The Northern Clemency

His parents had planned to spend the next day going round and finding a new house to buy. Although Francis had inspected the pile of agent’s particulars in his parents’ hotel bedroom with fervour and wonderment at the sums – £16,000 – involved, he and Sandra were to entertain themselves for most of the day. His ideas of entertainment were few, and he knew they were not allowed to stay in their room, the cleaners demanding access every morning after breakfast. But his mother had done a little research, and had discovered that a public library was to be found in a Victorian villa at Broomhill, only three hundred yards away. They were to spend the morning there, and find their own way back to the hotel, where they could order lunch themselves as a special treat. Of course, they could not take anything out of the library, not having an address, but if Francis wanted a book to read – there was no suggestion that Sandra was likely to share in this desire – there was a bookshop, only fifty yards further on, where he could buy something. Alice gave him two pound notes, an unheard-of advance on pocket money, and, it seemed, not even an advance: she did it when Sandra and his father could not see, a little squeeze of the hand pressing the money into his fist.

The library filled the morning, but it was short. He sat under the wooden bookshelves that, even in the children’s section, bore the intimidating municipal heading ‘Novels’. It took him a moment to recognize some familiar and favourite books there, and it was a surprise to discover that he had been reading ‘novels’ when he thought he had been reading Enid Blyton, or a book about Uncle, the millionaire elephant in a city of skyscrapers, Beaver Hateman at his heels. Chairs were supplied and, greedily taking five books with him, head down and not acknowledging the look of the librarian, whether approving or sour, he went to sit. At first he could hear his sister: she was talking to someone downstairs, in her ‘mature’ voice, as he called it; maturity, much evoked, had become her favourite virtue, and whenever she thought of it her voice dragged and drawled to the point of a groan. ‘No, we’re moving up here in a few months’ time. Yes, from London. We thought it best to sample the local amenities. I do hope you don’t mind us coming in – my brother’s the real reader in the family…’

And then the voice somehow faded away. The old library, in Kingston, he’d been going to since he was four, and had read every book in their children’s section, except the I-books, which he didn’t like, when people told you a story and said I. Here, there were so many new and different books, and what his sister’s voice had faded into was a book, a little childish but funny, about a bushranger called Midnite, and ‘bushranger’ was the Australian word for ‘highwayman’, with a cat called Khat, and, look, Queen Victoria, and—

It was quite short, and he had almost finished it by the time his sister, hot and bored, came to fetch him. She had left the library to explore the little parade of shops. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time for lunch.’ He followed her, the last five pages abandoned; perhaps he could come back later. And perhaps he could keep the two pounds – you could spend it on books in London, too.

‘We’ve found a house,’ Bernie said, coming into the hotel dining room while they were still eating their lunch. He was glowing with relief and satisfaction. The dining room, hung with velvet wallpaper and dark curtains, had been daytime dingy, and the children had been talking in whispers, not daring to bicker, but there was Francis’s dad, as if he hadn’t noticed anything. ‘You’ll like it, kids.’

‘I’ve found a book,’ Francis wanted to say to complete everyone’s happiness. ‘I’ve found lots of books.’

‘It’s nice,’ Alice said, sitting down in a flop and looking first, with concern, at Francis. She had something to console him with. ‘You’ll like it.’

‘My name is—’

She began to write. But the paper was resting on the lawn. Her pen tore through the paper on the y of ‘my’, and then she was writing on grass through torn paper. Jane was lying on her stomach in a secret part of the garden. She cocked her head and listened. She kicked her heels up, bouncing them against her bum. There was nobody about.

She took the paper and, rolling over, sat up to write properly. At the end of August, the grass was dry and brown, crackling like a fire. Under her legs, it was itchy with gorse droppings, and she could feel a holly leaf or two. The holly tree in the far corner was constantly shedding leaves. Nowhere in the garden was ever completely free of them. She folded the paper, and wrote: ‘My name is Fanny.’

Jane paused. For as long as she could remember, her name had really been Fanny. Her paper-name, the name of the heroine of her book when it should be written. Now she was fourteen, it was time to write it.

It was a great shame, really, that it was the end of August. She’d let so much of the summer holiday go by without writing anything. Now that she had written four words, she regretted it had taken so long. Until now, it had been a running, contiguous commentary in her head, a third voice putting her smallest actions into a sort of prose – Jane left the house, shutting the door behind her. In the garden there were birds singing. Her mood was black – but now she was writing something.

