Snowflake Challenge 2025: #6

[greerwatson]

Challenge #6: Share your favourite piece of original canon.

As if there could only be one!

This question reminds me of the tenth anniversary celebrations on maryrenaultfics, way back in 2014. Various activities were suggested by the moderators, my_cnnr and trueriver; and both my sister and I did the "Ten descriptions that have stuck with you" one—the descriptions in question being, of course, taken from any of Mary Renault's books. As I particularly like The Charioteer, I picked all ten from there. Here are a few of them:

1. Laurie's first sight of Andrew: The boy put down his floorcloth, wiped his hand on the seat of his trousers, and with the back of it pushed the hair away from his eyes. It was fairish, the colour of old gilt. He had a fair skin which was smoothly tanned, so that his grey eyes showed up very bright and clear.

2. Laurie meets Andrew in the orchard: The declining sun was ripe and warm. Hips and haws shone like polished beads in the hedgerows; the damp mats of fallen leaves had a smoky, rusty smell. […] The blackberries couldn’t have been picked over for at least a week. They tasted of frost and faint sun and smoke and purple leaves: sweet, childish and sad.

3. Laurie's reaction when seeing Bim: A young flight-lieutenant came in. He was a small man but very handsome, with a tough, steely kind of grace. The high girlish voice with which he greeted his friends was burlesqued and perfunctory, like a carnival vizard held with a flourish a foot away from the face. You felt, and were meant to feel, that he was playing at it. He was like a little fighting-cock, brave, shining and cruel.

4. A quiet moment with Ralph: The popping blue gas-fire had warmed to a spreading glow. Beyond the hooded reading-lamp’s small orbit it touched the room with dusky gold and rose. Laurie sat as he was bidden in the arm-chair; he had learned to accept such things simply, like the old. Ralph, curled easily on the old hooked-wool rug, would have looked incongruous there to no one, probably, except to Laurie, who found ancient habits of precedence still haunting his mind.

One of the people to leave a comment was my sister, who said:

Lovely all - and in an odd way, I think the difference between your choices and mine reveal the differences between us (no matter that my_cnnr often struggles with 'which Watson'). All your choices are the 'insignificant' descriptions which, for the most part (Bim being an exception) do not belong to hugely dramatic scenes (unlike the ones which stick in my memory) but nonetheless add so much to the quality of the novel, it would be much the less without them.

To which I could only reply:

At least you and I can tell each other apart. Just as well really. ;)

Which is true.