"He's normal! He's normal! He'll grow up like other people. Better than others." She was trying to scratch the teacher, but Dad was holding her back. "He'll go to college someday. He'll be somebody." She kept screaming it, clawing at Dad so he'd let go of her. "He'll go to college someday and he'll be somebody."
We were in the principal's office and there were a lot of people looking embarresed, but the assitant principal was smiling and turning his head so no one would see it.
The principal in my dream had a long beard, and was floating around the room and pointing at me. "He'll have to go to a special school. Put him into the Warren State Home and Training School. We can't have him here." Dad was pulling Mom out of the principals office, and she was shouting and crying too. I didn't see her face, but her big red teardrops kept splashing down on me. . . .
This morning I could recall the dream, but now there's more than that-- I can remember through the blur, back to when I was six years old and it all happened. Just before Norma was born. I see Mom, a thin, dark-haired woman who talks too fast and uses her hands too much. As always her face is blurred. Her hair is up in a bun, and her hand goes to touch it, pat it smooth, as if she has to make sure it's still there. I remember that she was always fluttering like a big, white bird--around me father, and he was too heavy and tired to escape her pecking.
I see Charlie, standing in the center of the kitchen, playing with his spinner, bright colored beads and rings threaded on a string. He spends long hours watching his spinner. I don't know who made it for him, or what became of it, but I see him standing there fascinated as the string untwists and sets the rings spinning. . . .
Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude and safety were physical sensatoins, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of his chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window that played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it would have been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books he percieved, are those that tell you what you know already. He had just turned back to Chapter 1 when he heard Julia's footstep on the stair and started out of his chair to meet her. She dumped her brown tool bag on the floor and flung herself into his arms. It was more than a week since they had seen one another.
The light grew stronger and soon he could see that a little way ahead there was an open track of bare gravel. He limped out of the heather, sat on the stones and shook the wet from his fur. He could see Fiver's hills plainly now, greenish-grey and seeming close in the rainladen air. He could even pick out the dots of furze bushes and stunted yew trees on the steep slopes. As he gazed down at them, he heard an excited voice farther down the track.
"He's done it! Didn't I tell you he'd do it?"
Hazel turned his head and saw blackberry on the path. He was bedraggled and exhausted, but it was he who was speaking. Out of the heather behind him came Acorn, Speedwell and Buckthorn. All four rabbits were now staring straight at him. He wondered why. Then, as they approached, he realized that they were looking not at him, but past him at something further off. He turned round. The gravel track led downhill into a narrow belt of silver birch and rowan. Beyond was a thin hedge; and beyond that, a green field between two copses. They had reached the other side of the common.