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By Root 828 0

of Vatican City, Giotto of Assisi, Piero della Francesca of Arezzo, Turner of London, Rodin of Paris, Goya of Madrid, Munch of Christiania (now called Oslo), Klimt of Vienna, Hokusai of Edo (now called Tokyo) and so on and so forth; and if that book were a rigorous and thorough sort of book there would also be one chapter named Chorlin of Entralla. It is this museum, incidentally, and no other, that holds the most comprehensive collection of the works of our celebrated painter Eugin Chorlin, whose canvases most commonly depicted our folk tales and legends, who has been not unfavourably compared to the Flemish (Belgian) painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The second floor of this museum, concentrating on more contemporary works, boasts among its treasures four prints by Salvador Dali, a lithograph by Andy Warhol and a napkin signed by Pablo Picasso, and not to be missed are the video installations by the local genius Jorge Bultt (mainly of shots of Entralla and Entrallans, taken at various highly populated locations on a special time-lapse camera, to show us speeded up and rushing about as sun and moon hurriedly trade places). But it is principally Galleries 24 and 25 that I would wish you to pay particular attention to.

The first exhibit in Gallery 24, on the right of the entrance, resting on top of a simple wooden plinth, is a model constructed entirely from grey plasticine of a group of buildings that bear a definite resemblance to the school that used to exist on Littsen Street. This model has reduced the size of the school so that its entirety can fit within the palm of a human hand. Careful examination will reward the viewer with the additional knowledge that the plasticine buildings have been pricked all over the surface with an instrument that possesses a sharp point, a needle perhaps or a school compass. These tiny indentations were never to be found on the real structure on which this model is based. If the model was expanded so that its proportions mirrored exactly those of the school, then these indentations would be revealed to be rather more serious than mere pricks of a pin: they would look in fact more like bullet holes, or even the vile gashes caused by mortar shells. If such an enlargement were to take place, or, and rather more simply, if the visitor to the exhibition were to place between his or her naked eyes and the exhibit a magnifying glass, then he or she would assume that the poor school had been the object of some vicious siege. But no siege ever took place on the modern thoroughfare called Littsen Street (named in 1919).

This model, a small monument to wish-fulfilment, is the first recorded insistence of the hopes of the twins being acted out in plasticine and also the first reliable evidence of the twins’ skills in the miniaturisation of actual buildings.

THERE WERE SO MANY school days it’s difficult to know what to leave in or what to take out. There was the time when we became ill with the chickenpox (ill at exactly the same time) and the enormous trouble Irva had stopping me from scratching my spots because she insisted there should be no markings on us to tell us one from the other. But I don’t want to talk about all that nonsense. So I’ll skip onwards now until Irva and I became great builders of plasticine, until the time when after school (leaving Mother at the school gates, walking her much slower steps, way behind us—such great strides we had after all) we would come to our attic to construct a city in which we would be happy residents, which was not, certainly not, the city of Entralla. Alvairvalla, as Irva named this place, was a very practicable utopia, and was the first city we built out of plasticine. It was not a very large city, having only forty or fifty buildings.

The important thing for us to remember as we built it was that it was a city for us only, it was built by us and for us, for no one else. Even Mother would not be allowed to enter Alvairvalla. There was only one law in this city which was a huge ‘Keep Out’ to anyone who wasn’t either Irva or me. In fact Irva wrote