- The voice
- Flat, matter-of-fact, London
- Home
- The Sleepy ForestWhere the trees close their eyes one branch at a time
- Part of
- The treesThe Sleepy Forest cast. Every one of them a different way of saying goodnight.
- How home goes to sleep
- It goes to sleep when every secret eye closes, one after another.
The story of Lonny
Lonny is the city tree — a London plane, the kind a child in London walks past every day without knowing it has a name. City trees learn a certain plainness. No nonsense, no long stories, no riddles: No. You must go to sleep. Flat as a pavement, and somehow exactly as comforting. His bark peels away in flat rounded plates, cream and olive and warm buff, a patchwork like camouflage, and every night on the way down the ladder a plate or two more comes loose and lies at his feet. He is the only one in the whole cast whose falling asleep leaves something on the ground — you can see how far the night has got just by looking under him. He puts the day down a piece at a time. Then he is quiet, like a street at three in the morning.
Also from The Sleepy Forest
Straight from the sheet
Every character is drawn once, properly, on a sheet — the same way the books were made. This is Lonny’s.
