Charlotte, you see, was only Charlotte sometimes.
2002-12-10 || 8:40 p.m.

I've had a mixed day. An up and down day. I started this morning unable to eat again. Actually, the unable to eat thing started yesterday.

Today I got to school and one of my kids bought in fairy wings to wear as an angel. I've always wanted fairy wings so I put them on and taught literacy wearing them. George said, 'actually Miss, they don't go with that black jumper you're wearing'. Which made me laugh. I mean, as if they 'went' at all - with anything!

I was ok up until break time when someone was horrid to me. But as always, when anyone is nasty to me I just back away and don't say a word. I don't want to talk about it either.

On Sunday when I finished reading Charlotte Sometimes I had this nagging feeling at the back of my mind that the ending was wrong. That there was something missing that had been in my original copy. I just had this feeling that the book ended with a rhyme - one of those playground rhymes. I don't have my original copy anymore because I gave it to Helen who lost all her stuff in a warehouse fire last Christmas but I knew that she had her copy of 'CS' at school. Today I borrowed it, brought it home and sure enough I was right: the ending is different in my new copy.

Ok, so this is the end of the paragraph that is in the new version although the last word has also been changed.

"...Just as what had happened in the war itself would go on mattering permanently."

And this is what is missing:

"It was almost the end of term. Charlotte, like everyone, longed for home, for Aviary Hall and her sister Emma. Excitement lit itself and grew through all the Christmas parties, plays and concerts. By the last morning the joy of going home had overcome all animosities and the five from the Cedar bedroom sat together on the bus in the most friendly way, giggling, singing, making silly jokes.

The bus went by modern, noisy roads. But when it came to the river and crossed over the bridge into town, just for a moment, looking down the river, Charlotte could almost have believed it was the past, 1918, again. The pigeons and ducks and gulls there looked no different, nor did the faded, once elegant buildings with their elaborate cornices. The stucco was cracked, the gardens full of weeds, just as they had been then, after four whole years of war. The river was as grey and empty, the winter trees as bare.

About her everyone had begun to chant:

'No more Latin, no more French, No more sitting on a hard board bench.'

Vanessa, Janet, Elizabeth, Susannah were chanting now; but it could just as well have been Bunty or Emily or Ruth or any of them, Charlotte thought, till she noticed two air-liners buzzing in the sky like insects with fastened wings, and those had to belong to now, not then. Still she craned to see the river so long as she could - and so it was she saw Sarah Reynolds in the seat behind, and Sarah smiled at her. She was leaving school today, and Charlotte thought, sadly, that she might never see her again.

Yet, as the bus crept on through the neon-lighted town, Charlotte too began to sing, to chant out with the rest. After all she was Charlotte now, safe, in the present, going home to Aviary Hall, to her grandfather, Elijah and her sister Emma.

'No more filthy bread and butter, No more cocoa from the gutter, No more beetles in my tea, Making googly eyes at me, No more spiders in my bath, Trying hard to make me laugh.'

She never had seen spiders in a bath, in either time, thought Charlotte seriously, as the bus ground into the station yard and came to a noisy halt."

It's a far better ending than leaving it at the paragraph it ends at.

I'm gutted they missed this bit out. It's poignant and just lovely. I'm going to write them a complaint letter. REALLY. I actually will complain. Its ruined. My copy is not right. And I'm ANNOYED.

I love this book so, so much.

I don't know why.

Its part of all the things that are wrong with me.

I'm sorry, I just had to put that in here. It really matters to me that they messed with that book. Fuck you RED FOX PUBLISHING.

Good things that happened today: I've cracked it with Nicholas and Emily. Both of them are beautifully behaved for me. Nicholas is fast becoming my most diligent pupil. Marilyn said she thought I was a saint so far as Nicholas was concerned. But I'm not and although I care about all the children in my class and indeed in the school, I'm sorry, I care just that little bit more about the ones that truly need me. The ones that have crap home lives. They need more allowances and I will always make more allowances for them. I don't subscribe to the Daily Mail way of looking at things. Some kids need more treats, you need to turn a blind eye to some things that kids do.

The best way to get positive results is through behaving positively towards the kids. So I give Nicholas more treats than the others. He fucking needs more treats than the others and don't assume the other kids are stupid. They are not. Mostly they understand that everyone needs something a little bit different. Well that's what I think anyway.

Here I go, ranting again. I've also made a vow to myself that if I find a mouse in a trap again that is not dead I will kill it myself because it is the kindest thing to do. I don't ever want to be fucking unkind, not to anyone or anything. Not ever, its just not me.

Sometimes I just think that I need my life to be full of hard things. I don't know why.