rs Reckitt’s Establishment for Orphans was preparing to celebrate Christmas.
In the spacious entrance hall stood a mighty spruce tree soon to be decorated with impressive ornaments.
On the front door hung a holly wreath the size of a lifebelt. That the front door was black was perhaps unfortunate, as the combination of the sombre colour and the wintry wreath had something of the funeral parlour about it.
Yet the brass knocker was polished to a shine and the brisk bell-pull gleamed for visitors. And visitors there were: the great and good of Soot Town were coming to Christmas dinner.
Soot Town had paid for the dinner, in honour of the day, and in charity towards the poor, parentless children who had taken shelter under Mrs Reckitt’s ample wings.
Had she been a bird it is unlikely that Mrs Reckitt could have flown far – or indeed flown at all – for in most respects Mrs Reckitt resembled a giant turkey. Not a wild turkey. No. A bred bronze bird with a substantial breast, a folded neck, a small head and legs – but no one had ever seen Mrs Reckitt’s legs, the fashion of the times being for concealment. Suffice to say that her legs, assuming she had them, were of the turkey type. That is, not designed for travel.
If in most respects the lady resembled the celebrated bird of the Christmas feast, in one singular respect she bore another resemblance.
Mrs Reckitt had the face of a crocodile. Her jaw was long, her mouth was wide. Large teeth lurked inside it. Her eyes were small and crêped and protruded from her face with an expression of watchful murderousness. The skin on her neck and décolletage had more of handbag than human about it. But she was not green. No, Mrs Reckitt was not green. She was pink.
And, as everyone in Soot Town agreed, a delightful and compassionate pink-flushed widow.
The cause of the late Mr Reckitt’s end is unknown. It is enough to know that he is dead and that the couple had no children.
Mrs Reckitt said it herself, often, with crocodile tears in her crocodile eyes. Her orphanage therefore became that happy collision of chance and charity, allowing her the family denied her by fate.
Orphans were collected from near and far and hospitably housed in the large villa paid for by subscription from Soot Town.
That Christmas the house was full of children. Orphans were the core business, but certain parents, having obligations elsewhere, from time to time boarded their offspring with Mrs Reckitt. The fees were considerable, but, as she said herself, remark the service.
Visitors to the Villa of Glory, as Mrs Reckitt liked to call her establishment, were regularly impressed by the cheerful, bright parlour where the girls did their sewing in front of a warm fire.
In the garden stood a workshop where the boys made and mended useful objects. There was a schoolroom, an allotment, a lily pond and two dormitories. Each little metal bedstead had a warm quilt on top and a button-eyed bear perched on the nightstand.
And Christmas – ah, well, Christmas. ’Tis the season to be jolly.
That morning the children were decorating the Christmas tree. It stood in the hall, a gift from the lumber-yard on the edge of town. Strong men had cut it down and put it upright again. Its lower branches were deep as a forest. Its feathery top was far away like a green bird.
The children, in their brown overalls, stood looking at the tree. Mrs Reckitt looked at the children.
‘Any child who breaks a glass bauble will be locked in the coal house without dinner,’ said Mrs Reckitt. ‘And why is the ladder too short to reach the top of the tree? Do I keep you idle boys to sit in woodwork classes learning to make ladders that are too short?’
Reginald put up his hand. ‘Please, Mrs Reckitt, it isn’t safe to make a stepladder taller than this one. A stepladder is an A-frame, Mrs Reckitt, yes, and . . . ’
Mrs Reckitt’s pink face was deepening towards red. She came forward and regarded Reginald through her pearl eye-glass. Reginald realised that Mrs Reckitt didn’t blink. ‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘if that is the tallest ladder you can make, you will have to balance a chair on top of the ladder, and then you shall balance yourself on top of the chair, and you will PUT the FAIRY on top of the tree. Do you hear me?’
It was impossible not to hear her. The children were silent. The chair was fetched. Reginald could hardly lift it. Maud stepped forward. ‘Please, Mrs Reckitt, Reginald can’t climb the ladder with the chair. He has a twisted foot.’
