A guide to one of London’s least-known but most curious boroughs.

It’s been said that London is a collection of villages, and nowhere is this more apparent than among the low-lying houses of Tower Hamlets, whose timber frames and thatched roofs stand in stark contrast with the glass and steel skyscrapers of the City of London just a few miles to the east.

The Hamlets are unique by London standard in being sunk into a natural valley, whose sharply sloping sides afford few opportunities for the kind of large-scale development that has reworked many of the neighbouring boroughs. What’s more, the western access to the valley — following Candlemass Lane, the narrow path that runs beneath the Lea viaduct through East London — is impassable due to life-threatening levels of atmospheric pollen for much of the summer, meaning that the funicular from Stepney, to the north, is the only way into the valley for much of the year.

The result is that the Hamlets’ villagey atmosphere has remained extraordinarily well-preserved, making it a must-see for visitors who wish to gain an insight into what London’s pre-industrial settlements might have been like. The folksy effect is carefully nurtured by the Hamleteers, for whom tourism is a big earner, but don’t be fooled: beneath their rustic manner, the locals are as urbane here as anywhere else in London.

Tip! If someone invites you to dinner, accept; then give them your wallet without making any sudden movements.

Whichever direction you come from, your visit to Tower Hamlets will almost certainly start in the large market square at the bottom of the valley. Historically, the Square would have been the centre of valley life: this is where villagers would come to buy and sell food, goods and services. Tower Hamlets’ inaccessibility put it effectively beyond the reach of the exchequer, making it a centre for trafficking in all kinds of goods of varying degrees of legality.

Modern times have brought an end to much of this illicit activity, but those who can stay awake long enough can get a feel for what those times must have been like at the bustling Egg Market (2am-4.30am Thurs-Sat) – which is to oophiles what Smithfields is to carnivores and Billingsgate to fish-fanciers. The array of eggs for sale is dizzying: large, small, plain, marbled, blotched, reptilian, amphibian, poultry and piscine. (Many of the more exotic specimens are bought by expatriates from other parts of London, hungry for a taste of home.)

Tip! Any stall-holder will gladly crack an egg open so you can examine its quality — but custom dictates that you eat it immediately afterwards.

The square is where most of the Hamlets’ shops are still to be found, as well as a sprawling flea-market — well named, since it is one of the few in the world where you can actually buy fleas! If you have a small appetite, you might prefer to try their eggs, available by the gross at the Egg Market or as a mid-morning snack at most local cafés. Those with a keen eye for bargains may well spot a bargain or two — this is a good spot to pick up a hand-carved acacia-wood hat — but it’s well worth browsing even if you’re not interested in arts and crafts.

The vast Portland stone building that runs along the entire northern edge of the Square is the Museum of the Governess (entry £4, 9am-10.30am Tues) — one of the hidden gems of London’s museum circuit, packed to the rafters with pince-nez, high-necked blouses and home to an unique collection of rare blackboard erasers.

Tip! Ask the keeper to open the “Stars and Garters” cabinet.

The Square is also home to the valley’s only four-star hotel, the Farthingale Arms (£45-£8,150 for a double, avoid the third floor), and most of its better eating options. Dabinet’s Portico serves traditional Tower Hamlets fare (£40 for two, no fluid consumption permitted on the premises), as do all the other restaurants. Local specialities include fried, boiled and raw eggs of all kinds (gurnard caviar is particularly good, although you’ll be lucky to visit during the short and unpredictable season), omelettes and frittatas.

Tip! Tower Hamlets is also one of the few London villages to still serve its traditional pudding, the herring-smelt turnover recently popularised by Fergus Henderson.

The Square is host to a number of other attractions, but none of them are worth more than a casual look if you have nothing better to do. The exception is the Arcade Soixante-Huite (entry £2, 11am-4.30pm Wed-Thurs), an oddly themed fun-fair that might excite fans of revolutionary kitsch but is unlikely to captivate anyone else.

Tip: Look for the telephone that connects you to Richard Nixon during his time in the White House. He will hang up if you ask him if he’s a crook.

If your time is limited, you’d be much better advised to explore the rest of the valley. The Hamlets actually comprise at least four distinct settlements, although the casual visitor would be hard-pressed to tell where the boundaries lie. But the locals are proud of their distinct heritages. Residents of Great Tower are quick to describe their village’s superiority over Tower-on-the-Hill, Tower-le-Meaux and Tower Shadwell — while the inhabitants of those settlements would be just as quick to make the case for each of their own townships

Tip! Tower Messington is said to have been destroyed by an incendiary bomb during the war, but it is better not to raise the subject with locals.

But all of the Hamlets have their charms, and all are well worth exploring at leisure. The possibilities are endless — there’s enough in the valley to reward a (short) lifetime of investigation, but here are some suggested itineraries.

