Extracts from a Diary
by Amelia Bourne-Phipps
-edited by Simon Barber-
10 July, 1937
Saturday 10th July, 1937 A scorching day, but just enough breeze came off the central waters to make it bearable outside. It was something I never expected to do again, to wake up in our dorm. We can do this for another week should we wish to – but Helen at least has far better places to be and things to do. Like the rest of our dorm, we got our steamer chests down from the attic and started packing for home. Not for the first time in my case – my ears blushed as I recalled my Songmark career almost finished in the Papeete Influenza when Molly had her first brush with Kuo Han “collection agents”. Actually we will not be taking much with us to Europe, the clothes we arrived in being out of style and hardly fitting us now. My Lunar Topee hat never got much use; I am used to doing without it here and will not need it in England. So there was a considerable charity pile of clothes and equipment in the corridor with eighteen of us doing much the same. * Actually, we are taking so little back that even my steamer chest is decidedly surplus. Helen can use some of my airtight tin clothes-boxes as she says she will not be spending all her time bare-pawed and full of kittens in Haio Beach and needs “respectable” Euro clothes which do not hold up well unprotected in a humid Spontoon summer. Most things for our Europe trip we can buy on Casino Island this week, after which we will be travelling light and air freight on a trunk that weighs thirty pounds empty would be more than it is worth! It is good to see the first and second years hard at work still; looking around our rapidly emptying dorm rooms it is hard to believe that after all this time there are no more reports to write or exercises to do – nobody is going to be chivvying us around the beaches with packs full of wet sand any more. We even came down five minutes late to breakfast, which apart from the Papeete Influenza outbreak and our shattered return from the Aleutians, is unheard-of. Somehow it seems wrong. Then, it is the first time I have really said goodbye like this, having finished at Saint Winifred’s a year earlier than expected. Did Father really like his glass-house (a mutual casualty with dear Flying Flea #8) so much? Looking through the projects the first and second-years are handing in is a strange sensation. In the first year Alpha Rote and her dorm have handed in something that should score them high marks – the first publicly available geological survey of Cranium Island! It fits with what we could observe last year, though we had no time to collect and analyse rock samples. Nobody would believe it who had not been there; all the Nimitz Sea islands between Hawaii and the Aleutians are volcanic with coral reefs. Cranium Island is radically different with gneiss, porphyry, greenstone belts and komatite volcanic minerals that should belong in the heart of Greenland, Australia or another one of the most ancient continents. Mrs. Rote speculates it is the last tiny fragment of a continent otherwise unknown to geography and lost to Time. I well recall the two very different parts of the island, with the conventional volcanic side and that impossibly ancient smooth, worn landscape of hard greasy-looking stone that had such an unpleasant mental feel to it all. One was somehow reminded of an exhumed corpse long buried and never meant to see daylight again. Our junior years are all looking forward to sewing that extra bar on their Songmark “note” badges, no doubt. I hope they all pass! It would be an alarming idea, someone like Alpha Rote being dismissed and returning to Cranium Island in a bad temper. It is one of the stories one hears, of how every young pup and kitten there builds a doomsday device or two as a perfectly normal and socially accepted part of their education. Alpha did not deny it, merely pointing out that an experiment that could not be recorded was useless, and any youngster contemplating pulling the big lever would know the difficulties of being able to record and get peer review on a successful test. One hopes they do not leave the devices primed in a cellar somewhere with the operating manuals lying around next to the big red button labelled “Do not touch.” The second-years have just returned from a long field trip and have put together a detailed report on what went wrong with their supplies – plus that standard part of any Songmark report, their ideas of how to do better next time. Beryl was looking over their revised food list with a critical eye and noted some of it might have unintended effects. According to her, pinhead oatmeal gets its name from its effects; it is eaten by show business families desirous of their children being born qualified for secure careers as circus pinheads. Definitely the same old Beryl! She is the one who started that ludicrous scare story about asbestos being bad for you – her religion still insists she tell one convincing lie and one disbelieved fact every day. When I left she was putting together another pitch for another bogus charity, collecting blown tins and tainted meat for distribution to the deserving poor. It depends on what you think they deserve, she says. Adele Beasley was objecting strongly (she has had more than one brush with severe food poisoning when she had her bad-luck curse) though Beryl stressed the charity would be fussy about who it chose to “assist”. She already has a registered charity raising funds for the appreciative rich – as she has said before, “would you rather have a peasant or a millionaire