The officer surveyed them. 'You were lucky.'

Lady Baverstoke turned from surveying a house that had not a window left in it with wobbling lip and welling eye. She said, 'lucky?'

'If that had hit the house you'd all have been killed. As it was-'He indicated the crater that had once been a croquet lawn. 'You'd probably have been all right if it hadn't been for that rotten old ceiling.' It was too much for Lady Baverstoke who broke down again. The cast tried to comfort her but the fact remained that her drawing room was ruined and the rest of her house not much better. She was quite inconsolable and perhaps it was a little tactless of Mrs Bennet to declare, after a few more minutes, 'well, we'll simply have to move the play to the church hall.'

The cast gaped. Even Lady Baverstoke was silenced. Then Mr Darcy smiled at Mrs Bennet. 'Maybe a sling will improve my performance.'

Mrs Bennet turned on him a face like the rising sun.

'Oh, Ken, how n.o.ble of you!' The smile vanished under a tide of relief. 'Thank goodness I didn't have time to bring those chairs over from the church hall.'

My inspiration: A Jane Austen novel seems the ant.i.thesis of violent chaos, although these novels were written between the Terror and Waterloo. They appear to be concerned with a thin veneer of civilised behaviour among an exclusive minority yet they have survived and flourished among readerships very different from the ones for which they were written. Jane Austen has always been a.s.sociated with the country house but has proved herself well able to survive and flourish in much tougher circ.u.mstances.

CLEVERCLOGS.

Hilary Spiers.

Yesterday I read 27,373 words. Not counting rereading the cereal packet. It would have been more but Dad took my torch away last night so I had to kneel on my bed to try to read by the light of the street lamp outside, with my head poking through the curtains. That was hard work, because I had to keep listening out for Mum's footsteps on the stairs. She's really sneaky, taking her shoes off at the bottom and creeping up to catch me out. 'You'll go blind reading in the dark,' she says. Which is stupid because all you are doing when you're reading is using your eyes, just the same as if you were looking where you are going or shopping in the supermarket or enjoying the view. Anyway, I wouldn't have had to read the cereal packet if Dad hadn't said at breakfast, 'It's rude to read at the table,' and taken my book away. He's always doing that.

The book I'm reading at the moment (or was until Dad took it away from me) is Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. Granny lent it to me. Dad flicked through it and said to Mum, 'Should she be reading this?' like it was one of those fat books Mum reads on holiday that I'm not allowed to borrow. Mum shrugged and said, 'It's a cla.s.sic,' so Dad just put it on the counter until I'd finished my muesli. I hate muesli; when I stay over at Gina's, she has those little packets with all the different cereals in them. Mum says they're bad for your teeth, but what I had for breakfast had 22g of sugar per 100g, so I don't think that's very healthy either.

I worked out the number of words I'd read by using a formula. My formula is one page equals 350 words. You times the number of pages by 350 to get the total, and then add all the other words you've read during the day. You can count adverts and things like menus, but not road signs or shop names that you pa.s.s every day, because they're not new. I read 60 pages of Sense and Sensibility today, so that makes 21,000 words already. Then I added all the words in lessons (in books and on the board) and the hymns in a.s.sembly. Plus the torn bit of newspaper someone had left on the seat by the bus stop. And it came to 27,373.

I overheard Uncle Terry say to Mum once, 'She's a right little bookworm', like it was something not quite right. I looked it up. The dictionary said Bookworm: An organism, sometimes a literal worm, which harms books by feeding on their binding or leaves. Also a term for a person devoted to books. I think he meant the 'also' bit. I like the word devoted. It makes me think of Little Women. I've read that too.

I yearn to get back to Elinor and Marianne. Yearn is my word of the day. It means to long or ache or hanker for. I don't like hanker much because it sounds too close to handkerchief which is not serious enough. Granny gave me a very old dictionary, which looks like someone has picked at the cover with their nails. I think it might be covered in leather because it smells a bit funny and the pages are blobby with little brown marks. I looked up yearn in that and it said: To have a strong, often melancholy desire. And I thought that suited Sense and Sensibility because that is how I feel about it. It makes me scrunch my toes up and hold my breath. I've just read the bit where Marianne falls ill because of the horrible Willoughby, which was so terrible I could hardly bear it (even though I think Marianne is a bit of an idiot sometimes) and I wanted it to go on forever at the same time. This is why it is such a good book, because it's almost making you read it whether you want to or not.

