‘Here in Filching, the poorest, dirtiest, most mysterious of all boroughs, here in Heap Deep, Heap House, London, here we are and here you are.’

It was up to my neck now, and still rising, still rising.

‘Grandfather, I shall drown!’

To my chin and rising, still rising.

‘Grandfather!’

‘Here where things must go bump in the night!’

And all at once all the dirt was gone and it was only Grandfather and me again, in an infirmary room.

The Way of All Things

‘Clodius Iremonger, attend this last please, and with great concentration,’ said Grandfather, in a gentler voice, ‘it was not just the rubbish that came to Filching. Many of the poor were rounded up and brought to us here, the malnourished, the luckless, the criminal, the indebted, the foreign, such people, the very worst of people, tired and wretched, drunk and moaning, little people, who scrub about in the mounds for us, shifting and sorting and giving up. The poor, the unfortunate. There have always been poor and unfortunate.’

In response to this speech, small unhappy pieces of rags knotted into shapes that vaguely resembled buckled human forms and came and huddled upon the slate.

‘Iremongers of wisdom, born before you or me, helped these people. They could earn money in the heaps, but such a little money to keep them heapbound. And these crouched ones had such a business with the objects, were so thick with them, breathing them in, cutting themselves upon them, mixing them with their blood, that something began to go wrong.’

One of the small bundles now opened up and within a moment was nothing more than a dented brass button.