grateful to you?” We had just finished packing when Miss Devinski sent word to meet her in her office. This was a request rather than an order but coming from her the two are the same with us, and I think they always will be. Certainly we were hardly a second off our best time getting down there. I confess my ears dipped slightly; about the only time we had ever been summoned to our Tutors’ offices was to be told off, much as a military recruit gets many lumps and little praise from their Sergeant-Major no matter how well they do. Sure enough, Miss Devinski did not look particularly happy. All started well as she handed a graduation certificate to Maria, and to Helen as a wedding present along with her congratulations. Looking at me and Miss Cabot, she told us the Tutors have a problem. Apart from the obvious marks earned in tests and exercises, at the foundation of Songmark the Tutors had a very clear vision of the sort of girl they would sign off as a graduate. She looked me in the eye and said that with my current willing legal status, they would not even consider it. Amelia Bourne-Phipps or Lady Allworthy would qualify – but Jade the property of Lin Chung never would. I took a deep breath and explained I did not actually like the idea as such, then for the next five minutes laid out my plan – which I had thought of as a possibility even before leaving for Kuo Han. By the end of it Miss Devinski raised an eyebrow, nodded curtly and conceded that it was both well-prepared and completely insane enough to stand a chance of working, should I really want to throw away the Allworthy inheritance that much. She added that her decision would stand but my certificate will stay unsigned in her desk for possible later use. When Lin Chung gets his money and papers back I can collect my own papers, so to speak. That is better than I expected; Lady Allworthy can manage without a certificate but I will need one should I manage to drop the title. Miss Cabot was another problem entirely, as I had feared. It would have been less of a problem had she become a casualty in a more physical way – had she come back minus an arm or a leg she would definitely have received her certificate though it would spoil an Adventuring career. I pointed out that one thing Songmark famously never judges on is character (I hear Beryl, Madeleine and Missy K passed after all, and Red Dorm are reputedly as criminal as ever) so the fact that she is a different character should not count at all. I am sure Miss Cabot can fly, calculate and shoot just as well as Molly ever did, and is probably much safer to have around. Our Tutor complemented me on good use of logic but said Molly Procyk was the one who was chosen to attend Songmark and Molly is the only one who will get the certificate. So – she shook paws with us all and confessed she was amazed to see us all still alive and no more damaged than we were. Our rooms, she confirmed, are ours till five o’clock on Friday. One thing I had quite forgotten though three years ago it would have been my main interest – she asked what I would be doing with my Flying Flea! After all, with a maximum range of thirty miles on a cold day I am hardly going to fly it back to Europe nor is there room to pack it even in the admittedly capacious hold of a Caproni Ca60. The Russians famously have fighter aircraft strapped under their giant bombers, but a Ca60 is aerodynamically complex enough as it is without my Sand Flea tacked on the outside. It was rather a wrench. But after all, as Lady Allworthy I can afford a better aircraft in Europe and as the hopefully happy but possibly penniless Mrs. Amelia Hoele’toemi I doubt I could afford hangar space for an aircraft that is hard to earn money with considering it can carry neither freight nor a single passenger. It had its limitations even as a single-seater last summer surveying for Professor Schiller’s ascent of the main face of Mount Kiribatori, as we all remember. I asked if Miss Devinski would accept it as a training aircraft for Songmark. With about one heartbeat’s hesitation she accepted – though for the past year and more her opinion has been that it is an outstanding example of how not to design an aircraft. I suppose that too will be educational for the junior years in its way. She said if I would call back tomorrow she would have the registration transfer papers ready. Well! I have lost Flying Fleas before but not like this; I have let three go as I parachuted away from them or their airborne pieces, but never signed a working one away before. Still, there are greater things than that I will be giving away. Back to our packing, Helen and Maria looking with pride at their coveted certificates before stowing them in the safest places they can find (Helen plans to seal hers hermetically between glass sheets, against the local climate especially in a longhouse). Considering there are only seventeen in the world being issued with this year’s graduation dates on them, they are decidedly rarer than diamonds. At most there will be two more of them. A strange experience indeed, packing and sorting through three years of souvenirs – not that we ever could store much in our dorm given the one drawer apiece allowed for personal items. I blushed somewhat recalling Miss Devinski finding that souvenir Lars gave me, and indeed Molly had the matching antler as he sheds them every Spring. At least I returned it to him on Krupmark that last time. And now I know what happened to that Tailfast locket I lost at Lars’ party nearly two years ago just before our Vostok trip! It seems Beryl is not