I ran back all the way to my room, avoiding the main corridors where Iremonger traffic was at its thickest. I did not wish to meet with jeers and whoops about me and my Sitting, any name calling and singing and all the clothes being pulled off, and being tossed up into the air, I should like to avoid all the business that often happens after a Sitting. I shouldn’t go to supper that night, I had a tin of squashed fly biscuits, that would do, and I wouldn’t come out till morning, when my Sitting would be less fresh and hopefully likewise their enthusiasm for it. I made it home just a short while before the train was back in from London.

My two rooms were not very large but they were all mine. Clod through and through and generally in a bit of a heap. Perhaps I was not the cleanest of all Iremongers. I had no parents to adjust me, to give me rules and see that I grow to their interpretation of how an Iremonger should grow, I had no sibling to steal or to be stolen from, to pry and talk and have in common. I am Clod and this was my kingdom. It was not very large perhaps and it was not so grand, but it was my sty and I wallowed in it nightly.