A Small Place

isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?

this person we were getting worked up about as if she were God Himself,

school named after a Princess of England.

for this wrong can never be made right, and only the impossible can make me still: can a way be found to make what happened not have happened?

For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal’s deed.

made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue.

Queen Victoria and the glorious day of her coming into the world, a beautiful place, a blessed place, a living and blessed thing, not the ugly, piggish individuals we met. I cannot tell you how angry it makes me to hear people from North America tell me how much they love England, how beautiful England is, with its traditions. All they see is some frumpy, wrinkled-up person passing by in a carriage waving at a crowd.

Antigua, the twenty-fourth of May was a holiday – Queen Victoria’s official birthday.

were so completely empty of grace.

for the English were supposed to be civilised, and this behaviour was so much like that of an animal,