"Diana Wynne Jones - Witch Week" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

my secret thoughts. I will now describe the Indian rope trick which I saw in India before my father
came to live in England . . .
Two desks away from Nirupam, Dan Smith chewed his pen a great deal and finally wrote, Well I
mean it's not much good if you've got to write your secret fealings, what I mean is it takes all the joy
out of it and you don't know what to write. It means they aren't secret if you see what I mean.
I do not think, Estelle Green wrote, that I have any secret feelings today, but I would like to
know what is in the note from Miss Hodge that Teddy has just found. I thought she scorned him
utterly.
At the back of the room, Brian Wentworth wrote, sighing, Timetables just ran away with me, that is
my problem. During geography I planned a bus journey from London to Baghdad via Paris. Next
lesson I shall plan the same journey via Berlin.
Nan Pilgrim meanwhile was scrawling, This is a message to the person who reads our journals.
Are you Miss Cadwallader, or does Miss Cadwallader make Mr. Wentworth do it? She stared at what
she had written, rather taken aback at her own daring. This kind of thing happened to her sometimes. Still,
she thought, there were hundreds of journals and hundreds of daily entries. The chances of Miss
Cadwallader reading this one had to be very small-particularly if she went on and made it really boring. /
shall now be boring, she wrote. Teddy Crossley's real name is Harold, but he got called Teddy out of
the hymn that goes "Gladly my cross I’d bear." But of course everyone sings "Crossley my glad-eyed
bear." Mr. Crossley is glad-eyed. He thinks everyone should be upright and honorable and
interested in geography. I am sorry for him.
But the one who was best at making his journal boring was Charles Morgan. His entry read, / got up.
I felt hot at breakfast. I do not like porridge. Second lesson was woodwork but not for long. I think
we have games next.
Looking at this, you might think Charles was either very stupid or very muddled, or both. Anyone in
6B would have told you that it had been a chilly morning and there had been cornflakes for breakfast.
Second lesson had been PE, during which Nan Pilgrim had so much amused Theresa Mullett by failing to
jump the horse, and the lesson to come was music, not games. But Charles was not writing about the day's
work. He really was writing about his secret feelings, but he was doing it in his own private code so that no
one could know.
He started every entry with I got up. It meant, I hate this school. When he wrote / do not like
porridge, that was actually true, but porridge was his code-word for Simon Silverson. Simon was porridge
at breakfast, potatoes at lunch, and bread at tea. All the other people he hated had code-words too. Dan
Smith was cornflakes, cabbage, and butter. Theresa Mullett was milk.
But when Charles wrote I felt hot, he was not talking about school at all. He meant he was
remembering the witch being burned. It was a thing that would keep coming into his head whenever he was
not thinking of anything else, much as he tried to forget it. He had been so young that he had been in a
stroller. His big sister Bernadine had been pushing him while his mother carried the shopping, and they had
been crossing a road where there was a view down into the Market Square. There were crowds of people
down there, and a sort of flickering. Bernadine had stopped the stroller in the middle of the street in order to
stare. She and Charles had just time to glimpse the bonfire starting to burn, and they had seen that the witch
was a large fat man. Then their mother came rushing back and scolded Bernadine on across the road. "You
mustn't look at witches!" she said. "Only awful people do that!" So Charles had only seen the witch for an
instant. He never spoke about it, but he never forgot it. It always astonished him that Bernadine seemed to
forget about it completely. What Charles was really saying in his journal was that the witch came into his
head during breakfast, until Simon Silverson made him forget again by eating all that toast.
When he wrote woodwork second lesson, he meant that he had gone on to think about the second
witch-which was a thing he did not think about so often. Woodwork was anything Charles liked. They only
had woodwork once a week, and Charles had chosen that for his code on the very reasonable grounds that
he was not likely to enjoy anything at Larwood House any oftener than that. Charles had liked the second
witch. She had been quite young and rather pretty, in spite of her torn skirt and untidy hair. She had come