A Winter Book

A Winter Book.

Selected Stories.

Tove Jansson.

Introduction.

by Ali Smith.

"How old must you be to write a story?" a young j.a.panese fan wrote and asked her heroine, the Finnish writer and ill.u.s.trator Tove Jansson. Jansson, at this point, was in her seventies and world-famous as the creator and ill.u.s.trator of the Moomins, the extended family of big-nosed philosophising creatures (and their various neighbours, including a tiny anarchist no bigger than a thumbnail) who, simply by mildness and geniality, survive the terrible upheavals of their often topsy-turvy life in a beautiful Scandinavian setting of mountains, forests, seas and valleys.

Jansson was then and is now much less well known for her fiction for adults, which she began to write in her early fifties and which she concentrated on for over three decades, pretty much the rest of her life (she died in 2001 at the age of 86). Typically, she kept that j.a.panese girl"s beautiful, spare letters and, as if to demonstrate that art can sometimes be what life itself sends you, but delivered back to you through clearer eyes, she transformed them into "Correspondence", a miraculously lightly held short story about youth and age, connection and isolation, published here in English for the first time.

In fact, this collection is the first selection of Jansson"s short fiction for adults to be published in an English translation for nearly forty years. The recent UK reprint of her cla.s.sic 1972 novel The Summer Book, thirty years after its original publication, has done a lot to remind readers that the brilliance, the thoughtful originality and the blithe hilarious anarchy people a.s.sociate with her tales of Moominvalley are really only half the story of Jansson"s quiet creative genius. Her ten books of fiction for adults her novels, short story collections and memoir writing form an equally shining achievement.

A Winter Book has been selected to provide as full a view as possible of Jansson"s short story work, with an array of pieces hard to find in English, and collected here for the first time in the book"s final section. The book also comprises some of the choicest stories from her very first collection, Sculptor"s Daughter (Bildhuggarens dotter, 1968), which she published when she was 54. Sculptor"s Daughter, one of her most dynamic works, was her first book written specifically for adults rather than children and, interestingly, its subject is childhood itself. Its gloriously funny, disarming and charming set of semi-autobiographical stories of a small girl wintering in Helsinki and summering on a small Finnish island haven"t been available in English since 1969.

Beautifully crafted and deceptively simple-seeming, these stories are like pieces of scattered light. In their suppleness, their childlike wilfulness, they"re much less melancholy than the average Moomin tale. Light-footed, skilful and mischievous, they belie both the age of their writer, a woman in her middle years, and the fact that they were written in the stark afterlight of her mother"s old age and ten years after her father"s death.

Jansson grew up a bohemian artistic child, a daughter of artists and bohemians; her mother was the famous Finnish/Swedish ill.u.s.trator and artist Signe Hammarsten; her father, Viktor Jansson, was an equally well-known sculptor; and if the very notion of the creative family resides at the centre of Moomin-lore, then these short stories partly autobiographical, though always wholly crafted into story in their own right give renewed meaning to words like "creative" and "family". After her mother"s death in 1970 she would write her last book for children, Moominvalley in November; she followed this with The Summer Book, her acknowledged adult masterpiece: the simple, spare story of a very old woman and a very young girl and the adventures, losses and gains there inevitably are when great age and youth live together on a very small Scandinavian island for the whole of an endlessly lit summer.

But Jansson"s short stories are as yet unacknowledged small masterworks. Each is distilled to an essence. "You should never keep a single inessential object in your boat," as the adventuring girl tells herself and us at the beginning of "The Boat and Me". These are stories that could safely weather storms; they"re written with the kind of economy that makes a story rich, and with the kind of precision that turns any mere clockwork of narrative into something that goes beyond time itself.

