I would walk about the building where we lived, seeing all the people, all that life. Sometimes I helped clean the different lodgings and then if I saw something that shined particularly or would easily fit in a pocket, I might find it essential. I stole a bit. I remember that part. Just a bit of food sometimes, or maybe a thimble, there was once a fob watch which later in my excitement I overwound. Its face was cracked when I got it, no matter what Father said. If ever I was caught, Father should get his belt out, but I was not caught that often. I learnt to hide these little bits of mine in my hair, I’d conceal them beneath my thick locks, under my plain bonnet, Father never found them there, he never thought to look in that red nest.

There were other children in the building, we used to play together, we went to school in Filching, and most of what we learnt there was about the Empire and Victoria and how much of the globe we were, but also we had lessons in Filching history and about the heaps and their dangers and their greatness. They told us the old story about Actoyviam Iremonger who was in charge of London heaps, of all London’s rubbish brought into our district, a hundred years ago and more, back when the heaps were smaller and manageable, and that he drank too much and fell asleep for three days and so never gave the heap sifters the order to sift and so the heaps just got bigger and bigger, all the used stuff, all the filth of Londoners pouring in, and the job got huger and huger, and ever afterwards the heaps have always had the advantage of us. The Great Heap sneaked ahead and became the gross wild thing it is. Because of Actoyviam and because of gin, and how they worked in partnership. I don’t think I believed a word of it, they just told us it to make us work harder, that story had a message: don’t be idle or you’ll drown in it. I never wanted to be married, I’d rather stay in the building with my parents and work there, and there was no reason, not then, if I worked hard, why I shouldn’t.

It wasn’t a bad life, all told. There was a man upstairs in one of the top rooms who never came out at all, but we would hear him wandering about. Sometimes we put our faces to the keyhole, me and my friends in the house, but we never exactly saw him. How we spooked ourselves about him and then ran downstairs laughing and screaming. But then the illness started.