Free The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones Page A

Last Governess sewed name tapes—C. CHANT—on the clothes and packed them in a shiny black tin trunk—also labeled C. CHANT in bold white letters. This trunk was shortly taken away by a carrier whose thick arms reminded Christopher of the women in Series Eight, and the same carrier took away all Mama’s trunks, too, only hers were addressed to Baden-Baden while Christopher’s said “Penge School, Surrey.”
    The day after that, Mama left for Baden-Baden. She came to say good-bye to Christopher, dabbing her eyes with a blue lace handkerchief that matched her traveling suit. “Remember to be good and learn a lot,” she said. “And don’t forget your mama wants to be very proud of you when you grow up.” She put her scented cheek down for Christopher to kiss and said to the Last Governess, “Mind you take him to the dentist now.”
    “I won’t forget, Madam,” the Last Governess said in her dreariest way. Somehow her prettiness never seemed to come out in front of Mama.
    Christopher did not enjoy the dentist. After banging and scraping around Christopher’s teeth as if he was trying to make them all fall out, the dentist made a long speech about how crooked and out of place they were, until Christopher began to think of himself with fangs like Throgmorten’s. He made Christopher wear a big shiny tooth-brace, which he was supposed never to take out, even at night. Christopher hated the brace. He hated it so much that it almost took his mind off his fears about school.
    The servants covered the furniture with dust sheets and left one by one, until Christopher and the Last Governess were the only people in the house. The Governess took him to the station in a cab that afternoon and put him on the train to school.
    On the platform, now the time had come, Christopher was suddenly scared stiff. This really was the first step on the road to becoming a missionary and being eaten by Heathens. Terror seemed to drain the life out of him, down from his face, which went stiff, and out through his legs, which went wobbly. It seemed to make his terror worse that he had not the slightest idea what school was like.
    He hardly heard the Last Governess say, “Good-bye, Christopher. Your uncle says he’ll give you a month at school to settle down. He’ll expect you to meet his man as usual on October the eighth in Series Six. October the eighth. Have you got that?”
    “Yes,” Christopher said, not attending to a word, and got into the carriage like someone going to be executed.
    There were two other new boys in the carriage. The small thin one called Fenning was so nervous that he had to keep leaning out of the window to be sick. The other one was called Oneir, and he was restfully ordinary. By the time the train drew into the school station, Christopher was firm friends with them both. They decided to call themselves the Terrible Three, but in fact everyone in the school called them the Three Bears. “Someone’s been sitting in my chair!” they shouted whenever the three came into a room together. This was because Christopher was tall, though he had not known he was before, and Fenning was small, while Oneir was comfortably in the middle.
    Before the end of the first week, Christopher was wondering what he had been so frightened of. School had its drawbacks, of course, like its food, and some of the masters, and quite a few of the older boys, but those were nothing beside the sheer fun of being with a lot of boys your own age and having two real friends of your own. Christopher discovered that you dealt with obnoxious masters and most older boys the way you dealt with Governesses: you quite politely told them the truth in the way they wanted to hear it, so that they thought they had won and left you in peace. Lessons were easy. In fact most of the new things Christopher learned were from the other boys. After less than three days, he had learned enough—without quite knowing how—to realize that Mama had never intended