They regard me with their solemn little eyes. They are perched on the edge of the double bed they share while I am installed in the corner by the window on an old camp bed constructed out of green canvas and rusting tubular metal. It’s covered in a dark, grey blanket that reeks of moth balls. The guest bed.

But how I got here or why I am here – these are mysteries, for I remember nothing about the journey. In fact, if I think hard – which is not easy to do with the twins staring at me – I can’t remember anything much at all. I confirm my existence to myself with a growing sense of panic – my name is Ruby Lennox, I have a mother, a father, sisters. These are not my sisters. Perhaps Daisy and Rose really are an alien life form and they sucked me up on board their spacecraft while I was innocently playing in the Back Yard and are now going to conduct a series of barbaric experiments on me. The twins begin to glow a funny shade of green—

‘Ruby! Are you all right?’ Auntie Babs squeezes into the bedroom – it’s clear that the guest bed is taking up much needed space – and looks at me doubtfully. I can see that the only way for a guest to behave in these circumstances is very politely. ‘Yes, thank you, Auntie Babs,’ I reply in a clear, firm voice.

‘Why don’t you play with Ruby, girls?’ Auntie Babs says, looking at her offspring. I shrink a little farther into the corner, I’m not at all sure I want to be initiated into their games. Auntie Babs turns back to me with a bright, artificial smile that I recognize because it’s Bunty’s. I wonder where they got it from? (See Footnote (iv)) ‘Can you tell them apart yet, Ruby?’ she asks. Perhaps they are like those quizzes in Gillian’s Beano where you have two ‘identical’ pictures and have to Spot the Difference!. Perhaps one twin will have six fingers, no ear and a ribbon in her hair. ‘Look up to the ceiling,’ Auntie Babs commands one of them and points out a small freckle under its chin. Is that all? Spot the Difference? Hardly any. ‘This one is Rose.’ Rose stares blankly at the ceiling until Auntie Babs says, ‘It’s all right now, Rose, you can put your head down.’ Rose looks at me as blankly as she did at the ceiling. They have a very limited range of facial expressions. Already I’m beginning to miss the startling variety of emotions that scud like clouds across Gillian’s face, or even the sombre, yet subtle, palette that Patricia draws from.

‘A game? A toy?’ Auntie Babs prompts my little hosts. Reluctantly, Daisy slides off the bed and produces a box of Fuzzy Felts. If I have a quick game of Fuzzy Felts with them, will I be allowed home? Somehow I don’t think so.

I have with me a small suitcase which contains a pair of winceyette pyjamas, a toothbrush and flannel, a pair of ruby-red slippers, five pairs of knickers, a vest, a liberty bodice, two Viyella blouses, a kilt, a corduroy pinafore-dress, a pair of tartan trews, two hand-knitted jumpers (one white, one Fair Isle), a cardigan (bottle-green, round-neck, raglan sleeves), a petticoat and four pairs of socks. Plus, of course, what I was wearing when I arrived – one vest, one liberty bodice, one pair of knickers, one pair of socks, one petticoat, one pair of shoes, one blue woollen skirt with straps, one yellow jumper, one winter coat, one pair of gloves, one scarf, one woollen hat (Tam o’ Shanter style). If there was one thing we were good at as a family it was dressing properly for the great outdoors.

Reviewing the amount of clothes, it seems as if I might be in for quite a long stay. On the other hand, there is the anomaly of only one pair of pyjamas – are the clothes really there to impress Auntie Babs while the pyjamas tell the real story? Who knows? Not me. And why am I here? Is this a holiday? It doesn’t feel like a holiday. As well as Teddy, I also have with me Gillian’s Ladybird book Puppies and Kittens which she must have given to me in an extraordinary and unprecedented act of generosity.

Over in the other corner is their doll’s house, a big four-storey Victorian one. It has pictures the size of postage stamps and postage stamps the size of dots; it has gilded chairs fit for a fairy queen and chandeliers like crystal earrings and a kitchen table groaning under the weight of plaster hams and plaster-moulded blancmanges.

