THE SIXTH NURSERY BOOK

A Bestiary of Small Nuisances — Beasts You Will Actually Meet.

Books One and Two gave you the great beasts — the wolf, the troll, the thing in the mist. This sixth book is about the small ones. The ones that are not going to eat you, or teach you anything grand, but that you will absolutely meet, probably this week, probably in the kitchen. There is no lesson in most of them. That is itself the lesson: a great deal of life is not danger and is not magic. It is just nuisance, and being decent about nuisance is most of being grown up.

The rule holds: each one has a bit the children shout. Four to begin the shelf; more small nuisances may join them in time.

1 · THE EAR-FISH

The star of the book, and the one they will make you tell first, forever.

In the still dykes there lives a small, silver, permanently anxious fish, and it has one habit, and the habit is this: when it is frightened, it hides its head in the nearest dark hole, and considers itself thereby invisible.

It is wrong about this. It is an entire fish sticking out of a hole with its head tucked in, exactly as certain large birds are said to do in the dry countries, and it is convinced, every time, that no one can see it. Nothing has ever talked it out of this. Nothing ever will.

And here is the thing to understand, because it is the whole of the joke and most of the mercy: the ear-fish does not want your ear. It wants no such thing. It has no interest in you at all. It only wants, like the great head-hiding birds of the dry countries, to jam its head into the nearest available dark hole and become — in its own serene and total conviction — invisible. It is not personal. It is not even aimed. It is simply that a human ear, to a small frightened fish casting about for anywhere on earth to tuck its head, happens to be a dark hole of very nearly perfect size. We call it the ear-fish; but that is our word, not its intention, and the fish would be appalled to learn it had a reputation.

And it does not even happen often. You might go three or four years and never meet one — and make no mistake, that is exactly what makes it so much worse when you do. A nuisance you meet every day you learn to wear lightly; but the ear-fish comes once in a blue moon, always by ambush, always when you are least braced for it, and the rareness of the thing is most of the shock. There is no getting used to a fish you meet twice a decade.

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT, and slap their hands over their ears to do it: "EARS IN! MUFFS ON! MIND THE FISH!")

So the dyke-country children wear ear-muffs from the first thaw, when the ear-fish wake, right through to the frosts — good thick woollen ones, pulled down hard — and they are not being soft, whatever the dry-country cousins say. They are being sensible, in the one way that matters, because an ear-fish in the ear is not dangerous. It will not hurt you and it will do you no lasting harm whatever. It is merely — and profoundly, and memorably — unpleasant, and about as inconvenient as a thing can be without actually mattering, in the particular way that only a small, frightened, flapping fish in your own ear can be; and there is no being brave about it, and no arguing your way out of it. You simply have to get the fish out.

(There is a story — only a story, and most likely wrong, because stories are the only news this realm ever gets of anywhere else, and they are wrong by the time they arrive — that a man called Master Fizzle once put an ear-fish in his ear on purpose. He had it third-hand, from a man who had it from another man, that away in some country nobody here has been to or is ever going to, they keep a fish you wear in your ear that lets you understand every tongue in creation. Master Fizzle wore his for a fortnight and understood nothing whatsoever, except a faint muffled panicking, and held to his dying day that this proved the far country had simply got its fish wrong. Nobody has ever been able to fault the logic, and nobody has ever wanted to try it. He is said to have tried, later and more ambitiously, to magic his fish into the other thing the same unreliable rumour spoke of — some little contrivance, from the same cluttered elsewhere, that a body was supposed to wear on the ears to be piped a private music all its own; though nobody here has ever seen one, or heard its name, or is entirely sure it is not also a kind of fish. He did not succeed. Magic here is of the clerical sort, the kind that mostly mis-files; and what the fizzle left him was a foam-and-wire contrivance, a soft cup for each ear, that piped no music anyone could ask for and never would. What it piped, faintly and for ever, was the fish itself, singing. Which was novel. It was, everyone agreed, remarkably novel. It was not, in any sense anyone could name, the least bit useful. The fish, you understand, was still in there. It always is. And it did not even stay: within the season it had worked itself loose of the foam and the wire and slipped back into the dyke, home to the general fish population, to tell — one assumes — no one. So that somewhere out on the still water there swims, to this day, a line of perfectly ordinary ear-fish descended from the one that was, for a single fortnight, very nearly something else.)

No one, before Master Fizzle or since, has ever found the smallest use for an ear-fish. The realm keeps only a faint, stubborn hope that somebody one day might — which is, when you think about it, the single use the creature has ever had: hope, and that at second hand.

And if one does get in — because one always eventually does — you do not panic, because panicking is the ear-fish's entire personality and there is no sense in two of you at it. You tip your head, and you offer the fish a better hole — a cupped dark hand, a jar laid on its side — because a frightened thing looking for somewhere to hide will always, always move to the darker, snugger spot, and out it comes, mortified, and swims off, and tells, presumably, no one.

