Act Your Age

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

~Margaret Atwood

I'm outraged.

I'm outraged with myself and I'm outraged with everybody else.

Yesterday I had my tenth birthday party, invited all the girls on the street and ended up talking war news with their fathers. There were strange looks all around. Partway through I couldn't remember whose birthday it was and asked one of the little girls.

"It's yours, of course," she'd said with a strange look in her eyes.

Then I remembered… and I couldn't even tell her that there should have been nearly six times more candles on the cake… which didn't have enough sugar, anyway (Susan does wonders with war rations, but it's just not the same).

The consequences of having grown up in another universe with a different time zone than ours have been quite far reaching. I was eight when we first went and when we came back, things were sorted to say the least. Peter and Susan squeaked by anybody being too suspicious without much trouble, but Edmund and I were more scrutinized… especially me.

People just don't seem to think its normal for eight-year-olds to rattle on about the quadratic equation and the changing velocities of the earth going around the sun. I've always had a keen interest in maths, mostly because of Edmund, and somehow, I had to remember to fail. It's horrid.

Peter has grown quite persuasive in his later years and convincing Mother and Father that we all ought to come home right away after our fifty year trip was a piece of cake. We came back to London (which wasn't even being bombed yet) and Mother and Father started closeting themselves up and having long conversations nearly at once. I found it distressing.

Don't get me started on the scars. I have scars all over me. I wasn't in battle a great deal; after all it was the Golden Age, but I'd been in enough of them. Peter and Edmund were able to get by without Mother seeing theirs and Susan just didn't have as many as I did; but Mother was horrified about me.

"Do you suppose it's some sort of disease?" she'd ask Father in one of her midnight rants.

I was sent to a boarding school in northern England, which presented a whole new set of problems. The other girls talked about me, of course, but I'd gotten over being talked about like that forty years ago. The real problem started with Mrs. Pross, the English teacher, who fell asleep regularly on the job. I just waited for my cue then went up to the front of the class myself.

"Today, class, we shall be learning about sentence parts."

The Head found out.

In our modern times, girl's schools have a distressing habit of punishing unruly students by smacking their hands with rulers. I may be nearly sixty, but my hand is now small and it hurt, badly. After the Head was done with her treatment I gave her a lecture. She was speechless.

"…treatment like that is lasting, we're going to be feeling this for the rest of our lives long after the memory of our crimes has been wiped away. I agree that punishment is necessary, but this is cruel. I could report you…"

When I was done, she stared.

"Why can't you act your age?" she gasped.

I was in London again when the bombing started. We'd been hearing air raid sirens for weeks, but this time it was for real. Susan, Edmund and I were all with Mother at home, Peter had already bamboozled our parents into signing for him and letting him join the RAF. Even after all my years, I don't think I'll ever forget how I felt when I first saw that dark mist coming down over the city and realized with shock that it wasn't clouds, but airplanes filled with bombs. We spent the rest of the day huddling in the shelter and listening to Mother read aloud. We caught every other word.

After that first day of thunder (they hadn't started night bombing yet), the four of us got on the subway to see some of the damage. There was smoke still boiling over the eastern section of Town and we saw piles of rubble where houses used to be. Nearly five hundred people had died that day alone.

After we got home, I turned to my mother seriously.

"Mother, I'd like to become an ARP worker-"

Edmund buried his face in his hands and I stopped. I'd forgotten again.

Last year, Edmund and I were sent to stay with Uncle Harold and Aunt Alberta. Father was a brain surgeon who had just made a breakthrough in some sort of medical imaging. There were some top secret things going on, which were dreadfully hush-hush, and he and Mother ended up flying to America; Susan went along to make sure everything went according to schedule.

That was when the Dawn Treader affair happened and everything just got worse.

I realized then, that Eustace would have it far worse than I would. He'd changed completely; I was just a child-genius with a habit of talking when I wasn't supposed to. He had to live with his mother and father, which were worlds different than mine…

"I just can't stand it, Lucy!" he'd cry from one of the red phone boxes down the street from his house. "Alberta has gotten into Theosophy and started on reincarnation now! I'm not even allowed to kill the spiders in my room!"

"Calm down, Eustace," I'd say. "When you're as old as I am, you'll realize that it all flew by faster than you thought. In no time you'll be living your own life."

There would be silence at the other end of the telephone.

"Aw, Lu, you're only a year older!" He'd say at last. "Stop acting like a blithering grown up!"

Eustace doesn't even understand.

I realize now that time will go by and soon it won't matter… but right now I can't act my age.

Can you imagine how irritating that is?

Author's Note: We were recently re-watching the Narnia movies when I was struck by a certain phrase in Prince Caspian. Act your age... what if they really did?

I never liked Lewis' timeline where he had them coming back after a measly fifteen years in Narnia. I much prefer fifty... it was called the Golden Age and gold is normally associated with fifty years.

I have to say, I don't like this piece very much...but I will let you decide for yourselves what you think of it.

~Psyche