This doll’s house is much coveted by Gillian who has frequently tried to persuade the twins to make a will and leave it to her. I doubt very much that they have. If it were willed to me (which is even more unlikely) I would refuse to accept it. There’s something eerie about it, with its microscopic plumbing (tiny copper taps!) and little, little leather-bound books (Great Expectations!). I would be frightened – I am frightened – of getting trapped in there and becoming one of the tiny ringletted and pinafored little girls up in the nursery who have to play with teeny-weeny dolls all day long. Or worse – the poor scullery maid, for ever consigned to blacking the kitchen range.

Perhaps the twins, with their galactic powers, will miniaturize me in the night and Auntie Babs will come in this room one morning and find the guest bed empty and the guest bed in the doll’s house (much nicer than the camp bed) full of a doll-like Ruby Lennox clutching a teddy bear the size of an amoeba.

The stairs are the worst – both in the doll’s house and in Mirthroyd Road. Auntie Babs and Uncle Sidney’s house reminds me of Above the Shop, the same thin, tall dimensions and the same abundance of staircases – although in Mirthroyd Road there’s really only one room on each floor and to get to the attic bedroom involves a long, long climb up the dark, narrow staircase, which is full of bends and twists and unexpected corners which harbour vast quantities of Unknown Dread. The amiable ghosts Above the Shop have been replaced by something that crackles with evil.

I am sent to bed first and have to negotiate this treacherous journey entirely on my own. This is manifestly wrong. I have adopted certain strategies to help us in this ordeal. It’s important, for example, that I keep my hand on the bannister rail at all times when climbing the stairs (the other one is being clutched by Teddy). That way, nothing can hurtle unexpectedly down the stairs and knock us flying into the Outer Darkness. And we must never look back. Never, not even when we can feel the hot breath of the wolves on the back of our necks, not when we can hear their long, uncut claws scrabbling on the wood at either edge of the staircarpet and the growls bubbling deep in their throats.

Terrible, apocalyptic images rise before my eyes as we undertake our ascent – images of Teddy being ripped to pieces, torn limb from limb and tossed from wolf to wolf as great gobbets of saliva drop from their jaws. Finally, his little body is held down under a stinking, matted paw and his stuffing is pulled out. He turns his pleading amber eyes towards me—

‘Who’s that?’ A hoarse, thick voice rasps out this question – we are on the landing outside ‘Grandpa’s’ bedroom, not my grandfather (they have both under-gone their genetic fate by now – one run over, one blown up) but the twins’ grandfather – Sidney’s father – who lives in the room beneath ours. ‘Just Ruby!’ I shout back to him – although I don’t think he has the faintest idea who ‘Just Ruby’ is – and carry on up the stairs. Now we’ve reached the really tricky bit – getting into bed.

We linger on the threshold of the bedroom for a while – thresholds are safe, but unfortunately you can’t stay on them for ever. Also, the wolves that live on the stairs can’t cross them (or they’d be all over the house), which is good, but the bed is on the other side of the room, which is bad. There are things living under the camp bed. There are a handful of crocodiles and a small dragon but mainly they are nameless things without clear definition or taxonomy. But one thing is certain – all the things that live under the bed, named, or unnamed, have teeth. Teeth that will snap vulnerable little ankles when they try to get into bed.

Speed is the only stratagem here. Ready, Teddy – steady, Teddy – Go! Little slippered feet patter across the linoleum, little hearts go thud, thud, thud, as we get near the danger zone – two feet from the bed – we launch ourselves onto the camp bed, which nearly collapses, but we are safe. Safe, that is, as long as we don’t fall out of bed during the night. I stuff Teddy down the front of my pyjamas, just in case.

I want to go home! I want Patricia. I want Watch with Mother! This is still a televisionless household and every afternoon I feel a hollow sense of deprivation when I realize that my friends – the biggest spotty dog in the world, Little Weed, Rag, Tag and Bobtail – are playing their games without me. Time to go home! Time to go home! Ruby and Teddy are waving goodbye! Goodbye! If only.

