Asked of her own history she couldn’t remember it. Others could drag out very little things, such as having their hands slapped with a ruler, or being picked up, or a balloon popping, or a man with a beard, or a dress, or someone holding their hands, or being read to. The younger Iremongers in the dormitory could remember more, but many of these had been born in the house and talked of nothing else but playing in the cinder box, but one or two tried very hard and could almost remember a mother or a father, but these were shadows of parents, they were only hats or dresses trying to be parents, an occasional floating moustache, a necklace. They were parents made of faint smells and whispers.

There were two old women Iremongers, dressed in the same white nightdress as everyone else, their creased and bent bodies put into the same cloth as the young lively ones. These women did not join in the excitement, they did not listen to my history even though one of the girls went over to their beds to whisper some of it to them, but the old women shifted over turning their backs, they closed their eyes and put their prunish hands to their large ears and would have none of it. One of them kept telling us to pipe down, even threatening to call out for Mrs Piggott.

There was a girl too, like the old women, who did not come out to see me. She was a little thing with a great nose that looked as if it should’ve been someone else’s.

‘And who’s that one?’ I asked.

‘Don’t worry about her. You mustn’t let her upset you.’

They told me that before I came she had been the last new Iremonger to arrive here, and that they had used to go to her bed every night and listen to her stories, but now, she was left alone, she was no longer news.

‘Come along,’ I called to her, ‘I’d like to hear your story.’

She put her head and her nose beneath the covers and it did not come out again until morning.

‘Your birth object is a matchbox,’ said a girl beside me and with great pride as if she was bursting to tell me a secret though I had told her, and others talked of seeing it not half an hour before.

‘What’s all this fuss,’ I asked, ‘about a matchbox?’

‘They’re very important, birth objects are.’

‘They are, I didn’t feel myself till I had my birth object.’

‘And what is it,’ I asked, ‘that it’s so important?’

‘’Tis a handbell.’

‘So much fuss about a handbell,’ I said.

‘Well mine,’ said another, ‘is a ladle.’

‘And mine is a dustpan.’

‘Mine a clothes brush.’

‘Mine an iron.’

‘Mine a needle.’

‘Mine poultry shears.’