The Pear Drum story is loosely based on ‘The New Mother’ by Lucy Clifford, a children’s story published in her 1882 collection, The Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise. This brilliant but disturbing tale has inspired several different literary interpretations and offshoots, and is also popularly retold by oral storytellers. But it caught my imagination because of its description of the pear drum – a colloquial term for a sort of mechanical violin called an organistrum (an early medieval musical instrument later reinvented as a hurdy gurdy). You can see a wonderfully surreal depiction of a pear drum in the third panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights, a late 15th century painting by Hieronymus Bosch. I can’t say whether or not Lucy Clifford was familiar with that painting, but Bosch’s inclusion of mischievous and devilish ‘little people’, both tortured by and delighting in the various musical instruments of Hell, could well be connected to the ‘little people’ referred to in the story. And they do say that the devil has all the best music …