Mrs Reckitt looked down at Reginald’s heavy black boot. ‘If there is one thing I dislike more than orphans, it is crippled orphans,’ she said, inspecting Reginald as though she might be considering eating him. ‘Ronald, are you a crippled orphan or an orphaned cripple? HA HA HA HA HA.’
Then she turned to Maud. ‘Very well, Mavis. I see you are the smallest child we have here – failure to thrive is always disappointing, but in this case useful. Climb the tree.’
Maud looked at the tree stretching upwards towards the ornate plasterwork ceiling. The topmost top of the tree was directly underneath the chin of a cherub.
‘Up you go, straight up the middle, and place this fairy at the top.’ Mrs Reckitt got out the fairy. She was made of cloth with raffia hair. ‘Carry her between your teeth. Like this.’ There was a terrified and disbelieving OOH and AAH sound from the orphans as Mrs Reckitt put the hapless fairy in her mouth. Holding it there, she carried on talking without any difficulty. ‘In my day orphans climbed chimneys twenty times higher than this silly tree, and it never did them any harm.’ She removed the fairy from her mouth – its presence had reminded her that she was hungry. ‘It is time for my mid-morning sausage roll. When I return this fairy had better be on the top of the tree. And mind what I said: if you break one single, solitary glass bauble, it’s the coal hole for you!’
Mrs Reckitt swept off towards her sausage roll. Reginald put the cloth fairy between Maud’s teeth.
Maud realised that she had to get to the centre of the tree and climb up the trunk. The tree smelled of resin and winter. The lower branches were so thick that it was like being inside her own private forest. The world was green. Maud couldn’t see the other children any more. She was lost in the wood like Gretel.
The tree was scratchy and the pine needles were well-named. Soon her hands and feet were bleeding and big red marks criss-crossed her face. She daren’t open her eyes or look up. She was getting cold and her face was wet. She had the strange sensation that it was snowing inside the tree.
Up she went. She was thinking about her mother, who had died when Maud was a baby. Her father had given her to an aunt, the aunt had given her to a cousin, the cousin had given her to a neighbour, the neighbour had given her to a rag-and-bone man. The rag-and-bone man, collecting old clothes and broken pans in Soot Town, had sold her for a drink at the Baby in Half. The landlord had never seen such a small child. He thought she might live in a bottle on the bar, next to a stuffed owl. Good for business.
But Maud had other plans and she ran away. She was caught stealing eggs to eat, taken to prison and rescued by one of those well-meaning old gentlemen who imagine that all a child needs is bread and butter and discipline.
At Reckitt’s Academy for Orphans, Foundlings and Minors in Need of Temporary Office, there was discipline. And occasionally bread and butter. But there was not play. And there was not hope. And there was not warmth. And there was not love.
Maud was nine when she came here.
‘Stunted,’ said Mrs Reckitt when she inspected her for the first time. ‘Useful for drains and retrieving small objects from gratings.’
Maud was given very little food – but she was a skilled thief and usually managed to get extra rations for herself and some of the other children.
The MINTOs (Minors in Need of Temporary Office) had plenty of good food – steamed sponge, dumplings, egg custard and so on. They had nice beds and nice bears, and their accommodation and bill of fare was offered as the standard. In truth, it was far from it. Parents of MINTOs paid handsomely to abandon their offspring for sudden necessary trips to Monte Carlo or urgent visits to dying wealthy relatives.
Mrs Reckitt depended on repeat business and glowing reports. And so the orphans and foundlings who had no parents, rich or poor, lit fires, blacked boots, combed hair, swept, dusted, mopped and polished, while the MINTOs, who were as selfish as the adults who had raised them, imagined all this to be their due.
Today, on Christmas Day, the MINTOs had their own dining room and Santa Claus. Lavish presents from neglectful parents were waiting to be piled under the tree.
The orphans and foundlings queued up later to take the discarded wrapping paper and string so that they could draw pictures or play cat’s cradle.