I resolve that I will use Puppies and Kittens as my escape plan. I will learn to read! I’ve been trying to read for a long time, I’m due to start school after the summer and I would like to get off to a flying start. I have absorbed as much as I can when I’ve been roped in to help Patricia play schools (to tell the truth, I don’t think she’s as good a teacher as she thinks she is) but although I know the alphabet inside out, back to front, and upside down, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

If I learn to read and then to write – because I know one thing leads to another – then I will be able to write a letter to the outside world, to Patricia, and she will come and rescue me from Mirthroyd Road. Auntie Babs is my unwitting ally in this because she gives me Daisy and Rose’s old alphabet cards to play with – I am ‘under her feet’ (not as much as I would be if I shrank to doll’s house size) all day long. The twins are at school and Auntie Babs is obviously peeved at suddenly finding herself with a child in the house, especially as she already has ‘Grandpa’ to look after. This is more evidence that I have been sent as a terrible punishment rather than a holiday; if I was here on holiday she would put herself out to make sure I had a good time. But then again, perhaps not.

Everything runs like clockwork in Auntie Babs’ house. For example, there’s a strict rota for the bathroom in the morning, with Auntie Babs going first, then Uncle Sidney, then the twins (together) and then me. The order is reversed in the evening. There is none of the bleary-eyed grumpiness that George, Bunty and Gillian taint the morning with. I wouldn’t say Patricia was exactly chirpy in the mornings, more phlegmatic and resigned, but that’s a great improvement on Gillian who doesn’t even speak in the morning and usually communicates via her Sooty and Sweep glove-puppets. Sooty can be particularly unpleasant at the breakfast table.

Auntie Babs is also a slave to housework, I know this because she tells me so. Often. On Monday she does the washing. She has an antiquated boiler that she has to heat up (her domestic appliances are all more primitive than her younger sister’s) and the whole house ends up a soapy, sudsy Turkish bath by the time she’s finished. She makes me play next to the frightening boiler because I have a croupy cough and tells me that ‘I should count myself lucky that’s all I have.’ Auntie Babs, you notice, has the same cryptic ways of communicating as Bunty. If the Germans had used Bunty and Babs instead of the Enigma coding machine they would probably have won the war. On Tuesday Auntie Babs irons all the clothes she washed on Monday. On Wednesday she does low dusting, on Thursday, high dusting. On Fridays she washes paintwork and floors and sweeps the carpet with her Ewbank. On Saturday she does the shopping. This is exactly the same housework timetable as her fellow housework slave – Bunty!

Meals are regular and wholesome; Uncle Sidney never has to wait for more than two minutes for his tea when he comes home at night. Auntie Babs prides herself on being a good cook and suffers none of the Strindbergian gloom that Bunty experiences when cooking. (Or perhaps it’s Ibsenesque – perhaps Bunty is also trapped in a doll’s house? Just a thought.) Uncle Sidney is a great encouragement to Auntie Babs’ culinary talents. He talks about ‘Babs’ Yorkshire Pudding’ and ‘Babs’ Onion Gravy’ as if they were fellow members of the family – ‘Hello, hello, here comes Babs’ Shepherd’s Pie’ – I’m surprised he doesn’t ask it if it enjoyed itself at the end of the meal. And Auntie Babs is the Queen of Puddings – every night a new one – treacle sponge pudding, jam roly-poly (which Patricia calls ‘dead baby’ but I think it best not to mention this at Auntie Babs’ table), lemon meringue pie, rhubarb crumble, rice pudding – what will we have on Sunday, I wonder? What will we do on Sunday? In our house it’s a no-housework day, so presumably it will be the same here.

Mr Wedgewood then proceeds to ask Spirit to come and talk to us and that’s the signal for all kinds of strange things to happen – the dead pop up all over the place – a woman’s husband who’s been dead for twenty years tells her there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Then there’s the father of another woman who ‘passed into Spirit’ last year and reports to her that he misses going to the cinema. Somebody’s mother comes back just to tell her ‘how to get rid of that scratch in your coffee table’ (linseed oil) and one woman has an entire family of six people materialize behind her chair (to Mr Wedgewood’s eyes, anyway) who turn out to have been next-door neighbours who died in a house fire thirty years ago. Clearly, there is no escape from the dead. Their message to their ex-neighbour is to ‘batter on’, to the end of the tunnel presumably. The world of spirits seems a rather mundane place to me, like a doctor’s waiting-room full of people trying to top one cliché with another.