Sometimes when I'm lying in bed at night, all the characters of all of the books I've read swim round my head in a mad dance. My head feels like it might burst with words sometimes and then I think that I've years and years of reading still to come and where do all the words go? Mrs Finch said in cla.s.s that everything we ever see or do or read leaves a memory in our brains, but I've seen a picture of a brain and it's so small. And if we can't store all the words and stories, then how do we know we aren't just reading the same things over and over without knowing it? That's why I keep all the books I've read in my bedroom so I can prove to myself I know what they are about. Some of my friends test me sometimes, especially Harriet. She says, 'Okay, cleverclogs, tell me what happens in the book,' so I do. I tell her about all the characters and what happens to them and the sorts of things they say and how it makes me feel. I did that with The Lord of the Rings, but she said, 'Oh, I've seen that on DVD so I don't have to read it,' and even though I told her that the books were miles better and that the films left loads of stuff out, she didn't care. At first, Mrs Finch didn't believe I'd read all three books it's called a trilogy because she'd never met anyone as young as me who had. She didn't read them until she was at university. I told her I hope they have loads of books at university because I don't want to go there if it's full of things like The Lord of the Rings that I've already read. Although I wouldn't mind reading something like Pride and Prejudice again (but not straightaway), because there's so much going on and you can learn a lot about life in olden times. Plus Mrs Bennet is really funny.

Once I'd learnt what a bookworm was, the word kept coming up all over the place. It was in the paper yesterday morning in an article about Jacqueline Wilson and I saw it on the back of a book I picked up in the local bookshop on the way home from school. I didn't buy the book, I never do, unless it's my birthday or something, but I love being in there, surrounded by the smell of books. Sometimes I think words just hang around in the background waiting to be noticed and then when they are they get sort of brighter so they stand out. I don't like the 'worm' bit, but if that's what the word is, then I suppose I'm stuck with it. I wonder if there are jobs for people to invent new words or better ones, because sometimes you come across something and there isn't a word for it. Or perhaps there is, but I haven't read it yet. I mean, why isn't there a word for those days in September when the dew twinkles on the spiders' webs in the privet hedge and the air feels like it's decided just that morning that summer is over? Or the sensation you get when the melted cheese in cheese on toast sticks to the roof of your mouth? I asked Granny that once and she just said, 'Goodness me, Laura, you do have some odd ideas, don't you? Sticky?' and then she gave me a big hug and said 'Bless' to Mum over my head. Sticky's not right: that doesn't describe the way you can push the cheese around with your tongue like playdough and how the b.u.t.ter makes it all slippery.

Mrs Finch has been having 'one-to-ones' with each of us at the moment. One-to-ones are conversations just between her and one pupil, in private. It's part of the preparation for us moving up to secondary school next year. I like Mrs Finch a lot; she reminds me of my Auntie Ruth. She's quite large, like Auntie, and very jolly, with a big laugh that makes her face and b.o.o.bies bounce up and down. But she can be very strict if she thinks we aren't behaving properly. Everyone knows to keep quiet when Mrs Finch gets one of her moods on. But in the one-to-ones, she is really kind and empathetic. That means standing in our shoes and imagining the way we might be feeling. She said, 'Are you nervous about going to Haydon Hill? I know I would be if I were you.' But I'm not, not at all. I'm looking forward to doing new subjects and wearing the Haydon Hill uniform. And anyway, most of my friends are going too, so I don't expect it will be that different there. Mrs Finch said a funny thing when we finished our chat, 'At least you'll never be at a loss for words, Laura,' and gave a little laugh, so I laughed too to be polite and went to collect my coat and bag because it was home time by then.

I was going to call in at the library on my way home, because I knew I would finish Sense and Sensibility at the weekend and I was worried I wouldn't have anything to read on Sunday. I want to read all Jane Austen's books and I haven't read Persuasion yet, but Granny didn't have a copy of that. 'Still enjoying Miss Austen, then, my pet, are you?' she said last weekend when I rushed back to Sense and Sensibility after Sunday lunch and when I said yes, she smiled and whispered, 'I think that's her best book. Takes you to another place, doesn't she?' I knew what she meant. She's taken me to loads of places already Norland Park, London, Bath, Pemberley, Mansfield Park so I was looking forward to my next adventure.

But when I came out of school, Mum was waiting at the gate, looking like someone had wiped all the colour off her face. She was peering all around as if she'd lost something, then she saw me and she gave a little cry and broke through the sea of bodies and grabbed me by the wrist. Her hands were icy cold, even though the day was warm. Her mouth was all wobbly and her voice sounded odd, like her tongue was swollen. 'Mum?' I said and my heart jumped in my chest, knocking all the breath out of me.

