‘Under Septimus’s declaration, it was his dying wish, we bought up all the small dirtmounds of the city and had them moved here,’ said Grandfather, and as he spoke a small mound of dirt formed in the centre of the slate. ‘We took on all broken things. We, unwanted ourselves, the Iremongers, abandoned, despised family, took on all the equivalent in object terms.’ The dirtmound was the size of the slate now and spreading beyond its borders, covering much of the bed blankets and growing yet. ‘The disgusting and malodorous, the shattered and the cracked, the rusted, the overwound, the missing-parts, the stinking, the ugly, the poisonous, the useless and we loved them all, with what great love did we love. No greater love is there than the Iremonger love of spurned things. All that we own is brown and grey and yellowish, and tainted and dustful and malodorous. We are the kings of mildew. I do think actually that we own that: mildew. We are moguls of mould.’

Now the dirtmound was over much of my bed, my legs already covered, and spreading yet, pouring over the sides of the bed and threatening to fill the whole room, I couldn’t see Grandfather any more but I could hear him.

‘We took up home here in the centre of the heaps,’ he said, ‘we made this mansion out of broken fortunes; as people shrank so we grew, as they threw away so we grew, as they begged, so we grew. Every time any person in London threw anything away, we profited it by it. Every chicken bone is ours, every spoiled paper, every unfinished meal, every broken thing. And they look at us, the people beyond, and they hate us, they find us vile and Iremongerish, ogreish and goblin-grubbing, foul of thought and small of love. They ban us from the rest of London, they passed an official law that no Iremonger is to leave the borough of Filching. So be it, in Filching we stay, within the borough walls, thick with our dirt. Do you know, Clod, what the Londoners say? They say that all London shall fall if the Iremongers leave Filching. In short, they hate us, in short, to their thinking, we stink of rot and death.’

By now the dirtmound was so huge it was swarming all over the room and still it grew on and on, all the space either side of the bed was now thick with dirt, dirt bubbling up, and still it was rising, beyond the bed level and lapping around me.

‘And you smell of it too, Clod Iremonger, you stink.’

‘Grandfather, help! Stop it!’

‘Here we have grown up amongst foul things, here where the objects move in the shadows, where they creep like animal life.’

The dirt was up to my chest now, all those filthy bits, all that scree, smashed rubble, broken shards, stinking old things, pressing hard against me, into me.

‘Grandfather!’