– If you have a day: Start by exploring the bric-a-brac stands in the market square. Don’t forget to tip the stand-keepers if they have to bail you out of the Pittage Hole! Choose one of the cafés around the square for lunch — any of them will do, since they are all served by the same kitchen. In the afternoon, set off for Stepney Pass, enjoying the scenery as you climb the valley wall: provided you don’t dawdle too much along the way, you should have plenty of time to make it to the border before curfew.

– If you have three days: Spend the first day as above, but stop for the night at the “Eagle’s Nest” inn just below the Pass. Day two: Take the narrowboard to Tower-Le-Meaux for a “lotus luncheon”. It will probably be dark when you awake, so it is advisable to pre-book accomodation. Drink lots of fluid. You may be served black bread before you retire for the night — if you choose to indulge, we advise moderation, since the local ergot is stronger than you may be used to. Day three: There are several options: you could explore the Secret Jungle of Tower Shadwell, visit the Museum of the Governess or simply wander along the valley floor in search of food and shelter.

– If you have a week: Follow the three-day itinerary above, but partake freely of the black bread. Take a day’s rest, then repeat: you’ll have forgotten everything about the first time. ##

Let no man put asunder.

And so it came to pass that Gretel and Spejbl were to be married, and a glorious day it was to be.

Spejbl had long sought his true love. He had waited, patiently, for the right girl, biding his time and moving to the time of the unseen hands: directed this way and that by the constant tugging of his strings. He had waited as days turned into weeks and months and years, and wondered if he would ever meet the one for him, the one who would understand that beneath his clownish exterior lay a true, loyal heart that would never waver in its devotion. He had almost given up all hope when quite by chance one day he happened upon Gretel, and he knew almost at once that she was the girl for him.

Gretel, for her part, had also tired of the constant dance, of the perpetual, pre-ordained rituals of courtship: one step forward followed by two steps back. Her good looks had brought many suitors, but most were not what they seemed. Sometimes they were dull; sometimes they were unkind; and sometimes they were both. She longed for one who would see below her brightly-painted surface and delicately-carved features to the warm and gentle soul locked inside her wooden body. And she too had almost given up hope when she by chance happened on Spebjl, and she knew almost at once that he was the boy for her.

And so the great day came, and there was much excitement among the friends and family who gathered. For when puppets marry, they lose their strings: no longer must they follow directives from above, but they may choose their own path together. So the assembled congregation were eager to see Gretel and Spejbl tied in matrimony, and there was much hubbub as they waited in the highest chamber of the hilltop castle for the ceremony to begin.

In the event, Spejbl, though nervous, acquitted himself admirably. Gretel, for her part, was a beautiful bride, and there was a rising murmur of approval as they exchanged their vows and their strings came tumbling down. Free at last, the couple led the way down the winding stairs of the castle to the great green outside. But suddenly a terrible thing happened: a great wind blew up and, before anyone could move to intervene, Gretel, untethered, was blown away across the moors, never to be seen again.

And so Spebjl was left, alone and afraid, on the hill. The congregation called to him, to come away from the dangerous edge, to return to them. But without his bride, and without his strings, he could not move an inch. ##

School’s out for summer; school’s out for ever.

Last Trump At Malory Towers represents a dramatic, and in many ways unsettling, break with the arc of the series to date. It’s almost as though Blyton had grown frustrated with her self-imposed chronology, cramming in ideas and themes that have barely figured up in the books until now. The result is startlingly anarchic, tearing down the edifice that Blyton has constructed over the previous five books and giving the lie to claims that her work depends on formulaic appeals to base prejudices.

The catalyst for the apocalyptic events of Last Trump is the startling announcement from Mary-Lou that she is pregnant – it’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it? – which provokes a schism among the girls, who cannot understand how this has happened – after all, Mary-Lou is not married! One faction, led by Darrell and Sally, holds staunchly that it must have been an immaculate conception; the other, following Alicia and Betty, is equally adamant that something more diabolical is afoot.

“It’s perfectly obvious that this is an abomination! How else could it have happened?” asked Alicia sharply. And it was true that none of the girls could think how timid Mary-Lou could possibly be with child. “Well, I think you’re all being beastly to poor little Mary-Lou,” said Darrell.

The girls quickly divide into rival sects, their opposing perspectives inevitably setting them on a collision course. Darrell’s group seclude Mary-Lou in the sanatorium, the better to prepare her for the birth; Alicia’s followers, meanwhile, accept Betty’s offer and set about creating a stronghold in the West Tower. Both sides try to persuade the other Towers to fall in line; the South Tower girls quickly pledge allegiance to their neighbours in the West, while the East Tower remains independent. That standoffishness proves their downfall.