She had switched on the lawn-sprinkler. The wet earth started to smell dense and delicious in the dry heat. The holly tree dripped with a tropical rhythm, irregular, on to the patio. The lawn-spray flung lazily in this direction with a hiss on each revolution, never quite reaching the little nest. A trickle of sweat, like a darting insect, slipped in a tickle from her armpit down her side; she could smell her own faint metallic odour. She was narrating in her head; she turned and began to write again.

‘My name is Fanny. I was born an orphan in the year 1863. My mother’…

It was a hundred years before her own birth. Her eyes filled with the sadness that by now Fanny was certainly dead. But she was Fanny, sweating in a sleeveless dress and no knickers in a patch of a Sheffield garden. Presently, as the cool wave of water in air, a jet of perfumed rain, swept over her head, she was lost in the thrill of authorship.

The garden was not squarely established but, like the whole estate, carved out of country and annexed in opportunistic ways. It swelled at the far corner to take in the substantial holly tree. (‘A hundred years old,’ Jane’s mother said reverently. She had always wanted to live in an old house, with character.) Elsewhere it wavered about in odd directions, claiming and abjuring patches of land. If the features of the garden seemed deceptively aged, like the trees, that was because the gardens had fenced-in patches of country. A moorland tussock, three feet square, brought in, surrounded by a lawn and a garden wall, like a rockery. The patchy lawn, the spindles of trees on the streets, rooted in squares of earth like tea-bags: those told the age of the development more clearly.

You could nest in the roots of the old holly tree where you were invisible from the house. For Jane’s less secret withdrawals, she went to read somewhere she could be discovered. You could sometimes hear a human noise beyond the garden and, in a series of corrections, understand that it was not, after all, one of the neighbours on either side at their pleasure, or a walker hugging the shore of the development before heading off into the wild heather of the country but the child’s-dismay-call made by a sheep, sheltering from the wind beyond the dry-stone wall.

But there was another better gift from the moor, which no one, Jane believed, knew about: three thick gorse bushes, brilliant banana-yellow blossom and always quick to slash at your arms. From the open lawn, it looked as if they went right up to the wall, but if you got down on your belly and wriggled through, a little space of secret untended grass opened up. You could sit there and watch, unnoticed. Her father was always talking about clearing the gorse bushes but he wouldn’t get round to it. Perhaps he was fond of them too. Here she had pressed down a space, clearing it of holly leaves and gorse twigs.

Another hiding-place had been the garden of the house opposite, empty for four months now. All summer it had been the province of her brother after nightfall; there he prowled and roamed, his girls coming to him eagerly. In the daytime, it had been hers. After four months of neglect, it had developed in unexpected, luxuriant ways. At first it was like a room enclosed, left tidy by the owners to await their return, and Jane ventured into it with a sense of intrusion. But quickly it began to grow and dissolve. An inoffensive small plant, a few shoots above the ground, had exploded, leaping through the trellised fence, a few more inches and a few more shoots every day. One day, all at once, a single slap of colour was there: a poppy had burst open, and then, for weeks, there was a relay of flowers, each lasting a day or two. Of course, her mother worked in a shop full of flowers, so they were not strange to Jane; but to watch them work their own stubborn magic, budding and bursting, fading and moulting on the stem, rather than dying, yellow and sour, in someone’s vase was new to her.

For weeks, the garden expanded along its permitted limits, and only the plants that Mr Watson, a gardener as draconian as Jane’s father, had admitted to his garden developed, stretching in their new freedom. But then the weeds started: the perfect lawn was scattered with constellations of daisies and, quite soon, dandelions. There were butterflies now and when, once, it rained overnight in torrents, the garden was filled with snails, come out to drink and feed. Best of all was a marvellous new plant, embracing and winding itself round anything, a fence, a post, running itself through other plants, with the most beautiful flowers like trumpets, like lilies, like the flowers of heaven. Jane had never had a favourite flower before, and whenever the craze for quizzes had arisen among the girls, she’d always replied, ‘Roses,’ when asked, a choice she knew was limp and conventional, as well as probably untrue. But now she really did have a favourite flower.

It was a shock to discover, when she asked her father, discreetly, that it was a garden pest called bindweed. Then he explained the complex and violent steps needed to eradicate it. Jane listened, but it seemed a little sad to her to remove a plant so beautiful, to prefer, as her father did, a border of squat green-tongued plants that would never flower or get anywhere much in life. Jane promised herself, when she grew up, a garden with nothing but bindweed, a dense bower of strangling vines and trumpeting innocent flowers.

