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for Vera, his first person singularfor Celia, who did not give up hopeand for Annie, whose cat it was
And in after years, if you would blame
His sadness, he was used to say,
‘It’s dull in our town since my playmates left!’
Robert Browning
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Contents
Once upon a time there were two old ladies. Their names were Kitty and Miss McGee. Kitty was tall and thin and liked to sit in a tall, thin chair. Miss McGee was little and round and preferred sitting on a plump, soft settee with puffy cushions. Kitty’s real name was Katherine, but Miss McGee called her Kitty. Her own name was Florence, but Kitty called her “McGee”; she only used Florence when she got cross with her, but this didn’t happen very often. It was normally Miss McGee who got cross.
This was because Kitty was a bit vague and dreamy, and went round saying little poems to herself. Her pale, oval face, the exact shape of an egg, was so calm and quiet-seeming that looking into it was like looking into a deep, calm lake.
Kitty and Miss McGee were very old. When they were little girls, there were no televisions or computers or mobile phones. In those days, a cart came along pulled by a little horse, and a man threw the coal for your fire down a hole in the pavement. The streets were lit by pretty lamps, worked by gas, and every night, before the dusk came, another man came round with a long stick and switched them all on. He was called the lamplighter. “Remember the lamplighter, McGee?” Kitty would say dreamily, as they sat in their chairs after tea, watching the darkness fall. “Remember the coalman’s horse?”
But you mustn’t think that Kitty and Miss McGee were two fuddy duddies. It’s true that they didn’t have a television or a computer and their telephone was a very old-fashioned one. It was black and it weighed a ton and it had a loud, clanging bell. But they certainly kept up with things. They listened to the radio and they read the newspapers and they both kept a very sharp eye on what was going on in Golden Square, which was where they lived, at Number 19.
It was called “golden” because in spring the garden in the middle was full of daffodils. This garden was private with black railings all round, stuck with iron spikes, and you got inside by unlocking a gate. The old ladies had a key to it but they didn’t go there much. It felt too lonely, sitting in the garden all by themselves.
Once there had been lots of families living in Golden Square. There had been a little school close by, too, and all the children used to play in the garden. They played hide-and-seek in the shrubbery, they climbed the trees and they skimmed pebbles across the small, round pond. But then the school had closed down and the families had all gone to live in new, shiny houses on the edge of the town. Apart from Number 19, all the houses in Golden Square had been turned into offices for dentists and doctors. In the evening everybody went home and there was silence.
“It’s dull in our town since the children went,” said Kitty to Miss McGee. “Even Debbie Springer seems to have deserted us. I really do miss Debbie.”
Debbie Springer was a little girl whose mum did cleaning for some of the dentists and doctors who had offices in Golden Square. They used to live in a flat in the very bottom of one of the houses, but one day a water pipe burst and there was a flood. The water had turned the bottom of the house all dank and smelly and mould had begun to grow on the walls. But the man who owned it was a bit of a miser and wouldn’t pay anybody to put the house right. So Mrs Springer, who had bright red hair and rather a hot temper, said “Right, then, we’ll go and live somewhere else, somewhere nice and light and airy. You can keep your rotten old flat – we’ll find another place!” And she had marched away with Debbie, refusing to pay