Darrell and Alicia call a summit in the music room, but any hopes of peace are dashed as a heated war of words breaks out. It does not take long for Darrell to snatch Alicia’s pen and smash it underfoot — a clear declaration of hostilities. (To confirm her intentions, she also pushes a first year over a stool). Oh Darrell, that temper will be your downfall! Alicia calls upon the Towers to take sides; when the girls of the East refuse to comply, they meet with a terrible fate, as Alicia’s followers set their Tower on fire; too late, its occupants call on Darrell to help them, but she refuses.

“They could do with learning a lesson!” Darrell thought, as the smell of roasting pork drifted across the quad. “Fancy being so stuck-up as to refuse to take a side!” She decided there and then that no girl from the East Tower would be named to any school team for the rest of the term.

It is at about this point that the teachers, ever watchful, first note that something is going on. Miss Potts is the first upon the scene – and the first to go to her death. Alicia’s upstart cousin June sees opportunity in rising lawlessness and leaps upon the startled Potts; she is followed by a legion of other frustrated girls. Blyton tactfully draws a veil on the ensuing scene.

From there on, the collapse of Malory Towers is all but inevitable as a war breaks out. All sides — including the Southsiders, having broken their pact with Alicia’s Western Front — are hell-bent on recovering Mary-Lou and her unborn child. Pitched battles break out at the entrances to the North Tower, with defenders snatching up makeshift weapons to buy time for Mary-Lou. Lacrosse sticks run with blood; the dorms fill with the dead and dying. Since Matron has been poisoned — after literally getting a taste of her own medicine — there is little medical support for the wounded, and the defenders are outnumbered. There can only be one outcome — or so it seems.

The situation was desperate, Darrell had to admit. Most of the first-formers were gone, and many of the second form. Soon she would have to start sending the older girls to their deaths. And the wound in her side hurt terribly, but not as terribly as the memory of those who had already gone: Daphne, redeemed at last; Connie and Ruth, reunited in death; and of course, Felicity. She had truly served Malory Towers well.

But in a surprise twist, salvation (or damnation?) arrives in the most unlikely of forms: Gwendoline — silly, sentimental Gwendoline; proud, vain Gwendoline; Gwendoline who has spent the two terms since In The Fifth assiduously cultivating the black arts. And Gwendoline is not alone: by her side is the mewling, crazed Maureen, while the unexpected third member of the coven is the American, Zerelda, who has not forgotten her time at Malory Towers during her career as a B-Movie queen (having shot to fame in “Girls’ School Hellcats!”). Gwendoline, so long a hapless figure of fun, finally has the power to control the other girls’ destiny. It takes her no more than a few words and gestures to silence the screaming masses, scorching the earth around the North Tower.

Whose side will she pick? On the one side, there is Darrell: the model Malory Towers girl, everything that Gwendoline is not. On the other, Alicia, whose sharp tongue ensured that hours, days and weeks of torment. Both sides lobby for her favour; but Gwendoline spurns them all. And in the end, she finally proves that she did learn something at Malory Towers after all. “A plague on all your houses,” she screeches, before setting Malory Towers ablaze.

That, inevitably, wakes The Grayling, who rises, shrieking, from the pyre, her eyes glowing and her talons outstretched. The final battle has begun.

To say more would do a disservice to Blyton’s carefully constructed finale. The narrative is relatively sparse, but rich in symbolism and filled with potent imagery. Who can forget Mam’zelle Rougier, her face blackened with soot, blade clamped between her yellowed teeth, promising to “streep ze fat” from the squealing Mam’zelle Dupont? Or the scene in which Bill and Clarissa ride their horses, manes ablaze, to snatch Mary-Lou from June? Mavis, singing her final solo amid the ruins of the North Tower? Or Darrell and Sally, united at last as the flames lick ever closer? Last Term; last call: a fitting conclusion to the series. ##

For what we are about to receive.

It is dark, and it is cold, and we are hungry.

The first two of these conditions have always been and always shall be, so it is said. And thus there is no cause for complaint. We would not know if the darkness were to lift in any case; we have long since given up our useless eyes. And the cold does not bother us. Sometimes we drift upwards in the current and the water grows fractionally warmer. We are grateful, but we neither expect nor crave such beneficence. We know our place.

But the hunger is different. The hunger gnaws at us. It has been a long time, an almost immeasurably long time, since anything fell from the heavens but the slow sleet that continually drizzles over us. Please do not think us ungrateful. We graze on the snow as we drift in the currents, and it is enough – barely – to keep us from the brink of death. But we could not endure if were not for the knowledge that one day a Fall will come. We hope and pray that it will be soon.

But what if it is not?

It is sometimes difficult for us young ones to keep the faith. We were spawned during the last Fall, or so we are told. Our flesh was made from its flesh. But we were still infants when the Fall was exhausted and the colony dissolved into a cloud, each of us tracking our own lonely course through the void, reaching out to snatch the wayward scents of neighbours, friends, lovers. To us, the Fall was never anything more than a distant tang in the water. More the fading memory of a taste than the taste itself, receding as the current carried us into the vast desert of the ocean.

