I gazed down at this new unguessed of scene and all the time the corner of my eye was aware of a white glint. I craned round till my neck was horribly ricked and, my hands gripping violently at a bit of protruding wall, I saw a piece of a white stone building.

Unblinking, my eyes widened.

At least, I expect they did, they have to anyway for this type of happening, according to most of the prose I’ve read.

I hung, silently, gazing at new horizons.

The white building whose end I was seeing obviously began somewhere quite beyond my range of vision. I thought (just at first) it might be a bit of this tower but I didn’t recognize it.

It’s a stone terrace, open to the sun, behind a beautifully-worked stone balustrade which looks tiny from this distance, and behind is a flat-roofed hall into whose shady clean blue colonnades I can see for some way before it disappears into its own shadows.

It all looks so cool, and unattainable.

I wondered and wondered.

Was it part of my own tower? But no, I had explored it from corner to corner since babyhood. (I know far more about it even than they do.)

“It must be the end terrace of my mother’s palace,” I thought.

Then I twisted myself back till my whole weight rested on the hot board sill again. I clambered back over the uneasy stones and lowered myself into the secure little Passage beyond. I would ask my mother some questions next time.

So I did, and she evaded them and questioned me instead and I had to be very clever and evade her questions because I don’t want anyone to find out about the Passage. But I am sure, by now, that that is the end of my mother’s palace and that I have seen part of the outside World.

On the third day of every single week, every week might be permissible but always the third day, they put long revolting aprons over their trousers and scrub the floors. If they think I have been particularly bad, they make me help them and I have been helping them for months now with only one week off.

The whole point of my starting this diary is that I am utterly fed-up and I must work off my steam somehow and a good way to do it is to write it all down, so I shall.