Only on the very stillest days was I allowed out to exercise in the heaps, with wadding stuffed up my ears and with a scarf wrapped around my head like a big bandage even if it was hot summer outside and the heap haze was impenetrable. So I stood there that day of the lost door handle, my face at the cracked window, wondering in my fancy about all those other people a huge dustheap away, wondering if I could somehow get word to the city beyond, to Forlichingham, to London, and imagining that there was someone beyond of all those people, someone who might like the look of me.

‘Is there,’ I whispered, ‘anyone there? Who are you? What do you look like?’

And then reflected in the glass came a face, and with it was a smile and with it were the words, ‘Got you, scab-rat!’

My Cousin Moorcus.

4

A SEALED BOX OF SAFETY MATCHES

Lucy Pennant’s narrative continued

The stench of the place. It stank so much way out in the dirtheaps it was as if you were always crowded over, the smell of it was so big and so shocking it felt like something solid, something you could touch and hold, was creeping about you, sweating on you, breathing hard on you. Back in Filching I had seen new people arriving, foreigners and such, coughing and weeping at the smell, a smell that I being a native didn’t take much notice of, and I should laugh at those complaining greenhorns, thinking them very delicate and weedy. But now, here was I far out, coughing and wincing, and the woman looking at me how I looked at Filching foreigners.

‘What a pong, however do you live with it?’

‘No talking, hurry yourself.’