"'Rupert Porson!' she shrieked. 'Rupert Porson uses the Royal Mail, just like everyone else!'"

Nialla laughed. "And then she begged him for his autograph. They always do, you know. Insisted he put 'Best wishes from Snoddy the Squirrel.' When he does it that way, he always draws a couple of little nuts. She claimed she wanted it for her nephew, but I knew better. When you're on the road a lot, you develop a certain sense for these things. You can always tell."

She was prattling. If I kept quiet, it wouldn't be more than a minute before she would be confiding her size in knickers.

"Someone at the BBC told Rupert that twenty-three percent of his viewing audience is made up of childless housewives. Seems a lot, doesn't it? But there's something about The Magic Kingdom that satisfies one's innate desire for escape. That's the exact way they put it to Rupert: 'one's innate desire for escape.' Everyone needs to escape, don't they? In one way or another, I mean."

"Everyone but Mother Goose," I said.

She laughed. "Look, I wasn't pulling your leg. I am Mother Goose. At least, I am when I put on my costume. Just wait until you see it--tall witch's hat with a floppy brim and a silver buckle, a gray wig with dangling ringlets, and a great puffy dress that looks as if it once belonged to Mother Shipton. Do you know who Mother Shipton was?"

Of course I did. I knew that she was some old crone who was supposed to have lived in the sixteenth century and seen into the future, predicting, among other things, the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, aeroplanes, battleships, and that the world would come to an end in 1881; that like those of Nostradamus, Mother Shipton's prophecies were in doggerel verse: "Fire and water shall wonders do," and all that. I also knew that there are actually still people running around loose today who believe she foresaw the use of heavy water in the making of the atomic bomb. As for myself, I didn't believe a word of it. It was nothing but a load of old tosh.