I have thick red hair and a round face and a nose that points upwards. My eyes are green with flecks in them, but that’s not the only place I’m dotted. There’s punctuation all over me. I’m freckled and spotted and moled and have one or two corns on my feet. My teeth are not quite white. One tooth is crooked. I’m being honest. I shall tell everything how it occurred and not tell lies but stay with the actual always. I shall do my best. One of my nostrils is slightly bigger than the other. I chew my fingernails. Sometimes the bugs do bite and then I scratch them. My name is Lucy Pennant. This is my story.

The first part of my life I do not remember any more with perfect clarity. I know that my parents were hard people, but showed kindness in their own ways. I think I was happy enough. My father was a porter on the Filching–Lambeth border of London in a boarding house where many families lived. We were on the Filching side but would sometimes go out into Lambeth and from there walk into London itself by way of the Old Kent Road right into it, hearing all the business of the Regent’s Canal. But those in Lambeth sometimes came to us on the borders of Filching and smacked us around about and told us to keep out, to stay in Filching where we belonged, if we were ever caught out of Filching without a pass there’d be trouble.

It used to be a nice place, Filching, so they say, a long time ago, before the heaps were brought here. Forlichingham it used to be known as once upon a time, but no one from here would ever call it that, not if they wanted to be taken seriously. Just Filching, that’s all. Everyone here grew up with the dirt heaps and around them and along them and in them and should serve them one way or another all our lives, either as part of the great army depositing it, or among the tribes that sort it, we’re all of us in Filching one way or another serving the heaps. My mother worked in the laundry of the boarding house cleaning the clothes of so many heapworkers, scrubbing the rubbers and leathers. One day, I told myself, one day they might measure you for leathers and that would be that, you couldn’t expect anything else after that, not once they’d actually measured you for leathers, or ‘married’ you for leathers. That was what they called it, ‘married’, because then you should really give your whole life to the heaps. There wouldn’t be anything else for you after you’d been married. It’d be wrong to expect it.