'It's Granny,' said Mum. 'She's in hospital.' And then we were in the car and Mum was driving in lurches through the traffic and when I looked at her, tears were dripping off her chin on to the front of her shirt. She tried to give me a smile as we pulled into the hospital car park, but it came out all wrong and then she was fumbling in her purse for change to buy a ticket. We ran up the side of the building hand in hand and into the entrance, which was gla.s.s and full of light like a cathedral. People were standing and sitting around as if they were waiting for someone to tell them what to do and then Mum was pushing me into a lift and stabbing the b.u.t.ton for the fifth floor.

Granny looked very small in the bed. There was something funny about her face. Half of it looked like Granny and half like someone else's face had been stuck on to it, and not very carefully at that. Mum took Granny's hand, which was lying all knotted up on the sheet and stroked it. 'Go on,' she said, nodding her head towards Granny's other hand, 'hold her hand so she'll know you're here.' It felt like tissue paper, all feathery and fragile, like it might tear if you rubbed too hard. 'Dad's on his way,' said Mum. 'And Auntie Ruth.'

I looked at Granny, at the tiny flicker of her eyelids, at the tears leaking out of the eye on the funny side, and I thought of all the things I wanted to tell her about. I wanted to tell her how happy I'd felt when Elinor realises Edward Ferrars really loves her. I thought about the way she always says, 'Goodness me, the speed that child reads!' as if she is a bit embarra.s.sed and a bit proud at the same time. I thought about the day she stopped looking things up in the dictionary for me and pulled the spotty book down from the top of the bookcase and said, 'There you go. That should keep you out of mischief for a while.' I remembered the musty smell when I opened it for the first time and how tiny the words had been and how it was the first time I'd seen the word 'ecstasy' written down and how I told Granny it was my favourite word and she'd smiled.

A nurse came in and murmured something in Mum's ear. Mum got up and whispered to me as if afraid she might wake Granny, 'Dad's on the phone. I won't be long. Talk to Granny while I'm gone.' I must have looked startled, because she leant towards me and said, 'I know she looks like she's asleep, but hearing's the last thing to go.' To go? To go where? And where had the first things gone? What were they? Mum hesitated in the doorway then rushed back to give me a really hard hug. 'Don't be frightened, sweetheart. It's just that at the moment Granny's in another place.'

The sun streamed in through the window, bathing Granny in a white light that almost hurt you to look at it. I sat forward on the hard plastic chair and opened my mouth to say something. I could feel my head buzzing with words, alive with them, but none of them would come out. I thought to myself, I must have thousands, millions of words in my brain, why can't I find any of them? I thought about what Mrs Finch had said and how it wasn't true. I had lost my words. And then I remembered my bag at my feet. I reached down and my hand closed around the book. I knew all about being in another place. I opened Granny's favourite book at my bookmark and, in my best reading-aloud-in-cla.s.s voice, but quietly so only she could hear, I began to read.

My inspiration: Our son is about to become a father. We were discussing the perfect 'starter library' for our grandchild and reminiscing about how and when we were introduced to certain books. I recalled first reading Jane Austen (and realising on rereading her years later how much I had missed!) and insisted she be included in our collection.

SNOWMELT.

Lane Ashfeldt.

'I had thought such ecstasy dead in me forever, but the sun of Italy has thawed the frozen stream.'

Mary Sh.e.l.ley, 'Rambles in Germany and Italy', 1844.

That winter, as snows fell on England and fires raged in Australia, as floods visited both countries, Miss Campbell became convinced the end was near.

She did not say so to neighbours or to people at the library, but the idea was not new to her. For months she had lived in fear of a plague. Scientists were on the alert for a new contagious disease. It was overdue. The next plague to hit would be rapid and deadly, they said. In deference to their opinions she filled two kitchen cupboards with tinned beans and bottled water, enough to survive a month without leaving her loft. She imagined her neighbours in the event of a quarantine. No 'Blitz spirit' for them: they'd be out looting the Tesco Express, the Boots, the Morrisons, even the all-night shop at the garage. When all obvious sources of food and medicine were exhausted, they would attack each other. Her only chance of survival would be to sit tight with her doors and windows locked.

But what form would this new plague take, Miss Campbell asked herself. The avian flu? Some sort of viral cancer? Perhaps, like the Black Death, it had sneaked in at the back door and was quietly multiplying as it fixed itself on the old, the weak and the young. Mr Shanahan, a regular at the library, had been hospitalised at Halloween for laser surgery on his eye. By Christmas he was gone. If she ever needed an operation she would choose day surgery; she did not wish to join the list of superbug victims.

Now, watching the burning bushes and frozen lakes, listening to the signs and portents that issued from her television screen, Miss Campbell began to think that the end of the world might after all be precipitated by something other than a plague. By extreme weather, perhaps: melted ice caps, fire and brimstone, a black sun.