Maud had reached the top of the tree. Her head suddenly popped up beneath the fat plaster cherub. The children far below cheered. Maud looked down; that was a mistake. She looked down just in time to see Mrs Reckitt returning from her appointment with the sausage roll.
Hands on hips, Mrs Reckitt bawled, ‘MARGARET! THE FAIRY, IF YOU PLEASE!’
Maud took the fairy’s arm out of her mouth, then secured the snap-clip sewn into the fairy’s back onto the topmost branch. Maud was as red and green as Christmas, what with her hands all bloody, and pine needles sticking out of her body like a hedgehog.
She was wondering how to get down when the branch under her left foot snapped. CRACK!
There’s Maud, tumbling, swinging, catching, falling, dropping, scraping, sliding, bumping, catching, missing, down and down through the dark green tunnel of the tree until she lands safe, on her bottom, on the piles of straw baled up at the base for the Nativity.
There was no harm done.
All the children clapped and cheered.
‘SILENCE!’ shouted Mrs Reckitt. She walked over and grabbed Maud by her arm, pulling her out of the straw. ‘Ow, ow, ow!’ cried Mrs Reckitt. ‘Wretched child, you are stuck through with needles – look what you have done to me!’
But before Mrs Reckitt could further catalogue her woes, she saw what she saw, and what she saw was a glass bauble broken on the floor. Her fat eyes gleamed. ‘What did I say? WHAT did I SAY?’ She tried to bend down and pick up the broken bauble but her corset would not allow it.
‘Hand me that bauble!’ she shouted.
Trembling, Maud picked up the broken glass, cutting her hands further, but as she did so she realised that inside the bauble was a tiny silver frog. She managed to conceal it.
Mrs Reckitt ordered Maud into the coal house for the rest of the day. Then, shuffling out of the wings in his customary white coat and rubber gloves, came Dr Scowl, her lieutenant responsible for child welfare. He regretted to say that it was not possible to place Maud in the coal hole; there were four children lumped in there already.
Mrs Reckitt looked unhappy.
‘May I suggest outdoors, madam?’ said Dr Scowl. ‘It is bracing and healthful for a child to be outdoors. We may be sure that the careless young person can reflect upon her delinquency without the distractions of coal. The other day the children imprisoned in the coal house, for the purposes of moral improvement, were using lumps of coal to build castles. Imagine that!’
Mrs Reckitt imagined it. When she had done imagining it, she turned to Maud. ‘You! Outside! No coat, scarf or gloves. Goodbye.’
Reginald limped forward. ‘Please, Mrs Reckitt, I’ll go outside. Maud climbed the tree for my sake.’
There was little Mrs Reckitt liked less than human kindness. She regarded Reginald down the long, unevolved lifetimes of her reptile brain. Why eat one child when two are available?
‘In that case, Rodney, you may join Marigold in the garden. Fresh air! I am too kind – but it is Christmas Day.’
There was a gasp from the gathered orphans. Mrs Reckitt swept round her skirts to face them.
‘And one single, solitary, stray, sad little slipped-out word from any other meaningless orphan – and you will ALL spend Christmas outdoors. Do you hear?’
The orphans did not have parents but they did have ears. They heard. The hall was silent.
Then . . .
‘DING DONG! MERRILY ON HIGH,
IN HEAV’N THE BELLS ARE RINGING;
DING DONG! VERILY THE SKY
IS RIV’N WITH ANGEL SINGING . . . ’
‘The carol singers of Soot Town!’ cried Mrs Reckitt, who, like all unfeeling people, was sentimental. ‘I must welcome them in for hot punch and melted jelly babies.’
To the front door she went, face flushed redder than any berry, heart colder than the snow that swept through the door. The lanterns were lit and the sound of singing filled the hall. The air was beeswax and green spruce and brandy and cloves and sugar and wine, and the tree shone.
Outside in the garden the pond was frozen solid. Reginald and Maud ran round and round to keep warm, but Dr Scowl saw them through the drawing-room window, where he was warming his sizable bottom at the sizable fire. Running looked too much like a game and too little like a punishment, so he yelled at them to stand still.