Her garden visits were over now. A couple of days ago one of those neighbours had rapped at the window as she had been going in – slipping in, she had thought, unobserved as a mouse in the middle of the day. It had been embarrassing enough to see the neighbour at her mother’s party; that hiding-place was now closed to her, and the garden went its way in peace.

She smoothed the paper: she started to write again. Something caught her eye. From here, she could not be seen from the house, if she kept low, but she could see anyone standing near the windows. There was a movement in Daniel’s bedroom. Daniel was supposed to have gone swimming in the open-air pool at Hathersage; he couldn’t have got there and back so quickly. The figure moved again, and it wasn’t Daniel. The day was bright, and in the dimness of the house, Jane could see only the outline of a figure, its shape and gestures. It moved again: a hand travelled towards the face, then paused in mid-air, shifted, went downwards, as if it was going through something on Daniel’s ‘desk’.

It was Jane’s father. She hadn’t realized how absolutely she knew his shape and movements, the way he had of letting his hands start to do one vague thing before abandoning it nervously for something else. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ she remembered Daniel saying to her once, watching her with an amused horrid gleam, ‘I bet they don’t do it any more.’ ‘Do what?’ Jane had said. ‘What do you think?’ Daniel said. ‘And I bet Dad’s relieved more than anything.’

Lying there, undiscoverable, in the middle of the day, Jane might have preferred a burglar. She allowed herself a minute of speculative romance, but it was no good, it was her father; surprisingly here in the middle of the day, surprisingly in Daniel’s bedroom, but that was all.

Twenty minutes later, she heard the front door shut. She hadn’t heard it open, she reflected, though it usually made a solid clunk. He’d opened it quietly, she guessed, as if he had sneaked in; he’d thought there was no one in the house so he’d shut it as he normally did. It wasn’t much of an adventure, really. She got up, picked up her notebook and went into the house for a drink, brushing down her print dress as she went. She should have gone with Daniel to Hathersage for a swim. She’d said she probably would, that morning over breakfast, just before her dad went off to work.

‘We said we’d stop at the next service station,’ Alice said, noticing a sign.

‘Yeah?’ Bernie said, not concentrating on what she was saying. ‘Sorry—’

‘I said, we told the removers we’d be stopping at Leicester Forest East,’ Alice said. ‘The service station. It’s the next one – I think it said seven miles.’

Bernie was gritting his teeth: he was stuck between lorries, thundering along at a frustrating ten miles an hour below the speed limit, boxed in by faster lines of traffic solidly flowing to the right. He felt like a box on a conveyor belt. ‘Not a bad idea,’ he said. ‘They won’t worry if we don’t, though.’

‘It might be as well,’ Alice said. ‘Sandra.’

‘What about Sandra?’ Francis said, his chin resting on the back of his mother’s seat, his face almost in her hair.

‘Oh, nothing,’ Alice said.

‘Your mum means,’ Bernie said, ‘that she might be fed up of riding in the lorry by now. The excitement might have worn off.’

‘I didn’t mean that exactly,’ Alice said.

‘Or on the other hand they might—’ Bernie broke off. ‘We ought to get a radio in the car,’ he said, after a while. ‘Aren’t you hungry, Frank? I’m hungry. That wasn’t much of a lunch.’

‘It couldn’t be helped,’ Alice said. ‘Everything was packed away.’

‘I know, love,’ Bernie said.

New experiences filled Francis with automatic dread. He had disappeared when the removers had arrived, feeling that demands would be placed on him, but dreading most the presence of rough men in their emptying house. He had never eaten in a motorway service station before; whenever they had travelled, picnics had been packed to be eaten in fields or off the dashboard, according to rain. Now he felt, knowing it to be stupid, that indefinite dangers were presenting themselves, dangers involving crowds of strangers, unfamiliar islands of retail and cooking, the probability of being lost and abandoned. The fear of abandonment was always high in him, and the specific dread, on this occasion, was of the family losing their possessions, now loaded into an untrustworthy, wobbling van.

‘Here we are,’ Bernie said, as the half-mile sign flashed past; he signalled left, and then Francis’s favourite thing, the three signs indicating three hundred yards, two hundred, a hundred, with three, then two, then one finger. You could work out how fast you were going: just count the seconds between each sign and multiply by whatever. But, of course, they were slowing down. There was a fragile bridge, glass, metal and plastic, over the breadth of the motorway, and people walking across it as if they did not know they were at any moment to be plunged, shrieking, into the metal river of traffic when the structure collapsed. At this new terror he shut his eyes.

