The Green Book Read Online Free PDF Page B

And it was Sarah who thought of trying to swap our two books for something someone else had brought.
    Straightaway she found that three other families had brought copies of Robinson Crusoe . And nobody at all wanted her pony story. Various people would have swapped something for Father’s technology book, only he wouldn’t lend it. “That doesn’t go out of my sight,” he said. “Anyone may come and read it here, but here it stays. It has to be kept safe.” Sarah made a list of books that were in the colony somewhere, to help her bargain. It was, Father said, “some lot.” He was very struck by Sarah’s list. “Not one Shakespeare,” he said. “Among us all, not one.”
    There was a Grimm’s Fairy Tales , though, and one of the men we hardly knew had Homer’s Iliad . The problem was that the owner of Grimm didn’t want to borrow Crusoe , they already had that. In the end, Father got it for us. He traded the loan of it for help in fitting out the family’s house with benches and cupboards and beds. He had to work very hard for it, too. Sarah thought it wasn’t fair, and asked the Guide, but he just said we must rely on good neighborliness for such things as lending between families. There weren’t any rules about that, and weren’t going to be. Father worked for the Grimm because he heard Pattie asking Sarah for the story of “Cindriella and the Three Bears,” and he realized that we had forgotten the Earth stories, or muddled them up.
    And the sad thing was that the Grimm was disappointing when we got it. Father said it wasn’t the real thing, but rewritten for children. And the book hadn’t been taken care of; it had coggled covers from being left out in the dewfall, and some torn pages. But when Father sat down to read it to us, one soft evening as we sat outside our hut after supper, the children gathered from the nearby houses and sat down to listen with us. Father began to read “The Three Feathers,” and very soon grownups gathered, too, and stood around listening. And as Father read on, a kind of quietness grew, a kind of strong attention, from the listening everyone was doing, as though it made the words louder and stronger if more people were listening to them. After “The Three Feathers,” we had “The Fisherman and His Wife.” And then the best of all, “The Boy Who Had to Learn Fear,” but that one had pages missing, so we were stopped in the middle without knowing how it ended. You should have seen how cross that made everyone! Some of the grownups tried to remember the story, but none of them could. Malcolm remembered another one about a girl with very long hair and a prince; the Guide remembered one about a huge, enormous beanstalk.
    We all sat up very late that night; when Pattie crept away at last, they were all trying to remember Hamlet . Later she half woke, and heard the dewfall beginning, and the Guide’s voice saying to Father at the door, “The truth is, we didn’t value that stuff when we had it, when we could just pick up a book any time. And now it’s all dying out of mind, and we must do without, as without so many other things.”
    And Father said, “I must have read that story once, and yet I cannot remember how it ended. But we have learned fear in our own way here, I suppose. God help us if we must do without our wheat harvest.”
    â€œYou are right, brother,” said the Guide. For in the time of fear and waiting for the wheat, the grownups had all begun calling each other brother and sister.
    The hard times were all in the mind, really. We still had stores from Earth for weeks. We weren’t actually hungry, though we were on half-rations. But every time a carrot blackened, or a bean plant failed in someone’s plot, the worry got worse. And without vegetables to grow, there wasn’t work enough, so there was time to worry. The