Maud’s grey overall was thin and her dress was thinner. Reginald wore grey shorts and the regulation mustard-yellow jacket made of felt. Soon the children began to turn blue.
It was then that they heard a tapping beneath the ice on the pond. Yes, it was quite clear. TAP TAP TAP.
They wondered what this could be, and momentarily forgot their chilliness.
‘Over there!’ said Reginald. ‘Look!’
Leaving a trail of prints the size of a saucer where he sat between leaps, hopped a large frog.
Silver. Not bright. Unpolished. His eyes, though, were bright as silver stars and steady in their unblinking gaze.
‘Greetings, children,’ said the Silver Frog. ‘My own children are trapped under the ice.’
TAP TAP TAP.
‘Who has imprisoned them?’ said Reginald.
‘In the past,’ said the Silver Frog, ‘the gardener always put a log in the pond in the winter. At a slant. Lying through the water and against the bank. This made a bridge and we frogs could come and go, hiding under the ice to keep warm, returning to land to feed. But now no one considers us.’
‘No one considers us either,’ said Maud. ‘All the orphans here are trapped under the ice of Mrs Reckitt’s heart but, though we can never escape, we will help you if we can.’
The Silver Frog listened, and his eyes, which were always moist, because, after all, he was a frog, grew wet. Amphibians don’t cry. But it was Christmas.
‘We can smash the ice to bits!’ shouted Reginald. ‘I can stamp on it with my twisted foot! Look, the boot has an iron sole.’
The Silver Frog shook his body. (A frog cannot shake his head.) ‘Too dangerous. You will fall in and drown. No, there is another way. She has the answer in her pocket.’
Maud fiddled around in her overall pocket. There was a bit of bacon rind she had saved from breakfast, and something hard, like a pebble. Maud fished it out. It was the tiny silver frog she had found inside the broken bauble.
‘Yes,’ said the Silver Frog, ‘that is the Croak.’
‘The Croak?’
‘The Croak is the Queen of Frogs. No one has ever seen her in the skin and bone, or web and slime, but no one doubts that she watches over us. That solid silver frog is her sacred image. Now, do as I tell you to do and place it on the surface of the pond.’
Maud had little confidence that an inch-scale silver frog could do much good in this frozen world, but she did as she was asked, and slid the frog onto the smooth ice.
Nothing happened. Maud shivered.
‘This is never going to work,’ said Reginald. ‘Why don’t I just smash it all up?’
‘Behold,’ said the Silver Frog and, as it was Christmas, ‘behold’, though ornate, was acceptable.
A dark patch was spreading under the little tiny miniature weight of frogness. The dark patch bubbled. There was a sigh and a crack. The surface of the pond was wet and crazed.
‘It’s melting!’ said Reginald, who had forgotten to shiver.
And it was. And, as the melting melted, the little frog slid ahead of the breaking ice, and where the frog slid the ice cracked, and the soft water spread over the hard surface.
And if this was not remarkable enough, something more remarkable happened next. The surface of the pond was alive with identical silver frogs.
‘They are tiny!’ said Reginald.
‘They are new,’ said the Silver Frog. ‘Like the moon.’
The children looked up. The moon looked down, bladed and beautiful and silver.
‘I’m not cold now,’ said Reginald.
And neither was Maud.
The Silver Frog said, ‘My friends, you have helped my children; now my children shall help you. Come along but tread carefully!’
Maud and Reginald followed the Silver Frog, and all the tiny frogs flowed round their feet like a river. The moon lit them up and the children seemed to be carried on a silver stream towards the house.
Through the long windows into the dining room the children could see the final touches being laid to the table for the Christmas feast. How beautiful it looked: red candles and red crackers, damask tablecloth and napkins. Maud knew all about the tablecloth and napkins; she had ironed them with a flat iron heated on the range. It had taken her four hours.
‘In we go!’ ordered the Silver Frog, and magically the tiny frogs streamed through the glass and suddenly the children were inside too.
