The Lives of Christopher Chant. Diana Wynne Jones

did not want you to go to it. It was quite near, but he always found himself avoiding it. He set off sliding, scrambling, edging across bulging wet rock, and climbing up or down, until he found another valley and another path. There were hundreds of them. He called them the Anywheres.

      The Anywheres were mostly quite different from London. They were hotter or colder, with strange trees and stranger houses. Sometimes the people in them looked ordinary, sometimes their skin was bluish or reddish and their eyes were peculiar, but they were always very kind to Christopher. He had a new adventure every time he went on a dream. In the active adventures people helped him escape through cellars of odd buildings, or he helped them in wars, or in rounding up dangerous animals. In the calm adventures, he got new things to eat and people gave him toys. He lost most of the toys as he was scrambling back home over the rocks, but he did manage to bring back the shiny shell necklace the silly ladies gave him, because he could hang it round his neck.

      He went to the Anywhere with the silly ladies several times. It had blue sea and white sand, perfect for digging and building in. There were ordinary people in it, but Christopher only saw them in the distance. The silly ladies came and sat on rocks out of the sea and giggled at him while he made sand-castles.

      “Oh clistoffer!” they would coo, in lisping voices. “Tell uth what make you a clistoffer.” And they would all burst into screams of high laughter.

      They were the only ladies he had seen without clothes on. Their skins were greenish and so was their hair. He was fascinated by the way the ends of them were big silvery tails that could curl and flip almost like a fish, and send powerful sprays of water over him from their big finned feet. He never could persuade them that he was not a strange animal called a clistoffer.

      Every time he went to that Anywhere, the latest nursery maid complained about all the sand in his bed. He had learnt very early on that they complained even louder when they found his pyjamas muddy, wet and torn from climbing through The Place Between. He took a set of clothes out on to the rocky path and left them there to change into. He had to put new clothes there every year or so, when he grew out of the latest torn and muddy suit, but the nursery maids changed so often that none of them noticed. Nor did they notice the strange toys he brought back over the years. There was a clockwork dragon, a horse that was really a flute, and the necklace from the silly ladies which, when you looked closely, was a string of tiny pearl skulls.

      Christopher thought about the silly ladies. He looked at his latest nursemaid’s feet, and he thought that her shoes were about big enough to hide flippers. But you could never see any more of any lady because of her skirts. He kept wondering how Mama and the nursery maid walked about on nothing but a big limber tail instead of legs.

      His chance to find out came one afternoon when the nursery maid put him into an unpleasant sailor-suit and led him downstairs to the drawing room. Mama and some other ladies were there with someone called Lady Badgett, who was a kind of cousin of Papa’s. She had asked to see Christopher. Christopher stared at her long nose and her wrinkles. “Is she a witch, Mama?” he asked loudly.

      Everyone except Lady Badgett – who went more wrinkled than ever – said, “Hush, dear!” After that, Christopher was glad to find they seemed to have forgotten him. He quietly lay down on his back on the carpet, and rolled from lady to lady. When they caught him, he was under the sofa gazing up Lady Badgett’s petticoats. He was dragged out of the room in disgrace, very disappointed to discover that all the ladies had big thick legs, except Lady Badgett: her legs were thin and yellow like a chicken’s.

      Mama sent for him in her dressing-room later that day. “Oh, Christopher, how could you!” she said. “I’d just got Lady Badgett to the point of calling on me, and she’ll never come again. You’ve undone the work of years!”

      It was very hard work, Christopher realised, being a Beauty. Mama was very busy in front of her mirror with all sorts of little cut glass bottles and jars. Behind her, a maid was even busier, far busier than the nursery maids ever were, working on Mama’s glossy curls. Christopher was so ashamed to have wasted all this work that he picked up a glass jar to hide his confusion.

      Mama told him sharply to put it down. “Money isn’t everything, you see, Christopher,” she explained. “A good place in Society is worth far more. Lady Badgett could have helped us both. Why do you think I married your papa?”

      Since Christopher had simply no idea what could have brought Mama and Papa together, he put out his hand to pick up the jar again. But he remembered in time that he was not supposed to touch it, and picked up a big pad of false hair instead. He turned it round in his hands while Mama talked.

      “You are going to grow up with Papa’s good family and my money,” she said. “I want you to promise me now that you will take your place in Society alongside the very best people. Mama intends you to be a great man – Christopher, are you listening?”

      Christopher had given up trying to understand Mama. He held the false hair out instead. “What’s this for?”

      “Bulking out my hair,” Mama said. “Please attend, Christopher. It’s very important you begin now preparing yourself for the future. Put that hair down.”

      Christopher put the pad of hair back. “I thought it might be a dead rat,” he said. And somehow Mama must have made a mistake because, to Christopher’s great interest, the thing really was a dead rat. Mama and her maid both screamed. Christopher was hustled away while a footman came running with a shovel.

      After that, Mama called Christopher to her dressing-room and talked to him quite often. He stood trying to remember not to fiddle with the jars, staring at his reflection in her mirror, wondering why his curls were black and Mama’s rich brown, and why his eyes were so much more like coal than Mama’s. Something seemed to stop there ever being another dead rat, but sometimes a spider could be encouraged to let itself down in front of the mirror, whenever Mama’s talk became too alarming.

      He understood that Mama cared very urgently about his future. He knew he was going to have to enter Society with the best people. But the only Society he had heard of was the Aid the Heathen Society that he had to give a penny to every Sunday in church, and he thought Mama meant that.

      Christopher made careful enquiries from the nursery maid with the big feet. She told him Heathens were savages who ate people. Missionaries were the best people, and they were the ones Heathens ate. Christopher saw that he was going to be a missionary when he grew up. He found Mama’s talk increasingly alarming. He wished she had chosen another career for him.

      He also asked the nursery maid about the kind of ladies who had tails like fish. “Oh, you mean mermaids!” the girl said, laughing. “Those aren’t real.”

      Christopher knew mermaids were not real, because he only met them in dreams. Now he was convinced that he would meet Heathens too, if he went to the wrong Almost Anywhere. For a time, he was so frightened of meeting Heathens that when he came to a new valley from The Place Between, he lay down and looked carefully at the Anywhere it led to, to see what the people were like there before he went on. But after a while, when nobody tried to eat him, he decided that the Heathens probably lived in the Anywhere which stopped you going to it, and gave up worrying until he was older.

      When he was a little older, people in the Anywheres sometimes gave him money. Christopher learnt to refuse coins. As soon as he touched them, everything just stopped. He landed in bed with a jolt and woke up sweating. Once this happened when a pretty lady, who reminded him of Mama, tried laughingly to hang an earring in his ear. Christopher would have asked the nursery maid with big feet about it, but she had left long ago. Most of the ones who came after simply said, “Don’t bother me now – I’m busy!” when he asked them things.

      Until he learnt to read, Christopher thought this was what all nursery maids did: they stayed a month, too busy to talk, and then set their mouths in a nasty line and flounced out. He was amazed to read of Old Retainers, who stayed with families for a whole lifetime and could be persuaded to tell long (and sometimes very boring) stories about the family in the past. In his house, none of the servants stayed more than six