We walked down to the lake. There were 3 women with pushchairs on the path and a man throwing a ball for a spaniel, and none of them looked twice at us. On the islands in the water the dinosaurs stood where they have stood since 1854, grey and green and enormous, with the damp on them.
"My dad brought me here every summer until I was 12," Emma said. "That 1." She pointed at the big lizard with a spike on its nose. "The Iguanodon. That spike is a thumb. They found the bone on its own and did not know where it went, so they put it on the nose, and it is still on the nose, and every child in Croydon thinks that is what it looked like."
"Who worked it out?"
"A coal mine in Belgium, about 25 years later. They found whole skeletons." She leaned on the rail. "And the man who made them had a dinner party inside the mould of that 1. New Year's Eve 1853. A table full of men in top hats, inside a dinosaur."
"How do you know all that?"
