Couldn't resist the temptation to write something set now, given that Austria and Switzerland are co-hosting Euro 2008
. Although I was rather disappointed to see that Innsbruck had vile weather during last night's match - I thought it was always nice there in the summer .
Con Maynard, as she’d always remained known professionally, leaned back in her deckchair, took a sip of her coffee and glanced appreciatively at the glorious view from the Entwistles’ garden. The Jungfrau loomed majestically towards the sky in the distance as she always had done and always would do. It was good, Con reflected, to know that there were some things which would always remain the same, when the world at large – even the Gornetz Platz, which she’d once thought of as a little world on its own, set in a place where the rapidly changing norms and trends of the modern world would bypass it almost completely – had altered beyond recognition in the fifty years since she and her triplet sisters had left school.
Fifty years! Had it really been that long? Well, yes, it had – to within a matter of weeks, in point of fact. She’d done a lot in those fifty years: she’d seen places she’d thought she’d never see, she’d seen and experienced things she’d never even have been able to imagine in her schooldays; and, one of the best-known British journalists of her generation, she’d witnessed at first-hand events that had made headlines right across the global village that the world had now become.
When she’d finally decided to retire, as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, she’d thought at first that she’d enjoy having all that free time, doing all the things that she’d always wanted to do but never been able to find a spare moment for. And she had done, at first; but, soon enough, she’d then become bored. She’d even started writing poems and short stories again as she’d done in her youth, but they hadn’t been enough for her any more. She’d wanted something that she’d really be able to get her teeth into - to use one of those dreadful clichés that would have had her Auntie Hilda looking at her aghast! And that was when Len had come up with her suggestion.
Len was one of those people who’d have been quite happy if nothing had ever changed at all, Con thought with a smile. She didn’t mean that as a criticism: it was just the way that some people were. Although really Len had adapted quite well to the changes that had been made at the Chalet School over the years, the world around it having changed so much and so quickly that not even such a traditional institution could escape from modernisation. Having said which, despite new technology and new curricula and all the rest of it, in many ways the culture of the School remained the way that it had been fifty years ago, and even earlier.
That was probably why Len had always been so happy teaching there. She was devoted to the place and always had been, just as their mother always had been. Even when her children had been young and she hadn’t been teaching, she’d been a regular visitor to the staffroom – and she still was now, nine years after she’d retired. The rest of the family found it rather amusing, not that any of them would ever have dreamt of saying so to her face. But there was no harm in it, after all. It didn’t seem to bother anyone, and it kept Len happy.
So, given Len’s lifelong involvement with the school that their aunt had founded over three-quarters of a century before, it was hardly surprising that she’d been the one to suggest that it was time for an official history of the establishment to be written. And her journalist sister was the obvious one to write it, she’d insisted.
