THE SOGMARSH NURSERY BOOKS

A note on the use of these books — printed at the front of every edition, by order of the parish, whether anybody reads it or not.

From the nurse, to whoever comes after.

These are the tales we tell the small ones at bedtime. They are set down here because I am tired of being asked to remember them at short notice, and because I will not always be here to be asked.

You will notice they are not the tales they tell in drier countries. In drier countries the wolf is wicked and the fairy is sweet and the moral is that virtue is rewarded. We have tried that here. It does not survive contact with the weather.

Each one has a bit the children shout. Let them shout it. That is not the interruption. That is the tale. A story a child cannot join in with is a story a child is only being told at, and we have quite enough of that from the castle.

You will be asked why our tales end badly, or sideways, or in a damp bedsit with an argument about the sink. Here is your answer, and you may give it to any dry-country visitor who raises an eyebrow.

We do not tell our children that virtue is rewarded. We would be lying, and they would find out, and they would find out from the weather. What we tell them instead is this: the house will leak, the gift will have a clause in it, the wolf will very often be right, and the person who does the worst job in your life will never once be thanked unless you do it.

And then we tell them the other half, which the dry countries have somehow contrived to lose: that none of that is the end of anything. The wolf found the boy. The girl left the broth out. The dish and the spoon are still arguing, twenty years on, in the same small room, together.

A child who is told only that things go well will be broken by the first winter. A child who is told only that things go badly will not bother to try. We tell them both, in the dark, over the drip — and in the morning they get up and go out into a sinking realm and are, on the whole, remarkably decent about it.

They are not cheerful because we lied to them. They are cheerful because we did not, and they decided to be cheerful anyway. That is the only magic in Sogmarsh, and it is entirely home-made.

THE SECOND NURSERY BOOK

Beasts of the Wet Country, As They Are.

The First Nursery Book took the tales of the dry countries and corrected them. This one does not correct anything. These are ours. They were not sent to us, and they were not translated, and nobody in Murkminster has ever approved of a single one of them.

The rule is unchanged, and it is the only rule: every tale has a bit the children shout. Let them shout it. They shout it in the yard, holding hands, until the rooks go up off the chapel — and they will be shouting it long after the person who taught it to them has stopped.

That is not sentiment. That is the whole method. Read the Running Book if you want to know why.

I. DON'T TAKE THE PAIL

The first one. The one they learn before they can spell. It is not the frightening one — but it is the one that will still be in their mouths at forty, in the dark, on wet ground.

There was once a child called Tam, who was sent to the well.

And halfway there, out on the wet, standing quite still with the mist about its shins, there was a thing.

It did not roar. It did not run at her. It did not do a single one of the things the pictures in the almanac do. It smiled at her, and it held out a pail.

And it said — in her own mother's voice, exactly, warmly, right down to the little crack in it — "Here, love. Hold this a moment."

And the pail was one step away.

Only one.

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT: "DON'T TAKE THE PAIL!")

And Tam did not take it. And do you know why? Not because she was brave, because she was not; and not because she was clever, because that is not what saved her either.

She did not take it because she stopped, in the wet, with her heart going like a bird — and she said out loud, to nobody, "MY MOTHER HAS A PAIL."

And the moment she heard herself say it, she knew it was true. Her mother did have a pail. A good one. She had scrubbed it herself on Tuesday.

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT, AND THEY SHOUT IT AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS: "MY MOTHER HAS A PAIL! MY MOTHER IS INDOORS!")

And the thing in the mist kept smiling and kept holding out the pail, because that is all it has ever been able to do — and Tam walked backwards onto the firm, and then she ran, and it did not follow, because it cannot.

It has never once caught anybody. Not in six hundred years. Every single person it has ever taken walked out to it, one step, because a kind voice asked them to hold something.

Moral: It will use a voice you love. It will only ever ask for one step. And the one thing it cannot survive is you saying, out loud, what you already know.

