The Green Book
Authors: Jill Paton Walsh
For
Robert, Matthew,
and Kate
J.P.W.
Father said, “We can take very little with us.” The list was in his hand. “Spade, saw, file, ax, for each family. Seeds, etc., will be provided. Iron rations will be provided. For each voyager a change of clothing, a pair of boots,
one or two
personal items
only
; e.g., a favorite cooking pan, a musical instrument (small and light), a picture (unframed). Nothing under this heading will be taken if it is bulky or heavy, fragile or perishable. One book per voyager.”
It was easy to pack. We were allowed so little, and we didn't have to bother about leaving anything tidy behind us. Only the books caused a little delay. Father said, “I must take this.” He showed us an ugly big volume called
A Dictionary of Intermediate Technology
. “But you must choose for yourselves,” he said. “It wouldn't be fair of me to choose for you. Think carefully.”
We didn't think. We were excited, disturbed, and we hadn't really understood that everything else would be left behind. Father looked wistfully at the shelves. He picked up
The Oxford Complete Shakespeare
. “Have you all chosen your books?” he asked. “Yes,” we told him. He put the Shakespeare back.
We had time to waste at the end. We ate everything we could find.
“I don't want to eat iron,” Pattie said, but nobody knew what she meant.
Then Father got out the slide projector, and showed us pictures of holidays we had once had. We didn't think much of them.
“Have they all gone brownish with age, Dad?” said Joe, our brother, the eldest of us.
“No,” said Father. “The pictures are all right. It's the light that has changed. It's been getting colder and bluer now for yearsâ¦but when I was young it was this lovely golden color, just like thisâlook.”
But what he showed usâa beach, with a blue sea, and the mother we couldn't remember lying on a towel, reading a bookâlooked a funny hue, as though someone had brushed it over with a layer of treacle.
Pattie was glad that Father wasn't going to be able to take the slide projector. It made him sad.
And the next day we all went away, Father and Joe, and Sarah, and Pattie, and lots of other families, and left the Earth far behind.
When this happened, we were all quite young, and Pattie was so young that later she couldn't remember being on the Earth at all, except those few last hours, and even the journey was mostly forgotten. She could remember the beginning of the journey, because it was so exciting. When we could undo our seat belts, and look out of the windows, the world looked like a Chinese paper lantern, with painted lands upon it, and all the people on the ship looked at it, and some of the grownups cried. Father didn't cry; he didn't look, either.
Joe went and talked to Father by and by, but Sarah and Pattie stood at a porthole all day long, and saw the world shrink and shrink and diminish down till it looked like a round cloudy glass marble that you could have rolled on the palm of your hand. Pattie was looking forward to going past the moon, but that was no fun at all, for the ship passed by the dark side, and we saw nothing of it. And then we were flying in a wide black starry sky, where none of the stars had names.
At first there were voices from the world below, but not for long. The Disaster from which we were escaping happened much sooner than they had thought it would, and after two days the ship was flying in radio silence, alone, and navigating with a calculator program on the computer, and a map of magnetic fields.
The journey was very boring. It was so long. The spaceship was big enough to frighten us when we thought of it flying through the void. Joe kept telling Pattie not to worry. “Heavy things
don't
fall down in space,” he told her. “There's nowhere for them to fall; no gravity.”
“When I knock things over, they fall down, just like at home,” Pattie said, doubtfully.
“That's just the ship's gravity machine, making it happen inside the ship,” said Joe. “To make us feel normal.”
But the ship was
small
enough to frighten us too, when we thought of spending years inside it. “We will still be here when I'm fourteen!” said Joe, as though he found that as hard to believe as Pattie found the lack of gravity.
“Better get used to it, then,” said Sarah. We had pills to make us sleep a lot of the time, but the rules said everyone had to be awake some of each forty-eight hours. When people were awake, they played gamesâMonopoly, and Go, and backgammon, and chess, and Mastermind, and Space Invaders, which were all on the ship's computer and could be played with the video screens. And one of the grownups had even brought along as his special luxury a funny hand set for playing chess which let you play it with another person instead of with the computer. When we weren't playing games, we could read the books we had brought. Joe asked Father why there were no books to read on the computer screens.