I’m just beginning to droop into sleep in the overheated atmosphere when I realize Mr Wedgewood is standing at the end of our aisle and looking at me. I swallow with difficulty and stare at my feet, perhaps he knows I was only pretending to sing the hymn. But he smiles benignly at me and says Your sister says not to worry about her and Auntie Babs gives a little gasp, but before I can work any of this out the little organ strikes up another hymn identical to the last one (all the hymns in the Church of the Spirit are exactly the same – a phenomenon that, interestingly, nobody seems to notice).

I puzzle over my experiences in church for the rest of the day, even Babs’ Roast Beef and Babs’ Apple Pie – our guests for Sunday dinner – cannot allay my fears that Patricia or Gillian are dead. I try and bring this subject up with Auntie Babs – to a background accompaniment of ‘Willow, Tit-Willow, Tit-Willow’ – but she just says, ‘Don’t try to be clever, Ruby – it doesn’t suit you’ (I think it suits me very well, actually) and refuses to talk any further about it.

The worst things of all are the nightmares – terrible dreams of drowning, of falling, of being trapped, of flying. Flying dreams are the worst – we’re pitched headlong from the top of the stairs onto a vertiginous, non-stop flight over which we have no control. We accelerate faster and faster until we reach the hallway down below when we wake up just before crashing into the stained-glass panels of the front door.

These dreams are bad enough when they take place on the stairs at Mirthroyd Road, but even worse when they are in the doll’s house. Its stairs are too narrow to negotiate properly and after a night in the doll’s house Teddy and I wake up with bruised elbows and battered ankles. Whichever stairs we’re on, we also have to dodge the Unnamed Dread lurking on the landings, or worse – Grandpa shouting out at us like a mad cuckoo clock screaming, ‘Who’s that?’ and I wake up crying, ‘It’s just Ruby,’ but now, even I’m not sure who ‘Just Ruby’ is.

And then something really horrible happens – I begin to walk in my sleep. And now I not only dream about the staircases – I am sometimes shaken awake by Auntie Babs and find that I’m really there! Just Ruby – all alone except for the Unnamed Dread. Once, I wake up and find I am alone in the dark, no Auntie Babs – perhaps I have shaken myself awake? I am standing in front of the doll’s house and the dim street light filtering through the attic curtains reveals a complete muddle in its little rooms as if some small creature desperate to find something had ransacked it from top to bottom. Horrors!

Another Sunday comes around. We go to church. This week Rita introduces a visiting medium called Myra, who looks like Alma Cogan, but without the frocks, and Myra gives us a little talk on ‘Animals in the Spirit World’. Myra claims that animals as well as people pass over into Spirit, posing many unanswered questions, not least of which is how there can be enough room for everybody. If all living things exist in the afterlife then there must be zillion upon zillion of plankton, amoebas, bacteria, spinning off to the astral plane every day. If not, then where do you draw the line? Domestic pets only? Nothing smaller than a Yorkshire terrier? A wasp? And are they segregated – do dogs float around with dogs, giraffes with giraffes? Puy with Ktn? Does chicken flock with chicken? Bluebird fly with bluebird (birds of a feather)? Or all the birds of the air? And what of teddy bears – is there one section where all the spirit teddy bears are corralled or are they allowed to live with their children? Questions, questions . . .

I devote myself to the alphabet. Teddy and I sit, day after day, on the magic carpet in front of the fire and study its arcane messages – ‘A is for Apple’, ‘B is for Bus’, ‘C is for Cat’, ‘D is for Dog’. I understand the meaning all right, it’s the form that escapes me. The cards have pictures on them – Apples, Buses, Cats, Dogs, Elephants, Fish, Goats – hermeneutic symbols that drive me into a frenzy. ‘I’ is for Indian and in the night the hostile tribes gather on the landings, their eyes and beads shining in the darkness, their feathery headdresses forming a barricade behind which huddle the Unnamed Dread. The things that live under the bed crawl out and join them and here and there, a cutlass flashes. We fly past them all on our unstoppable, roller-coaster dreams.