‘Glass is ruled by the moon,’ said the Silver Frog as though this explained everything.
Once inside, two tiny frogs climbed into every cracker. Twenty-four tiny frogs dropped themselves into the bottom of the crystal water glasses. There was a beautiful trifle in a glass bowl in the centre of the table. The trifle was decorated with tiny silver beads that were soon replaced by tiny silver frogs.
‘Now, then, my dear little froglinos and froglinas, scatter yourself like balls of mercury wherever you please and be sure to cause trouble from the moment you hear the first scream.’
‘What will you do?’ asked Maud.
‘I have a particular task but that is not yet. In the meantime, Maud, you and a dozen froglissimos – the fastest I have – will hide behind the Christmas tree in the hall. They will know what to do – and they will do it to Dr Scowl.
‘Reginald! Under the table with you – crouching, frog-style – and be sure to tie together the gentlemen’s bootlaces, and when the ladies take off their shoes – as ladies always do when their feet are out of sight – move the shoes from one to another so that no one has a matching pair. Do you understand?’
The children nodded.
‘Excellent!’ said the Silver Frog. ‘And now help yourselves to that ham on the sideboard. We have a little time.’
The great and the good of Soot Town were arriving in the hall, as carriages with steaming horses queued for their place at the steps, by now lit up with flares.
Dr Scowl had put off his white coat and rubber gloves and stood resplendently stuffed into white tie and tails.
Mrs Reckitt was wearing an evening gown that had taken its inspiration from a large pink blancmange. Around her shoulders lay a pink fox-fur that fastened itself by means of its fox-teeth to its fox-tail.
‘Such an interesting clasp!’ said Lady Fleas, putting her finger to it. ‘Ow! I declare I am bleeding!’
‘Ha ha ha ha ha!’ laughed Mrs Reckitt. ‘My little joke of the season. Not quite dead.’
In they came, one and all, great and good, self-satisfied and vain, and they enjoyed their usual tour of the accommodation: they were shown the rooms where the MINTOs slept, where indeed there were eiderdowns and bears, but they were not shown the rooms where the orphans slept, where the bedclothes were made of sacking and the pillows stuffed with straw, and never a fire blazed in the boarded-up hearth.
And they were shown the children’s dining room, set out with delicious food – jelly and cakes and a steaming bird – but they were not told that all this food would soon be whisked away and that Christmas dinner for the orphans was a thin soup made of bones and peelings and some beef spread on coarse bread.
‘Somewhat cold in here for small children,’ remarked a kindly gentleman with a gold watch. He was new to Soot Town. Mrs Reckitt realised she had forgotten to have the fire lit.
‘Oh, my! Yes! Bless me! We have all been so busy playing Christmas games and decorating the tree that I quite forgot! It shall be lit at once.’
And with that she firmly closed the door.
‘Where are the orphans?’ enquired the kindly gentleman. ‘I should like to give each one of them a silver sixpence, in honour of the day.’
‘They are putting on their best clothes,’ said Mrs Reckitt, ‘after all the excitement of the games. But do not worry. If you give the sixpences to me I shall give them out in my happy guise as Mother Christmas.’
‘They are indeed fortunate children,’ said the kindly gentleman.
The fortunate children were at that very moment shovelling coal from the coal house into iron wheelbarrows to be wheeled to the great furnace that warmed the house and heated the hot water.
The children were so black that they could not be seen at all against the black sky and the black coal.
‘Ah, listen to them singing!’ cried Mrs Reckitt as upstairs Dr Scowl put on the phonograph recording of a long-dead children’s choir singing ‘The Holly and the Ivy’.
And, warmed and touched by happiness and deception, the great and the good of Soot Town went in to dinner.
It was not long into the first course of jellied eel that one of the ladies took a drink from her water glass and screamed and threw the contents over her neighbour. Her neighbour stood up in silk-drenched fury to find that her shoes were missing. The gentleman on her left agreeably got up to help her and fell flat on his face into the trifle – out of which exploded like the plagues of Egypt dozens of tiny frogs.