Parts I and II are stories originally from Sculptor"s Daughter, rearranged here seasonally into winter stories (Snow), then summer stories (Flotsam and Jetsam). The winter stories are largely town-based and the summer ones island-and-sea stories, a landscape that readers of The Summer Book will immediately recognise. Jansson herself spent every summer living and working on a tiny island off the coast of Finland with her lifelong partner, the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietila; as winter drew in, they would return to their shared flats in Helsinki, and one of the finest pieces here is the collection"s final one, the beautiful and honest "Taking Leave", which records the end of their island life, an end enforced by their own old age. Its perfect final image of release allows this collection to end on what you might call a real high.

So A Winter Book modulates between winter and summer, youth and old age. "The Boat and Me" a story which seems as if it should have been part of, but has somehow cast itself out on its headstrong own journey away from, the safer moorings of Sculptor"s Daughter was also published when Jansson was in her eighties. It is included here as a go-between story before the final part Travelling Light whose theme is maturity and whose stories, all written when she was between her sixties and eighties, have been selected from various collections and sources to give a taste of Jansson"s artful, often funny and always spellbinding take on the hardships and release of later life. Three of her stories on the subject of writing letters have also been brought together for the first time, and some of her more obviously autobiographical writing here reveals some of the hilarious nonsense and ephemera which fame brought her in old age, as well as exposing something a little closer to existential.

What? Scandinavia and existentialism? Don"t expect the heavy old, dark old cliche. Though they never miss a challenge, though they"re very much about the dark, about risk, violence, jealousy, fears of abandonment, and though they never short-change a reader when it comes to the truth about anything unsettling, these stories are the opposite of heavy. Whether they"re about crabbed age or youth, they make an art of lightness, of letting go.

Take one of the later stories, "The Squirrel", where an old woman living on an island becomes fixated by the visit of a far-too-unreliable wild creature. The story"s refrain is the word "grey" and its subject is the process of growing old. But its protagonist, in her well-meaningness and her determination, shares a lot with the child protagonist of the stories in Sculptor"s Daughter. Though it reads as more realistically shocked, numbed out of the confidence, the trusting innocence, of the child-stories, it shares with them the same fascination with the fight between existential release and optimistic disgruntlement, or force of will, as can be found in a story like "The Iceberg". Here the child, excited by seeing a perfectly formed tiny iceberg, decides to jump into it and sail away in its grotto-like mouth. But the iceberg is just too far out of reach. "It was lying there b.u.mping against the rocks at the end of the point where it was deep, and there was deep black water and just the wrong distance between us. If it had been shorter I should have jumped over; if it had been a little longer I could have thought: What a pity, no one can manage to get over that." Instead, she throws her lit torch into it. Then she watches it float away, all lit up, triumphant. It"s beautiful. The child wonders how long the batteries will last. Then she despises herself for not risking the jump.

This glorious creation of a child-self, with all her cowardice, her jealousies, her funniness, her witty wilfulness, her precocious understanding of the mechanics of art and her unprejudiced filtering of the adult wisdoms fed to her, is the perfect literary voice. It is innocent, and is all about inference and the getting of knowledge. It is as if the stories themselves are saying, just like the child does: "I know. I know a lot that I don"t talk about." They explore human urges at base. They examine the creative urge and the destructive urge. They get very close to real violence and anger. They are always revealingly aware via the child"s blithe innocence, her very unawareness of cla.s.s and gender prejudices.

These slight-seeming stories are really discrete philosophical gifts. "Flying" is directly about lightness, the flight of the imagination, yes, and about the imaginative act of shaking off individual guilt but in the end this story, in whose finale the whole of Helsinki (including "cats and dogs and guinea-pigs and monkeys" as well as the President) takes to the sky, banishes northern work ethic and shows how creative power has to be hand-in-hand with generosity if it"s going to get anything off the ground. "The Stone", a diminutive reworking of the myth of Sisyphus, is enthralled by what looks weighty. Its child-self battles to roll all the way home, and then up some impossible stairs a stone as big as herself and much, much heavier, which she has decided is a ma.s.sive lump of precious metal. This story, about the real worth of things, shows how richness is found in the least likely places as well as how everything ordinary becomes silvered-over by adventure even adventure that ends in what looks like abject failure. The noise the stone makes as it falls down through the building means "Every door opened and everybody ran up and down the stairs". It"s a story that goes out of its way to make shut doors open.