Small wonder, then, that some of us think stories of the Fall to be nothing more than superstitious legends. Perhaps our prayers for deliverance do nothing but breed false hope that our destitution will one day come to an end. But is it better to live in false hope than to live without any hope at all? There can be no hell without hope, after all. Perhaps our dissatisfaction with our station in life infuriates the Almighty. Perhaps if we asked for less we might be given more. Perhaps we need to learn humility.

The males are complaining again, squirming in their clusters along my flanks. They have no mouths, or limbs, but they have their own ways of making their discontent known. Gentle infusions of waste into our shared blood; bursts of pheromone clouding the water around us; feeble, futile assaults on my fertility. The time is not right, I gently remind them with my own packets of scent. If the fall comes, perhaps then there will be time and energy to spawn. Until then, they will have to remain patiently celibate.

Of course, the elders have little time for our doubts. Their faith is constant, unyielding. It will come, they say in chemical bursts carried piecemeal on the current. It will come. Be patient. There have been hard times before, long hard times. But there will be a Fall. There is always a Fall. We must be unyielding in our faith, stay true to our beliefs. We must not anger the Almighty by showing anger or fear, or by succumbing to scepticism and heresy. The Fall will come.

Some of the most venerable, their scents thin but redolent of age, insist that they can already smell the next Fall coming. It would be disrespectful to suggest that this is a delusion, but they have been claiming this for as long as I can remember. Age takes its toll. Even now, a wave washes over me, carrying word from a distant senior: the Fall is coming, it says. Prepare yourself. Repent your sins. I have smelt it all before; and it has never amounted to anything.

And yet, there is something in the water.

There is a ripple of fragrance. It is coming, the elders spray into our shared current. It is coming. And I can feel the truth of it. I have not tasted this scent, this oily luxuriance, since I was newly born, but the sense memory of it rushes back. I reach out, eager to taste it, to grasp it. It is growing stronger every second: and yet it is already the sweetest flavour I have ever known. The sulphide bouquet is around me, within me; I am bathing in it, swimming in it. I hardly dare breathe for fear that its glory will overwhelm me.

My doubts and fears are melting away, just as the snow fades into the deep darkness below. The time of reckoning is at hand. The rapture is here. I can feel the waters swelling, the pressure mounting beneath the Fall, and I pray that the dividing currents will not carry me away, that I will be found deserving of salvation. Erstwhile neighbours are swept along eddies, spiralled into vortexes: their scents fade and disappear. Not all have been chosen: some are vanishing into the trackless void.

I am grateful that my faith, though sorely tested, has proven strong enough to pass this final judgment. How disastrous it would have been if my faltering had turned into denial! How disastrous it would have been to stray from the path! Glad I am to have been chosen, and I feel myself gathered into the calm circle directly beneath the Fall. And then It is upon us, its immensity too vast to be reckoned. As far as I can smell, in every direction, It is there.

A cathedral of flesh and bone, majestic in Its ponderous descent, Its magnificence stuns us into submission as we spiral in reverence around Its form. It takes a seeming eternity to slow to a halt, to offer Itself up to us. I cannot wait for this moment to end; and yet I hope it never will. And as Its bounty of rich oils bursts through the water, as scraps of Its flesh drift free and as Its bones settle into the muddied floor, we fall upon it, exultant and jubilant. And as we do so, we sing in an ecstatic chorus of scent; a song of celebration, of joy and of thanks. ##

Life is very long when you’re lonely.

The Queen was once a handsome woman, but now, she sits drab in her spiky silver throne on the dark lawn among the dandelions, and little of her beauty remains. She has not gone to seed in the usual overfed manner of her kinswomen, but instead has a thin, strained look, as though all the angles in her face have been redrawn to be a little sharper by some malicious artist.

The Lady-In-Waiting looks at her mistress with some concern; the soft links of her hair are fraying and her nails are rough and serrated with bites. She is gazing, fixed eyed, at the bridge to the castle, and at the crowned figure who stands, immobile at its rail, elbows propped and legs straight. The King has been a statue for almost a year, and still the Queen has not forgiven him for the haste of his leaving. A moment’s shudder, a clutch of the chest, and a wax-faced figure in a long wooden box; and another who sits in the silver chair and watches his statue, and the thick water pools and eddies like blood in the river below him.

The Queen stares up at the Lady-In-Waiting, and her blue eyes are thick yet absently clear. The Lady-In-Waiting kicks a stone with the tip of her slippered foot. Far above, a bird chirps in proclamation as the wind hurls a single dark cloud across the sky, but when the cloud moves on, the Queen remains in darkness, her brow set in a crease that shadows her face, a reflection of the rotating edges of pain that cut her inside. To the Lady-In-Waiting, she seems like an empty vessel, a paper puppet of a woman with no form or function but to jerk awake in the still of the night and lie breathing alone in the incomplete dark.

