating Larwood House. He hated the field under his feet, the shivering autumn trees that dripped on him, the white goalposts, and the neat line of pine trees in front of the spiked wall that kept everyone in. Then, when he swung round the corner and had a view of the school buildings, he hated them more. They were built of a purplish sort of brick. Charles thought it was the colour a person’s face would go if they were throttling. He thought of the long corridors inside, painted caterpillar green, the thick radiators which were never warm, the brown classrooms, the frosty white dormitories, and the smell of school food, and he was almost in an ecstasy of hate. Then he looked at the groups of legs straggling round the field ahead, and he hated all the people in the school most horribly of all.

      Upon that, he found he was remembering the witch being burnt. It swept into his head unbidden, as it always did. Only today, it seemed worse than usual. Charles found he was remembering things he had not noticed at the time: the exact shape of the flames, just leaping from small to large, and the way the fat man who was a witch had bent sideways away from them. He could see the man’s exact face, the rather blobby nose with a wart on it, the sweat on it, and the flames shining off the man’s eyes and the sweat. Above all, he could see the man’s expression. It was astounded. The fat man had not believed he was going to die until the moment Charles saw him.