The fact that the stories are so brief somehow suggests an eternity, a complete world. It is an extraordinary feat. With a child"s pure adamance, Jansson, the laureate of small things, is confident of the value in the seemingly worthless. The Sculptor"s Daughter stories are held between present and past tense in a way that creates a new kind of time, at once vital, happening right now, and yet safely past, preserved in memory. They make, with a double-edged consciousness that"s often very funny, a s.p.a.ce that"s neither simply adult nor childlike but is somehow believably both. An innocence in these stories puts the innocence back into adulthood, yet preserves the potential and knowing s.p.a.ce that childhood is.

A Winter Book is full of stories that make art of life and celebrate the life of art. In the process, and like everything Tove Jansson wrote, they celebrate the endless, unstoppable, good-natured force of the imagination. They take, for instance, the attempts to communicate, the blunt requests, the repeated language-stammers of a total stranger, that j.a.panese girl fan, and, in a typical Jansson combination of inference and clear-sightedness, reveal them as a beautiful story in their own right, a fine tight-roped balance of hope and hopelessness. The stories face age, youth, and each of the dark and light seasons with the same determination to make something light of it all. In their slightness they may seem almost dismissible, but they light up the dark for miles like that torch drifting away on the unmoored iceberg: "Perhaps that torch would go on shining at the bottom of the sea after the iceberg had melted and turned into water." These small acts of seeming accident and covert deliberation make something momentous happen.

PART I.

Snow.

The Stone.

IT 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. But now it had to cross the road.

One car after another went past and sometimes a tram, and the longer I waited, the more difficult it was to roll the stone out into the road.

In the end I began to feel weak at the knees and then I knew that soon it would be too late, in a few seconds it would be too late, so I let it fall into the gutter and began rolling very quickly and without looking up. I kept my nose just above the top of the stone so that the room I had hidden us in would be as tiny as possible and I heard very clearly how all the cars stopped and were angry, but I drew a line between them and me and just went on rolling and rolling. You can close your mind to things if something is important enough. It works very well. You make yourself very small, shut your eyes tight and say a big word over and over again until you"re safe.

When I got to the tram-lines I felt tired, so I lay across the stone and held it tight. But the tram just rang and rang its bell so I had to start rolling again, but now I wasn"t scared any longer, just angry and that felt much better. Anyway, the stone and I had such a tiny room for ourselves that it didn"t matter a bit who shouted at us or what they shouted. We felt terribly strong. We had no trouble in getting onto the pavement again and we continued up the slope to Wharf Road, leaving behind us a narrow trail of silver. From time to time we stopped to rest together and then we went on again.

We came to the entrance of our house and got the door open. But then there were the stairs. You could manage by resting on your knees and taking a firm grip with both hands and waiting till you got your balance. Then you tightened your stomach and held your breath and pressed your wrists against your knees. Then quickly up and over the edge and you let your stomach go again and listened and waited, but the staircase was quite empty. And then the same thing all over again.

When the stairs narrowed and turned a corner, we had to move over to the wall side. We went on climbing slowly but no one came. Then I lay on top of the stone again and got my breath and looked at the silver, silver worth millions, and only four floors more and we would be there.

It happened when we got to the fourth floor. My hand slipped inside my mittens, I fell flat on my face and lay quite still and listened to the terrible noise of the stone falling. The noise got louder and louder, a noise like "Crash, Crunch, Crack" all rolled into one, until the stone hit the Nieminens" door with a dull thud like doomsday.

It was the end of the world, and I covered my eyes with my mittens. Nothing happened. The echoes resounded up and down the stairs but nothing happened. No angry people opened their doors. Perhaps they were lying in wait inside.