But then the Queen rises and walks to her King, her feet crunching on the chipped gravel of the bridge below, and carefully extracts her handkerchief; folded, she dabs it at the King’s face, scouring it of the day’s effluvia and muck. She does this every day and every hour, although there are staff who can do it for her; and as she does, she never once loses the lock of her eyes on the dead King’s face. But the granite is grey and unforgiving, and never quivers in its turn, and every time the Queen turns and retires to the throne.

Today, she finishes her task and drops the cloth into the waiting hands of a maid, climbs from the pedestal in a flurry of skirts and black stockings, and looks up at the model of her King. In life, he was not so hard of jaw, nor so smooth of skin, but the castle staff are agreed that it is a likeness; and to the Queen it is more than that. The King was burned on a hamper of crossed sticks, with oil, his ash gone to the sea from a cave in a cliff’s edge. The Lady-In-Waiting remembers that day; for though the Queen never cried, she would not release the ash until the wind tore it through her clenched knuckles, drifting grain by grain between her fingers. The Lady-In-Waiting’s black lace was pricked with grey, and though the Queen ordered all the paintings, writings and clothes from that day destroyed, the Lady-In-Waiting has kept the grey ash in a porcelain thimble.

The wind is whipping leaves across the bridge, and the Lady-In-Waiting’s eyes fill with tears, although she does not know if the wind or the scene is to blame; and the Queen’s dark hair flies out in an untethered cloud as the dandelions burst and the flags blow down; and the clouds grow huge and darken the sky. A soundless white light clicks on for a moment; and when the Lady-In-Waiting opens her eyes the Queen is dead and collapsed on the grass; but by the side of the King, there is a woman in motion, her eyes live with light and her face glad with joy; her limbs made of glass and her heart made of diamond. ##

We’re all going on a summer holiday.

It took a few days for the bomb’s effects to become clear.

The first vague hints came with the emergence of a grainy video, released almost simultaneously on a clutch of paramilitary websites and some of the greyer peer-to-peer networks. “With this action,” the masked narrator declaimed, “we have dealt the Little Satan a mighty blow. No more will it play host to peoples of all nations. Now it is truly a pariah.” The rest was long on rhetoric; short on explanation: the usual stew of obscure factionalist scores being settled and incomprehensible morality being double-thought.

A more coherent answer was supplied by the intelligence services, which swiftly apprehended a group of suspects based around the Norwich area. “They” quickly made it known, through the usual officially unofficial channels, that they’d been watching the cell for some time. The plotters, they explained, had originally targeted the financial services sector, London’s mightiest engine. But they had found the City truly impenetrable, thoroughly fortified during the decades it had spent under siege from terror.

Thus, the adversary had moved on to the next target of economic opportunity: tourism. The results were as baffling as they were devastating. The device, detonated on the triple-witched beginning of the Spanish, Italian and American summer vacations that year, had killed no one. But it had removed every single tourist from the Big Smoke’s alternately sweltering and showered streets. Like a neutron bomb, it had seemingly evaporated the people, but left the buildings standing.

No exchange students; no silver-haired golden oldies. No hitch-hikers, no jet-setters; no weekenders, no backpackers. Suddenly, the piazza of Covent Garden was once again broad and empty. No cameras flashed futilely against the neon glare of Piccadilly Circus. The Guard changed in privacy and the Colour trooped alone. Open-topped buses roamed the streets, lobotomised and feral in their hunger for passengers. Pigeons, deprived of table scraps, starved in the streets.

The consequences were grave.

Desperate shopkeepers lined Leicester Square, brandishing Busbied soldiers in plastic tubes, berating passers-by who refused their entreaties to come see their wide range of mugs emblazoned with the Royal Family. In despair, they smashed their porcelain models of Tower Bridge, set fire to their Union Jack tea towels, ripped the pages from their books of Cockney rhyme. Postcards of breasts disguised as mice fluttered in the summer breeze, piling up in gutters like sheaves of premature leaves.

Hotels, too, struggled to adjust to the precipitous decline in occupancy rates. It was estimated that the population of the Gloucester Road area had dropped by three-quarters. From flophouse to penthouse, no hostelry was too humble or too grand to be affected. Restaurants abandoned all-you-can-eat in favour of whatever-you-can-get – although by some anomaly, the Caledonian steakhouses of Soho festered on, even though their red-velvet banquettes were now almost entirely empty.

And yet Londoners somehow found the strength to carry on. Faced with this insult to all they held dear, they invoked, once again, the Spirit of the Blitz. In respectful remembrance, they boarded the capital’s trains and buses, now woefully punctual and capacious. Solemnly, they paced the streets, stiffening their lips when confronted with the sudden absence of companiable crush. No comradely rucksack in the face, no teetering piles of luggage to negotiate; no zigzag slaloms to the top of the escalators.

