The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) by Howard Elizabeth Jane

Author:Howard, Elizabeth Jane [Howard, Elizabeth Jane]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780330527262
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers UK
Published: 2011-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

Simon had spent a wizard day with Teddy, who was not only two years older but in Simon’s view pretty marvellous in every way. In the morning they had played seventeen games of squash, until they were both so boiling they had to stop. They were fairly evenly matched: Teddy, being taller, had the longer reach, but Simon was very good at placing balls, in fact, potentially the better player. They played American scoring because the games, though sometimes longer, came to a predictable end, and part of the fun was to tell the grown-ups how many games they had played. ‘In this heat?’ their uncles and aunts and parents would say, and they would grin: they were impervious to heat. They had played in just their shorts and their tennis shoes until their hair was soaked and their faces were the colour of beetroot. Teddy won by two games – a respectable conclusion. They stopped, not because they were too hot, of course, but because they were starving, and it was half an hour till lunch, so they had a quick snack of motoring chocolate and tomatoes from the greenhouse. Teddy told Simon, who had good and awful reasons for wanting him to know, more about his new school at which Simon was to join him in the autumn. Everything that he said filled Simon with terror, which he concealed beneath a breezy interest. This morning the subject had been what happened to new boys and Simon had been told about them being strapped in a bath and the cold tap turned on very slowly and everybody going away and leaving them to drown. ‘And do they – often?’ he had asked with a thudding heart. ‘Oh, I don’t think much,’ Teddy had replied. ‘Someone usually comes back and turns off the taps and unties them.’ Usually! The more he heard about it, the less Simon felt that he could possibly stand it, but in twenty-three days he would be there – in about fifty days, he might even be actually dead. Sometimes, he went to the really ghastly lengths of wishing he was a girl so that he wouldn’t have to face this frightful place that seemed to be full of awful rules that nobody told you till after you’d broken them and were in trouble, and trouble was a pretty mild word for it. Teddy, he felt, was unbelievably brave and probably could stand anything, whereas, he, who had felt homesick at Pinewood although it got better towards the end, he knew that it would start all over again in a new place: the feeling sick, and having nightmares, and forgetting things and having to rationalise how much he thought about home because it made him blub, and blubbing meant you got bullied, and then he got tummy aches and couldn’t stop going to the bog, and masters made sarcastic remarks and everybody laughed. Teddy would be senior to him and naturally couldn’t be his friend. Making

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