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nearest one is indescribably beautiful. Her long dark hair is as soft as a cloud and the artist has covered it with sequins, probably some special finishing coat when the rest was done. Her profile is gentle and grave. And she walks there watering for the whole of her life and no one really knows how beautiful and how sad she is. The watering cans are painted with real silver and how the publisher could afford such a thing neither Mummy nor I can understand.

    Mummy’s stories are often about Moses – in the bulrushes and later; about Isaac and about people who are homesick for their own country or get lost and then find their way again; about Eve and the Serpent in Paradise and great storms that die away in the end. Most of the people are homesick anyway, and a little lonely, and they hide themselves in their hair and are turned into flowers. Sometimes they are turned into frogs and God keeps an eye on them the whole time and forgives them when he isn’t angry and hurt and destroying whole cities because they believe in other gods.
    Moses couldn’t always control himself either. But the women just waited and longed for their homes. Oh I will lead you to your own country or to whatever country in the world you want and paint sequins in your hair and build a castle for you where we shall live until we die and never never leave each other. Through endless forest dark and drear no comfort near a little girl alone did roam so far from home the way was long the night was cold the thunder rolled the girl did weep no moreI’ll find my mother kind for in this lonely haunted spot my awful lot will be beneath this tree to lie and slowly die.
    Very satisfying. That’s how it was when we shut the danger out.
    Daddy’s statues moved slowly round us in the light from the fire, his sad white ladies stepping warily, all ready to escape. They knew about the danger that lies in wait everywhere but nothing could save them until they were carved in marble and placed in a museum. There one is safe. In a museum or in a lap or in a tree. Perhaps under the bedclothes. But the best thing of all is to sit high up in a tree, that is if one isn’t still inside one’s Mummy’s tummy.

The Stone
    I T WAS LYING BETWEEN the coal dump and the goods wagons under some bits of wood and it was a miracle that no one had found it before me. The whole of one side shone with silver and if you rubbed away the coal dust you could see that the silver was there inside the stone too. It was a huge stone of nothing but silver and no one had found it.
    I didn’t dare to hide it, somebody might see it and take it while I ran home. It had to be rolled away. If anyone came and tried to stop me I would sit down on the stone and yell my head off. I could bite them as they tried to lift it. I could do just anything.
    And so I began to roll it. It was very slow work. The stone just lay on its back quite still and when I got it to turn over it just lay on its tummy and rocked to and fro. The silver came off in thin flakes that stuck to the ground and broke into small pieces when I tried to pick them up.
    I got down on my knees to roll it, which was much better. But the stone only moved half a turn at a time and it was terribly slow work. No one took any notice of me as long as I was rolling down in the harbour. Then I managed to get the stone onto a pavement and things became more difficult. People stopped and tapped on the pavement with their umbrellas and said all sorts of things. I said nothing and just looked at their shoes. I pulled my woolly hat down over my eyes and just went on rolling and rolling and rolling and then the stone had to cross the road. By then I had been rolling it for hours and I hadn’t looked up once and hadn’t listened to anything anyone said to me. I just gazed at the silver underneath all the coal dust and other dirt and made a tiny little room for myself where nothing existed except the stone and me.