Little Nelson by Norman Collins Page A

of suburban drawing rooms. The statisticians were confronted by a whole battery of unknowns and variables. Additional mathematicians had to be called in, and nationwide computer facilities became stretched to the limit. Even then, the report wasprominently marked ‘Provisional’. But it was enough. It revealed the astonishing figure of over a quarter million boxes (or books) of matches entirely unaccounted for.
    One explanation soon began to present itself – a blazing hayrick here, a gutted sports pavilion there. Reports began coming in of wisps of burning newspaper thrust wantonly into the slots of pillarboxes, of Corporation litter bins unaccountably spouting smoke and flames, and of piles of hymn books, scorched almost beyond recognition, discovered in the chancels of remote, unlocked country churches.
    Then came a new phenomenon, the night flares and beacons. On a single night in September as many as eleven entirely separate conflagrations were observed by a company of Boy Scouts camping on the hills by Ivinghoe; and hardly a full twenty four hours passed without dancing lights being seen, piercing the darkness in places where no light had ever been observed before.
    The Deputy Commissioner was wholly unprepared when the day’s case-sheet from Larceny listed a major raid on a world-famous West End toy emporium. Here again meticulous planning was immediately apparent. No fewer than three – the Traffic Department contended that there must have been a minimum of four – lorry-loads must have been employed to cart the stuff away. And the nature ofthe stolen goods was in itself remarkable. Some departments were utterly cleared out. All air rifles, bows and arrows, boomerangs, catapults and water pistols had been painstakingly removed, and the entire garage of pedal motors, scooter cars, tricycles and fairy cycles were cleared out, leaving nothing but tyre marks on the polished boards.
    One floor above, the electronic toy section, was similarly cleared out. Miniature racers with remote control were all taken, and a full showcase of toy airplanes including one toy helicopter – all expensive demonstration models – was emptied on the spot. Here again it was significant that the kind that simply had miniaturized petrol engines and were kept tethered on a string were left untouched in their separate showcase, and that it was only the fully manoeuvrable sort that was stolen. Plainly the theft had been methodically planned in advance because the department’s entire stock of batteries for the operating panels had all been removed, too.
    It is to the RAF that the credit must go for discovering the eventual destination of the stolen goods. A Nimrod aircraft, returning from a more than usually pointless sea reconnaissance, spotted something unusual on the runway of a disused air station on the Norfolk coast. Coming down from some thirty-five thousand feet, the Captain made three low-level runs across the field and, despite deteriorating weather conditions, secured irrefutablephotographic evidence. This revealed six lines of extremely small vehicles all drawn up along the tarmac, and all in the hands of equally small drivers in bright, unfamiliar uniforms. What was of particular interest, however, was the picture sequence of the rapid-succession camera. It showed that the runway was being used for intensive training exercises – rapid acceleration from a standing start with the drivers bent low over the steering wheel and peddling away like mad; U-turns taken at full speed; and delicate reversing operations into narrow and confined spaces. Some of the photographic frames even showed up minor collisions, and one a quite nasty pile-up involving a road racer, a toy fire-engine, a kiddy’s go-cart and a fairy cycle complete with bell, headlamp and wicker shopping-basket.

Chapter 8
    It is noteworthy that, at the very moment when gnomes were congregating in the shires and counties of the kingdom,