“No one will think anything, Alma. It’s an empty room, remember – you said so yourself.’ I began to sit cross-legged at his feet so as to listen to his operatic flourishes. Soon I was running to meet him when he came home, then crawling up onto his lap so I could see the words on the page. I still didn’t say much, and I was mute with all strangers and continued to hide my face in my grandmother’s skirts. We were sat this way one afternoon when there was a tap at the window that startled us both. We looked, but there was nothing there. It sounded like something had been thrown at it, so my grandfather told me to stay inside while he went out to investigate. When he came back, he was carrying a tiny bird in his hands. ‘It’s a little dunnock, Susannah. He must have got himself confused, or scared, chased by a sparrowhawk maybe, and flown into the glass. He’s only stunned himself. We’ll find him a box and keep him warm, see if he comes to.’ The bird looked dead to me, but my grandfather lined an old box with straw, placed the tiny bird inside and closed the lid. ‘We need to remove him from all the terrors of the world for a while, let his little body recover. You know, it’s a very good thing for an animal to hide if he’s injured or in danger. All the clever animals do it. He crawls into the tiniest space he can find and makes his world very small. It’s a natural thing, when you’re very scared, to make your world very small indeed. The trick is to understand when the danger is gone, to be very brave and let the world be big again, or else there may as well be no world at all.”