‘What is it?’ I whispered to my neighbour.

‘We have it every night. It’s so good,’ she said, a stout girl with a nose that was askew.

‘Yes, but I cannot tell what it is.’

‘If I told you, you might think strangely of it, perhaps you should eat it first and then I should tell you. I think there was a time when I thought it a little strange, I do seem to remember that, but actually it’s really quite something. Eat then, do eat.’

I raised the substance to my mouth, but my nose protested, I could not do it. ‘I’m not hungry,’ I said.

‘Then may I have it, may I?’

‘Help yourself,’ I said, but then, ‘if you tell me what it is.’

‘We’re not supposed to tell new Iremongers, they’re to learn it later.’

‘Then you shan’t have it.’ I raised the spoon to my mouth as if I was going to eat.

‘No, wait! I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you.’

I lowered the spoon.

‘It is,’ said the girl, ‘city dirt, London dirt. Collected from dustcarts and haulers and pounded in the kitchens. One spoonful every night-time.’

‘Truly,’ I said, ‘what is it?’

‘City dirt,’ said the girl, offended, ‘what I told you.’

This girl, I thought, shall be no friend of mine, to bait a person who’s just arrived, a person that’s such easy prey, no sport in that. In any case, I wasn’t going to eat that muck. Around the room I saw all those serving Iremongers licking their spoons and their lips.

A bell was rung again, and I was taken by some Iremongers to a dormitory, one of the women’s dormitories. By then I was very tired and hoped that after some rest all might seem better and less strange. It was a peculiar place sure enough, filled with peculiar behaviour, well so what, I thought, people are peculiar. And people with money are at liberty to be as peculiar as they like. And so what, too, if this place was such a long way from anywhere else, people are private are they not, and people with money may be as private as they like. And so what even if it was below ground, and we lived like rabbits in a burrow, and these cellar halls and rooms were very like a warren, so what when I, tomorrow, should go up the stairways and be above the ground. And I must never forget, I told myself, that I was out of the orphanage, I had a job, the food but for that spoonful was good, I had even perhaps something of a future. I lay down, stroked my arm which did ache a bit, but it was all, I told myself, for my own good, and then very soon I was quite asleep.