I had so often been through the great hulk house, chamber by chamber, in the regions where I was permitted, and through some that I was not, up and down, through long winding staircases, listening to its talking objects, that I knew quite well where I might hide myself. Our home, Heap House, as we called it, was not an original structure; it was built up of other former places. When Grandfather bought up new places, he should often have the buildings dismantled, brought across the heaps, reassembled once more, only this time at a different address, clamped, and bolted, braced and steel-girdled onto our home. Out here deep in the heaplands we had London roofs and turrets, ballrooms and kitchens, outhouses and stairways and many, many chimneys. Huge carts had pulled great masses across the heaps – back when the heaps were still navigable. So I felt, in my way, I was discovering London by walking into those transplanted bits. I sought out London by walking in London rooms, by reading books, by touching places Londoners had actually been. I looked for names scratched on walls and furniture, for people did like to write their names, they liked to leave a proof of themselves, they were all wonderful to me, those names, clues of a greater world. I loved to wander through all those bits of London, there must be many gaps then, over there. It must be something similar, I have often thought, to when a person loses a tooth, only London must have so very many teeth you might not be able to tell. There were small shacks and pieces of palaces in our heap home. It was an enormous building, our place, made up of many other ones. But the original structure, hard to find now, had been in our family for several centuries.

My family lived only with its own kind, Iremongers with Iremongers, full-blooded Iremongers, all steely and grim and poker-faced. There were so many cousins and uncles and aunts, great aunts and great uncles, hordes of us, Iremongers of every age and shape, all connected by blood. And to keep those plentiful people fed and dressed a whole army of servants was needed. These servants were Iremongers too, but they were part-Iremonger, Iremongers of a lesser hue: one of their parents somewhere down the line married someone un-Iremonger and each generation afterwards kept on doing just that. I cannot say exactly how many servants there were, there were many that worked downstairs in the deep honeycomb of the cellars or out in the heaps who never came upstairs.

I was up in a high corridor, much of it taken from a former caulking factory of Tilbury, when the house suddenly shuddered. I held onto the wall waiting for it to finish. There followed a loud and horrible scream. And that was quite usual. It was the scream of Grandfather’s steam engine.