Perhaps the flower-twins, the cabal of two, have bewitched me – put a flying spell on me that dooms me to fly, wingless, every night. Or perhaps they have made a wax doll of me and have slipped it unnoticed into the nursery of the doll’s house and practise telekinesis on it at night, throwing it down the narrow little stairs while lying ‘innocently’ in their beds. When I wake in the mornings they are both lying there, looking at me; their eyes are pinpoints of darkness boring into my skull as they try and probe my brain. I will not let them read my thoughts. I will resist them.

There are so many things I want to ask and nobody who has the answers. One of the twins, chin held down to avoid identification, shows me one of her school books (I’m surprised they bother with language when their telepathy is so advanced) in which Janet helps Mummy bake a cake while John makes a bonfire with Daddy. And I thought ‘J’ was for Jam! One afternoon, Auntie Babs comes into the living-room and finds Teddy and me sitting on the magic carpet in tears – in front of us a ouija-board of letters spelling the mysterious word P-E-A-R-L. Auntie Babs’ face is pinched in fury so that she resembles a Picasso portrait. She picks up the letters and throws them on the fire. Fools that we are – ‘P’ is for ‘Puy’ not ‘Pearl’.

So the days fly by in the alchemical pursuit of reading and the nights speed past in flight and all the time I try to find the secret spell that will take us out of our mysterious exile and back home. How long have we been imprisoned in Mirthroyd Road? A year? Five years? Two and a half weeks really, but it seems like a hundred years. How will my family be able to recognize me when I return? I have no handy freckle to mark me out as the Ruby Lennox who left them so long ago. Perhaps they will cry ‘Impostor!’ and refuse to let me back in.

Before I go to bed that night I harass Patricia into helping me translate Puppies and Kittens. I regret ever having doubted her talents as a teacher, for the way she explains it now it all suddenly makes sense and, as if by magic, I am able to unlock The Mysteries – ‘Here is a Puppy, Here is a Kitten, Here are Puppies and Kittens.’ I am powerful! I have the key to the Temple of Knowledge and there’s no stopping me – we get out crayons and form letters. No need for Puy and Ktn any more, now there are enough letters to make all the Puppies and Kittens we want, enough letters to make everything. Slowly, with a red crayon, I create my own hieroglyphics – R-U-B-Y spells Ruby! My name is Ruby. I am a precious jewel. I am a drop of blood. I am Ruby Lennox.

I go to sleep in my own bed for the first time in what seems like a long time. It’s strange to be alone in my bedroom and I have a distinct feeling that something – or somebody – is missing. There is a space in the room that wasn’t there before, not a vacuum but an invisible cloud of sadness that drifts around, bumping into furniture and lingering at the foot of my bed as if the domestic phantoms had been joined by a raw recruit. The fur on Teddy’s neck stands up and he growls nervously.

My night-time perambulations do not stop when I’m home and Bunty often wakes me from my parlous state in order to tell me how annoyed she is at being woken by my ghostly odysseys. But what of the times when she doesn’t wake me? Why do I have such unquiet sleep?

Something has changed Above the Shop. Patricia, for example, has definitely taken a turn for the worse, there is a look of troubled confusion in her eyes that’s quite distressing to behold. On my first night back, as I race to the end of Puppies and Kittens (‘Puppies and Kittens are sleeping’), I can see she’s trying to say something. She bites her lip and stares at the picture of sleeping puppies and kittens. Then she speaks in an urgent, ferocious whisper – ‘Was it Gillian, Ruby? Was it Gillian’s fault?’ – but I just look at her blankly because I haven’t the faintest idea what she’s talking about.

And as for Gillian herself – Gillian is being nice to me! She says I can keep her Puppies and Kittens and have untrammelled use of Mobo (not much good as I’ve outgrown him and he’s on his way to the knacker’s yard. Outgrowing the Mobo is a kind of rite of passage and I can now understand Gillian’s feelings when it happened to her.) Furthermore I can borrow Sooty or Sweep – I am even given a free choice and I choose Sweep because he has a voice. Of sorts. For a brief, pleasant period of time, Sooty and Sweep have a friendly relationship, until Gillian’s natural animosity reasserts itself and with one last Izzie Wizzie let’s get busy she breaks Sooty’s wand over Sweep’s head and reclaims him by pulling him violently off my hand. I don’t really care – I still have Teddy and an Alexandrian library of books, in the form of the Children’s Section of the York City Library, is waiting to be deciphered by us.