“How now, Holofernes,” said Judith.

Holofernes put down his sack of grubbings on the floor and leaned to kiss the back of Judith’s hand.

“Your moustache is very bristly, Holofernes,” said Judith, “I fear it has raised tiny scratches on my hand.”

“Plunge it into a tub of ointment and it will be as right as rain, woman!” shouted Holofernes. Holofernes always shouted, he was that kind of general.

“Oh, never mind, Holofernes, I am fond of your moustache. It suits you. It is, how shall I say, decisive,” said Judith.

Holofernes picked up his sack of grubbings again. He was blushing slightly.

“I must take this sack of grubbings to my encampment, woman!” he shouted, “It will not do for me to dilly dally with a widow woman such as yourself.”

“What a pity, Holofernes,” said Judith, “I have just borrowed some interesting pamphlets by Dobson from the mobile library, and I thought you might like to join me in browsing through them. We could go and sit upon a municipal park bench, and take a picnic with us. I have some radishes and coleslaw and a jug of potato pulp diluted with rainwater.”

Holofernes was a sucker for pamphlets, particularly ones written by Dobson, and he needed little persuading to join Judith in the municipal park. The clouds were louring, however.

“See here, woman!” he shouted, after swallowing a mouthful of coleslaw, “If it begins to rain these pamphlets will get soaking wet and when you return them to the library on or before the due date there may be ructions!”

“I am sure you know a thing or two about ructions, Holofernes,” said Judith coquettishly, “But don’t worry, I have a tarpaulin here in my pippy bag and in the event of a downpour I can take it out and unfold it and place the pamphlets underneath it. Here, have another radish.”

Holofernes furrowed his massive forehead, as if deep in thought, but then seemed to relax and, taking the proffered radish, popped it into his mouth and crunched it. Judith caught a glimpse of his teeth.

“Have you had a recent dental checkup, Holofernes?” she asked.

“That, woman, is between me and my dentist! It is unseemly for a widow woman from Bethulia to pry into such matters,” shouted Holofernes.

“Forgive me, Holofernes,” said Judith, “I was forgetting my manners there for a moment. But I was a little concerned that you may need an appointment with the hygienist, for I clearly saw scraps of raw meat and carrots and cake-crumbs stuck between your teeth. You have not been flossing, have you?”

Holofernes’ temper flared. He stood up, picked up his sack of grubbings, and was about to stomp off out of the municipal park when there was a cloudburst and the rain began teeming down.

“Quick, Holofernes, help me to unfold the tarpaulin!” said Judith.

Two minutes later the Dobson pamphlets were safely covered up but both Judith and Holofernes were sopping wet.

“When the rain stops we ought to find a little boatman’s hut in which to dry off and get a nice cup of tea,” said Judith, “Just like Laura and Alec do in Brief Encounter after he falls into the boating lake. Come to think of it,” she added, “You remind me of Alec’s friend Dr Stephen Lynn, played by Valentine Dyall, except that Stephen didn’t have a decisive moustache and he was a bit of a prig. And you’re not a prig, are you, Holofernes?”

“I am a general in Nebuchadnezzar’s mighty army, woman!” shouted Holofernes, “And that is all you need to know!”

“Oh, you’re such a grumpy general, Holofernes,” said Judith, “You know what I think would be good for you? Some aromatherapy. But you strike me as more of a sweat lodge kind of chap.”

“Enough, woman!” shouted Holofernes, “You may seek out an humble boatman’s hut if you wish, but I must return to my encampment with my sack of grubbings. I shall dry off in my tent, which is a tent fit for a general!”

“Well, I shall come with you,” said Judith.

Holofernes grumbled, but he was secretly delighted, for there was something about this widow woman that intrigued him and inflamed his passions. They set off across the plains together.

“Tell me about Babylon, Holofernes, where your king Nebuchadnezzar lives. I have heard it is full of Rastafarians smoking ganja and moaning on and on, rhythmically of course, about their misery,” said Judith.

“As a general in the army, woman, I pay no heed to such countercultural doings,” shouted Holofernes, “I have enough on my plate keeping my troops on their toes and smiting mine enemies with a big sword.”

“Ooh,” said Judith, “You’ll have to let me see that big sword when we get back to your encampment, Holofernes.”

Later, of course, when they were in Holofernes’ tent and he showed Judith his big sword, she used it to slice his head off. Then she went back to Bethulia, carrying the head of Holofernes, and was received in triumph by her people.

