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Listen, it was my autobiography, the name's Clive Bish, we had taken the whole downstairs at Jason's in Soho for the launch party, but all we wanted to talk about was her. She had died a couple of days ago and she was the only conversation. A few celebs had turned out and the mee-jah had crawled away from its watering holes on Fleet Street, to collapse against the long zinc bar in Jason's. The complementary fizz of flashbulb and champagne. And we talked all night of the dead and the wonderful Chriselda Frey.

I was proud of the book, let me say. The cover was a smart black-and-white number, I was in white tie with slick, black hair, with my washy eyes and wearing the arch expression for which I am famous. God, I looked something thirty years ago. There was nothing new inside it. I have spent my professional life as a monologist, so this was a collection, a re-telling for the fans. There were several copies around the wine bar and some large, blown-up posters of the cover. A Life Trespassing, Clive Bish. My name was splashed under the title in typeset that resembled a signature. The multiple self-images were like talismans and I soaked up their charm, and sparkled it back into the room. My face ached from exaggerating that phiz on the front of my book, from copying myself.

Toward the end of the evening - I am talking five in the morning - I found a table where I could sit on my own with a martini. I was quite drunk and I had the thoughts of a drunk: I decided that the martini glass was like Chriselda Frey. Of course the long, thin stem; of course the provocative sloop of the cup; and also the cool, mentholated moment when it lingers against your breath, before wetting the lips. The two of us had never been lovers, though yes, I was in love with her.

She was known as the German Songbird. She was a much bedded and multi-wedded star. An influence to Fats Waller, to Billie Holliday, she was all the trouble you wanted and she sang that trouble straight into her jazz, into her blues. Chriselda Frey could take her songs right down, keep the audience with her as she wound down the musical energy to a near standstill, a teasing high-hat cymbal keeping tempo for her occasional murmurs and sighs, for ten minutes she could go like this, until she chose to build back up, rethreading the tune into play with loose and dotted rhythms. A lesser genius would have trilled her way to the climax. She did better. Allow me to mention, then, her mordents, also her pralltrillers: the way she would alternate one note above or below the main note, quickly and just once. It was like a small trip, like catching her high-heel shoe and then recovering. She did not overuse it. And after you heard her do that to a piece, you found that no one else got it right ever again.

I could see that J.D. was making his way over. There were not many of us left in the place. I concentrated on my drink, hoping to avoid him. It had a sweet and olive smell. The liquid was clear as fine crystal, its surface like a thick, polished lens. I took a wincing sip of the stuff. We all know this: you know it and I know it: the correct drink for this time of day is champagne. I don't know what I was thinking when I ordered the martini.

"Terrible way for her to go," J.D. said to me, speaking pudgily. There was always something of a recently consumed feast discernable in his speech, glotting up all the sounds.

"It was as real as Berlin," I said.

He did not know what I meant.

"You are like a pig," I said to him. "All you lot, a herd of swiney hacks and diarists, snouting around for your tid-bits. Look at you, you're slavering, as if my pockets might be brimful of acorns and truffles."

I was being rude to him because I thought he might want to sleep with me. He took it all as a huge joke and sat down. His fingers were clutched against a high tumbler of something amber.

"I saw you two," he said. "That Mouse thing." He spoke like a man with an inflammation of the tongue.

He was going way back with mention of the rodent. It had been a revue somewhere off Shaftesbury Avenue - Mouse, the Mouse, it was called - designed to showcase the best of the post-war talent. We performed in a condemned space and we bothered to term it The New Theatre.

"Legendary," J.D. said.

"In this weather, in this whirling," I said, "we should never have let the children outside." Just to say these words transported me. Chriselda's set piece had been a jazzing of the Kindertotenlieder. She had thought to do that to Mahler. By comparison, I had managed only some slight piece of storytelling, I forget, nothing that made it into my later routines. She was on stage with a saxophone and a cello, softly destroying hearts with her lullaby: let the children sleep, no longer afraid, alone in the woods no more. It bears repeating: songs for the death of children; saxophone, cello, voice. I want to use the term 'echt,' which I pronounce as a composite of wrecked and ache.

It was clear what J.D. wanted from me. His society column appeared in the evening editions, so there was time, if I could provide one fresh anecdote about her. He was sitting at my table, motioning for new drinks.

Before our evening performances, at The New Theatre, Chriselda and I would sit in her then poky dressing room and we'd argue. We fairly hated each other by the time our respective calls came. But our performances benefited.