II. BLESS YOU, BARNABY

The loud one. The one for the little ones who are frightened of the dark, and it works, and it has always worked, and no child in this parish has ever been frightened of a wolf again.

Now. The moor has a wolf on it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, and he is enormous.

He is nine feet at the shoulder. He is faster than any horse in the realm. He can cross open ground in the dark at a speed that would stop your heart, and he is coming, right now, towards you, and his name is BARNABY.

(Let them squeal. That is the point of the paragraph.)

And here he comes! Over the heather! Through the gorse! Past the bracken! Through the wet whin and the peat-dust and the sheep!

And thirty yards away — thirty yards, and not one yard closer, not once, not ever — he stops.

And his enormous face goes strange.

And his enormous nose goes wrinkly.

And Barnaby's Bane, the terror of the Bogmoor, the beast of the high moor, the fastest thing in the realm —

AAAA-CHOOOOOO!

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT, AND THEY MUST NOT BE STOPPED: "BLESS YOU, BARNABY!")

He is allergic. To the heather, and the gorse, and the peat, and the sheep, and the bracken — and to people. To the smell of us. To one small child standing in the wet.

So down he sits, in the mud, with his head in his great paws, sneezing his enormous head off, and he looks up at you with an expression of such terrible, personal, hopeless apology that grown men have found it worse than being eaten.

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT AGAIN, KINDLY: "BLESS YOU, BARNABY!")

He has never harmed a living soul. He has never tried. He would very much like to be somewhere else, and he cannot, because this is where he lives, and it is full of things that make him sneeze.

Moral: The biggest and the loudest and the fastest thing on that moor is not the thing you need to worry about — and it has spent six hundred years sitting down in a puddle, being sorry. Say bless you. He appreciates it. Nobody knows how we know that, and everybody does.

III. WHOSE SHOES ARE THESE?

The class-war one. The Quill nuns have twice requested it be removed from the imprint. It remains in the imprint.

You have heard the tale from the dry countries. A poor shoemaker goes to bed with nothing but leather, and in the night the elves come, and they work, and in the morning there are shoes — beautiful ones — and the shoemaker sells them and grows rich and is very happy.

And that is the end of the story, in the dry countries.

We have the rest of it.

Because the elves came back the next night. And the next. And the next. For eleven years they came, in the dark, and they cut and they stitched and they tacked and they finished, and every single morning the shoemaker came downstairs and found shoes.

And every single morning he sold them.

And he grew rich, and he got a bigger shop, and then a bigger one, and he bought a hat, and then a horse, and then a house with a gate on it — and not once, in eleven years, did he come downstairs in the night to see who was doing it.

He did not want to know. It is remarkable how long a man can not want to know something that is making him rich.

Then one night — and this is the part they leave out — the smallest elf put down her awl, in the dark, in the workshop, and she looked at eleven years of shoes, and she said the thing that has been said in every kitchen and every drain and every turf hall in this realm since the day it was founded:

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT, AND THEY LOVE THIS, AND THEY SHOULD: "WHOSE SHOES ARE THESE?")

And the elves looked at one another.

And they did not smash the shop. They did not curse him, or steal, or set anything alight — that is what the dry countries think poor people do when they have finally had enough, and it says a great deal about the dry countries.

They simply stopped.

They put down the awls. They tidied the bench, because they were not animals. And they walked out of that workshop in a line, in the dark, and they went and made shoes somewhere else — for people who had asked them their names.

And in the morning the shoemaker came downstairs, and there was leather, and there was no shoes, and there was never any shoes again, and he could not for the life of him understand what had gone wrong.

He is still telling people he was robbed.

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT, ONE LAST TIME, VERY POLITELY: "NOTHING WAS TAKEN, SIR. IT WAS ONLY EVER LENT.")

Moral: A man who has never asked who made the shoes will genuinely believe that he made the shoes. And the day the making stops, he will not call it a wage dispute. He will call it a haunting.