I crept down on my hands and knees. Every step had a little semicircle bitten out of it. Further down they became big semicircles and the pieces lay everywhere and stared back at me. I rolled the stone away from the Nieminens" door and started all over again. We climbed up steadily and without looking at the chipped steps. We got past the place where things had gone wrong and took a rest in front of the balcony door. It"s a dark-brown door and has tiny square panes of gla.s.s.

Then I heard the outside door downstairs open and shut, and somebody coming up the stairs. He climbed up and up with very slow steps. I crept forward to the banisters and looked down. I could see right to the bottom, a long narrow rectangle closed in by the banisters all the way down, and up the banisters came a great big hand, round and round and nearer and nearer. There was a mark in the middle of it, so I knew it was the tattooed hand of the caretaker, who was probably on his way up to the attic.

I opened the door to the balcony as quietly as I could and began to roll the stone over the threshold. The threshold was high. I rolled without thinking. I was very scared and couldn"t get a good grasp and the stone rolled into the c.h.i.n.k of the door and got wedged there. There were double doors with coiled iron springs at the top, which the caretaker had put there because women always forgot to shut the doors after them. I heard the springs contract and they sang softly to themselves as they squeezed me and the stone together between the doors and I put my legs together and took tight hold of the stone and tried to roll it but the s.p.a.ce got narrower and narrower and I knew that the caretaker"s hand was sliding up the banisters all the time.

I saw the silver of the stone quite close to my face and I gripped it and pushed and kicked with my legs and all of a sudden it tipped over and rolled several times and under the iron railing and into the air and disappeared.

Then I could see nothing but bits of fluff, light and airy as down, with small threads of colour here and there. I lay flat on my tummy and the door pinched my neck and everything was quiet until the stone reached the yard below. And there it exploded like a meteor; it covered the dustbins and the washing and all the steps and windows with silver! It made the whole of 4 Wharf Road look as if it was silver-plated and all the women ran to their windows thinking that war had broken out or doomsday had come! Every door opened and everybody ran up and down the stairs with the caretaker leading and saw how a wild animal had bitten bits out of every step and how a meteor had fallen out of a clear-blue sky.

But I lay squeezed in between the doors and said nothing. I didn"t say anything afterwards, either. I never told anyone how close we had come to being rich.

Parties.

SOMETIMES I WAS WOKEN UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE night by the most beautiful music there is balalaika and guitar. Daddy played the balalaika and Cavvy played the guitar. They played together very softly, almost in a whisper, both of them a long way away and then they sounded a little closer in turns so that sometimes it was the guitar that I heard and sometimes the balalaika.

They were gentle, sad songs about things that go on and on and that n.o.body can do anything about. Then they became wild and disorderly and Marcus broke his gla.s.s. But he never smashed more than one and Daddy made sure that he was always given one of the cheaper sort. Below the ceiling near my bed on the top bunk there was a cloud of grey tobacco smoke, and it made everything more unreal than it was. Perhaps we were out at sea or up in the mountains and I heard them shouting to each other through the cloud and things kept falling over and behind the violent noises came loud and soft waves of balalaika and guitar music.

I love Daddy"s parties. They could go on for many nights of waking up and going to sleep again and being rocked by smoke and the music, and then suddenly a bellow would strike a chill right down to my toes.

It"s not worth looking, because if you do everything you"ve imagined disappears. It"s always the same. You can look down on them and there they are sitting on the sofa or on chairs or walking slowly up and down the room. Cavvy sits huddled up over his guitar as if he was hiding in it, his bald head floating around like a pale spot in the cloud, and he sinks lower and lower. Daddy sits very upright and looks straight ahead. The others doze off from time to time because having a party is very exhausting. But they won"t go home because it"s very important to make an effort to be the last. Daddy generally wins and is last. When all the others are asleep, he goes on staring and thinking till morning.

