the prize hare, Masquerade - an armchair treasure hunt, 1979

Someone who knew my heart gave me this book when I was a small child, though I do not remember who, now.

Once upon a time, an artist had made a fine prize and wrote a slim book of picture riddles, which when solved would lead to the location of the prize buried somewhere in England - it is there in the photograph above.

Each page was densely packed with riddles and puzzles; one whose answer served as a clue for the prize, ancillary ones in script that bordered the picture, more in the accompanying text, and finally hidden in the picture itself, a hare.

Isaac Newton drawing, Masquerade (1979)

Sometimes I say I am an escape artist; this is the first escape I think I might have made that was in some way successful, in that I could pass into those pictures and be there a while. I’ve had more since, and haven’t we all?

On one of the pages, this riddle:

‘Fifty is my first, nothing is my second, five just makes my third, my fourth a vowel is reckoned. Now to find my name, fit my parts together. I die if I grow cold, but never fear cold weather’

and me, lying on my stomach, on the top floor of the house far from the slow chaos below, thinking carefully and then suddenly delighted; tracing out the solution with the very tip of my tongue against the soft flesh underneath and behind my bottom teeth.