IV. IT ISN'T YOURS

The sad one. There is one in every book. Do not skip it; the children never let you.

Up on the crag there is a dragon, and he has a great heap of treasure, and I am going to tell you the true thing about him straight away, because the false thing is boring.

He does not want it.

He does not gloat over it. He does not count it, or love it, or roll about in it laughing. He sits on it, in the cold, with his chin on his claws, being miserable, and he has been miserable for four hundred years.

Because it is not treasure. It is lost property.

There is a wedding ring in that pile that belongs to a woman in Drudgeford who cried for a week.

There is a wooden horse in it that a boy carved for his brother, and the brother is old now, and he still mentions it.

There is a spoon. It was a grandmother's. It should never, ever have been cleaned, and it has been cleaned, and that is somehow the worst of the lot.

And every day — every single day — somebody comes up that crag and stands at the mouth of the cave and says, politely, because we are polite here: "Please, sir. It's mine. May I have it back?"

And the dragon looks at them.

And the dragon wants to give it back. You must understand that. He wants to more than anything in the world.

And he cannot.

He puts out his claw, and the claw will not open. It has never opened. It will never open. Four hundred years of the parish coming up that hill and asking nicely, and four hundred years of an enormous, weeping, utterly wretched creature who physically cannot let go of a single thing he has ever picked up.

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT — and they shout it sadly, and that is right, and you must let them: "IT ISN'T YOURS! BUT WE KNOW YOU CAN'T!")

So they leave a bowl of something warm at the mouth of the cave, because that is what this parish does with things it cannot fix, and they walk back down the hill without the ring, or the horse, or the spoon.

Moral: Not every monster is keeping your things out of wickedness. Some of them are keeping your things because they have never once in their lives managed to open their hands — and there is nothing you can do for them, and you can still be kind on the way down the hill.

V. THE DOOR IN THE HEATHER

The frightening one. It is told late, and it is told once, and the parish has never once been persuaded to soften it.

Out on the high moor, when the light is going, you may meet a white horse with a horn.

It is beautiful. I am not going to tell you it isn't; you would know I was lying, and then you would not believe the rest, and the rest is the part that matters.

It is the most beautiful thing you will ever see in your life.

It does not chase you. It does not touch you. It does not say a word.

It opens a door.

And through the door there is a room.

And here is the terrible thing, and you must listen to it now while it is only a story and I am here and the fire is lit: it is the right room. It is the kitchen with the pot on and the lamp lit and the coats on the hook. It is warm. You can smell it. And there is somebody sitting at the table with their back to you, and you know exactly who it is, and you have wanted to see them for a very long time.

And they begin to turn round.

(HERE THE CHILDREN DO NOT SHOUT. THEY GO VERY QUIET. LET THEM. THIS IS THE ONLY PLACE IN EITHER BOOK WHERE THE SHOUT COMES LATE, AND IT COMES FROM YOU FIRST.)

The room is not there.

There is no kitchen. There is no pot, no lamp, no coats, and there is nobody at that table — and there never was — and the thing standing beside the door is not a horse and does not love you and has never loved anything.

The parish has a song about it, and the song calls it what it is: a ledger with hooves. Step through that door and you are not going home. You are being filed.

Now. Say it with me. Say it in the warm, with the fire lit, so that your mouth knows the shape of it if you ever have to say it out on the wet, in the cold, at dusk, with your boots full of water and your chest aching:

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT — AND NOW THEY DO SHOUT, AND THEY SHOUT IT UNTIL THE WINDOWS RATTLE: "THE KITCHEN IS BEHIND ME!" "THE COLD IS REAL AND THE ROOM IS NOT!" "I AM NOT GOING THROUGH!")

And you turn around. And it is cold, and it is wet, and it is a long walk, and every step of it is real.

