The Homeward Bounders
Read The Homeward Bounders Online
Authors: Diana Wynne Jones
Diana Wynne Jones
Homeward
Bounders
To Thomas Tuckett, with thanks for advice about War Gaming
I
Have you heard of the Flying Dutchman? No? Nor of the Wandering Jew? Well, it doesn't matter. I'll tell you about them in the right place; and about Helen and Joris, Adam and Konstam, and Vanessa, the sister Adam wanted to sell as a slave. They were all Homeward Bounders like me. And I'll tell about
Them
too, who made us that way.
All in good time. I'll tell about this machine I'm talking into first. It's one of
Theirs. They
have everything. It has a high piece in front that comes to a neat square with a net over it. You talk into that. As soon as you talk, a little black piece at the back starts hopping and jabbering up and down like an excited idiot, and paper starts rolling over a roller from somewhere underneath. The hopping bit jabbers along the paper, printing out exactly the words you say as fast as you can say them. And it puts in commas and full-stops and things of its own accord. It doesn't seem to worry it what you say. I called it some rude words when I was trying it out, just to see, and it wrote them all down, with exclamation marks after them.
When it's written about a foot of talk, it cuts that off and shoots it out into a tray in front, so that you can read it over, or take it away if you want. And it does this without ever stopping jabbering. If you stop talking, it goes on hopping up and down for a while, in an expectant sort of way, waiting for you to go on. If you don't go on, it slows down and stops, looking sad and disappointed. It put me off at first, doing that. I had to practice with it. I don't like it to stop. The silence creeps in then. I'm the only one in the Place now. Everyone has gone, even himâthe one whose name I don't know.
My name is Jamie Hamilton and I was a perfectly ordinary boy once. I am still, in a way. I look about thirteen. But you wouldn't believe how old I am. I was twelve when this happened to me. A year is an awful long time to a Homeward Bounder.
I really enjoyed my twelve years of ordinary life. Home to me is a big city, and always will be. We lived in a really big, dirty, slummy city. The back of our house looked out on to a lovely cosy courtyard, where everyone came out and talked in fine weather, and everyone knew everyone else. The front of our house was our grocery shop, and all the neighbors shopped there. We were open every day, including Sunday. My mother was a bit of a sharp woman. She was always having rows in the courtyard, usually about credit. She used to say the neighbors expected to buy things for nothing just because they lived in the court, and she told them so to their faces. But no one could have been kinder than my mother when a neighbor's daughter was run over by a brewer's wagon. I often hope they were as kind to her over me.
My father was big and soft-spoken and kind all the time. He used to let people buy things for nothing. When my mother objected, he used to say, “Now, Margaret, they needed it.” And usually that stopped the argument.
The arguments my father couldn't seem to stop were always over me. The main one was because I was in my last year at school. School cost money. My school cost rather more than my father could afford, because it had pretensions to grandeur. It was called Churt House, and it was in a dreary building like a chapel, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. We had all sorts of pretend-posh customsâlike calling our teachers Dominies and a School Songâand that was why my mother liked it.
My mother desperately wanted me to grow up to be something better than a grocer. She was convinced I was clever, and she wanted a doctor in the family. She saw me as a famous surgeon, consulted by Royalty, so she naturally wanted me to stay on at school. My father was dead against it. He said he hadn't the money. He wanted me at home, to help in the shop. They argued about it all the last year I was at home.
MeâI 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 learned music and things. They despised usârightlyâfor 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 washhouses on either side filled the whole alley with steam. It was like playing in fog. I was forever 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 crisscross one another, it always seemed to me. Trains were clanking over the water every hundred yards, or else barges were getting dragged under iron bridgesâexcept 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 cornerâgray, quiet parts that everyone seemed to have forgotten.
The quiet bit that was the end of me was right near the center. 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 treesâand bushesâin 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 onâI always wonder why it's Art to take your clothes off: they never put in the goose pimplesâand 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.