the only one who worships a trickster deity, and with appropriate alterations as to whose fur was braided with mine, Lars certainly got a lot of use out of it. And me. I suppose I ought to be furious about it, but – recalling my various encounters influenced by that charm, I cannot honestly say I disliked any of them. Then again, apart from my first week on Kuo Han where I encountered those same furs whose photographs I had seen on Lars’ desk on Krupmark (the rhino and the bat were most distinctive) it is hard to be certain exactly which those were. My encountering Lord Leon Allworthy was not actually one of Lars’ manipulations at all, and I enjoyed (most of) that at the time too. Just about everyone was finished by lunchtime, and none of us felt very like seeing if it was poi on the menu again. It was certainly not roast chicken, we would have scented that. Jasbir’s dorm had the fine idea of heading out to Mahanish’s and we very happily tagged along eager to catch up on the news. Quite a lot happened, as might be expected in the last six weeks of a Songmark third year! The Ave Argentum have already packed their bags and gone, though not before one final rather subtle and vicious campaign against us. Interestingly, Beryl was one of those who led Songmark’s counterattack as indeed if anyone is professionally qualified in dirty tricks she is the one to ask. The fatal runway crash of one of their Potez fighters last month was not her work and not even in her style as Miss Devinski concedes – pushing one’s students the way they did was an accident waiting to happen. Jasbir tells us our mischievous mouse has been having plenty of fun, making the most of her final weeks. She completely devastated one of Red Dorm last week using a copy of New Haven’s own much-publicised political Manifesto. Using only quotes from that and a progression of nine logically impeccable deductions, all of them innocuous in themselves, she logically proved that in New Haven both using the toilet and indeed eating were crimes against the State punishable by death. A certain half-breed coyote has been going around with her tail and ears right down muttering to herself ever since trying to find holes in the argument. It just goes to show, there is good in everyone – even Beryl. There may be some good in Miss Morgenstern, too. There may also be a diamond the size of a cricket ball buried on Eastern Island, but nobody has found that yet either or been too inspired to look. Mahanish’s was jolly full, with a tourist season’s worth of airline pilots and hungry ground crew tucking into one of the best value “Euro” menus around. It is well-known in the Nimitz Sea that any pilot bringing in a cool hay box of bacon, Portobello mushrooms or similar locally scarce foodstuffs eats free, as do his or her crew. They certainly serve a lot more than their famous chilli dishes! I gave that a miss myself, being lunchtime and not in the mood for something that almost sets one’s snout alight (and elsewhere, the morning after.) Huge omelettes for most of us, with Irma Bundt opting for the stir-fried palm heart with coconut milk. Jasbir is heading out with an archaeological team in a few weeks time; she has managed to persuade her father to let her stay away a little longer. She is not next in line to the family title after all, and says with luck she can stretch trips away till folk get used to the idea. She hinted she would be heading out with her sister Meera to visit their Native friends on Gull Island. She says back at Easter they were much taken by Meera, and visa versa. One definitely hopes they have hundred percent effective Precautions, as with a family of their rank and religion any “accidents” would be awfully embarrassing! I recall back at Saint Winifred’s a senior year girl commenting that she was not keen on ruining the family name even if it was only Jones. While the rest looked around our familiar haunts, I took Miss Cabot with me to Casino Island where I had booked some consultations at Madame Maxine’s. Definitely that is a place that does not depend on passing trade, the door being as discreet as it can be. They have no need to advertise except by word of mouth; nowhere else does professional quality fur dyeing and the like. I well recall Kim-Anh was “created” here by Madame Maxine, a Siamese herself and a definitely pedigree one with the distinctive snout and the blue eyes that the half-breed Kim-Anh lacks. Thinking of markings and alterations, I did ask about the possibility of removing the ones Miss Cabot and I returned from Kuo Han with. In my case this would have to wait till various other matters are resolved. After all, they are one feature that cannot be discarded on a whim. Madame Maxine noted that it would be possible to an extent, but considering their position where our fur will never re-grow (no more than Aunt Millini’s will in places though for a very different reason) it would always be obvious that some marking had been there. Still, there is no hurry about it. Madame Maxine is quite as thorough as Songmark’s Mrs. Oelabe when requested – and at least here we are spared the sarcastic comments. I recall what Mrs. Oelabe told Jasbir when she returned from her first adventurous Gull Island holiday. All is well with Miss Cabot, and after my own checkup I paid our bills and declined any further treatment. All is well with Jade, one might say. I think it might take a lot to surprise Madame Maxine, though she can read my “calligraphy” and most furs would doubtless want it removed as soon and thoroughly as possible. Miss Cabot has far less, but