Quote of the Day

"Nothing ever happens to me," said Ricky Andersen, putting down the book that she had just finished and sighing gustily.

Her friends, Julie Mitchell and Fay Macdonald, had heard this gloomy grumble so often in the past that they did not even bother to glance up, far less answer. They went on with what they were doing, which was in Julie's case cataloguing a batch of new books for the library, and in Fay's case nothing.

The three girls were in the school library doing a spell of duty as library monitors; but as usual Julie was the only one who was doing any actual work - Ricky's idea of being a library monitor was to read all the books, and Fay's was to ignore the whole thing as far as possible and sit thinking her own thoughts.

Ricky's proper name, which she despised, was Erica; fortunately, however, no one called her by it, not even the mistresses except under extreme provocation. She was tall and long-legged, and her hair, which was done in a very neat pony-tail, was smooth and shining and so fair as to be almost flaxen. According to her friends, she had inherited her fairness and startlingly blue eyes form some remote Viking ancestor along with some very peculiar Viking ideas, like this constant itch for excitement. Ricky rather liked to dream about a remote Viking past and compare it unfavourably with a staid Glasgow present, living with her parents and two small brothers in a flat near the Botanic Gardens and going to a staid Glasgow day-school. Her life, as she would have put it herself, was one long wait for something to happen, one long search for excitement.

From CROOKS TOUR, Chapter 1, Excitement at Last?. These are the very first words by Jane Shaw that I ever read.