There were no internets in the flood days of Endland (sic) and no televisions, not even devices or mobile devices or anything would function and so life was officially boring most of the time and it was only the pictures they saw in the fire sometimes and the actual puppet shows that helped them pass the time.

For the puppets Marion would gather any kind of broken stuff or waste things she could salvage from the top floor rooms they occupied or stand on the drowned staircase to reach out and scoop up items with a improvised netting, pulling them from the waters of the flooded lounge and then carrying them upstairs to be dried and used right away or else dried, adapted and formed as proper puppets. Marion’s first time puppets were just a bit of old indistinguishable clothing like a soaked wet rag that was purple in colour, a bottle of Pale Ale and a solitary shoe.

For the first shows she made it was just the two of them up there near the fire and all she enacted was just what she had seen from the window on that particular day; the drowning of a old woman, for example or the strange unseaworthy craft of some surviving children and how they called out from it in broken voices in a language that she and Tigar could not understand, or the dance in the water of a creature they thought it was a probable whale, octopus or kraken, they were not sure, with its white belly and its tail, flippers, tentacles, fins, ribs, arms, tendrils and maximal multitude of deep and thoughtful sorrowful eyes.

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When the rains and floodwater withdrew from the city, Marion and Tigar walked the pavements that slithered with mud, avoiding other survivors where possible to do so. And as they walked they collected things – mostly like not-too-wet firewood, tinned food and not tinned food, and often in the long ago flood ruin of a supermarket M found more things for the puppet show.

It was in the basement of a building near what used to be the centre of N_____ and M later started doing bigger shows, inviting kids from the neighbourhood to join her as helpers and puppeteers. There were three shows a night, sometimes five shows on a Saturday and several on a Sunday. Admission was free but if they wanted persons could contribute to the food and so on, in the form of foodstuffs which they used to make and share.