She spent the morning boxing atlases and encyclopaedias. The building she'd worked in for fifteen years had closed its doors, and they had three days in which to stock the new library. Someone came into the reference room and called out, 'Miss Campbell, you here?' She popped her head out from behind the shelf and b.u.mped into Angela from reception.

'Oh. I've a caller asking for the head librarian, but Matt's at a conference. He wants to know when he can set up those PCs in Heads.p.a.ce-'

'Heads.p.a.ce?'

'You know, the new zone for teenagers. He just needs to confirm an installation slot.'

Oh yes, the room Matt wouldn't let her order any books for. Some grand scheme of his to 'raise the footfall' of young people.

'Very well, I'll speak to him.'

She took the phone and confirmed a time on Thursday.

'Great. So they'll be up and running ahead of the launch,' Angela said.

'Indeed.'

Miss Campbell found it hard to be enthusiastic. She'd hoped to stay on at the library another eight years, until retirement, but her role was changing so fast. Once, her job had been to share her love of books. Not any more. Books, actual physical books made of paper, were becoming a rarity, something to be tucked away in forgotten corners.

That lunchtime she came across a skip in the car park filled with old library hardbacks. Matt had enquired about stock disposal the other day. 'Generally we donate,' she said, but he told her, 'There's additional costs attached and we're over budget on the move.' She spent her lunch break standing on a chair, reaching into the skip to fish out books worth saving. Then she ferried them down the road to Oxfam. It seemed churlish given how much the council was spending, but Miss Campbell couldn't help it: she was going to miss the old library.

The day of the move coincided with a day's annual leave booked months ago. For weeks Miss Campbell had looked forward to this trip. She was taking an evening cla.s.s on the early novel, and a visit to a library of early women's writing was part of her studies.

Fresh snow had fallen and it glittered on the ground like a Christmas card. The train travelled back in time as swiftly as it raced through frozen fields and copses, until it reached a station whose platforms held no cafes, only painted wooden shelters and matching footbridges. The last stop: the end of the line.

Miss Campbell consulted her map and picked her way down the high street and through the small town, avoiding icy patches and lumps of trodden snow. When she reached the grounds of the house, the whole area was warm and dry. A meadow stretched snow-free and golden into the distance, and a man loaded bales of hay into the loft of a barn as if she'd happened on a small unseasonable patch of summer.

She rang the bell, signed in, climbed the uneven wooden steps and knocked on the library door. A simple room. Books, wooden desks, lamps. A concentrated silence that she longed to bottle and unleash in her own library.

She requested The Last Man.

It was an early edition bound in three volumes. Leather edged, with marbled covers and a matching box. She slid the books out, noting that in 1826 the name Mary Sh.e.l.ley still did not appear. By then Percy had been dead a few years and her married name might have helped sales, but the credit was to 'The Author of Frankenstein'. She placed the top book on the foam reader. It opened on the first page.

'Hear you not the rushing sound of the coming tempest? Do you not behold the clouds open, and destruction lurid and dire pour down on the blasted earth? See you not the thunderbolt fall, and are deafened by the shout of heaven that follows its descent? Feel you not the earth quake and open with agonising groans, while the air is pregnant with shrieks and wailings all announcing the last days of man?' *

Miss Campbell rose from her seat in alarm. What if this pa.s.sage from the third volume had revealed itself to her as a warning? A sign. Yes, that was it. The signs were here, but no one could read them. No one wanted to read them.

She hurried to the window, searching for what? A thunderbolt, a quake, a tempest? She half expected to watch the lawn rip asunder, but still it stretched away from the house, green and sunny.

She stood at the window as others had stood before her, going back four centuries. Even before the house existed, local thanes had lived in this area; and before them, Romans, drawn by a warmth they missed from the south.

She breathed deeply.

These ancient words, which might have filled her with terror had she read them alone in her flat at night, were not ready to come true just yet.

Miss Campbell returned to her seat, and to her work. The day pa.s.sed swiftly, the sun racing across the south lawn to disappear behind the trees. She looked back as she closed the gate; the last light bathed the house and filled the air around it.

On the walk to the station the magic of bygone centuries receded. People on the high street did the same kind of thing people in Balham did - bought naan bread or focaccia, fruit or meat, wine or beer, as they wended their way home. On the train back to the city the sky closed over, a lid slammed on the world.

Descending the steps into the Underground, Miss Campbell was. .h.i.t by its rich dirty stink. Metallic yet animal. A smell she'd not noticed this morning, it was so long since she'd breathed clean air.