They were bickersome, needling sessions. We knew how to get and stay under the other's skin. She stared at me with her large, green eyes and dismissed me entirely as a man. "Forget the physical," she said. "Trouble with your sort is you could never defend the honour of a woman." She wanted this assessment to bother me. We discussed world affairs. She wanted my opinions to be hot-blooded and unbending. She made circle movements with her ankle, pressed her hands down and across her hips. With each flirting gesture she was saying, Any red-tempered man, any man-of-man is all over me by this point.

And, perversely, because I should not have cared, because I never gave a hoot for that level of masculinity, these attacks mattered all the more to me. She wanted me to have decisive views and no doubts. To annoy her I gave, often, tentative or nuanced thoughts. I sometimes conceded to her line of reasoning, told her that she might have a point. This maddened her; she did not want the reasonable. She simpered and stared ice in equal measure, alternating. It was an out-of-place response, one that she used, to effect, to get men into her bed. It was sad and it was her fallback routine, self-defeating, when she could see no other way to dominate.

We knew, both of us, that we were the only talents in the revue. We were the names, we carried the others; we were the two whose fame had the quality of lasting. And this was true. Two decades later she could still make a splash, her duet with Cleo Lane hop-scotching up the charts, Gonna Keep It For My Daddy. They kept Cher locked out at the number two spot, her Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).

So Chriselda and I stuck to each other. Arguments before the show, cramped in her dressing room. We sparred half for fun and half for the adrenaline rush it gave to our art.

The week after Mouse opened, there was that terrible disaster at King Edward's Junior and Middle School. It was in one of the northern boroughs, I think Highgate. Even the print in the evening editions was smudgy and subdued.

We were sitting in her dressing room.

"All of those poor, poor children," Chriselda Frey said.

She had the newspaper folded in front of her and I could see an upside-down picture of the school, and the headline. They had the number at forty-eight, plus many more injured. Furled against her knees the paper was like the whole city. It was drab and it was at half-mast. The low mood was in everything. Some events can do that to the spirit of a day and I was aware of it on my walk to the theatre, I felt it in the splash of bus tires on the wet streets, in the striking of public clocks, and in the muted peal of Evensong along the Thames.

I looked up from the upside-down newspaper and, to my surprise, I saw that Chriselda Frey was smirking. I realized that she wanted to use the story of the disaster with the children to start an argument between us.

Later, she insisted to me that it was not a smirk on her face. She said that it was a mis-face. Sometimes you make an attempt not to cry and by mistake you get a rather snide expression, or you turn out looking sly and flirtatious. She said that's all it was.

"How dare you," I said to Chriselda Frey and her face.

She raised an eyebrow at me. She could get me angry very fast.

"It is difficult, though," she said, "when the scale is so tragic, to find the right reaction to it."

I knew exactly what she was going to say.

"I mean, is it as real as - "

"How dare you, Chriselda Frey."

"It's just as real as Berlin."

I marched out of her dressing room. The door snapped closed behind me. Then I turned back round and went into her dressing room again.

News of what had happened to the children at the King Edward's Junior and Middle School had grown throughout the day. I spoke with a man on the street about it in the afternoon. He had a grey trilby that he had taken off and he was clutching this in front of him. His hair was lank and he had a pinched sort of nose. He said that someone must have counted all the children. I could see from his face that he wanted to lay blame somewhere. The number was seventy-four at that time: it kept changing. His point was that behind the headlines there was the task of counting and separating, of pronouncing each of them individually dead. I do not remember anything else of the encounter. I remember the man's hat and his hair. I don't recall what set us to talking or where, particularly, we were. It was a conversation with a stranger and I think people wanted to connect, to express something to others of the common feeling.

"Berlin is real," I said when I went back into the dressing room.

"Quite," she said.

"It's damn real."

She had given me a pitying look. She pretended to be busy with the newspaper but she could spare a second to look up and patronize me.

"The death of those children is real," I said.

"Quite. That's what I meant."

The phrase, 'As real as Berlin,' was a code for us and it came along always before our tetchiest and most drawn out fights. The cleverness of the phrase was that it could mean just about whatever she chose it to mean. But she said it with such a damned superior attitude, as though she were above and removed from the object of discussion. And that is why I reacted.

As real as Berlin. Sometimes all she meant was that a thing teemed with the same vitality as the craziest city she had ever lived in. If it was as real as Berlin then nothing was more solid. But she could also say it to mean the exact opposite. For this woman had lived under Weimar, performing cabaret, she had stayed on for the Reich and, in her time, she saw the city quartered, halved, saw it sundered by the cold war. How could one unqualified word, how could 'Berlin' hope to stand for such a place and mean anything? Who knew the thousand, million connotations held by this word on any one day? There was nothing existing in the world that could stand in unique and unchallenged relation to that label, to Berlin. Or to any other word. Or sentence, or expression, feeling or belief. It was a lousy worldview. It was a statement of relativism. Worse, it was a sentence that was only sometimes about relativism.

I have perhaps not articulated so well why this always led to an argument between us. I think it was for no reason other than that when she said it, I knew she wanted to fight, and that we would fight.

Another thing she liked to say: "We are all trespassers, here."

At ten thirty on the morning of November 16th, 1948, the fire bell sounded at King Edward's Junior and Middle School. It was a false alarm. That did not stop the stampede. It did not prevent the collapse of the stair banisters. It was the fire that was false, but the bell was real. And as from an actual fire the children scrambled. There were 1,800 on the roll. The landing at the top of the stairwell of the main hall was very narrow. They crashed through the splintering banisters. The bell kept ringing and more children came out onto the landing.

The doors to the main hall of the King Edward's Junior and Middle School were the sort that opened inwards. Afterwards, it was not possible to push them open. The firemen had to cut, slowly, with knives. The unluckiest had died from the crush and did not snap their necks when they fell.

The same evening, Chriselda Frey had to go on stage to perform her Kindertotenlieder. I went to see how she would deal with it, watching from one side by the empty orchestra pit. I was still angry from our fight. There was a settling across the audience as her act came on, like the shuffling sound of the enpewed commencing prayer. I realized that I was jangling loose shillings in my trouser pocket and I stopped.

Her saxophonist and cellist took positions upstage, much further back than normal, close to the velvet backdrop. From this alone I knew there were big changes in store and she had not discussed any of them with me. We were after all two very private people, No Trespassing signs and wire fences around the core, around our artistic instincts. She believed, I believed it too, that you let another inside the sanctum and you might as well dash it all to dust. I was annoyed, of course. I wanted inside.

And then the men in zoot suits walked on. They had never been a part of her routine. There were seven of them, thick chalk pinstripes, trilbies cocked forward, and they spaced themselves evenly across the stage, right to left. The saxophone started to blow a slow, brassy sorrow across the theatre and Chriselda approached her microphone. Now will the sun shine as if nothing happened. Brilliantly, the stage lights dimmed. It was almost completely dark. There was only her moony, deathmask face, her pale shoulders and glorious brooding lips. The lights remained low through the music until she sang, husking the phrase in a jagged whisper, A small lamp has gone out. The stage lights came back up.

I noticed for the first time that each of the men carried a length of rope. The rope shone silvery in the new light. One stepped forward, drew the rope around her waist, knotted it, and fixed the remaining end to the microphone stand. There was a high-waisted rigidity through his legs; his jacket drooped and furled. It was like watching a matador. Chriselda continued to sing as he worked. When he pulled the rope tight around her she faltered slightly, then she was tied to the microphone. She was in a long blue dress with bare arms. The pickup of the microphone was a bright metal disc, suspended inside a hoop at the top of the stand and held in place by black springs. The black springs made the shape of a star between the pickup disc and its circular frame, ten springs, five points of a star. Because of the springs, there was no interference with the clarity of Chriselda's voice while the rope was fixed to the stand.

The structure of sound in this song cycle - its spare scoring, the taut balances of rhythm, tune and discord - is so bleakly brittle it could break at any moment. Chriselda Frey nearly broke it. The opening lines are a tentative statement, joy still shines in the world, its radiant beams are for others maybe, but there is a world still, it turns on. Chriselda rapped the notes roundly against the silver disc. The poem coursed on through grief, through disbelief, such dark-flashed flames. Listening to the words, I thought of them as a search party, now gathering, now tapering, always onwards, fanning across their subject and seeking consolation. The music did not follow, Chriselda kept it tethered in place. She, nor her cellist, nor her saxophonist - they were not going to the same place as the words, their music was moored to the inescapable facts, disconsolate, irresolvable. There was to be no harmony of sound to match the cautious upward thread of the lyrics.

The men with ropes stood in a row between Chriselda and her musicians. The soft hanging lengths drooped in their upheld hands. She worried at the belt of rope around her waist, her fingers fretting, they were wringing gestures, no sanity left anywhere in her fingers.

And then the jazz took over, the meter tricky, her voice shrill, the face awful and twisting around the lip-shapes of rage, never let them out, we should never let the children outside, and then quieter, through the aching length of ordinary moments, at suppertime, the opening of the front door, when my glance falls not on father's face, but on that lower place where once your face...

It was towards the end of her set that the men in suits started moving. The words were close to their mark now, at least there was no more to fear, the children were resting, protected by their god. But on stage we were not to get it so easy. They tied her at the ankles, thickly around the neck, they fastened her elbows and knees, and more rope to fix elbow to elbow, elbows to knees, all the ropes lashed to the stand of the microphone. Like goblins the men moved. Chriselda sang and they spun her tight to the microphone. The words had found a place of grace but it was not up there for us on stage. The zoots departed. The instruments came quiet. Chriselda was supposed to raise her hands, heavenwards. She could not. They were fixed by her side. The rigging had lifted the long blue dress like a rag around her bare knuckle-knees.

The curtain fell. There was no applause. There was only the shock of our hands frozen still.

"Yes, yes, all of that," J.D. said, in his bloated voice. "Heard it, saw it, I was there. It's old rope, Bishey, tying her up, the dead children. Everyone's heard it a thousand times before." He kneaded words out with his lips. He excreted them, pushing them out from his hardened, fat-lined throat. "Give me something new."

"Nietzsche said you could give the measure of any person in three telling anecdotes."

He didn't give a damn about Nietzsche. "Doesn't have to be brilliant or saucy. It can be a quiet story. They like to read something nice and gentle after a death. But make it outside the canon. Something we haven't heard a thousand times before."

"I think if I ever use you in one of my pieces, I'll describe you as the man with a pinguid voice."

"Pinguid," he said, "I like it. I like it a lot. Pinguid."

"I may just call it fatty."

He looked at me stupidly, as if I had just slapped him.

"How you transmit meaning in blubbery phonemes. You have to let me insult you. I've got something you want."

He snapped his little fingers and called the bar-boy. "Champagne for this man, for both of us."

"Taittinger," I said. "Obviously."

I watched the boy walk back across the length of the wine bar, in his tight clothes.

"For my column," J.D. said. "Do it for her."

"We can pretend it's for her," I said. And in a way it was. I thought I wanted to give the world something of her, something they'd never seen or heard or known before. It could stand as a fitting, quiet coda. But because of his journo's pencil and notepad, I could not get away from feeling a bit self-serving, unclean. To bask in public in her light. To share secrets, unlocking private things that were maybe more valuable nursed alone. Of course, this was the premise behind my career. I resented him for making me feel it.

I would give nothing from the time of her illness, her troubled days at the end. And of her erased period, the sparsely documented facts behind her survival of the Reich, I wanted to remain clear. I kept returning to the Mouse. Something from that time to give to J.D. and his readers. So try this one, see what you think:

On the weekend, after the rope men, we took off, got out of the city and I drove Chriselda to the Malvern Hills. It was a three-day round trip, going up on the Sunday and returning Tuesday. The papers had latched on to her act, they were cultivating outrage from some quarters, plaudits from others. It was a way to keep the King Edward's story near the front. The matter of her German-ness made its ugly appearance.

She performed her song in the new way. Audiences increased. I didn't know what it was about any more. What, they needed to explore the fuss? So that when they quoted the opinions of the opinion-formers at dinner parties, their words would carry some weight - they had been to see her. Is that why they came? You can tell when the audience changes from art seekers to spectacle seekers. Chriselda hated to go up in front of them. She talked of dropping the segment, but she had nothing suitable to stand in its place. Her newer stuff was not ready. "They say I'm an angel of death," she said to me. She needed to get away.

My car was a Mercedes-Benz. She had a white body, black roof and the fat curves in her design were like a snifter of Old Pale. I mean to say that she was a showstopper. And not an uncontroversial choice of transport, so soon after the end of the war. I think that's the reason Chriselda accepted my offer. "Good riddance," she said as she climbed in. "Here's how." Farewell to London.

We set into the bleary Sunday traffic, dilettantes. Chriselda kicked off her shoes and pushed her feet into the thick carpet I'd put down for the road noise. Hours later, we arrived in the small village. In that car it was like showing up in evening dress.

They recognized her at the B&B. "Oh God," she said when we were in our room, and she collapsed on the bed. The arrangement was that I slept in a chair.

"I shan't be doing much walking," she said when I woke.

I was still juddering in my ears from the long trip. The wingchair night was stiff in my shoulders and had made tight knots of my loin.

Chriselda was abluted and attired. She was at the window with the curtain pulled back. She had on black jackboots up past her knees, and jodhpurs. I thought, She'll go downstairs like that, and me looking this wreck - they'll think I've had quite the time of it. They were bloody ghastly curtains, though. And it was grey outside. Thick grey.

"You have to walk," I said. "People come here to go hiking and it'll do us some good."

"Good nothing. It's the end of November."

"We'll do a short walk."

"I'm not going into those hills. In November."

"We'll do the foothills."

"We'll explore the village."

She came over to the bed and pulled on a long coat. It was leather.

I looked at her in the wide-flapped breeches and slender-fitting boots, and the double row of black buttons fastening down.

"You look like a Nazi," I said.

"I despise you." She smiled, crinkling up at the sides of her eyes.

"Goebbels," I said.

"Get dressed. We'll have a big breakfast and a little walk." ***

We made a reasonable walk out beyond the village. She wore a wide-brimmed hat for anonymity and we were getting some looks. I think our hosts gave us up. Now, in the teashops, the locals were reading the week's papers to find out who she was, measuring her celebrity. Kids had gathered around the Mercedes: An actress from London. Dad says she's a singer. She's not a singer, she's a German. Famous one.

It was damp and miserable. I quickly agreed that we wouldn't be going into the hills. You couldn't even see them.

"Let's do this," I said.

We had come to the outskirts of some huge property. And I mean it was vast, an estate, bigger than the village behind us. There was a low brick wall. Then there were some trees and beyond the trees a wire fence. A tree had collapsed onto the fence.

"Trespassing," she said.

I helped her over the tree. First she had to unbutton part of her coat and lift it above her knees. She bothered with it, smoothing the inner lining flat until she had a skirt of beige tartan below her waist, a wide sort of Burberry hem. She was pleased with the result and kept it like that the remainder of the walk. I stood on the other side of the tree and reached my hand across to her. What a sight, in her hat with the brim flopping down and the long, tight, shiny boots, and her coat rolled up to its belt with the lining showing.

The bark was stripped off the tree and the tree was wet. She made heavy work of it, inching along, swaying, and leaning and pulling her weight against my hand. It was a slight upwards slope and the soles of her boots were flat with no grip.

"Use the knots of the trunk," I said.

It was part of playing the female, of placing me in a manly position with regards to her. She knew it, and she took her time with it.

I had champagne with me, of course. She jumped down, falling into me and laughing. I took one of the bottles out of my coat pocket and opened it.

We were in a small wood. The leaves were slippery and black for walking. We could smell the wet, bare trees. Chriselda linked her arm in mine and we went along, stopping now and then to glug from the bottle.

"This is bad of us," she said. She was leaning into me, walking sloppily. Her default approach to the company of a man. "We're trespassing. I saw no signs for it."

"There was the small matter of the barbed wire fence. And I don't think the stile we used was exactly a public right of way."

"The stile we used."

"We're on private property, there's no doubt."

"We're being a little bit naughty."

"We are being, a little bit."

I gave her some more of the old Taitt. She looked at me with those green eyes. "Mister Bish," she said. "Herr Bish."

I could have made a go of it. I could easily have engineered a fall, landing with her in the skiddy leaves and the mud. We know these moments when they arrive. But I don't think she wanted it, not for certain, and I'm not sure that I did, either. Anyway, there were more important matters to address.

So instead I said to her, "You have to drop that piece. It will kill you. It will be the end of you."

She did look a bit relieved, and part disappointed, that she wasn't going to be kissed.

"I know," she said. "I will drop it."

"It's become too big and it's not who you are. It's not what you're about."

"I know it."

"If you stop now, those performances will be legendary."

"I'll not sing it again."

"You mustn't." I wondered, though, what she could put in its place. We were breaking our most important rule, which was that we were not supposed to go near the art, we were not to talk about it.

"What you did this week can not be surpassed," I said.

"I can always do better," she said. "You know that if I showed you what I planned then it would be ruined."

We shared this superstition. I was the same with my monologues. I practiced alone. When we blocked out the stage lighting for a new routine, I mimed my way through. The first reaction to the words had to come from the audience.

"I do have something," she said. "To replace it. If I show you then I can never perform it."

We came to the edge of the wood. There was a stone manor house, still some distance away. Its large lawn was the only bright thing we'd seen that morning, it must have been rolled flat and it was glimmering. There was an orchard and some low buildings I took to be stables. A field sloped down from the lawn toward a cold brook. We could not bring ourselves to walk out brazenly across the field, by the brook, in sight of the manor house. To do so we'd have had to feel some kind of right, a sense of entitlement, springing perhaps from the hundreds of years that this land had been common land, unfenced. We had only come to look, to nose around a little, and who'd deny us the pleasure? We turned and went back into the wood.

Trespassing has this about it, that it takes place where greater crimes have been committed: such as the roping of boundaries, such as the isolation of beauty. The appropriation of territory and the titling of property. It is noble to challenge this. But to enjoy trespassing fully, you also have to feel that you are in the wrong, witness to views not intended for your eyes. It is such a human activity. It is the human activity. I've spent my life perfecting a confidential tone as I lean into a microphone. My famous friends, let me spill their secrets. And that summer, the summer of 'forty-eight, had been the summer of the allied airlifts into Berlin, against the soviet blockade.

As we came back to the fallen tree, we saw the ranger for the property. He wore a cap and had a pile of logs slung under his arms. He was clearly the ranger. We'd been spotted and he was approaching.

"Make him go away," Chriselda said. She pulled the brim of her hat lower.

I had a good idea what I was going to say. Chriselda gripped my arm. We had stopped walking. When he challenged us I would give my name in full. Mr. Clive Daniel Bish. I can make it very clear to another man that I expect to deal as gentlemen. If the law had to get involved then he could take down my address. I'd say that Chriselda was Mrs. Bish.

"Do you know what I'm doing?" he said to us.

The situation appeared ripe for sarcasm.

"I don't have a very good idea, no," I said.

"They want this space cleared. So I'm cutting me some logs for my cabin, use as firewood." He pointed back to where he'd come from, but I don't know what we were supposed to see there.

"I'm sure it gets very cold," Chriselda said.

"I'll wish you both good day," the ranger said. He left us and went on his way. "It doesn't get so cold," he called back to us, "not with a great roaring fire." Then he was out of sight.

"You were good." Chriselda said to me.

"I'd have kept you out of it. I'd have protected your honour," I said.

"Don't I know it."

"No, I really would."

"I know it, you rascal."

I checked to see that the ranger was definitely gone and then tossed the empty champagne bottle into the undergrowth. "Let's go and have a drink," I said.

"But wasn't he a charmer? Very real," Chriselda said. "You know, I could spend my life doing this."

We were about to go back over the fence where it was broken, using the fallen tree, but she stopped me.

"What did he say about fire?" she said.

I hadn't really heard what he said, properly; I was still surprised that we weren't in any trouble.

"Something about not being cold," I said.

"Did we really see him at all? Do you think he was an angel?"

"I think he was the ranger."

I had a sense that she was being serious. He had not appeared for very long and we were so completely on our own, but there was that feeling of being in company that comes from a wood, from the spacing of trees and the filtering of light, and the small noises of animals poking the dead leaves. She took off her hat and clutched it in front of her, like the stranger I'd met with the trilby. Her coat was still folded up from the bottom, showing the lining. She held her hands neatly in front of her hat and pulled her shoulders back, and waited.

I tried to indicate that I would not be flippant.

If you go out in the woods today…

"You're sure of a big surprise," I said.

If you go out in the woods today,

"You'd better go in disguise."

She was singing to the tune of the teddy bear two-step.

For every bear that ever there was / Will gather there for certain, because / Today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic.

It was the simplest I ever heard her sing. She pitched her flawless voice out into the trees and somehow there its timbre grew magical, I was almost five years old listening to her, and I wanted her to keep me there and not do anything but keep the tripsy little steps of the tune going, and for the children who died that week to hear the song.

I once saw a boy at the street market on the Portobello Road, a poor ruffian with long shorts, playing a game of using two sticks to juggle a rubber ball. This must have been years before I went trespassing in the wood. He kept the ball in the air, using only the sticks, tossing it and rolling it, it seemed impossible to do this with only the two thin sticks but he managed it, running along. It became very important to me, watching him, that he should not fail. I followed him along the busy street for about a hundred yards and was relieved when he stopped and put the ball in his trouser pocket.

At six o'clock their mommies and daddies / Will take them home to bed / Because they're tired little teddy bears.

I'm the man, the grownup child, who never wants to see the ball dropped unless it's certain the game is over.