Denny looked at her in astonishment for a couple of seconds, then his lower lip projected, quivering, and he launched into a bawl of outrage. His face contorted and went scarlet and his body became rigid, except for the arm which pushed flailingly at the aggressor, who clung on, still screaming. Poppy Tasker watched the encounter with mild interest. It was the sort of thing that happened every few minutes in the play-group, especially when a child turned up who hadn’t yet learnt the rules—rules unwritten, of course, and largely unspoken because most of the children’s vocabularies were still limited to ‘Mine!’ and ‘No!’. Adult rules did exist, but were different, less subtle than those the children had evolved among themselves to govern such confrontations, the gestures and stances by which one would attempt to take over a toy or piece of apparatus and the other assert primacy of possession. It was these conventions of the instinctive democracy of childhood that the newcomer had ignored.
