Piggott turned around, all insult and disgust, and as she turned to me so many drawers seized their chances and cannoned themselves from the wall, so much spilling out now.

‘You! You again!’ screamed Piggott. ‘You’ve ruined everything! All I ever had!’

Drawers took their advantage, so many breaking their locks, so many shooting out, all those things rushing past her.

‘Come back, come back! Come you all back to me!’

They didn’t though. They kept falling out, tumbling everywhere. Clod, wide-eyed, watched it all and grinned now at the lovely storm of it. Looking at all those things running free, so lovely, so lovely. A floating, flying tape measure eeling in the air! A chair, its legs kicking up dirt as it ran! A boot scraper, upturned, clockworking its way out.

‘Matchbox, Lucy!’ cried Clod. ‘Find the matchbox!’

I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t there.

A thumping behind me then, and I was slammed to the ground, someone was rushing by. It was the great lockwoman, Mrs Smith, agony on her flat mug, smashing through those things, crushing whatever was underfoot, fumbling with all her keys. But which keys now? Which to use? How to keep all those locks closed, locks that were bending, snapping, breaking? Her world, just like Piggott’s, was coming unfastened, was getting out.

Smith soon gave up with the keys and, turning around, flattened her great back against the drawers, so doing covering a good portion of the back wall, she was herself a lock. She grinned then, a great happy, simple grin, full of triumph. But it didn’t linger long. Smith looked up, she saw it before I did. The great tall safe of Piggott’s sitting room was wobbling, it was wobbling and also it was leaning forward, tilting itself forward. Now Smith, grinless, looked up at it, and that great lead thing looked down upon Smith, it looked down and down upon her like its own metal child. There was a screech of metal, Smith’s face very white now, and then Smith’s face was not there at all, nor the rest of her neither, the great safe had fallen upon her and taken her quite out. The lock of Heap House was no more and, as if in answer, as if in glorious salute, the remaining drawers smashed open and all the disobedient objects hurried out. Piggott, in her loud misery, snatched at the air, trying to grasp them back, she had hold of a wax crayon for a little moment, but it soon slipped her grasp. Then I was being pulled at. There was Clod, tugging at me, smiling and holding something in his hand: a box of matches.

‘I have it! I have it!’ he cried.

‘My matchbox!’