Mummy doesn"t join in the party. She sees that the oil lamp doesn"t start smoking in the bedroom. The bedroom is our only real room apart from the kitchen; I mean it has a door. But there is no stove in it. So the oil lamp must burn all night. If the door is opened the smoke gets into the bedroom and Per Olov gets asthma. Parties have been much more difficult since I got a brother but Mummy and Daddy try their best to arrange them all the same.

The table is the most beautiful thing. Sometimes I sit up and look over the railing and screw up my eyes and then the gla.s.ses and the candles and all the things on the table shimmer and make a whole as they do in a painting. Making a whole is very important. Some people just paint things and forget the whole, I know. I know a lot that I don"t talk about.

All men have parties and are pals who never let each other down. A pal can say terrible things which are forgotten the next day. A pal never forgives, he just forgets, and a woman forgives but never forgets. That"s how it is. That"s why women aren"t allowed to have parties. Being forgiven is very unpleasant.

A pal never says anything clever that"s worth repeating the following day. He just feels that nothing is so important at the time.

Once Daddy and Cavvy played with a catapult that could shoot aeroplanes. I don"t think Cavvy understood how it worked because he did it wrong and the aeroplane flew straight at his hand and the hook went right through it. It was awful and the blood ran all over the table and he couldn"t even get his jacket on because the aeroplane wouldn"t go through his sleeve. Daddy consoled him and took him to the hospital, where they snipped off the hook with pincers and put the aeroplane in the museum.

Anything can happen at a party if you aren"t careful.

We never had a party in the studio, only in the living room. There are two high windows there which have a solemn-looking arch at the top and the whole of Grandmother"s and Grandfather"s curly-grained suite with scrolls all over it is there. It reminds Mummy of the house in the country where everything is just as it should be.

At first she was worried about the suite and was cross because of the cigarette burns and the marks left by gla.s.ses but by now she knows that it"s all a question of patina.

Mummy is very good about parties. She never puts everything on the table and she never invites people. She knows that the only thing that really creates the right atmosphere is improvisation. Improvisation is a beautiful word. Daddy has to go out and look for his pals. They might be anywhere at any time. Sometimes he doesn"t find anybody. But often he does. And then they feel like going somewhere. One always lands up somewhere. That"s important.

Then someone says: "Let"s look and see what we can find in the pantry." And one goes quietly to have a look and there"s lots there! One finds expensive sausages and bottles and loaves of bread and b.u.t.ter and cheese and even soda water and then one carries everything in and improvises something. Mummy has everything ready.

Actually soda water is dangerous. It gives one bubbles in the tummy and it can make one feel very sad. One should never mix things.

Gradually all the candles on the bal.u.s.trade go out and candle wax runs down onto the sofa. When the music is finished, there are war stories. Then I wait under the bedclothes but I always come up again when they attack the wicker chair. Then Daddy goes and fetches his bayonet, which hangs above the sacks of plaster in the studio, and everybody jumps up and shouts and Daddy attacks the chair. During the day it is covered with a rug so that you can"t see what it looks like. After the wicker chair, Daddy doesn"t want to play his balalaika any more. Then I just go to sleep.

The next day everybody is still there and they try to say nice things to me: "Good day pretty maiden," "How lovely "twould be if you"d come a-walking this morning with me." Mummy gets presents. Ruokokoski once gave her half a pound of b.u.t.ter and another time she got a dozen eggs from Sallinen.

In the morning it"s very important not to begin to tidy up too obviously. And if one lets in all that nasty fresh air, anyone can catch cold or get depressed. It"s important to break the new day in very gradually and gently. Things look different in daylight, and if the difference seems too sudden everything can be spoilt. One must be able to move about in peace and quiet and see how one feels and wonder what it is one really wants to do.

One always wants something the next day, but one doesn"t really know what. Finally one thinks that perhaps it"s pickled herring. And so one goes into the pantry and has another look and there really is some pickled herring there.

And so the day goes on quietly and it"s evening again and perhaps there are some new candles. Everyone behaves terribly cautiously because they know how little it takes to upset everything.

