So, I did think that I would try to make the chapters successively shorter until the end, but I realised I couldn't do this without a lot of boring expository dialogue, and I never use exposition or indeed dialogue when a nice symbol will do. So another long'un. The title is from Ernie O'Malley's memoirs of the conflict in Ireland, but comes from a colloquialism the gist of which is that it's easy to feel satisfied with your own lot when confronted with the suffering of others.

Since I'm nearing the end - indeed, I have the final couple of chapters more or less written - I have to say that this has been a really interesting experience for me, writing in installments and with characters invented by someone else - within a kind of pre-existing framework. And it's been really fun as well. And I'm sorry I'm not mature enough to write about English public schoolboys and not have them have sex with each other, but we all have our cross to bear.

Once again - do, please, review.


Who is stronger than hope? Death.

Who is stronger than the will? Death.

Stronger than love? Death.

Stronger than life? Death.

But who is stronger than Death?

Me, evidently.

Pass, Crow.
- Ted Hughes, Examination At The Womb Door


The one of them said to his mate,

'Where shall we our breakefast take?'

'Downe in yonder greene field,

There lies a knight slain vnder his shield.

'His hounds they lie downe at his feete,

So well they can their master keepe.

'His haukes they flie so eagerly,

There's no fowle dare him come nie.'

Downe there comes a fallow doe,

As great with yong as she might goe.

She lift vp his bloudy hed,

And kist his wounds that were so red.

She got him vp vpon her backe,

And carried him to earthen lake.
- The Child Ballads: 26. The Three Ravens


The Son of the Family was a creature of appetite. Movement always, hunger, eternal and savage. The boy did not have any awareness of this, only the faintest dimmest yearning of his own, the need to live once more, that was quite lost in the bilious maelstrom of continual desire. It was agony to be a formless cloud; it was sweet agony to be a creature of flesh and blood. Yet he couldn't quite be concrete, for anything that he took would wither when he took it. Instead of housing himself in a form, he merely absorbed the pain and desperation of whichever creature had once possessed that form, and his hunger remained unabated. Yet he was superior to Mother and Father, who were mere bursts of hunger, bright bursts like fireworks, for he had the knack of organising, he knew that there must be a method. And he could scent the delicious length of the Doctor's life, and he knew that they must take it. Until then, continual hunger, embracing without consummation, like a knight in a fairytale who loves his liege's lady. But now they had the scent of the white hart, and like the knight's pointers they pursued it.

To be guarding the fields was to have been martyred, painful yet fitting. He saw into another world. He was quiet, though inside him there were still little lives that would have ached and bellowed mournfully for what was lost, if they could. But they would cease to recall what it was to be alive, soon enough.

The one thing that he wanted, at times, was his Sister.


Tim had not been aware that anyone other than Hutchinson would arrive at his house later in the afternoon, and yet Eleanor and Jane were both with him. "I told them that you had a visitor, but nothing else," Hutchinson whispered as they entered the house. "Between you and me, I think that they are plotting something."

They both seemed extraordinarily cheerful, and Jane in particular had a secretive look about her that was obviously causing Hutchinson some discomfort. Tim knew, though they had not discussed it explicitly, that Hutchinson felt that the war had changed women irrevocably and for the worse – they now had these notions of equality, and wore skirts above the ankle (though Eleanor, Tim was pleased to note, was, as a bohemian, always in pre-Raphaelite long skirts), and had developed a ghastly little system of secrecy amongst themselves. They were more physically intimate with each other, Hutchinson thought. They had lost sight of why they needed men.

It was a broken world they lived in now, and it had split men and women in two just as Zeus had when first the cartwheeling children of the sun, and moon, and earth, tried to make war upon heaven.

"I'm not sure why you felt the need to accompany me," Hutchinson informed his wife stiffly.

"Oh, darling, I imagine he'll look quite ridiculous if we let you see to him," Jane replied, with a golden laugh that made her husband visibly flinch. Her eyes focused on Tim. "You ought to have seen," she said, shaking her head maternally, "what he had picked out for your visitor – I've never seen such a horrid pile of rags."

