For V.D.B
Contents
The Little Snake
Acknowledgements
This is almost, but not quite, the whole of the story about a remarkable, wise little girl. She was called Mary. Everything I will tell you here began when Mary went walking in her garden on one particular afternoon.
Mary was a little bit taller than the other girls her age and had brownish crinkly hair. She was quite thin, because she didn’t always have exactly enough to eat. She liked honey and whistling and the colour blue and finding out.
She lived in a city filled with very many different kinds of people. Its very many different kinds of people made it a very wonderful place, full of interesting songs and stories, foods and clothes and conversations. Nevertheless, the people in charge of the city were not overly fond of people and so some of the apartments in which the very many different kinds of people lived were often dry where they should have been wet, or wet where they should have been dry, or just cold and dark and supplied with especially listless electricity. In order to enjoy the sky, which was free to them and as large as can be, the people in the wet and dry houses would fly kites from their roofs. Some looked like birds of paradise, some looked like fish and some looked like wonderful serpents.
Other houses – like the ones owned by the people who ran the city – were luxurious and stretched into the sky with great towers much higher than the kites. These apartments contained beautiful pools to swim in, or to keep fish, or perhaps vast tanks containing large reptiles like crocodiles and blue iguanas. And they had larders as big as living-rooms and living-rooms as big as meadows and probably meadows in their basements that were as big as small counties with jewelled rollercoasters and golf courses made of cake.
Mary knew about all this. She knew about all kinds of things and was very clever. Standing in her garden – which was on a rooftop and a bit bigger than a big tablecloth – she could look one way and see the very many sad, tiny houses of the squashed-in people. If she looked the other way, she could see the tall, sparkling buildings full of crocodiles and meadows. The building where she lived was only a little bit squashed. And its pipes only leaked on Mondays and Wednesdays and at weekends, and when they did her mother would put metal basins under the drips and the metal would ring like small bells – or maybe more exactly like small, wet bells – when the water hit them.
Mary’s flat was just the right size for her mother and her father and herself – which was all there was. Sometimes she wanted a little brother or sister to play with, but then she would remember that a little sister might get jealous of her cleverness, or be interested in ballet dancing which would be noisy, or woodcarving which would be messy. Mary was sleeping in a bedroom that was supposed to be a store cupboard and if she had to share it with a sister then it would seem crowded. And maybe her new sister would snore, or have very long and pokey feet.
A little brother might eventually grow up and stop lying in his baby crib wriggling his fingers and might want to run about – and their garden was too small for running about. The people who were in charge of the city and who didn’t very much like people hadn’t made many parks for children to play in, or for adults to sit down in and eat ice cream and tell each other how wonderful their children were (or how terrible their children were, depending). Mary thought the people who ran the city probably weren’t interested in parks, because they could enjoy their own waterfalls and perhaps swim with their own crocodiles and make treehouses and swings in the thick rooftop forests she could see if she stared very hard all the way from her garden up to the shining towers.
People who came to visit the city would talk about it in the way that adults do in front of children, saying just what came into their heads and imagining that someone as small as Mary would not be able to understand them, or pay attention. They would say, ‘This city is very interesting, but there are no flowers to smell here and that makes us tired.’ Or they would say, ‘Things here are very expensive and we cannot afford to buy tickets so that we can hear people sing, or listen to music and dance. And we are surprised by the price of large sandwiches.’ Or else they would say things like, ‘This city seems to want birds and not people. It is covered in edges and ledges and nooks and crooks for birds to enjoy and is full of food scraps that are small enough for beaks. It was built by people, but it would prefer birds.’ And this is often true of cities. They need people to build them, but they prefer birds. This can make them sad places.
Mary thought that the visitors should come and have dinner with her parents and sniff in the nice scents of soup – or maybe go and stand in her little garden and smell the roses in it. Or they could talk to the lady in the bread shop, who whistled and hummed while she fed the birds with breadcrumbs and also fed the people with bread because she liked both birds and people. Or they could watch the beautiful dancing of the kites. Or they could listen to the gentleman who sang almost all day on Sundays and who lived across Mary’s street and who wore a vest instead of his shirt in summer. Any sensible and observant visitor would then see that they were in a friendly city filled with good things and happiness.
Mary liked the city and her garden. She could walk across the garden in six steps and walk from its top to its bottom in eight steps. On some afternoons she would take very tiny paces and this would allow the garden to seem twice the size and much more beautiful. The grown-ups she explained this to became confused.
They would tell her, ‘The garden is the same size, no matter how many paces you squeeze into it.’
She would tell them, ‘Not at all. The longer I take to cross the garden, the larger and more extremely wonderful it becomes, in the same way that ice cream becomes much more magnificent when you eat it very slowly with a little spoon.’ As I said, the girl was very clever.
‘Then your ice cream will melt,’ said the grown-ups.
And Mary would shake her head and start to skip and hum a tune to herself, because grown-ups expect children to do such things and it pleases them much more than questions they can’t answer. She did not mention that if she stood perfectly still in her garden then it went on for ever, because she could never reach its end. That would have made the grown-ups frown.
This – as it happened – made the grown-ups the exact opposite of the little girl.
Anyway, as I said at the beginning, if you remember, this little girl called Mary was one day walking in her garden. She believed it was hers because she loved it. She believed that loving something should make it a part of you, in the way that your feet are a part of you. (And you would, of course, be very foolish not to love your feet – should you have any – because they can be quite useful.)
On this particular afternoon, which was a wintry Sunday, the girl was taking extra-tiny steps so that her garden stretched for miles, almost into other countries. This made the four rose bushes into four giant rose trees and the three flowerbeds into vast prairies and the tiny pond into an inland sea of impressive dimensions. Sadly, it still had no crocodiles.
The little girl put her hands in her pockets to keep them warm because she preferred this to wearing gloves. This was definitely not because she had lost her gloves, as her mother had suggested earlier. The girl also watched her breath appearing in ascending, steamy clouds, as if her body were somehow burning the dead leaves from autumn, or perhaps washing a large number of sheets and producing steam like a laundry. She was perfectly absorbed by what she was doing and so it took a while for her to notice that one of her ankles was feeling slightly unlike the other.