Excerpt from Laura Blundy by Julie Myerson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He just stared at me with his head gushing and then -as if nothing had happened - brought up some more words, except this time they made no sense at all. Laura-no-Laura- no-Laura-no - they spewed out all cock-a-snip, like gibberish.

I did not mean to laugh but I couldn't help it. My head had gone into a different place where good and bad did not exist and there was only this and that. And he looked so funny, falling backwards off his chair - the shock widening his face and a bloody black hole taking the place of his mouth.

Somehow, he got himself up and dragged himself towards the pantry - perhaps hoping to lock himself in there. But I was too quick for him. I dashed across and swung the door back on its hinges and lobbed the bronze animal at him again. Easier this time. I got his face - felt the bone that held his nose in place crunch like sugar.

There was a clatter of enamel dishes, jars falling off the shelves, the earthenware beer smashing. That was when I saw the ham skid, pinkly glossy in the half-light.

Ewan was on the floor and he was crying like a baby animal. It was a snouty, fumbling noise.

I hit him hard with my crutch.

I knew from the very start where Billy lived and how. It was easy to know that he shared some cramped and dingy rooms at Shanklin Court with his skinny, makeshift wife and four babbies.

I knew the wife was named Cally, short for Caroline, and that her and the child Pinny slept in the one wide single bed by the window with the ex-babby Lulu. I knew that Baby Dora lay fretfully next to them in a rickety banana crate cot.

I knew that Billy shared a bed in the next room with Arthur, the only male child since the other died. I knew that was the sleeping arrangement most of the time but if he and Cally fancied a bit of a shag, then they shuffled the babbies around to suit themselves.

I knew what it was to live by the river, for hadn't I spent so many years doing the exact same thing myself? Though I was brought up by my dear father in a good and comfortable home with one servant and glorious views over the Thames and a great deal of books and maps, I had found myself at the age of fifteen on the streets and been drawn to the river for no reason other than that it seemed familiar.

And right until I married Ewan, I lived along its edges in the muck and dull damp, in cottages, rooms, on the steps of the workhouse with the meanest of the crawlers - even, once, under a tarpaulin dragged up on the shingle by the whiting factory near Nash's Yard.

Even when I was imprisoned at Tatum Fields, I was never far from the river's familiar stink. The place was close enough that the laundry rooms were constantly foul and slick with damp and more often than not ankle-deep in thick brown water.

In the Tatum laundry it was a constant battle against damp. You could fumigate the clothes all right, but sometimes you were better leaving them crawling with lice for, once they were soaked with stale water, it was hard to dry them. We had horses for airing - airing? what a joke! - so in the end would resort to flat-ironing them damp and giving them back with the sulphurous steam and odours still coming off them.

I say all this because when you live by the river, it is a certain style of life, a constant consideration. You are well acquainted with how the moisture clings to your face and hair regardless of the season, how the buildings lean so close in together that they coax the alley below into permanent shadow. How in winter there is flooding and in summer there is the big stink and then of course the cholera that floats into your chest, borne on the wind from all that filthy air.

They said that the structure that Billy was working on would save us from all that, though it has to be said that even B. himself did not exactly see how. They said that when it was finished you would not recognise London -and it would be goodbye to turds floating on the river and there would be salmon to catch again off London Bridge in its startled blue waters.

Reprinted from Laura Blundy by Julie Myerson by permission of Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright (c) 2000 by Julie Myerson. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.