"And where is your visitor?" Eleanor finished, without missing a beat.

And, without a pause, Baines appeared in the doorway. He was wary of them. He smiled wanly and said, "Hello," in a quiet voice, and extended a hand.

"Hello," Eleanor said, taking it. She stared at him, her mouth open a little, and then remembered her manners and said, "I'm Eleanor, Tim's fiancée."

"Pleased to meet you," he mumbled. "Jeremy Baines."

And then Jane introduced herself. She was not nearly as transfixed as Eleanor, but she smiled at him pleasantly all the same. Hutchinson cleared his throat. "Here," he said, roughly taking the bag of clothes from Jane and pushing them into Baines' hands.

"No, no," Jane said equably, taking some of them back. "You put on what you have there, Ed – Jeremy, and then come back down to us." It was not even a particularly obvious slip, but Hutchinson heard it.

He padded up the stairs.

Then Eleanor looked at Tim shrewdly and asked, "Who is he?"

"Just, I suppose, an old friend," Tim said off-handedly. "Have you got my watch?"

She began to hand it to him, and then held it back as he reached for it. "He's very young," she said slowly.

"That's what I thought," Jane agreed.

"And he does seem rather like he doesn't fit."

"Certainly, there's something very incongruous about him, I saw it as soon as I looked at him."

They were talking to each other now. The men might as well not have been present. Hutchinson gave Tim a baleful look. "The watch," Hutchinson snapped.

Eleanor glanced at him as though considering arguing, bristling at the way he had spoken to her. But she pressed it tenderly into Tim's hand. "I don't understand why it's so important anyway," she muttered. "And you aren't usually so sentimental."

"It isn't just sentimentality," Tim said. "Time is important to me. It seems that everyone else has a very instinctive grasp of this business of living one's life from one end to the next – well, I don't. You must forgive my attachment to the object, only it feels to me like the concrete realisation of that fact."


Jane and Edward would play hide-and-seek in every dark corner of the house. They would tramp through the rooms in nearly identical dress – Jane would wear one of Mummy's petticoats with a yellow scarf, and Edward would wear the same but with a red scarf, and they would carry wooden bows and arrows. The petticoats were silk and so were the scarves, because the Mongols had worn silk underwear to deflect the arrows of their enemies; because the arrows flew with a corkscrew motion, and silk does not tear, the arrows would get caught and twist the silk tightly, and the Mongol warrior had only to unscrew the arrow from the bunched fabric and continue on his merry way.

Sometimes a bird would fly out of one of Jane's dreams, cross the nursery on spectral wings, and enter Edward's dream. Upon discussing this, they would conduct a thorough examination of the house and find the offending bird perched inside a crest adorning a flagon in the dining room.


When Baines had returned downstairs, a smile cleft Jane's face in two. He was wearing shirt and trousers – now the women set about dressing him. The rain hissed softly outside. Hutchinson was simmering angrily, and so to distract him, Tim said, "Listen.". It was a dripping sound, the water dripping from the eaves.

"Stillicide," Tim said.

"I say, is that really a word or did you invent it?"

"I believe Keats invented it. It's my favourite."

"Curious." Hutchinson chewed his moustache slightly. Then he looked embarrassed.

Tim, delighted, asked, "What?"

"Oh – oh, before one has the word for something, it doesn't quite seem to – ah, exist, in the same way."

Eleanor grinned bitterly at this. She understood it well enough, she knew what the Gaelic League and Thomas Davis had been up to, but she decided not to mention it. Jane was now helping Baines on with his jacket, as Eleanor wound a scarf around his neck. He had been protesting, of course, that he could do these things perfectly well himself – but Eleanor noticed the change in his bearing, and how happy he seemed to be, being coddled. It was so hard not to coddle him. They decided to get inside the overcoat with him. "Look," Jane crowed happily, as he squirmed, embarrassed, between them.

"For God's sake, leave him alone," Hutchinson said disgustedly.

"He's so young, isn't he?" Eleanor said, as they released him. "I think I invented him," she said, looking Baines straight in the face. He faltered and blushed, which made her laugh loudly.

