Chapter Eighteen ~ Scrooge
…the fugueur was no average man on the road. He was sober, clean, respectable, a member of the working poor…
(Mad Travellers, Ian Hacking)
The thing about Scrooge is that he must have been good really, otherwise he couldn’t have changed, and yet he’s horrible and mean to start with. Which makes you think about how people are. I couldn’t help putting a bit of Great Auntie Beryl and Great Uncle Tony into Scrooge. They’d changed, Mum said. They’d once been fun, just as much part of the hilarious history of Mum’s family as the other Great Aunts and Great Uncles. So you could change any way, not necessarily good. Which made doing Scrooge very slippery, because what were you supposed to base it on if people can become anything?
At school we were still doing ‘rivers