That night she settled in front of her 1973 typewriter and began to type. Earlier she had put off this task, because how can you reduce a person to a few pages, a life and its work to five thousand words? Somehow she felt less wary of her subject now. Spurred on by the noisy rattle of the Golfball, she wrote of Mary Sh.e.l.ley's dark loneliness; her struggles as a single parent; her visions of the end of the world, penned a hundred and fifty years before this typewriter was manufactured, and set another century beyond that in 2073.

'Like Frankenstein and horror,' Miss Campbell wrote, 'The Last Man was conceived before science fiction was a genre, before others trod accepted paths into these strange new worlds. Before leaps in time became pedestrian. Mary Sh.e.l.ley's vision of the future was very different from the one we have today. It had no place for gadgets such as the sonic screwdriver or the improbability drive...'

She typed far into the night, aware and yet unaware of time pa.s.sing, pausing, rewinding, forwarding.

The following day the computers arrived, and by eleven Miss Campbell was in Heads.p.a.ce with the man who had come to install them. Matt, too, was there to see his vision take shape.

'Fantastic, isn't it?'

'I suppose.'

'You don't sound so sure.'

'It's just, we could fit thousands of books in this s.p.a.ce, do you know?'

'And I'm sure you know,' he smiled, 'that each computer allows its user to view an infinite number of virtual books?' 'No actual books, though.'

The man installing the machines looked up and the two men exchanged sympathetic glances. Matt declaimed as if a small crowd was gathered round to hear him: 'Isn't what an actual book is quite an arbitrary construct? Engravings, wooden tablets, scrolls, vellum sheets, paper: technology moves on, and we must move with it. Change doesn't have to be a bad thing.'

'I like computers,' Miss Campbell said, 'but I like books, too. And I don't think computers can replace them.'

She looked up, curious to see how he'd respond, but by then Matt was sending text messages.

At the launch event she avoided him. Easily done. Matt was busy impressing the local government luminaries who had bankrolled his new library, telling them about the events planned to promote it. They cl.u.s.tered around him, looking even more ironed and dry-cleaned than the librarians, who were at pains to look their best. A champagne reception at work was a rare treat and they were out to make the most of it.

Angela followed Miss Campbell's gaze.

'He's such a high flyer, Matt. I wonder, will he still be with us in six months, or will he move on to some other milestone project?'

'Who cares?' said one librarian.

'Fine by me if he goes,' said another. 'We'll cope without.'

'He gave me a lecture last week on the benefits of change,' Miss Campbell said. 'I took him at his word. I'm selling my flat and moving out of London.'

'Isn't now a bad time to sell?'

'Only the worst for thirty years, they say. But I'm not waiting thirty years for the next good time.'

There was a rush of questions about where she was moving to, and she told them.

'Oh, not such a long commute,' Angela said. 'So you'll stay on here? At the library I mean.' The look she gave Miss Campbell said: don't do anything foolish, my girl.

'Like Matt says change can be a good thing. There's a little library out that way needs a volunteer. I'll love the work, and if all goes well they'll think of me when a paid vacancy comes up.'

Half disbelieving, half envious, they raised a toast to her new life and the conversation moved on. Later Angela took her to one side.

'If you don't mind my saying, I hope you've thought things through. Doesn't pay to be too impulsive, does it?'

Miss Campbell thought of Mary Sh.e.l.ley. Always hard up. No wonder, since her menfolk were so careless with their finances -but she never let money take over. If she had done there'd be less of interest for a modern reader to learn about her now. As things stood, the time was ripe for a serious in-depth study, and she might just be the person to undertake it.

'Doesn't the danger lie in entrusting our future to others? Like bankers, I mean. Perhaps, Angela, we should take charge-'

'Don't bring "the recession" into this. I'm thinking of you, is all. You don't want to make things hard on yourself.'

Miss Campbell smiled.

'I'm thinking of me, too. I'm thinking, "I only have one life and it could end any time." There are a few things I'd like to do before that happens, do you know?'

Light and shadow flickered across Miss Campbell's face as the train pa.s.sed a stand of bare-branched trees. Then, in the open fields, the sun steadied and she closed her eyes to focus on its warmth. Already the journey felt familiar. This time she was going south to look for a flat. She had boxed her things in readiness; early that morning a man from Oxfam had come to collect her donation.

'Not the kind of stuff we normally get. Gone off beans, then, have you?' he asked as he lifted the crates of tinned food.

Miss Campbell smiled. She'd stopped believing there was much point in preparing for a plague or for the end of the world. If it came, it came.

He nodded towards the cardboard boxes. 'Those old hardbacks, you'll be wanting them gone too, my love?'