"Oh, stop bullying him," Tim said affably, "you pair of mad women."

"But I'm not lying. I'll show you. I'll show you later, darling." And, with these mysterious words, she placed a hat ceremoniously upon Baines' head. She and Jane stood back to admire the effect. Baines was almost wholly obscured.

"I say, it looks like your laundry has decided to take the air," Eleanor chuckled. Jane laughed too, and they held onto each other like schoolgirls as they giggled.

"It's not my fault," Hutchinson snarled, "that he hasn't grown."

And the force with which he uttered these words, coupled with just how incomprehensible they were, caused everyone to fall silent, and for a moment all that could be heard was the sound of the rain and its slow trickling from the eaves.


"It's starting to rain," Cecily said, and she turned her head swiftly so that her hair brushed his face. The ivy was thick, and although the leaves began to tremble agitatedly, neither of them felt particularly wet.

"Do you think they've forgotten all about us?" she asked. Her head was still turned away from him, so that he got very little of her voice. What he had, in abundance, was the smell of her neck. He found himself unable to say very much.

"I say, Germs, did you hear me?" She turned back to him now. A feather's width separated the tips of their respective noses. It was not so dark that he couldn't see her, but it was dark enough that he felt comfortable. "You're so dense."

But her voice wavered a little when she said it. Blindly, he fumbled with her skirts.

First she said, "Germs, stop it." And then she made a little gasp, and for a moment shifted about as though she were quite pleased with this turn of events. But perhaps he was overenthusiastic, and oughtn't to have used his whole hand, because soon she was shouting loudly, "Stop it, you fool, it hurts, it hurts."

They lingered under the ivy until the rain lightened, and then went back into the house, where the others were eating their tea placidly. He was starving and ate two large slices of cake. After a moment, he realised that she was staring at him with something between disgust and pity.

"Are you always so hungry?" she asked. "Always?"

Her mother shushed her.


The hall was near-silent. They shuffled in one at a time and took seats before the podium. A dour-looking collection of people on one side of the stage must be the mediums – and they appeared disappointingly earnest, red-faced, gentle. Something told Tim that perhaps this would not be as amusing as he had hoped, and nor would it find them any answers, but he sat back and tossed Eleanor a conspiratorial smile. She sat at his left. On his right was Baines, and, beyond him, Hutchinson and Jane. The atmosphere was both hot with anticipation and simply, in terms of temperature, hot – everyone was itchy in their wet woollen coats, and the breath of others tickled one's face.

People began to trickle in, as much, he supposed, because it was a rainy afternoon as anything else. But soon he became aware of a very distinct contingent in the makeup of the audience. There were many widows and brides-that-never-were. So, when the speaking began, he knew that he ought to be contemptuous of the man who spent a long time engaged in conversation with a woman whose husband had died shortly before the armistice – he knew he ought to see this as manipulative and cruel. But it was clear that, though the gentleman was obviously extracting the information from her, piece by piece, he did it entirely unconsciously, and she responded in kind. And then there was a perfunctory and comforting message from the afterlife, and the woman, weeping with relief, turned to her daughter and hugged her.

It was too pitiful to be entertainment.

There was a noise at the back of the hall, and those assembled turned to see Joan Redfern, who smiled, embarrassed, and folded her umbrella, and embarked towards a seat at the front of the hall. Tim had imagined the scene so frequently, the Doctor striding to the front of the room with Martha in tow, producing some intricate gadget from his pocket, talking at great speed and intermittently bugging his eyes out, lights, vaporisations, secrets revealed – that he actually emitted a little gasp of disappointment. Following close behind Joan was a shambling woman in a grey coat, and behind her was a thin and sallow girl of about thirteen years.


As they had walked into town, Eleanor had taken his arm and held him back from the others. He huddled under her umbrella (not as awkwardly as he might have wished, for he was not much taller than she), and took her sketchbook carefully when she handed it to him. "Must I look now?"

"If you want to understand what I meant earlier," she said, with a smile. "I won't show it you again. And please don't drop it this time, I couldn't bear it if it fell into a puddle."