And there is a door at the end of it, and it is a plain one, and it sticks, and behind it is a kitchen that is not as warm as the one on the moor, and a person who is not as kind as the one at the table, and they are actually there.

Moral: The thing that offers you a way out of the cold is the only thing on that moor that has ever wanted anything from you. Refuse the door. Walk home in the rain. Rain is real.

VI. THE TROLL WHO HAD ENOUGH

The last one. It is the one they ask for again, and you say no, because it is late — and then you tell it again anyway.

Under the bridge at Drudgeford there lives a troll, and he is very large and very ugly and he has been down there since before the bridge was.

(There is another troll, mind — old Woooozniak wrote him down, up on the Bogmoor — who sat under his own bridge so long and so quiet that he turned into it, and holds it up to this day, and is happy enough, only he dreads the dark, when he half-remembers being a troll. That is a true troll and a sadder one. But he is not our troll. Ours is the Drudgeford troll, and he never turned to stone, and this is a different tale.)

And in the dry countries, this is where the story starts to go wrong.

In the dry countries the troll leaps out and demands a toll, and there is a great deal of shouting, and a clever little goat tricks him, and everybody laughs at the troll, and the moral is that you should be clever.

Ours does not go like that.

Our troll comes out from under the bridge, and he holds up one enormous hand, and he says: "One turnip. Or a heel of bread. Or, if you have neither, sit down a minute and tell me something."

And that is the toll. That is the whole toll. It has been the toll for four hundred years.

And when the first drover of the morning gives him a turnip, the troll says thank you, and eats it, and goes back under the bridge — and he does not come out again all day.

Because he has had enough.

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT: "HE'S HAD ENOUGH!")

Now. Along comes a Pennyworth, on a good horse, with a good coat and a very good hat, and he watches this happen, and he cannot bear it.

He climbs down off his horse, and he explains to the troll — kindly, and slowly, because he thinks the troll is stupid — that he is running his bridge all wrong.

"You have a monopoly," says the Pennyworth. "There is no other crossing for nine miles. You could charge every cart. You could charge by the axle. You could take a percentage of the load. Man, you could be rich by Michaelmas — and then you would never need to come out from under that bridge again!"

And the troll thought about this for a very long time, because he is not quick, and everybody waited, and the river went by.

And then he said:

"But I don't come out from under the bridge now."

(HERE THE CHILDREN SHOUT, AND THEY WILL SHOUT IT ALL THE WAY HOME, AND AT THEIR SISTERS, AND AT THE DOG: "BUT I DON'T COME OUT FROM UNDER THE BRIDGE NOW!")

And the Pennyworth opened his mouth, and shut it, and got back on his horse, and rode away — and he was extremely cross for eleven miles, and he never once worked out why.

The troll is still there. He takes one turnip a day, from the first person across, and after that the bridge is free, and the whole of Drudgeford knows it and nobody has ever told the Crown.

And on the days when nobody has a turnip, he takes the other thing instead. He sits on the bank with his enormous ugly chin in his enormous ugly hands, and somebody tells him something — how the calving went, or who is ill, or what the Committee has done now — and he listens to all of it, every word, and it is the best part of his day.

And that, children, is the richest creature in this entire realm.

Moral: Up at the castle there is a family that owns everything and cannot afford dinner, and a bank that has been adding up the same loaf for five hundred years, and a dragon on a crag who has never once opened his claw. And under a bridge at Drudgeford there is a troll with one turnip in his hand, who is finished for the day.

Work out which of them is poor.

Here endeth the Second Nursery Book.

Blow the candle out. Leave the door on the latch — the good door, the plain one, the one that sticks. And if you wake in the night and you are frightened, you know exactly what to do, because we taught you in the yard, and you shouted it until the rooks went up off the chapel:

SHOUT WHERE YOU ARE.

Somebody will come. Somebody always comes. That is not magic and it is not luck and it is not a story.

It is just what we do here.