I go to bed and hear Daddy tuning his balalaika. Mummy lights the oil lamp. There"s a completely round window in the bedroom. n.o.body else has a round window. One can see out across all the roofs and over the harbour and gradually all the windows go dark except one. It is the one under Victor Ek"s asbestos wall. There"s a light on there all night. I think they"re having a party there too. Or perhaps they"re ill.u.s.trating books.

The Dark.

BEHIND THE RUSSIAN CHURCH THERE IS AN ABYSS. The moss and the rubbish are slippery and jagged old tins glitter at the bottom. For hundreds of years they have piled up higher and higher against a long dark red house without windows. The red house crawls round the rock and it is very significant that it has no windows. Behind the house is the harbour, a silent harbour with no boats in it. The little wooden door in the rock below the church is always locked.

"Hold your breath when you run past it," I told Poyu. "Otherwise Putrefaction will come out and catch you."

Poyu always has a cold. He can play the piano and holds his hands in front of him as if he were afraid of being attacked or was apologising to someone. I always scare him and he follows me because he wants to be scared.

As soon as twilight comes, a great big creature creeps over the harbour. It has no face but has got very distinct hands which cover one island after another as it creeps forward. When there are no more islands left, it stretches its arm out over the water, a very long arm that trembles a little and begins to grope its way towards Skatudden. Its fingers reach the Russian Church and touch the rock oh! Such a great big grey hand!

I know what it is that"s the worst thing of all. It"s the skating-rink. I have a six-sided skating badge sewn to my jumper. The key I use to tighten my skates is on a shoelace round my neck. When you go down onto the ice, the skating-rink looks like a little bracelet of light far out in the darkness. The harbour is an ocean of blue snow and loneliness and nasty fresh air.

Poyu* doesn"t skate because his ankles wobble, but I have to. Behind the rink lies the creeping creature and round the rink there is a ring of black water. The water breathes at the edge of the ice and moves gently, and sometimes it rises with a sigh and spreads out over the ice. When you are safely on the rink it isn"t dangerous any more, but you feel gloomy.

Hundreds of shadowy figures skate round and round, all in the same direction, resolutely and pointlessly, and two freezing old men sit playing in the middle under a tarpaulin. They are playing "Ramona"and "I go out of an evening but my old girl stays at home". It is cold. Your nose runs, and when you wipe it you get icicles on your mittens. Your skates have to be fixed to your heels. There"s a little hole of iron and it"s always full of small stones. I pick them out with the key of my skates. And then there are the stiff straps to thread through their holes. And then I go round with the others in order to get some fresh air and because the skating badge is very expensive. But there"s no one here to scare, everybody just skates faster, strange shadows making scrunching and squeaking noises as they pa.s.s.

The lamps sway to and fro in the wind. If they went out we should keep going round and round in the dark, and the music would play on and on and gradually the channel in the ice would get wider and wider, yawning and breathing more heavily, and the whole harbour would be black water with only an island of ice on which we would go round and round for ever and ever amen.

Ramona is as pretty as a picture and as pale as The Thunder Bride. Ramona is for adults only. I have seen The Thunder Bride at the waxworks. Daddy and I love the waxworks. She was struck by lightning just when she was going to get married. The lightning struck her myrtle wreath and came out through her feet. That"s why she is barefoot, and you can see quite clearly lots of crooked blue lines on the soles of her feet where the lightning came out again.

At the waxworks you can see how easy it is to smash people to pieces. They can be crushed, torn in half or sawn into little bits. n.o.body is safe and therefore it is terribly important to find a hiding place in time.

I used to sing sad songs to Poyu. He put his hands over his ears but he listened all the same. Life is an isle of sorrow, you live today and die tomorrow! The skating-rink was the isle of sorrow. We drew it underneath the dining-room table. With a ruler Poyu drew every plank in the fence and the lamps all at the same distance from one another, and his pencil was always too hard. I only drew black and with a 4B the darkness on the ice, or the channel in the ice or a thousand murky figures on squeaking skates flying round in a circle. He didn"t understand what I was drawing, so I took a red pencil and whispered: "Marks of blood! Blood all over the ice!" And Poyu screamed while I captured this cruel thing on paper so that it couldn"t get at me.

