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recalled then, that on her household errands through the streets, children had been everywhere, swarming like ants: ragged sharp-eyed brats, the active ones earning pennies by holding horses, or sweeping the mud from street-crossings, running messages, picking pockets, shouting their small shabby wares, bundles of matches or bunches of cress; and sick, shrunken, starved ones sitting listlessly on doorsteps or curled under bridges, waiting for death to come and solve their problems.
    But now all these seemed to have vanished altogether. In London there were hardly any children visible; the hurrying crowds in the street were all adults, going about their adult affairs.
    Croopus, where have all the kinchins got to? Is asked herself. It sure is a mystery! Funny no one’s wondered about it sooner. Nobody cares above half, I reckon. Streets look tidier without kids all about. Some folks likes it better that way, I daresay.
    ‘You seen a boy called Arun Twite, mister – missis?’ she demanded, over and over, but very few people even troubled to reply.
    Asking, listening, watching, Is drifted northwards, up Charing Cross Road, up Tottenham Court Road. Near here, in a small public garden by Whitefields Tabernacle, she found a street fair; if two or three meagre stalls and a shabby Punch and Judy could be said to constitute a street fair. Dingy flags and bunting hung between the stalls, and a doleful-looking man played alternately on a set of pan-pipes and a tabor. The stalls offered a few playthings for sale: whistles, tops, hoops, balls, one or two dolls and toy animals. None of them so well-made, Is noticed with a critical eye, as those produced by Penny and herself. But she remembered, now, Penny’s recent grumbles about the fall in the sale of toys. And no wonder, thought Is, if more than half the young ’uns are missing.
    The Punch play was drawing to a close; Punch had murdered most of his family and was singing a loud boastful song of self-praise:
    ‘Ha ha ha, hee hee hee,
    Oh Mr Punch, what a clever boy you be!’
    Is recognised the tune as one made up by her father: ‘The Day Before the Day Before May Day’. Many of his songs were still to be heard about the streets and countryside, sung or whistled or chanted. Funny how tunes can stop in folks’ heads long after the person who made them up is dead and gone, thought Is; and funny how he could make up such gladsome tunes when he hisself was such a no-good.
    At this moment, under cover of the music, she heard a voice whisper sharply in her ear: ‘ How about a trip to Playland? Kids gets a real good time in Playland !’
    Startled, Is glanced back over her shoulder. A crowd of twenty or so people had collected in the little space; which of these could have spoken to her? It had sounded like a man’s voice. Several men stood near her. Was it the merry little character with black curls and whiskers, a velvet waistcoat and kerseymere breeches? Or the tall, lugubrious fellow in a striped jacket who looked like a waiter from a tavern? Or the man in a leather apron who offered to grind people’s knives and scissors at the top of his lungs, as he wove among the crowd? Or the thin white-haired man who stood near Is with a bundle of books under his arm?
    ‘Where’s Playland, mister?’ Is asked him, but he gave her a severe look and replied sternly,
    ‘ Playland? There is no such place. And a child your age ought to be at work, not idling about asking foolish questions in the public street.’
    A boy caught her eye and seemed as if he were about to say something, but the Punch show came to its end just then, the crowd quickly scattered, and the boy vanished from view.
    Is began to make her way back to Shadwell, taking a circuitous route by Seven Dials and Piccadilly Circus, along the Strand, past St Paul’s cathedral and the Tower of London. Once again, as she stood in a crowd near Piccadilly, watching the antics of a man walking on stilts, she heard a soft murmur in her