‘And there they are,’ Alice said, with soft relief. The van was reversing into a bay in the lorry park to the left; they drove right, and Bernie found a space. They got out and waited for the men and Sandra; but as they approached, they were a few feet behind her; she was walking with brisk anger. The youngest man had a flushed face, as if he had just been discovered in some peculiarly personal activity; the chief remover’s mouth was set.

They waited by the Simca, Alice smiling defensively. ‘Lovely day for it,’ she called to them, but they didn’t reply. Sandra, scowling, came up and took her father’s arm.

‘I think it’s best,’ the chief remover said, ‘that your daughter ride in the car the rest of the way.’ He had stopped; the other two kept going.

‘I thought she’d get fed up of it before long,’ Alice said hopefully.

‘We’ve got the directions,’ the chief remover said, ignoring this. ‘We’ll see you up there in a couple of hours, I reckon.’

He walked off, following the others. Bernie squeezed his daughter; no one said anything. In a moment, they went inside; Bernie had seen that the men were going upstairs, but there was a nearer café on the ground floor. They went into that and ate fish and chips, all together. And when the men went out, back to the lorry, they pretended not to notice, and sat there for fifteen minutes longer. Alice even had a piece of cake. Everyone did their best to be cheerful, talking around rather than to Sandra, and by the time they had finished, they could look directly at her. Although she was still a bit red, she no longer seemed about to burst into tears.

Daniel was home by half past four. He’d been at Hathersage all day, pretty well; it had been a hot day, a perfect one. The pool was built on a hillside just outside the Derbyshire village. Surrounded by schoolmasterly red-brick walls, it was concrete and tile inside; outside were the Derbyshire hills, and the huge sky. If you hurled yourself from the highest diving board, you were horizontal for one moment, poised above the water, framed against the sky and hills. Perfect. He’d got there at ten, in the first bus of the morning, still empty; later buses were full of kids, as he said to himself. Barbara had been supposed to come, and he’d told her to meet him at the bus stop at the bottom of Coldwell Lane at nine, but she hadn’t been there when the bus came. He’d got on anyway; not a bad excuse to dump her, especially since she hadn’t been on the next bus.

He’d spent an hour thrashing up and down, throwing himself off the diving board in bold, untidy shapes, enjoying more the gesture and the moment of flight than anything else, and grinning when he surfaced after a bellyflop, his stomach red and stinging, joining in with the laughter of the girl lifeguard. By eleven or so another bus had arrived from Sheffield, much more full, and they came in; some he recognized from his school, three girls from his sister’s year, finding Daniel splendid in his exercise, brown limbs jumbled, the disconcerting swirl of his turquoise-patterned trunks, flying above the vivid oblong of water which shone with the Derbyshire blue of the sky. He’d met some friends and made some more; he always did. But in the end he went home on his own, hardly saying goodbye, burying his face in a bag of cheese and onion crisps from the machine.

The bus home, the three-thirty, was as empty as the morning bus had been – too early for most people – but with all that day’s exercise he ached, sitting at the front of the top deck. Ached, too, slumping up Coldwell Lane when the bus let him off; it was uphill all the way, and just a bit too far; his black sports bag, the one he used for school, banged away in the heat at his bony hips. Half enjoying his exhaustion, groaning as he slouched up the hill, he almost expected Barbara to be sitting on the wall outside their house. Perhaps crying.

There seemed to be nobody in the house. Daniel was terribly hungry; he hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, apart from the crisps. He went through to the kitchen, dropping his bag in the middle of the hall, and went through the cupboards and the fridge, banging the doors as he went. He poured himself some vividly orange squash; it was always too weak and watery when your mother made it for you, and he liked it about one part to three. In a few minutes, he’d got the stuff for a magic sandwich together, and sat down with a breadknife, contentedly putting it together and eating the constituent parts individually as he went.

‘That looks revolting,’ Jane said, opening the kitchen door. She must have been in the garden.

‘You don’t have to eat it,’ Daniel said, putting the sandwich spread on awkwardly with the breadknife. ‘I’m starving.’

‘I bet you had some chips in Hathersage,’ Jane said. She put down her notebook and pen on the table. He noticed that her dress was stained with grass.

‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘What’ve you been doing? Writing poetry?’