There was once a woodcutter who had a burning sense of injustice. He dwelt in a cottage deep in the forest, where there was plenty of wood for him to cut. A day’s walk to the west was the cottage of a charcoal burner, and a day’s walk to the east was the hovel of a drink-soaked ex-Trotskyist popinjay. These were the woodcutter’s neighbours, and they worried about his burning sense of injustice and sought what they could do to alleviate it, but the woodcutter was a very taciturn woodcutter and he never answered either the charcoal burner or the popinjay when they asked him to explain, as they did on Thursdays when their separate foresty routines took them both past the woodcutter’s cottage where they dropped in in the hope of being offered a mug of piping hot cocoa. Sometimes they dropped in at the same time, so it could be a cosy threesome huddled in the unrelenting gloom of the woodcutter’s cottage.

On one such Thursday, the woodcutter was as reluctant to speak as ever, but he happily poured out cocoa for his neighbours. The charcoal burner had brought some charcoal to burn to keep him occupied, and the popinjay was reminiscing about his Trotskyist days when he spent much of his time standing at the entrances to railway stations handing out pamphlets to passers-by. The woodcutter neither watched the charcoal being burned nor listened to the slurred anecdotage of the popinjay. He sat in his chair glowering at the embers in the fireplace, nurturing his burning sense of injustice.

Now, the charcoal burner and the popinjay had hatched what they thought was a very clever plan to get the woodcutter to spill the beans. They reasoned that if they each claimed to have a burning sense of something, and babbled on about it in confessional mode to the woodcutter, he might well tell them of the injustice gnawing at his soul. So the charcoal burner pretended to have a burning sense of righteousness, and the popinjay assumed a burning sense of indigestion. They were waiting in the gloom for an opportune moment to launch into an account of their counterfeit burning woes.

This clever plan was not the only thing that was hatched on that Thursday. In the cellar of the woodcutter’s cottage, in a crate packed with straw, there nestled a clutch of eggs that, as the charcoal burner burned charcoal and the popinjay wittered, began to crack. The beings inside the eggs were grown too large to be confined any longer. They were ready to be born. And what beings they were! Startling forest creatures, crinkly and crumpled and covered in hoar-frost. Tiny now, when full grown they would be as tall as the trees and as broad as a barn. Their fur was matted, and the feathers that sprouted from their foreheads were of colours beyond the known spectrum. Their many bulbous eyes, unlidded, stared from quivering stalks with a look of tragic reproach, the tears that dripped from them sulphurous and boiling hot. They had collapsible lungs and sharp fangs and great thumping hooves and a milky pallor and beaks and ears and elbows and pot bellies. When they crawled upon the earth, they turned the soil to muck teeming with maggots, and when they reared up on their hind legs and roared, they blotted out the sun. They had enormous brains, and enormous shovel-like paws, and enormous ill-will. They fed on everything, living and dead, and vomited most of it up again, making disgusting, deafening noises. Their antennae picked up signals from outer space, their inability to understand which caused them such fury that they ripped and tore and savaged whatever was in front of them with their long pointy claws. When they were not roaring they made a tremendous buzzing sound, and when neither roaring nor buzzing they howled and whimpered. A continuous stream of steam and smoke poured out of each of their numberless orifices, poisoning the air around them. They were hunchbacked. They moved with inhuman speed. They left a trail of filth and pus in their wake. They stank of beer and gin and sweat and death. Nobody, not even the weird mad people who dwelt in the weirdest, deepest parts of the forest, kept them as pets, or wove pretty wicker baskets for them to doze in, or cosseted them, or loved them.

In his pamphlet on the forest beings, which is out of print, Dobson described them differently. But he had never seen one, and he was working from unreliable sources. Indeed, he did not know they were hatched from eggs, believing instead the mediaeval superstition that they were formed from the breath of seagulls blown upon the excrement of ladybirds. Where such a fancy originated is unknown.

The sound of the eggs cracking open was loud enough to be heard in the room above the cellar, and both the charcoal burner and the drink-soaked ex-Trotskyist popinjay cocked their ears and gave quizzical looks, first at each other and then at the woodcutter. The woodcutter remained as taciturn as ever, slumped in his chair, taking great gulps from his mug of cocoa. He had sprayed himself, that morning, with half a canister’s worth of Hengist, “the scent for men of the forest”, and there was an aura of indestructibility about him, as well as a burning sense of injustice.

It was that sense of injustice which had led the woodcutter to steal the eggs from the nest of a forest being matriarch. His mind had gone loopy long ago, and he thought that he would be able to train newborn forest beings, put them on leashes, and have them do his bidding. First he would whet their appetites by letting them rend and slash and gobble up the charcoal burner and the popinjay, and then he would set out with them on a long, long journey, tracking down Benny and Bjorn and Agnetha and Anna-Frid, one by one, and wreak vengeance upon them for having, so many years ago, sacked him from their pop group on the day they signed their first recording contract.

He had reckoned without the matriarch, of course. She, too, heard the cracking of her eggs, and now she loomed huge and hideous over the woodcutter’s cottage, deep in the forest, where no one with any sense would ever dwell, for it is a weird and eerie place and it is teeming with monsters.