A lady clutched at the curtains and found her hand shimmering with frogspawn. She fainted. A gentleman bent to help put her head on a cushion and saw that her wig was leaping alive on her head.
Mrs Reckitt, reaching to ring the bell for reinforcements, saw, or thought she did, a determined frog clinging to the clapper. Ring as she might, mightily, no sound sounded. She threw the bell in a rage onto the fire and did not see the agile frog leap out of the bell and onto her fox-fur, where he sat quiet as a brooch.
The ladies were all hysterical by now, especially without shoes, and, thanks to Reginald, there was not a gentleman whose shoes were not tied together, except for Dr Scowl.
‘Those evil orphans!’ shouted Mrs Reckitt. ‘This must be their idea of a joke! I’ll give them a joke! I’ll bury them up to their underfed necks in stinking sewage.’
The kind old gentleman new to Soot Town was taken aback by this outburst, and privately wondered if all at the Villa of Glory was as it was advertised. No one else seemed to care about Mrs Reckitt’s threats to her charges; the guests were too busy fighting off frogs and managing their footwear.
At length, and after being served copious amounts of champagne, everyone was at last settled again and tucking into the excellent roasted meats, without incident.
All except Dr Scowl, who had taken it upon himself to tour the orphanage.
In the quiet of the hall, he heard a loud croak. Croak? Surely not? Then he heard it again, coming from the Christmas tree. Perhaps there were frogs living in the tree? Tree frogs? Did tree frogs live in Christmas trees? Perhaps the orphans weren’t responsible after all. They would still be punished, of course. But perhaps Mrs Reckitt could sue the lumber-yard. Misfortune meant money.
Dr Scowl poked himself deep into the tree.
‘Now!’ said the Silver Frog, who was sitting on Maud’s lap surrounded by a hundred-thousand froglissimos.
As one, they LEAPT, and the doctor, in his black tails, found himself with a frog tail, and a frog body and froggy arms and legs as the rapid froglissimos covered him like pins on a pin-board.
Dr Scowl fell on all fours, unable to see as two determined frogs held down his eyelids. He opened his mouth to cry out and five warm, wriggling frogs jumped inside and sat on his tongue like a lily pad.
‘Take him to the pond and throw him in!’ said the Silver Frog.
And, by a miracle of frog-motion, the doctor began to slide along the polished wooden floor on what looked like silver castors.
‘Ho, ho, ho,’ said the Silver Frog. ‘Now, Maud, go and find every orphan you can and bring them out of their dark, damp, shivering holes and sit them around the Christmas tree.’
Back in the dining room, the guests declared themselves so exhausted by unexpected events that they elected to take their crackers and Christmas pudding into the warm, comfortable sitting room that opened off the dining room.
No sooner had they vacated than a thousand froglets whisked away the ham and turkey and roast potatoes and conveyed all these to the orphans gathered in the hall.
The frogs grouped themselves into what looked like shining silver plates – on legs – and in this way everything was easily managed. Reginald crawled out from under the table, several silver shillings richer from where the guests had upended their pockets.
In the hall the children tucked into such food as they had never eaten before and felt the good, wholesome warmth in their empty stomachs. They started to smile, and some laughed, and they talked to each other, not in whispers any more, and everyone shared what they had and no one took too much and the smaller children hoped that when they grew up they would marry a roast potato dressed in gravy.
In the comfortable sitting room the guests were calmed by pudding and Mrs Reckitt comforted herself with thoughts of punishment and revenge. No child would be given food for a month and all would be required to sleep in the garden until at least half were dead – as an example to those who remained.
It occurred to her that she had been too kind to the children. If they were dead they would be cheap to feed. From now on she would only take dead orphans.
As she ate her sixth helping of Christmas pudding the kind old gentleman new to Soot Town proposed a toast, followed by crackers pulled in the traditional way – in a circle, hands crossed to your neighbour.
‘To the founder of the feast – Mrs Reckitt!’