‘No,’ Jane said. ‘Where’s Tim?’

‘I don’t know,’ Daniel said. ‘I only just came in. You know Jason in my year? Him and his brother Matthew were out on the crags a week ago and he said to me, “I saw your sister. And she was sitting on a rock and gazing at the landscape and guess what she was doing? She was making notes in her little book.” Making notes.’ He broke into hilarity.

Jane flushed, picked up her notebook and hugged it to her. ‘I couldn’t care less what someone like that says about anything I do,’ she said. ‘Whoever he is.’ She knew who he was: they’d thrown a stone at her.

‘Making notes, though,’ Daniel said, subsiding. ‘It was dead funny.’ He leant back in his chair, took a satisfied look at the complex sandwich he’d put together, with ham and sandwich spread, cheese and salad cream, all bursting out from the sides, then took an enormous bite. Much of it fell out, splattering his red shiny shorts and his brown legs.

‘That’s disgusting,’ Jane said. ‘You know what? Dad came home this lunchtime.’

There was a noise from upstairs, a little thud and a door opening – Tim coming downstairs. ‘I thought he’d gone out,’ Jane said. ‘I haven’t seen him all day.’

‘Upstairs reading his snake books,’ Daniel said. ‘He’s made himself a sandwich, though.’ He nodded at the mess on the work surface. ‘He’ll not have been starving.’

‘That was me,’ Jane said. ‘I was saying, I thought you’d gone out.’

‘No,’ Tim said. ‘I was upstairs in my room. Can I have a sandwich?’

‘Make it yourself,’ Daniel said. ‘Upstairs with your snake books?’

‘Yes,’ Tim said, and then, in a singing tone, ‘Do you know—’

‘Probably not,’ Daniel said.

‘Do you know what the most venomous snake in the world is?’

‘No,’ Jane said, with a feeling she’d been asked this before.

‘Lots of people would say the cobra or the rattlesnake. But it’s not. It’s the inland Taipan. It can get up to eight feet long. If it bites you you’re bound to die. It’s brown, it’s called Oxy, Oxyripidus something. Oxyripidus – Oxy – I’m almost remembering it—’

‘Where’s it live?’ Daniel said.

‘Australia,’ Tim said.

‘Just so long as it doesn’t live near me,’ Daniel said.

‘It wouldn’t hurt you,’ Tim said. ‘It’s quite timid, really. It would avoid you and it’s probably more scared of you than you would be of it. You wouldn’t have to worry about it even if you were in Australia. Most people think snakes would attack you but they wouldn’t, really. They only bite if they’re in danger. I like snakes. I wish I could have one. Do you think if I asked they’d let me have a snake in my bedroom? I’d keep it in a glass case. I wouldn’t let it out and it wouldn’t have to be venomous – or not very.’

‘What do you mean, “if” you asked?’ Daniel said. ‘You ask them all the time, about once a week, and they always say no. You’re not getting the most venomous snake in the world to keep under your bed. Face facts.’

‘I’d save up,’ Tim said, reciting his case stolidly on one note, ‘and I’d pay for it myself. I wouldn’t want an inland Taipan – I wouldn’t want any venomous snake, really. And I’d buy the mice with my pocket money. They don’t need to eat very often, it wouldn’t be expensive. I wish I could have a snake. It’s not fair.’

‘I dare say,’ Jane said. ‘Go and make yourself a sandwich or something. I’m going to watch the telly.’

‘There’s nothing on,’ Daniel said. ‘It’s rubbish.’

‘It’s better in the holidays,’ Tim said. ‘There’s stuff on in the mornings. For children.’

‘It’s still rubbish.’

‘This boy told me a joke,’ Tim continued with his dull reciting voice, though the subject had changed.

‘What boy?’ Daniel said.

‘This boy I know,’ Tim said.

‘You haven’t seen anyone for five weeks,’ Daniel said.

‘Yes, I have,’ Tim said, not crossly, but setting things right. ‘I saw Antony last week. We went to the library.’

‘Did smelly Antony tell you a joke?’ Jane said incredulously. Tim occasionally gave the impression of a rich and varied social life once out of sight of his family, but Antony was its only visible representative. They’d all concluded, with different degrees of worry or amusement, that Antony, a boy as pale and quiet as a whelk, was not the tip of some festive iceberg but probably Tim’s best or only friend.

‘No, it wasn’t Antony’s joke,’ Tim said. ‘It was another boy, at school.’

