Sorry, I forgot to stop reading and got all the way through Chapter 6! So that’s where we’re reading up to this week.
Summary
Tiffany is at the end-of-summer scouring fair on the Chalk. Two girls approach to give her a bouquet meant to attract a beau and ask if she has any “passionate parts” as a witch (since they’ve been told not to become witches on account of witches not having those parts). Tiffany tells them that witches are just like everyone else that way, just more busy. She goes to watch the cheese rolling, which turns to mayhem due to the Feegle turning up and unleashing Horace on all the unsuspecting and unsentient cheeses. Rob Anybody tells Tiffany he was sent on behalf of the kelda, who just wants to make sure that Tiffany is okay. Then Roland pauses on his journey home after seeing the injuries on the cheese-rolling field. Tiffany assures him that nothing wrong, and he leaves with his new paramour, Letitia. Later that night, Tiffany is sent to Mr. Petty, an angry drunk who has beaten his daughter until she miscarried, to warn him away before the men in town come to kill him. Then she has a talk with her father about why Petty became the sort of man he is, and the fact that his daughter might not be his biological child. Tiffany tells her father to get the old stone barn cleared out for her.
The Feegle are nearby listening. Tiffany asks them to help her get Petty’s daughter Amber up to their mound where she can be helped. Jeannie, the kelda, and the Feegles aid the girl, who is still unconscious. Jeannie then has Tiffany fed and tells her that she’s been having visions in her brain that danger is surrounding her, but she cannot tell where the danger comes from this time around. She warns Tiffany to be cautious and invites her to stay the night and rest. Tiffany does and wakes to Amber laughing: The soothings that Jeannie performed have worked well on her, and she can begin to heal. Tiffany leaves swiftly to head back and bury the stillborn child, but she sees a figure with a walking stick that vanishes. Then she sees a hare that bursts into flame, runs off, and also vanishes. When she gets back to Petty’s barn, she finds Mr. Petty has come back and put a ring of flowers around the baby’s body, then tried to hang himself from the rafters. Tiffany cuts the rope with Rob’s help, saving his life. She brings Amber to her home and learns that Mrs. Petty went back to find her husband, claiming he was attacked. Tiffany’s father says the rest of the town need to look after the family and not everything can be Tiffany’s job.
Tiffany goes to the Baron next to help take his pain away, and his nurse Miss Spruce is talking about how she doesn’t hold with Tiffany’s magic and thinks that people shouldn’t fall to demonic forces. The Baron talks to Tiffany for a while and asks if she saved his son’s life all those years ago—as her father apparently told him recently. She admits that she did, and he gives her fifteen dollars: old money made of mostly gold, which will fetch a very high price. Tiffany doesn’t want to accept it, but he insists. He asks if he’s going to die soon, and she admits that he is. Tiffany shows him the fire trick she does to sanitize her hands, and it brings up a precious memory for the Baron, a song about a hare going into fire, and he dies happy. Miss Spruce is quick to accuse Tiffany of murder and theft, though the head of the guards, Brian, knows Tiffany and isn’t too concerned about that. Tiffany suggests that she go to the city to inform Roland that he is Baron, which everyone agrees to. She arrives at the Feegle mound to find Amber back there; Jeannie thinks Amber should be trained as a witch, as she learned their ancient language just by hearing it. Tiffany goes to talk to Mrs. Petty and has the Feegles clean her kitchen, which terrifies the woman.