No more did their ears delight in the cheery cries from vendors of birdsong whistles and sketchers of celebrity caricatures. No more did their eyes rejoice in picturesque offers of cheap pasta, lodging or internet access. No more were their noses delighted by the sweet scent of candied peanut, or the tangy fumes of idling coaches. No more did they idly banter with bronzed living statues, boisterous nightclub promoters or shy promoters of English lessons.

With quiet fortitude, the people of London soldiered on. A proud people, they declared that they would labour honestly under the burden that had been thrust upon them: and that they would be satisfied with the remaining pleasures of their denuded city. Somewhat to the surprise of their friends elsewhere, they rejected all offers of help in assistance in rebuilding their crushed tourist industry. Somehow, they said, they would make do without it.

But what of the missing tourists? It quickly transpired that most had been transported, in the blink of an eye, to a hitherto deserted atoll in the South Pacific. Most quickly took up their governments’ offers of repatriation; but a few decided to stick it out. Their Babel of languages quickly transmuted to a lilting Creole; culinary traditions collided, and then fused; and the new islanders quickly developed a range of unique diversions that hybridised the favoured recreations of their homelands. After a few years, they could truly claim to have created Paradise on Earth.

It was not long before the first flight touched down from Heathrow. ##

Go forth and multiply.

The rabbit was tiny, a nut of fur in your hand: jumping, scampering, hiding. It was time, you said, and I agreed. Time to decouple, to multiply. Time to become breeders. Like rabbits. Time to quit the worldwide whirl, time to stay home. Now, there was time enough to love a pet, in rehearsal for the greater love to come. The rabbit was a girl, so we gave her your names: the first for herself and the second for your line.

She, blithely unaware, crunched carrots, munched leaves; oblivious to the greatness that been thrust upon her. The youngest in the family, she bore her burden lightly – more lightly, perhaps, than her kidnapped sister, whose custody you had lost in an unhappier parting. That loss pained you still: the loss of your spirit guide, familiar, companion and daemon. The rabbit: always gentle, always curious, always exploring – and vegetarian, to boot – easy, perhaps, to fit into your stories; a trickster god for your mythology.

And so there we were, a happy strange little family: and the baby rabbit became a girl, grew abruptly into a teen, and then the trouble began. Fierce and wild, she was too fecund, too feisty: her reproductive vigour threatened our peace – and her life. Rabbits, like humans, are always in heat: their overstrained ovaries and womb primed to explode into malignant fervour. The solution, both convenient and excusable: the removal of her sex, the extraction of the female.

Affectionate; playful; safe: un-gendered. Is it what she would have chosen, if she had a voice? Godlike, we made that diabolical choice for her. She would never have children: her Fibonacci sequence would both begin and end at unity. But nor would her cells ever give themselves over to an orgy of microscopic multiplication: no misshapen, misdirected malignancy could ever take hold in her voided belly.

If she resented our decision, she gave no sign: slept in the sun, leapt on the furniture. Scratched at the carpet.

Still, we were busy with larger concerns; a bun in the oven, ha ha. A grey peanut floating in empty black space; an embryo with two names: one for itself and one for its line.  Unseen, we fed it, protected it: waited for it. And so your belly swelled, grew: so quickly, we marvelled: so early. But for all its haste, it was an easy pregnancy, at least at first: the weeks and months flew by without care.

But the next time, there was only the black void: the peanut had crumbled away. Had it been merely a phantom, no more solid than the high-frequency echo it returned from the void? We wondered perhaps if it had never been there at all: perhaps our longing had given it form, made it real. A hysterical pregnancy: a wish turned into a promise that could never be kept.

But what was there was the pale ghost looming over the space it had fled. A grainy, pendulous balloon, swollen and engorged: rich from its diet of the past months, a monstrous twin to the vanished grey blob. And in due course, the balloon burst. Thence the headlong, heartless rush to remove the crucible in which infection had brewed. To unsex you: first with knives, then with drugs. First, the primaries of your sex; then the secondary.

Affectionate; playful; safe; ungendered. I wondered, in my hard-headed way, at the synchronicity. You, more magically minded, said the rabbit had shown you the way: your spirit guide, it had proven that the malfunctioning engine of gender could be mended. That the prophylaxis was a worthwhile sacrifice: that life could still be worth living. Sex might start in the body; but it ended in the head.

To others, too, the rabbit was a symbol: a dumb proxy for the children we would never have, an escape from the end of your line – and mine. Careless tongues dubbed her “the baby”: a coinage as accurate as it was offhandedly cruel. You were cast as the woman who gave birth to rabbits; Hogarthian curiosity remade in modern flesh. And yet even this freakish line of descent was severed, tied off: for the rabbit could not make more rabbits.

And in time, your womb wandered further: to the consternation of the medical men, it lived on and appeared in places far from its home. Its rogue cells found new places to fester. And things took their course.