He opened the book and flipped through it, unsure as to what he was looking for until he found it. It was a sketch of a boy in roughly the posture of the Dying Gaul, reminiscent of St Sebastian, drawn in the same heavy Blakean style as everything else that Eleanor drew, only perhaps a little slighter to emphasise the youth of the subject. But for some reason it reminded him also of the pornographic picture Hutchinson had given him, and in the corner of the page there was a cluster of unfinished heads, with horns in various styles, that seemed to confirm that Eleanor had indeed been thinking of this. The figure did not have a clear face but was convulsing as though in agony, and this convulsion was so accurately rendered that once again Tim wondered what Eleanor had done with herself in Ireland.

"Do you see the resemblance?" she asked.

He fumbled with it. "It could be anyone," he said.

"Tim! You're getting rain all over it." And with that, she snatched it back.


There was only one individual who seemed to be what they had expected, or rather what they had secretly hoped for and simultaneously dreaded. His name was given as Benzelius, and though he was otherwise modern enough, he wore an eighteenth-century-style frock coat. He had a calm, smooth, unnerving face with eyes set deep in his head, and a mouth that in some oblique way seemed to suggest that he was a charlatan just as plainly as if he'd said it himself. Eleanor grew very excited when she glimpsed him; they were certain that his would be great feats of smoke and snake oil. Their anticipation rose further when he made some allusions to a spirit-guide.

But alas, here also they were disappointed. Tim began to feel boredom set in, and fidgeted. His mind roamed throughout time, into the future, trying to see Eleanor, but all he saw was the baby. There would, he knew for certain, be a child.

Jane was the only one to look at all alert, and Hutchinson was quite alarmed to see her so. She was beginning to frighten him quite terribly now, sitting straight-backed, her eyes bright and attentive. He himself could have cared less about the whole thing, until his ears briefly caught a snippet of what the odd, boring little man was saying – "Marriage is forever," he said, with great seriousness. "A righteous marriage is the binding together of two souls in a process of continual refinement, so that the bond cannot be broken even in the afterlife." A righteous marriage? Hutchinson looked at his wife once more.

When Benzelius began to speak of marriage as the union between wisdom, represented by the man, and love, represented by the female, Eleanor snorted loudly and Tim glared at her, not because he didn't take her point, but because other people had looked round.

And Tim could see them, the wives whose husbands had never returned, some of whom had damp and silent faces. He would rather that Eleanor saw his approbation than theirs, for theirs was fearsome, and had its origins in the wellspring of ancient grief. Joan Redfern had sufficient self-control not to cast such a glance, but Tim saw her face momentarily blank.


After a little while, Jane became aware of a shadowy figure who stood beside Benzelius and mimicked his every movement. The figure was as faint as breath upon glass, but had the dark sheen of oily feathers. She watched, fascinated, the long curving beak and sparkling eyes. No one else appeared to see this figure, and she realised why when its hands suddenly fiddled behind its head, and the feathered face and sharp beak came away easily.

It was Edward.


Then they all returned to being bored for a long while, and eventually the sermonising reached its end. As they were going out, Tim looked sadly at Baines and said, "Well, that was a waste of time. We still don't know what to do."

"We have to get him to the hidden land," Jane said, matter-of-factly.

They all stopped to look at her. The rain was battering hard at their umbrellas, rebounding off them with great force. "Whatever do you mean?" Eleanor asked.

"She's still feverish," Hutchinson muttered, tight-lipped.

"I'm certainly not," Jane said, and the others realised that they had never seen her speak to him in anger before.

"The hidden land," Jane informed them. "Edward told me. While we were in there, he was whispering to me. He is in the hidden land, and so are all the other boys. It's the land of the dead and dying and half-dead and thought-to-be-dead."

The thought made them all silent. Tim squeezed Baines' arm gently and without realising he did it, and this tender gesture angered both Eleanor and Hutchinson, though they said nothing of it.

"That's nonsense," Hutchinson said eventually. "In any case, it's an impossibility. Even if there were such a place – "

"If there were such a place," Tim informed him, "there would be a lot of doors to it, if one only knew where to look." Doors under hawthorn trees, he was thinking, and rivers that run into underground caves, and dark places beneath bridges.