Father told us that all the new, well-equipped spaceships belonged to big wealthy countries. They had flown off to find distant, promising-looking planets. “We were the bottom of the barrel,” he said, “the last few to go from an old and poorer country, and only an old ship available, and no time to outfit it properly. Our computer was intended for exploration journeys, not for colonization. It has no spare memory; it can barely manage our minimum needs. And there was so little fuel we couldn't get lift-off with anything extra on boardâno useful livestock, like sheep or cows; just ourselves, and what the organizers thought we needed for survival. But we are lucky to be away at all, remember, and they allocated us a much nearer destination so that our old ship could get us somewhere.”
There were some chickens in cages on the ship, with two very noisy cocks who had lost their sense of timing in the flight through darkness and crowed at all the wrong times when we were trying to sleep. And there were rabbits too; we could let them out and play with them. Rabbits are fun when you are very small and like furry things, but they aren't much fun, really. You can't teach them tricks. All they ever think about is munching. And when we got bored with rabbits, all we had was that one book each to go back to. Of course, we tried to read slowly. “Read each sentence at least twice, before you read another,” the rule books said, under “Helpful Suggestions.” But Sarah couldn't read that slowly. At home she read four or five books every week. She finished her book quickly and then wanted to borrow Pattie's.
Pattie wouldn't let her. So she swapped with Joe, and read his. He had brought
Robinson Crusoe
. Sarah didn't much like
Robinson Crusoe
.
“You'd better think about him, old girl,” Joe said to her. “That island is just like where we're going, and we have to scratch a living on it, just like Crusoe.”
“Well, I hope we don't have to pray and carry on like him,” said Sarah.
Joe didn't like Sarah's book any better than she liked his. Hers was called
The Pony Club Rides Again
. Joe didn't like horses, and he couldn't resist telling Sarah that, after all, she would never see a horse again as long as she lived.
So then they both wanted to borrow Pattie's book. Pattie wouldn't lend it. “I haven't finished it myself yet,” she kept saying. “It's not fair. You finished yours before you had to lend it.”
In the end, Father made her give it to them. It was thin and neat, with dark green silky boards covered with gold tooling. The edges of the pages were gilded and shiny. It had a creamy silk ribbon to mark the place, and pretty brown and white flowered end-papers. And it was quite empty.
“There's nothing in it!” cried Sarah, staring.
“It's a commonplace book,” said Joe.
“What's that?” asked Sarah.
“A sort of jotter, notebook thing, for thoughts you want to keep.”
“And she's been pretending to read it for months!” said Sarah, beginning to giggle. They both laughed and laughed. Other people came by and asked what the joke was. Everyone laughed.
“Oh, Pattie, dear child,” said Father when he heard about it. He didn't laugh, he looked a mixture between sad and cross.
“It was my choose,” said Pattie very fiercely, taking her book back and holding it tight.
Father said, “She was too young. I should have chosen for her. But no use crying over spilt milk.”
We did get used to being on the ship, in the end. A funny thing happened to the way people felt about it. At first, everyone had hated it, grumbled all the time about tiny cubicles, about no exercise, about nothing to do. They had quarreled a lot. Grownup quarreling isn't very nice. We were luckier than most families; we didn't seem to quarrel, though we got very cross and scratchy about things, just like other people. But time went by, and people settled down to playing games, and sleeping, and talking a little, and got used to it, and so when at last everyone had had four birthdays on the ship, and the journey had been going on for what seemed like forever and ever, and the Guide told us all there were only months to go now, people were worried instead of glad.
“We shall be lucky if we can walk more than three steps, we're so flabby,” said Father, and people began to do pushups in their cabins, and line up for a turn on the cycle machine for exercising legs.
Joe began to ask a lot of questions. He didn't like the answers he got and he talked to Pattie and Sarah about it after lights-out in sleeping times. “They just don't know what this place is going to be like,” he told them. “They
think
it should support life; they know there is plant growth on it, and they suppose that means we could grow wheat. But there may be wild animals, or any kind of monster people on it already, they don't know.”
“Couldn't there possibly be wild ponies, Joe?” said Sarah.
“No, sis, I don't think so,” said Joe, very kindly. “And if this place isn't any good, we can't go anywhere else. The fuel won't last. All they've got for us if it isn't any good are pills.”
“I don't want to take pills,” said Pattie.
“We'll have to, if all the others are taking them,” Sarah told her. “We couldn't be left alone.”
“I think we ought to be allowed a choose,” said Pattie.
“Oh, Pattie!” said Joe, grinning at her from his bunk. “You're a fine one to talk about choosing! What good is your choosing, you goose!”