Moral: The cleverest idea in the whole wide world — a fish you put in your ear to understand everything — turns out, close up and in your own ear, to be one frightened little creature that understands nothing and only wants somewhere to hide. Wear your muffs. Don't panic. And when the nuisance comes, as it will, give it a better hole rather than a fight. Most things that get stuck are only looking for somewhere to feel safe, and the kind way and the quick way are, gratifyingly, the same way. And the fish itself — head in the dark, dead certain it cannot be seen? It is not safe. But it feels safe, and whatever makes you feel safe makes you feel safe, which is not the same as being safe, and is not nothing either. The trick — which the fish never learns, and you must — is telling those two apart.

2 · THE SPIDER IN THE CORNER

The one they scream at, and the one they should thank. Told to the ones just old enough to be brave for someone else.

There is a spider in the corner of the wash-house, and she is enormous, and everybody screams.

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT — the scream is allowed, once, and then the real line: "...OH. IT'S ONLY HER.")

Because she is not there to frighten you. She has never once been there to frighten you. She is there, patiently, in the damp corner, eating the biting flies and the fever-gnats that come up off the wet — the ones that would otherwise be eating you — and she does it for nothing, all summer, asking only to be left in her corner and not screamed at quite so much.

The parish that keeps its wash-house spiders has fewer bitten children. This is simply true, and the dry-country folk who sweep every web away for the look of the thing spend their summers slapping their own necks and wondering why.

Moral: The thing in the corner that makes you scream is very often the thing keeping the corner safe. Being frightened of her is a luxury, and she is the one paying for it — in flies. Learn her. Leave her be. Say "oh, it's only her," and mean the "only" kindly.

3 · THE BEAR

The short one, and the joke one, and — mind — the true one, in its way.

There are no bears in Sogmarsh.

There has never been a bear in Sogmarsh. The climate is wrong, the country is wrong, and no one alive, nor anyone their grandparents knew, has ever actually seen a bear.

The realm is nonetheless completely certain there is one.

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT, with enormous confidence, having never seen it either: "MIND THE BEAR!")

It is blamed for the knocked-over churn and the gone ham and the odd noise in the night and the gate left open. It lives, reliably, just over the next rise from wherever you happen to be standing. It is enormous. It is always very recently somewhere, and never quite here. And it is, when you look closely — which nobody ever does — made of exactly the same stuff as the extra ledger and the man on the far side of the round: a useful, agreed-upon, entirely load-bearing thing that is not, strictly, anywhere.

Moral: Every parish keeps a bear it has never seen, to be the reason for the things it would rather not explain. There is no harm in the bear. Mind it cheerfully. But when you are older, and something has gone wrong, and everyone is very sure whose fault it is — just check, quietly, whether the culprit is a real one, or the parish bear again.

4 · THE BOGMAN

The last of these four, and by a long way the oldest. Told gently; it is not a frightening one, whatever its shape.

Every so often, out on the peat, the cutters come down on something in the turf that is not turf. It is a man. He has been there a very long time — longer than the parish, longer than the names — and the peat, which keeps everything, has kept him: brown, and leathery, and calm, and folded up as though he had lain down for a minute in a comfortable spot and let the bog draw the blanket up over him.

He is not a monster. He is not a ghost. He is not, whatever the dry countries would make of him, a warning or a curse. He is a very old neighbour, and the only remarkable thing about him is that he is still here — which, in this realm, is the most ordinary thing there is. The peat keeps everything. It has kept the reed-knives and the lost boots and the odd sad single shoe, and it has kept him along with them.

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT — softly, and take off their caps if they have any: "MIND THE BOGMAN. SAY GOOD MORNING.")

And the cutters do. They take off their caps, and they say good morning. They do not poke him, or prop him up, or sell him to the antiquarian from the capital who would very much like to have him under glass. Because he was somebody, once — with a name nobody now knows and business nobody now remembers — and the whole of being decent, the entire trade of it, is being kind to a person when there is nothing left of them to know, and nothing whatever to be gained, and nobody watching but the rooks.

Then, most often, they lay the turf gently back, and leave him where he lay, and mark the spot, and go home a little quieter than they came.

Moral: The peat keeps everything, and one day it will keep you too — and you would like, you would very much like, the next lot of cutters to take their caps off and say good morning. So learn to do it now, over an old brown stranger who can do nothing for you whatever, because that is the only kind of kindness that ever proves you meant it.

Here endeth the Sixth Nursery Book — the small nuisances, which is to say, the most of life.

Blow the candle out. Tomorrow you will meet at least one of them — the spider, likely, or the bear that isn't, or, once in a blue cold moon, the fish. Be decent to it. It is only trying, like everything in this realm and everyone in this house, to get through the day and to feel safe. So are you. Say good morning.