"Is that not Joan Redfern?" Eleanor asked, raising her arm to point.

They made her out through the sheet of rain, in the act of bidding farewell to her cousin and cousin's daughter. And then her relations set off towards her little house, and she set off in quite the opposite direction. They watched her go. Then, with barely a glance at one another, they followed her.


To be a person is, it must be said, infinitely superior to being a formless gas trapped in a glass bulb. And it means that one can do such cruel things, for cruelty is so inherent in humanity that it passes almost without notice. You realise I could quite easily have lived out the rest of your life like this? I might have gone home at the end of the school term and your mother and father, rather more occupied with the antics of George and Robert than you, would have been none the wiser as long as you kept eating and breathing and making the right noises. They might even have been pleased at this change in you, this sudden focus and discipline and the evaporation of your usual gormlessness. In the war, with myself as pilot, you would have been a hero – for I have prior knowledge of all of these events, and I am impossibly cruel. You could have married Cecily, who would have been so grateful for such a husband. You would be exactly as an Englishman is supposed to be: silent and unostentatious and entirely heartless.

If I could live so long, or be satisfied by such things.


"What in God's name," Hutchinson began, for Baines had suddenly turned and run off along the road that led out of town. Jane glanced at them, dropped her umbrella, and sprinted after him. Hutchinson made to follow, but Eleanor stopped him. She looked to Tim.

"You go on ahead," she said, "and I'll catch up with them."

Hutchinson would have argued, but Tim shook his head at him, and they continued on, while Eleanor pursued the rapidly receding shapes ahead of her. She had to lift her long skirts for fear of tripping, and the velvet quickly became soaked and heavy. Through the rain it was hard to make out the others distinctly, but once she swore that what she saw ahead of Jane was not human at all, but an animal.


First he changed into a white hart. This hurt. His fear grew worse, and he ran still faster, impelled by the wild beating of his heart. He saw only black and white blurs. His eyes rolled in his head.
But somehow, she had caught him. She grabbed at him, throwing her arms around his neck. Her legs scraped painfully along the muddy ground, but she held tight, even as he tried to shake her off. Her fingers locked as though in prayer.
They had ceased running, Eleanor saw. Baines was nowhere to be seen. Jane had fallen to the ground. Eleanor rushed to help her, and started back in horror when she saw that Jane held in her arms a large snake, that twisted violently from side to side and did all it could to shake her off. She would not let go. Eleanor bent down, but Jane screamed, "Stay back!" The snake was beginning to wrap itself tightly around her waist and chest, hissing loudly.
And then the hissing was the hiss of steam as it poured off a bar of molten iron. Jane had clutched it to her chest – its outer layer was a dull red, though inside it was white with heat. She screamed and screamed. It was adhering to her skin, burning through her clothes to her pelican-heart. She had never felt such searing, not even when she lay silently alongside her husband in bed, and his face was the face of a stranger. But she knew that she could not let go. She clutched it to her as though it were a baby.
Eleanor, horrified, began trying to prise Jane's fingers from the metal, singeing her own in the process, but Jane screamed at her again. The light in the heart of the iron seemed to be twisting and writhing just as the snake had, and the steam was making a fearful jet. Jane wept tears that felt, to her, like tears of blood.
And then the jet of steam was breath, and he was a youth once more. He lay, exhausted, his eyes unseeing. Jane crouched over him. She clutched him tightly, just as tightly as the iron bar or the snake or the hart. She was sobbing violently. Eleanor dropped to her own knees and hugged her friend tightly, and for a moment they knelt in the rain. Then Eleanor got to her feet, and extended her hand, and Jane took it, and after slumping back for a moment in the mud, as though he were quite possibly considering staying there, Baines reluctantly stood and followed them.
Joan did not turn once to look behind her, as she went. She seemed terribly single-minded, and were it not for that, and for the dawning realisation of where she was going, Tim would have wondered to what end they were following her. It had seemed like the natural thing to do; when she made for the Cartwright house, Tim knew that this intuition had been right.