Last year, I extended my pilgrimage beyond your meadow to the quiet white stands by the icy northern sea. There, on a cropped green field, I watched as an army of rabbits emerged in the sunset. Razored grass: thumped their feet: danced into the hedgerows. Cousins, perhaps, to those who leave their spoor round your grave: a ruminant offering to one of their own.

Our rabbit, today, is quiet and lonely: she sits in the shadow as much as the sun.

And now, on the hard-pounded road to your resting place, I see, ahead of me, the shape of a tiny black rabbit: hopping into the grey of the motorway tarmac. I brake, but it is too close, too sudden: but the car swoops over the rabbit, unscathed through the wheels. And I see in my mirror the shape of it passing, slipping over the horizon: and I wish it farewell, and then it is gone. ##

Of mice and men.

## the elephant and the omnibus

The elephant waited quietly for the bus to Clapham.

Behind his massive form, a line of ecstatic schoolchildren slipped their neckties up, around their foreheads, and stamped about in what they took to be an elephantine fashion, their improvised trunks swinging.

The elephant sighed. He was amiable by nature, but sometimes humans really tried his patience. He pacified himself with a peanut from his blazer pocket.

There was a tug at his sleeve, almost too tiny to notice. He tried to ignore it, but the tug came again, more insistently this time.

He peered down between his tusks at the tiny form before him.

“Mister,” said the child. “Why are you an elephant?”

The elephant rolled his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he said wearily. “Call it a quirk of fate.”

The child seemed satisfied with this explanation, stuffing its thumb in its mouth and regarding the elephant with wide-eyed and quite unashamed fascination.

“Do you live at the zoo?” asked the child.

“If I did, would I be catching the bus to Clapham?” asked the elephant sarcastically.

“Elephants don’t catch buses,” said the child with quiet authority.

“Just watch me,” said the elephant.

##

the pig and his admirer

She liked the pig. But he did not like her.

“It can never work between us,” he said. “A pig and and a hedgehog! It can never be. We may have similar names, but we are from different worlds.”

Without another word, he turned and marched back into his sty.

She pushed her nose through the chicken-wire plaintively.

If only he would reconsider.

They could find a way, she knew it.

But he did not look back.

##

gladley the cross-eyed bear

Gladley the cross-eyed bear was sad.

Everyone made fun of him because his eyes were crossed.

“Silly Gladley!” taunted the kids in the street. “Silly cross-eyed Gladley!”

So he tore off their heads and ate them.

“I’m still a fucking bear, you know,” he said.

##

terpsichore the lonely cat

Terpsichore was the loneliest cat in the world.

She waited and waited for her master to come home.

But he never did. ##

6

“Up a bit at your end,” said Cousin Billy. Ricky grunted, put his back into it – bend at the knees, stand up straight, he reminded himself belatedly – and hoisted the sofa up a couple of inches. He wasn’t sure that this was going to work – the sofa looked just a bit too wide to pass through the front door – but he wasn’t going to argue. After all, Billy might have been tiny, but he was wiry with it; and he was, after all, the handyman of the family.

Billy grunted too, but it was a soft snort of satisfaction, rather than effort. Sure enough, the leg of the sofa had just scraped through the doorframe. Thank goodness for that, thought Ricky: he could imagine how the oldsters would moan if they didn’t have somewhere to sit down when they got there: most of them had trouble standing up for very long. Uncle Gary would moan about his back. Granddad Richard and Great-Uncle Barry would start grumbling about their feet. But Great-Great-Aunt Lucy would say nothing at all; she’d just squat pointedly in silent, purse-lipped disapproval.

Ricky was a little resentful, too, that he’d been roped in for this job – he was big, but tired easily. If he asked for a rest, though, Billy would rib him about it for ages. He had a knack for making Ricky feel inadequate, even though Billy was actually quite a bit older and didn’t have much going for him. He was a survivor, you had to say that for him, but he was a drifter, too. To Ricky, it seemed as though Billy was going nowhere fast: no real job, no place of his own – and no children. Billy at least had Flo, even if her mother had done a runner.

Where had the kids got to, anyway? Off trying to get the fire started, he supposed, despite the cautions of their elders. They weren’t much for honest hard work; it was all gadgets and chat with them. Probably for the best: it was brains, not brawn that you needed to get ahead these days. If it was brawn you wanted, though, you couldn’t do much better than Cousin Tony: with his massive bulk, he could probably have dragged the sofa out all by himself.

Ricky smiled to himself. Tony was your original gentle giant: he looked scary, but wouldn’t hurt a fly. Didn’t even eat meat. But Tony was off on an Outward Bound Course somewhere on the West Coast of the US. Ricky could just imagine him stomping about in the woods, putting his big feet in every muddy puddle going. Tony was a sucker for travel: he’d been all over – even to the Himalayas, of all places. Heaven knew what he’d got up to over there.

