0 comment(s) so far. Please add yours!
How to Read “Inez of the Upper IV”
The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a series of documents—some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.
Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond.
Forward to Inez’s Diary Entry 1
(Pinned inside the front cover, possibly written years later. Possibly not.)
The pages that follow were not meant to be shared. Not with teachers. Not with school authorities. Certainly not with Mummy (not that she would ever read another’s diary!). These are the extremely private thoughts of one Inez de Vries, age fourteen, penned under the covers at Saint Clare’s School for Girls, Summer Term 1955, using a torch that needed new batteries and her trusty, if leaky, fountain pen.
They were tucked away in a locked tuckbox, behind an embroidered handkerchief, a Latin vocab book, and three boiled sweets (two of them fuzzed). She cursed the book so no one could read them. Naturally, you may read them anyway –but on your own head be it.
You may already have seen other documents from this term — the official reports, the memos, the staff meeting minutes (oops! that’s tomorrow!), the infamous reflective essay. This document is not like those –i’s her diary, what she didn’t say, not even to her closest friend. Or perhaps especially not to her closest friend.
It’s tempting to say the diary reveals “the real Inez,” but that’s too easy. All of these posts are “real,” as Inez was “real” in all her forms: the strategist, the spark, the girl with too much cleverness and just enough conscience. Her diary doesn’t contradict the rest —-it deepens it. Complicates it. And, perhaps makes you feel ashamed for having read it.
Grown-up Inez, now an old woman of 84 –though she doesn’t look a day over 70– will likely laugh and claim it was all fiction, all drama, all performance, and perhaps it was. Still, if feminism taught me nothing else, it’s the truth that just because something’s constructed doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
— Archivist’s Note, redacted version. Not for circulation outside Form IV without permission.
Private!!!!
This diary is for me only so you Get Out!
To Whomever Disturbs This Book:
Death shall come on swift wings to him who touches the secrets of the daughter of de Vries.1Adapted from the tomb of King Tut. Look it up — they found the curse scratched in charcoal behind a statue. No, really.
Sunday, 19 June 1955
(Under the covers. Torch getting dim. Note to self: Ask Mummy for batteries in next letter. Also: do Not leave this in pillowcase again, you idiot.)
Dear Diary,
I wasn’t going to go up there, truly. I’d survived the caning — medium cane, four sets of three, all very proper — and I wrote the “reflective” essay they asked for. It said what happened. It said more than what happened: it named names, explained motives, laid everything out. No one but me wanted that, but TOO BAD.
Miss Kelley said it didn’t take responsibility. But it did — it took as much as I should, as much as is mine. I’m not going to take ALL of it. I may have been the spark, but the fire came from Mr. Mean’s hot air and rage going TOO FAR. They all know it, tooo, whatever they say.
(Must stop calling him Mr. Mean. Even in here or will do it where he could hear about it. That’s the sort of thing some swot fink might tell him.)
It was amazing – Green was incandescent. Not only red, but that awful blotchy purple one sees on exploding thermometers. I rather thought he might burst. (No such luck.)
- 1Adapted from the tomb of King Tut. Look it up — they found the curse scratched in charcoal behind a statue. No, really.
Based on 