One Sunday I taught Poyu how to escape from the snakes in their big carpet. All you have to do is walk along the light-coloured edges, on all the colours that are light. If you step on the dark colours next to them, you are lost. There are such swarms of snakes there you just can"t describe them, you have to imagine them. Everyone must imagine his own snakes because no one else"s snakes can ever be as awful.

He balanced himself with tiny, tiny steps on the carpet, his hands in front of him and his great big wet handkerchief flapping in one hand.

"Now it"s getting narrow," I said. "Look out for yourself and try to jump to that pale flower in the centre!"

The flower was almost right behind him and the pattern disappeared in a twirl. He tried desperately to keep his balance, flapped his handkerchief and began to scream, and then fell into the dark part. He screamed and screamed and rolled over on the carpet, rolled off onto the floor and under a cupboard. I screamed too, crawled after him and put my arms round him and held him tight until he calmed down.

People shouldn"t have pile carpets they"re dangerous. It"s much better to live in a studio with a concrete floor. That"s why Poyu is always longing to come to our place.

We are busy digging a secret tunnel through the wall. I"ve got quite a long way and I only work when I"m alone. The wooden panelling went alright but then I had to use the marble hammer. Poyu"s hole is much smaller, but his daddy"s tools are so bad that it"s a disgrace.

Every time I"m alone I take down the hanging on the wall and dig away, and no one has noticed what I am doing. The hanging is Mummy"s. She painted it on sackcloth when she was young. It shows an evening. There are straight tree-trunks rising out of the moss, and behind the tree-trunks the sky is red because the sun is setting. Everything except the sky has gone dark in a vague greyish brown but there are narrow red streaks that burn like fire. I love her picture. It goes deep into the wall, deeper than my hole, deeper than Poyu"s drawing-room; it goes on endlessly and one never gets to the place where the sun is setting but the red gets more and more intense. I"m sure it"s burning! There is a terrible fire, the kind of fire Daddy is always going out and waiting for.

The first time Daddy showed me his fire, it was winter. He went across the ice first and Mummy came behind him, pulling me on a sledge. It was the same red sky and the same shadowy figures running and something terrible had happened. There were jagged black things lying on the ice. Daddy collected them together and placed them in my lap. They were very heavy and pressed against my tummy.

"Explosion" is a beautiful word and a very big one. Later I learned others, the kind you can whisper only when you"re alone. "Inexorable". "Ornamentation". "Profile". "Catastrophic". "Electrical". "District nurse".

They get bigger and bigger if you say them over and over again. You whisper and whisper and let the word grow until nothing exists except the word.

I wonder why fires always happen at night. Perhaps Daddy isn"t interested in fires during the daytime because then the sky isn"t red. He always woke us up and we heard the fire engine clanging; there was always a great rush and we ran through completely empty streets. It was always an awful long way to Daddy"s fires. All the houses were asleep and the pointed chimneys were lifted upwards towards the red sky, which got nearer and nearer and at last we got there and Daddy lifted me up to see the fire. But sometimes it was a silly little fire that had already gone out long before we got there and then he was disappointed and had to be consoled.

Mummy only likes little fires like the ones she makes in ashtrays when no one is looking. And log-fires. She lights log-fires in the studio and in the pa.s.sage every evening after Daddy has gone out looking for his friends.

When the log-fire is alight, we draw up the big chair. We turn out the lights in the studio and sit in front of the fire and she says: "Once upon a time there was a little girl who was terribly pretty and her mummy liked her so awfully much ..." Every story has to begin in the same way, then it"s not so important what happens. A soft, gentle voice in the warm darkness and one gazes into the fire and nothing is dangerous. Everything else is outside and can"t get in. Not now or at any time.