“Okay, let’s take it straight back,” said Billy, gesturing with one long arm towards the garden gate behind Ricky, while the other stretched effortlessly to support the sofa. “You can manage that, can’t you Ricky?” Ricky smiled weakly, despite Billy’s slightly sneering tone, but inside he groaned. He’d have preferred to put it down and drag it, but then the legs of the sofa would rake furrows through the lawn. If only there was some way of rolling it! It needed something under the feet, something round, but –

His train of thought was interrupted as Heidi emerged from the kitchen. “All right, lads?” she said. “Hard at it, I see. Fancy a cuppa?”

“Bless you, you’re an angel,” said Billy. Ricky, labouring under his half of the sofa, simply nodded grateful assent. His sister had the same rangy frame as him, the same heavy jaw and low forehead. But it looked better on her: there was tacit acknowledgment throughout the family that she was the good-looking one. And the smart one.

Still, Ricky bore her no resentment: to him, she’d always be his little sister and he was proud of her. And he was as fond of her boys, Andy and Sebastian, as he was of his own little Flo. “Right you are,” she said. “I’ll put the kettle on.” She smiled at Billy, then shot Ricky a quick look that said: Don’t let him wear you down.

They had reached the bottom of the garden now, Billy hollering “Mind your backs!” to clear a path through the gathered family members. They were from the Parry branch of the family. Most were a lot older than Ricky, so he didn’t know many of them well, although he recognized Robbie and Boisey and their mum Effie. Ricky found it difficult to communicate with the Parry clan: he didn’t have much in common with them.

For that matter, there were a bunch of relatives from overseas that he didn’t really know how to talk to either: George, Rod and Rene. He hardly ever saw any of them; in fact, he wasn’t really sure how they were even related to him. But he ought to make the effort, he thought: they had come a long way to be here. And then there was Lincoln, who he couldn’t see anywhere. But then, he probably hadn’t turned up: he was always missing. And there was –

“Hello, Terry,” said Billy amiably. Ricky’s dad watched, with the air of a foreman, as they put the sofa down. “Hello, Billy,” replied Terry, with a grin. Ricky was momentarily jealous: he suspected that his dad, a workman all his life, secretly wished he had turned a bit more like the practical Billy. “Good job you’re doing there, keep it up – ah, tea, lovely.” Heidi had come out with a tray full of mugs and they each took one appreciatively.

They stood for a moment, sipping the sugary tea, and watched with slight concern as the kids messed around by the beginnings of the bonfire. Ricky wondered who’d finally managed to get that going – they’d been trying and failing all day. He was glad to see Flo joining in, alarmed as ever that she looked so tiny next to the other kids: she was certainly small for her age. She looked particularly tiny next to Andy’s heavyset frame: he was devouring a chunk of meat that looked as though it had spent barely any time on the barbeque.

But it was Andy’s brother, Sebastian, who caught Ricky’s attention. He was bossing the other kids around, getting them to build something out of stones. Probably him who’d started the fire, too. Ricky could just about hear the rapid patter of his voice – Sebastian spoke so quickly, and was always using big words. And he was always coming up with some scheme or another: Andy tried to keep up, but was always being overshadowed by his clever kid brother.

Despite his youth, Sebastian was already taller and better groomed than most of his relatives. And he had a kind of masterful air about him that was a little spooky: looking at him made Ricky feel as though he was a bit past it. He wasn’t alone. His dad and Billy were both looking at Sebastian thoughtfully, too. “You mark my words,” said Terry, after a moment’s consideration. “That one’s going to rule the world some day.” And Billy and Ricky looked at each other, and nodded. ##

Run for your life.

- the walk back from the station is the same walk every day, the same dull dry combination of dogshit, tarmac and fumes. grey, all of it, grey, grey like the sky above and the ground below and the soul inside. step upon step, each and every one rehearsed each and every day.

bus shelter. fractured glass, veiled youth. scrawl of pen. the wind blows right through. waiting. waiting for the bus that never comes. a scrap of paper struggles fitfully along the gutter. passers-by passing by. don’t catch their eyes. but now a woman, too striking to ignore.

and she smiles. her mask cracks. her eyes light up.

and a young, fair-haired man is running down the street, white shirt untucking from his pressed black trousers, tie slipping from his neck. not just running: sprinting, legs pinwheeling. and another, this one dark haired. and another woman, and another and another and now it is a crowd; a mass of commuters, a train of suited and skirted sprinters, a flock of running, shouting humanity.

but there is no fear, no anger; no mob, no riot. instead, joy, delight. a woman pulls out the pins that restrain her long black hair and throws them to the floor. two bare-chested men sing passionately. birds burst from the trees. grass blooms. and you with it. with them.

and the crowd keeps moving: remembering how it is to run, to laugh, to shout for no reason but for the running, laughing, shouting. And before you know quite why or how, you too are running, and laughing and shouting.

great times are ahead, great times. and you will do great things -