It had stood unmolested since the catastrophe. No one wanted anything to do with it. The villagers were not sure exactly what had happened, but there was a bad feeling about the place. Even children would not play there, though they spoke of it in hushed tones and dared each other to knock at the door and so forth. The windows were filthy, so that nothing could be seen inside – but now, Tim realised with a chill, there was a light shining somewhere inside. He tapped Hutchinson's arm lightly, and they withdrew into another doorway as Joan stopped, glanced about her, and rummaged in her pocket. Having found whatever she was looking for, presumably a key, she set about opening the door, and, with one last glance, disappeared inside.

Hutchinson was staring at Tim. He had a protective arm around him. "What are we doing?" he murmured tersely.

"We're going to find the hidden land," Tim said, with a smile.

"Tim – "

"No, I mean," Tim's voice became a conspiratorial whisper, "I really think that – he – might be here."

"Your Doctor?"

"You needn't sound so sceptical. You know that what happened, the scarecrows, the bombardment, you know that it wasn't natural."

Hutchinson did know; but he did not feel exactly certain. His memories were such a jumble that he wondered if he might not have imagined certain things, as he had once seen plainly, upon the battlefield, a huge and filthy raven picking at the corpses. It was far vaster than an ordinary bird, almost the size of a horse, and it was not frightened by the shells or bullets. It seemed not to see them. He had never told Tim this. Tim did not need to suspect that he was going mad. Tim needed to believe that he was strong. But all the same, it made it hard for him to trust his own recollection.

"Please," Tim whispered. "Please."

Hutchinson kissed him lightly. "Very well," he said. "I suppose it won't do any harm."

But they were both, of course, horribly frightened that it would.


Eleanor examined Jane as they walked. She had not a mark on her, except that her knees were badly scraped – but the bar had left no burns of any kind. She smiled. Baines walked alongside them, stumbling as though sleep-walking.

They had finally returned to the spot where they had parted ways from Tim and Hutchinson. The sky was almost entire dark now, the clouds so thick that there was no moonlight, and the air was painfully cold. The only light came from a single streetlamp. Eleanor let out a little cry. "Oh goodness, how stupid of me! We don't know where they are. We've lost them."

"The Cartwright house," Jane said matter-of-factly. "Edward says that's where they are."

Eleanor sighed. "It isn't that I don't believe you," she began.

Then there was a great flapping overhead, and a dim shape whipped past the light of the streetlamp and briefly obscured it. Jane chased after it, and Eleanor and Baines followed her. They followed it down a little street, where it suddenly evaporated.

Before them stood the Cartwright house. There was a light shining boldly from a downstairs window.

"You see," Jane said. "I'm right."


When you write something, it is like a baby. It exists in you, but it is separate from you. It may contain things that you didn't put it into it, say things that you never intended it to say. When you have finished it, it seems utterly separate and self-sufficient, except for the strange family resemblance, the way that you can see, in its features, traces of your own. While you write it, you feel it grow. It moves inside you mysteriously. It kicks. It wants to be alive, it wants to live. It does not wait for a seemly moment in which to be born, and it hurts to give birth to it.

Likewise, it hurt the Doctor to become John Smith, and to become the Doctor once more. Why, then, did he do it? He didn't love this woman, although he had great respect for her and was thankful for her quick mind and her courage. He liked her, vaguely, in an abstract sense. He wished her well.

He knew, as well, that this arrangement made her faintly uncomfortable – that she had not asked for it, that it was even as much a source of pain as of happiness to her. But there was a little piece of him that was restless, that would throw out images of their wedding day, their baby, like a distress signal. He would try to pacify it. "Every year," he would murmur softly. "Every year, in November. Wait, be patient."

It was hard for him. He often got so caught up in other things that he forgot entirely about it, but Martha had taken to reminding him at certain intervals, between adventures, so to speak. This meant that sometimes it would have been only a few days, to him, since the last visit, once even only a few hours.

But it was always the same to John Smith. It had always been an eternity. He was always grateful. He usually wept a little.