she was less favoured by Lin Chung. Then – duties done, we were free on Casino Island on a fine Saturday on tourist season! Shopping was definitely in order – not so much for Helen’s wedding as Casino Island shops do not sell such clothing (only parodies for the tourists to buy) but some more formal clothing for our European trip. The Casino Island dressmakers learn the latest fashions from Paris or Milan about five minutes after London does, and have everything we could want. What with the gold we removed in Tanglon from criminal paws (several of whom had no further use for such) we are not having to watch our cowries and shells as much as I had feared. In theory Miss Cabot could afford Songmark all over again, which given Miss Devinski’s decision is about the only way she will get her certificate unless we find a way of getting Molly back. The differences between the two does is getting rather striking. Miss Cabot had been studying the various furs dressed in Euro style with a keen interest, and at Chan’s dressmakers she had herself fitted for some rather nice up-to-the-minute fashion, in very tasteful pearl grey rayon with frills. Molly Procyk was always happiest in something tougher and less flammable. Chan’s have a dozen or so oriental mice who can take a fur’s fairly accurate measurements by eye, but scurry everywhere with measuring tapes. Miss Cabot did not flinch by a hair, despite Molly’s (jolly unfair) dislike of oriental murines getting anywhere near her. In fact if anyone blushed it was me as I recalled Lin Chung. I had never seen a Mongolian Jerboa before, and thought him rather exotic with his long brush-tufted tail. Some other features turned out to be more compatible than exotic. Very compatible with felines, as I found out. Nature has some jolly fascinating tricks that are too good to give to just one species, it seems. In two hours at Chan’s we had recycled some of the gold recovered from criminal Celestials, returning it to honest hard-working descendants of such. Our outfits will be ready by Wednesday, they promise. We will not be needing them for Helen’s wedding, having more suitable Spontoonie costumes to wear to Sacred Island. I had wondered how the Penningtons stayed in an approximation of (very conservative) modern style; given their family history one could imagine them as the last wearers of lace and crinolines outside a film set. The answer was of course mail-order catalogues sent care of Dutch Harbour, from which they chose the most respectable-looking outfits available. I imagine the 1920’s styles must have been a shock to the family. Back to Eastern Island and Songmark, for almost the last time! Madeleine X is leaving tomorrow, there being a French military flight heading East that she has got a seat on. She is returning with profuse thanks to a French-speaking world; first real stop their great naval base on Clipperton Island off the Mixtecan coast, then Martinique, Senegal and Morocco on her way home. She wants to look at the new French “Ecole d’Adventure Aerienne” on their Atlantic coast near La Rochelle, a place she dearly wishes had been open three years ago and the less charitable of us loudly agree. Someone we will miss rather more is Adele Beasley. She is heading back to join her parents who are still treasure-hunting, though one might have thought they had learned their lesson after that curse hit Adele after they looted that burial mound. Adele is an excellent mechanic who can fix most other things – I recall one of the airport maintenance furs’ admiring comment “she could fix the break of day.” It sounds better in Spontoonie. Everyone else already has tickets out; ironically enough my dorm (well, me and Helen) are almost the only ones planning to stay around Spontoon and even we are leaving for Europe first! Prudence’s dorm are going to be Adventuring across the Pacific for a living but I am not sure where they will be based. Eastern Island is expensive but well-off for contacting potential customers and getting aircraft maintenance done locally. Finding a longhouse and beach slipway in the Kanims would be far cheaper on the rent but tricky to get fuel and spare parts in a hurry. A very fine evening. Prudence was teasing Helen somewhat about her being a “blushing bride” – unlike in the Euro tradition she has nothing to wonder about how her wedding night will be. On the one paw some folk might think that a bad idea, not having that discovery to look forward to – but on the other, Spontoonie brides have no shocks or disappointments in store. Prudence is marrying Tahni next weekend over on Main Island, having unlike us managed to renew her Tailfast ring this past solstice. We are all invited, but I fear we will be on our travels by then. Ironically, the first stop will be Alaska and not so far from the Penningtons’ lost plantation. Helen is saying farewell to her Songmark bed – they are most charitably described as firm, not that I had been used to luxury at Saint Winifred’s beforehand. We never got as much time in them as we really wanted, even so. How many times have we been walking along the fence on guard at half past three in the morning wishing we were back in them? At least with such austere beds field trips sleeping on the bare ground were less of a shock to the system, which might have been the idea. * Editor’s note: Amelia has said on various occasions there are 19 in her year rather than the theoretical class size of 20. Presumably Missy K as a Spontoonie had no need to store anything at Songmark when her family home on Main Island was only half an hour away. next |