‘Mrs Reckitt!’ returned the company, glasses high and brimming with port.
Mrs Reckitt blushed, one imagines – her face was too red to allow blushing – but she did murmur her thanks, profoundly, while hinting that further funds would allow her to expand – not referring to her waistline; the iron-corseted ladies tittered.
‘But where is Dr Scowl?’ wondered Mrs Reckitt.
The doctor, who had trained as an undertaker, taken a course in body-snatching, made money and returned to civilised society with a title he did not own, was stationed by a kind of levitation at the edge of the pond.
Frogs from every garden, every woodland, every bog, every stone, every ditch, every heap, every cellar, every fairy tale were gathered round in silent, crouched concentration. They were gathered in the name of the Croak.
The pond had frozen over again but that would be no challenge to a mortal as fleshed-out as Dr Scowl.
‘Dispatch him,’ ordered the Silver Frog.
It was just at the second when the crackers were to be pulled that Mrs Reckitt heard what sounded like a very large object entering water. But her grip was tight round her own and her neighbour’s cracker and, as she was determined to win whatever was inside both, she closed her little eyes and pulled with all the strength in her fat fists.
WEE – KE-BANG – POP – CRACK – OW!
And in a flare of gunpowder everyone laughed and then
SCREAMED!
The little frog-bombs leapt from the crackers square into eyes, nostrils, mouths, décolletages, trouser bottoms, trouser tops, and wriggled and squirmed and jumped and waited and waited and jumped.
The great and the good of Soot Town ran out of the parlour into the hall, and there their yelling stopped, as it must, because sitting around the tree, cross-legged and ragged, were the orphans, the real ones, not the postcard offerings and exhibits.
They were lost. They were neglected. They were broken-hearted. They were dirty. They were thin. They were tired. They wore tatty clothes and odd shoes and their hair was either not cut or all cut off. They were children.
Their eyes were big through staring at the dark and they no longer expected something to happen. But today something had happened.
And the kind old gentleman said, ‘How dare you, madam?’ And some of the ladies started to cry.
And Maud stood up and said (as the Silver Frog had told her to say), ‘Please come this way.’
And the Christmas guests saw the peeling dormitories and the bare beds. And the cold rooms and the empty toy box. And there had been a bear, but the smallest children had shared him, so that one had a leg, and another an arm, and his head was passed round to anyone who had been punished that day so that they could hold his gentle head against their hurt hearts.
And they found the children still shovelling coal into the furnace. And the children asleep in the straw in the hen-house. And the children outside under the moon.
Mrs Reckitt was packing a carpet bag with valuables. She didn’t notice the brooch on her fox-fur twitching or the frog’s legs stretching. She didn’t know that this frogarina, a princess among frogs, was a tiny live alarm for a cohort of silver soldiers.
And they came. And they waited. And as she set off, cloaked and secret on her turkey legs, the frogs were like ball bearings, everywhere at once, random, underfoot, and Mrs Reckitt was sliding and falling and clutching and rolling, and the Silver Frog opened the front door and out she rolled, bang, bang, bang, down the steps.
And she was never seen in Soot Town again.
Is that the end of the story?
No! It’s Christmas.
The kind old gentleman took over the orphanage and the children were looked after, and fed, and they had lessons and playtime, and warm clothes and beds and bears.
And every year the Christmas tree decorated the hall, and instead of a star or an angel they put a silver frog on top – though this one had wings.
Maud grew up and became the matron of the orphanage, and every child who went there, sad though the circumstances might be, found a home, and love, and was never shut out in the cold.
Reginald ran the woodwork classes, and taught all the boys and girls how to look after their home from home, and he even built a special ladder that could reach right to the top of the Christmas tree.
And some time later Reginald and Maud got married, and the Croak herself came to their wedding and gave them, so the story goes, a bag of silver coins that never ran out.
And in return Reginald and Maud dug a series of ponds for the frogs, who were never again trapped under the ice in winter, and who sang with the best of us on Christmas Day.
