Jasper Fforde - The Constant Rabbit

About the Author

Also by Jasper Fforde

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Speed Librarying

Toast & TwoLegsGood

Spotters & Spotting

Fudds and Flopsies

Ross & Rabbits

Griswold & Gossip

Pippa & Pasta

Next Sunday, Next Door

Searching in vain & Shopping in town

Senior Group Leader

Dinner & Dandelion Brandy

Labstock Bunshot

Rabbit Riot

Shopping & Sally Lomax

Tittle-Tattle and Toast

All Saints, All Spite

Cops & Kitten

The Thespian Talk-Through

Toby’s Torn T-shirt

Connie & Caution

Morning Mood

MegaWarren

Car & Custody

The Art of the Deal

Bunnytrap Trap

Bouncing with Constance

Bugged Bunny

Dinner & Deity

Cordiality Collapse

Lapin Flambé & HMP Leominster

The Trials of Lance deBlackberry

Rabbit Colony One

Endgame

The Battle of May Hill

Aftermath

Acknowledgements:

Footnotes

Jasper Fforde spent twenty years in the film business before debuting on the New York Times bestseller list with The Eyre Affair in 2001. Since then he has written another twelve novels, including the Number One Sunday Times bestseller One of our Thursdays is Missing , and the Last Dragonslayer series, adapted for television by Sky.

Fforde lives and works in his adopted nation of Wales.

The Thursday Next Series

The Eyre Affair

Lost in a Good Book

The Well of Lost Plots

Something Rotten

First Among Sequels

One of Our Thursdays is Missing

The Woman Who Died a Lot

The Nursery Crime Series

The Big Over Easy

The Fourth Bear

Shades of Grey

Early Riser

The Dragonslayer Series

(for young adult readers)

The Last Dragonslayer

The Song of the Quarkbeast

The Eye of Zoltar

www.hodder.co.uk

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Jasper Fforde 2020

The right of Jasper Fforde to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: Cover images © shutterstock.com

The quote used in the epigraph here from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (© Bill Bryson 2003), first published in the UK in 2003 by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 76362 1

Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 444 76363 8

eBook ISBN 978 1 444 76365 2

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

It cannot be said too often: all life is one.

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

To the human eye, each rabbit looks very much like the other.

The Private Life of the Rabbit – R.M. Lockley

Somebody once said that the library is actually the dominant life form on the planet. Humans simply exist as the reproductive means to achieve more libraries.

‘Still on the Westerns, Baroness Thatcher?’ I asked, moving slowly down the line of volunteers who were standing at readiness outside our library, a smallish mock-mock-Tudor building in the middle of Much Hemlock, itself more or less in the middle of the county of Hereford, which in turn was pretty much in the middle of the UK.

Much Hemlock was, in pretty much every meaning of the word, middling.

‘Westerns are the best when they’re not really Westerns at all,’ said Baroness Thatcher, ‘like when more akin to the Greek Epics. True Grit , for example.’

‘ Shane is more my kind of thing,’ said Stanley Baldwin, who I think fancied himself as a softly spoken man of understated power and influence. Winston Churchill opined they were both wrong and that The Ox-Bow Incident was far better with its generally positive themes of extrajudicial violence. Neville Chamberlain tried to keep the peace and find some middle ground on the issue while David Lloyd George simply sat there in quiet repose, mentally preparing for the adrenaline-fuelled six minutes of Speed Librarying that lay before us.

Perhaps I should explain. The UKARP Government’s much-vaunted Rural Library Strategic Group Vision Action Group had kept libraries open as per their election manifesto, but reduced the librarian staffing levels in Herefordshire to a single, solitary example working on greatly reduced hours – which meant that each of the county’s twelve libraries could be open for precisely six minutes every two weeks.

And this is where my hand-picked team of faux politicians entered the picture. Using a mixture of careful planning, swiftness of foot, a robust understanding of the Dewey Decimal Book Categorisation System and with strict adherence to procedure, we could facilitate a fortnight’s worth of returns, loans, reserves and extensions in the three hundred and sixty seconds available to us. It was known to all and sundry as a Buchblitz .

My name is Peter Knox, but for the next six minutes I’ll be your John Major.

‘Ready, Stanley?’ I asked Mr Baldwin, who oversaw returns and reservations but was actually retired Wing Commander Slocombe, a former RAF officer who famously lost an ear while ejecting out of a Hawker Hunter over Aden. Remarkably, a solitary ear was retrieved from the wreckage of the aircraft and reattached. Even more remarkably, it wasn’t his.

‘Three times ready, Team Leader.’

‘Mr Major?’ asked Mrs Griswold, who usually ran the Much Hemlock village shop, post office, gossip exchange and pub combined. ‘I can’t remember if I’m Winston Churchill or David Lloyd George.’

‘You’re David Lloyd George,’ I said. ‘You select the books from the shelves to be given to Mr Chamberlain, who takes them to the counter and to Mrs Thatcher, who offers them up to the Sole Librarian to be stamped. It’s really very simple.’

‘Right,’ said Mrs Griswold, ‘David Lloyd George. Got it.’

I had devised an Emergency Code system for Speed Librarying, and Mrs Griswold was definitely a Code 3-20: ‘Someone who village diplomacy dictated should be on the Blitzer team, but was, nonetheless, useless’ . Sadly, no one but myself knew what a 3-20 was, as the system hadn’t reached the levels of awareness I thought it deserved – a state of affairs that had its own code, a 5-12: ‘Lack of enthusiasm over correct procedures’.

The church clock signalled 10.45 and the chatter gave way to an expectant hush. We had seen the Sole Librarian rummaging around prior to the opening, and while she would permit us to reshelf, log reservations and even use the card index, her stamps were sacrosanct: hers and hers alone. Because of this it was Mrs Thatcher’s responsibility to ensure that books and library cards were placed before the Sole Librarian so that her stamping time was most effectively spent. The steady rhythm of rubber on paper was the litmus test of an efficient Blitz .