‘You’ve been saving it up for five weeks?’ Daniel said.

‘I only just thought of it,’ Tim said. ‘There are these three bears, right?’

‘I thought this was a joke,’ Daniel said. ‘I don’t want to hear Goldilocks.’

‘It isn’t Goldilocks,’ Tim said. ‘And these three bears, they’re in an aeroplane.’

‘Not very likely,’ Jane said. ‘They wouldn’t let three bears on an aeroplane. They’d eat all the meals and then they’d eat all the passengers. And they’d open the doors at the other end and there’s no one there except a lot of bones and three bears who weren’t hungry any more.’

‘Well, there’s mummy bear and daddy bear and baby bear,’ Tim said, persevering, ‘and they’re in an aeroplane.’

‘Where were they going?’ Daniel said. ‘I can’t remember stories like this if I don’t know where they’re going.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Tim said. ‘They never got there, anyway. Listen to the story and you’ll find out.’

‘Is this a joke or a story?’ Jane said. ‘You said it was a joke. Now it’s a story.’

‘I want to know where they were going,’ Daniel said. ‘Can they be going to Spain? I’d like a bear who went to Spain. Or can they be coming back? Then they’d have those hats on, those sombreros. A bear in a sombrero, there’s a sight you don’t see every day.’

‘They weren’t going anywhere,’ Tim said. ‘Stop interrupting. I’m telling a joke.’

‘They’ve got to have been going somewhere,’ Jane said, ‘or they wouldn’t have been in an aeroplane in the first place. Go on, tell us your joke.’

‘All right,’ Tim said. ‘So they’re in this plane, and suddenly the engines catch fire. I forgot – I should have said there’s only two parachutes on the plane.’

‘There’s only two parachutes on the plane?’ Daniel said. ‘For three bears, and a plane full of passengers, and the crew as well? That’s not very sensible.’

‘There’s not a plane full of passengers,’ Tim said, getting red in the face. ‘There’s only three bears.’

‘But even supposing there are only three bears – I suppose they’ve eaten all the other passengers, or maybe everyone in the departure lounge saw three bears getting on the plane, and thought, Hmm, do I want to get into a confined space with three hungry bears or, really, do I want to go to Spain that much anyway, and changed their mind and went home – I mean, even supposing that, there’s got to be someone flying the plane.’

‘Or even two,’ Jane said. ‘I think you have to have two pilots. When we went to Paris last year there were two pilots in case something went wrong with one of them.’

Tim thought for a very long time, breathing noisily. Finally, he said, ‘Daddy bear was flying the plane. Because he knew how to.’

‘Oh, that makes perfect sense,’ Daniel said. ‘An untrained savage wild beast from the Canadian wilderness who’d learnt how to fly a jet plane. One of the most majestic yet complex machines ever invented by the human race.’

‘No, it was invented by a moose,’ Jane said. ‘Everyone knows that.’

‘Called Harold,’ Daniel said.

‘And the daddy bear said to the mummy bear, “There’s only two parachutes, one for me and one for you.” So the daddy bear puts one on and the mummy bear puts the other on and they jump out of the plane.’

‘What – they didn’t even try to hold their infant?’ Daniel said. ‘Their poor suffering infant who they loved better than anyone else in the world? They just left the baby bear to die in a plane crash? This isn’t a funny story at all. It’s deeply moving and tragic.’

‘No, wait, because they go down, they go down in their parachutes, I mean, and then at the bottom, when they get to the bottom, there’s baby bear anyway.’

‘I’ve heard this before,’ Jane said. ‘It’s crap.’

‘And they say, “Oh, baby bear oh, kissy kissy, how did you get down safe and everything?” And the baby bear says, “Me not stupid, me not silly. Me hold on to daddy’s willy.”’

There was a lengthy silence. Daniel and Jane exchanged a sorrowing look.

‘That’s it, that’s the joke,’ Tim said. ‘It was funny, I mean, it’s funny if you don’t ask stupid questions all the time.’

‘What I don’t understand,’ Jane said, ‘is why they have to be bears. They could be anything. They could be people, or they could be donkeys. It wouldn’t make any difference to the joke.’

‘They couldn’t be donkeys, though, could they?’ Daniel said pensively. ‘If you think about it.’

‘Why couldn’t they be donkeys?’ Jane said.

‘Well, you couldn’t hold a cock with your hooves,’ Daniel said. ‘If you were a donkey. Have some sense, woman.’