Читать онлайн «Let Sleeping Sea-Monsters Lie and Other Cautionary Tales»
Автор Ева Ибботсон
Contents
Foreword by Julia Donaldson
The Worm and the Toffee-Nosed Princess
Never Steal Milk from a Frid
Let Sleeping Sea-Monsters Lie
The Boobrie and the Sheepish Scotsmen
The Brollachan Who Kept Mum
Foreword
As long as stories and people have existed, parents have been telling cautionary tales to their children, warning them what might happen to them if they are nasty, reckless or just bad-mannered. But these are cautionary tales with a difference. True, the offenders have the usual vices – they are rude, snobbish, disobedient, aggressive and bossy – and are bound to come a cropper. But the way in which they get their comeuppance is ingenious in every case, and always has something to do with an imaginary monster. In these adventures you will be introduced to a Frid, a Kraken, a Boobrie and several other creatures populating Eva Ibbotson’s fertile mind.
Eva Ibbotson, in common with some of my other favourite writers such as E. Nesbit and Roald Dahl, writes with a delightful mixture of wild imagination and down-to-earth common sense, tempering her flights of fancy with a satisfying sense of justice. These are the sort of stories I enjoyed as a child, which my children enjoyed and which I’m sure my grandchildren will enjoy too.
Julia Donaldson
The Worm and the Toffee-Nosed Princess
Once upon a time there lived a worm. Not an earthworm – earthworms are smooth and pink and soft with purple bulges in the middle. Not a tapeworm – tapeworms are white and flat and slippery and like to live inside people’s stomachs if they can. Not a lugworm either – lugworms, which people use for fishing, stay buried in the sand.
No, this was a very different sort of worm. It was a great, long, hairy worm, and when I say “long” I mean as long as a train or as two football pitches or as four thousand, three hundred and fifty pork sausages laid end to end. This worm had a forked tongue like so many monsters and a poisonous breath but it didn’t have wings; it just slithered.
Dragons have wings; worms don’t. What it did have was the power to join itself up again when it was cut into pieces. It also had blue eyes which is unusual in a worm.
One day this worm was lying peacefully in a field. Its head was by the gate and its body was looped round and round and round the field it was in, and a bit over into the next field. And as the worm lay there, just thinking its own thoughts, the gate opened and a Princess walked in.
The Princess looked at the worm and the worm looked at the Princess. Then the worm lifted its head, with its cornflower-blue eyes, and said:
“Good morning. ”
It did not say “Good morning” because it thought it was an enchanted prince and wanted the Princess to kiss it and turn it back into a prince. It knew perfectly well that it was not an enchanted prince. It said “Good morning” because it was a polite worm and that is what you say to people – and certainly to princesses – when they come through your front gate.
But the Princess did not say “Good morning” back. She made a rather rude gesture and then she said:
