Snow you can picture, picture-postcard style, but the sodden, rotting tangle where the brazen nettles were, the once-secret nests now stark in the bare branches and above all the sheer dead silence of the sky – these things are unimaginable for the rest of the year. That year, November shut the living city down without reprieve. Within a week only a few yellow leaves remained on the trees on the common, fluttering like prayer flags against the leaden sky. TC loved this time of year. Like most children, he was on intimate terms with the earth. The under-tens deal in little sticks and pebbles; they are artisans of holes, experts in the types and properties of stones; they appreciate the many qualities of mud and its summer corollary, dust. And then they grow up, and the ground is just whatever’s underfoot. What TC most liked about the ground in winter were the clues it gave up about everything that went on that was secret. For instance, toads hibernated under the abandoned paving stones at the end of the communal gardens behind his block of flats.