Tiffany comes home to find that Wentworth has been in a fight with a local boy who was saying mean things about her being a witch. Tiffany’s mother warns her that things are getting strange out there, and that she needs to be more careful. Tiffany and the Feegles start toward the city, but Daft Wullie sets fire to Tiffany’s broomstick, necessitating a landing on a carriage that’s carrying a disco ball. The coachman, William Glottal Carpetlayer, has jumping bones. Tiffany tries to help him when a figure suddenly appears—a man with no eyes, who casts no shadow and promises to find her wherever she goes. The Feegles attack him and he’s gone, and the coachman is so grateful for having his bones fixed that he agrees not to charge Tiffany for scraping the carriage’s paint job. They make it to Ankh-Morpork, where Tiffany heads to Boffo’s Joke Shop and meets Derek and his mother Mrs. Proust, the witch who all the warty stereotypical witch masks are actually based upon. Mrs. Proust tells Tiffany about witching in a big city and takes her to see dwarfs who can repair her broomstick. When they find out she’s friends with the Feegle, they agree to do her repairs at no charge.
Commentary
Unsurprisingly, as Tiffany approaches adulthood, she finds herself doing too much and expecting that she can somehow shoulder the whole thing by sheer force of will. Or, as the narrative helpfully hands us:
Perhaps that was the trick of it, Tiffany thought. If you kept yourself busy you wouldn’t have time to go nuts.
Gurl. That’s not how this works.
I dunno, I love that while a good witch’s work is predicated on doing what needs to be done that other people are leaving by the wayside, this book is peeking over the top of that summit and finding… oh look, there’s just more work. And Tiffany is in a prime position to allow this to happen because she has always been like this, always believed that other people couldn’t manage without her and always trying to do everything herself. It’s very easy to blow right by the Self-Sufficiency mark and careen straight into burnout being your life’s default state.
This is a subject I happen to be a little belligerent on personally, due entirely to personal experience. I will grab my more Type A friends by the face and lovingly whisper “If you don’t take a break, your body will decide when you take it in the most dramatic way possible” every chance I get. I wish I could do the same for Tiffany, but that is the point of this story.
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These coming-of-age lessons for Tiffany always deal in both rather than either-or as a rule of development, like a finely balanced seesaw: In previous books we’ve seen her take responsibility for her community, learn that most of life is in doing the gritty awful jobs that you’d rather look away from, but now we’re getting the inverse of that, an acknowledgment that being part of a community does involve relying on it in some fashion, and also that no one person can be everything that people need.
We’re also arriving at the point where many of Tiffany’s personal relationships are reshaping themselves into what they will be when she’s an adult, and the changes there are rocky, to say the least: Her potential romance with Roland is over—he’s moved on to Letitia—and her relationship to her family is altering too. Mr. Aching would hardly be the first parent to realize that his kid’s grown up a bit faster than he’d prefer, but the real tragedy is in Tiffany looking at her family and not believing for one moment that they can aid her, that she can trust them to pick up slack.
It’s going to be a rude awakening.
Asides and little thoughts
- Of the Baron: “To him, the pain was a bully, and what do you do to bullies? You stood up to them, because they always ran away in the end. But the pain didn’t know about that rule. It just bullied even more.” Yeah. Um.
- I’m trying to remember if it was ever suggested that the Baron was such a genial fellow, because I feel like this is a sizable retcon on Pratchett’s part. The guy we heard about in the first couple books sounded pretty distant, haughty, and cold to me. Granted, dying probably makes a difference, but he’s still a lot more affable than I would have expected.
- It seems important that Mrs. Proust says she’s teaching young people respect for other people’s property, not because vandalism is in and of itself some kind of high-grade evil, but because a lack of respect for it “would, you mark my words, have resulted in him getting a new collar courtesy of the hangman.” A teach-to-the-outcome sort of plan.
Pratchettisms
She sidled away as politely as she could, but as noise went, it was sticky; you got the feeling that if you let it, it would try to follow you home.
For the onlookers, of course, it was just another show; you didn’t often see a satisfying pile-up of men and cheeses, and—who knew?—there might be some really interesting casualties.
What a name. Halfway between a salad and a sneeze.
The world was always very nearly drowning in mysterious omens. You just had to pick the one that was convenient.
At last someone had taught a boy something useful!
Next week we’ll read Chapters 7-10!
