Wild Stories

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968 ), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Wild Stories

  ePub ISBN 9781742741147

  Kindle ISBN 9781742741154

  Visit Colin Thompson’s website: http://www.colinthompson.com

  This work is fictitious. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A Random House book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  This collection first published in the United States by Kane Miller in 2010

  First published in Australia by Random House Australia in 2010

  Copyright © Colin Thompson 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry is available from the National Library of Australia

  ISBN: 978 1 86471 826 3

  Design, illustrations and typesetting by Colin Thompson

  Additional typesetting by Anna Warren, Warren Ventures Pty Ltd

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my grandsons Walter and Donald

  and

  to the memory of Margery Fisher (1913–1992) who, in the first review I ever got, said that Ethel the Chicken was a masterpiece. It was the most wonderful start to my writing career.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Disclaimer

  Dedication

  Introduction

  BOOK 1

  Sleep

  The Old Dog

  Sid the Mosquito

  Three Sparrows

  Ted the Flea

  The Rabbits

  Bob the Slug

  The Rats

  Delilah the Spider

  George the Millipede

  Autumn

  Barry the Hedgehog

  The Boy Next Door

  Ethel the Chicken

  BOOK 2

  Waking Up

  Nearly Spring

  Albert the Bat

  Four Bluetits

  DorisEthel

  Brenda the Tadpole

  Geoff the Snail

  Joan the Sparrow

  Dennis the Owl

  Metamorphosis

  The Five Dorises

  Arnold the Mouse

  Attila the Bluebottle

  Arkwright the Cat

  BOOK 3

  Christmas

  Winter Morning

  Four Pigeons

  Rosie

  Ambrose the Cuckoo

  Ffiona the Shrew

  Joey the Budgerigar

  Godfrey the Maggot

  Bert the Crow

  Venus the Caterpillar

  Moonlight

  Ethel’s Dreamtime

  The Twelve Thousand Franks

  Full Circle

  How To Live Forever

  Random House

  INTRODUCTION

  The first story I ever wrote was called Ethel the Chicken.

  It was published in 1991 and in 1993 it was published again with some more stories in a book called Sid the Mosquito & Other Wild Stories.

  In 1995 I had a second book of stories published called Attila the Bluebottle & More Wild Stories, and in 1996 there was a third book called Venus the Caterpillar & Further Wild Stories.

  These three books were only published in the UK and all three went out of print several years ago.

  Although Ethel the chicken sort of died in the third book, she went on to have an exciting career in five more books. She re-appeared as a ghost in The Haunted Suitcase. She turned up as a not very good reincarnation in Castle Twilight and as an extremely wise old bird in The Puzzle Duck. Then her career really took off when she appeared as an all-powerful super-intelligent being from outer space trapped inside a chicken’s body in Future Eden and again in the sequel Space – The Final Effrontery.

  Unfortunately none of these books are available any more, but to prove that Ethel the chicken is immortal, I’m delighted to say that Ethel and all the stories from Sid, Attila and Venus are here again in one big book.

  Sleep

  At the end of a quiet street, at the edge of a large town, stood a beautiful old house. The honeysuckle grew high around its walls and the paint curled up at the edges of the windows. Behind the dusty glass, dark velvet curtains brushed against a forest of cobwebs and at the back of the house a wide lawn led down to a tangle of fruit trees and a forgotten pond.

  At the top of the street the traffic hurried by but in this short road that led to nowhere it was peaceful and quiet.

  Around the house and lawn, tall trees and thick bushes grew wonderful and wild with birds and creatures and insects that flashed in the flickering sunlight. Hedgehogs slipped beneath overgrown branches, watched from the cellar windows by dark brown rats. Mosquitos hovered over the lawn in the misty haze of summer and from beneath the eaves of the house swallows swooped down to catch them. At the bottom of the garden there were rabbits and in the tops of the trees there were squirrels.

  An old lady and an old dog lived in the house. They had lived there all their lives. The old lady had been born there when the house had been bright and new and full of people. With her brothers and sisters she had run through the rooms, and every corner of the house had been full of sunshine and laughter.

  Everyone else was gone now. Her mother and father had died a long time ago and her brothers and sisters all lived far away in other towns.

  The old lady and the dog and the house had grown old together. Twelve years ago, her nephew, who thought she might be lonely, had bought her the dog. For the first time in her long life the old lady had someone who needed her. And for the first time in years the house was filled with words as she talked to her new friend.

  ‘Shall we go and pick some flowers?’ she would say, or, ‘Time for a cup of tea, I think.’

  Every morning the old lady opened the back door and the old dog shuffled out into the garden. He sniffed the dustbin, lifted his face to the sky to catch the smells of the
day and then set off round his territory.

  ‘Morning,’ said the weasels as he passed their hole in the wall.

  ‘Morning,’ said the dog as he ambled by.

  ‘Nice day,’ said the mole.

  ‘It’s raining,’ said the dog.

  ‘Yes, but it’s nice rain.’

  The dog was always surprised to see the mole. No matter what time of day he went round the garden, she would be there, just coming out of her hole. What he didn’t know was that she was lonely and listened for his footsteps across the lawn. She thought he was wonderful and as he walked across the grass she scampered beneath him down her tunnels so that she could pop up as he went by.

  ‘Morning,’ said the dog to the old chicken who lived in a box at the bottom of the lawn. The chicken was even older than he was and when he went by she was usually fast asleep and didn’t answer.

  As he passed the dark wooden shed where the lawnmower and the deckchairs were kept, he pushed his nose into the hole where the hedgehogs lived.

  ‘It’s raining,’ he said into the dark space under the shed. His daily weather report was usually met with sleepy grunts. Most of the hedgehogs slept all day, particularly if it was raining. Some of the young ones were often about, snuffling in the dandelions for slugs, but it was very rare to see an adult hedgehog before mid-afternoon.

  The dog moved on to the bottom of the garden where there was a rusty car that had once taken the old lady to school. Now it was full of ferns and mice who lived behind the dashboard.

  ‘I do wish he wouldn’t do that,’ they said when the dog lifted his leg against the front tyre.

  ‘I know,’ said a sparrow who had built her nest in the glove compartment. ‘It lowers the tone of the whole neighbourhood.’

  As the dog walked under the tall sycamore trees, the crows that nested high up in the top branches called down to him.

  ‘Good morning, dog,’ they cried.

  ‘What? Who said that?’ said the dog, looking round. It was the same every day. He never thought of looking up towards the sky and he had begun to believe the trees were haunted. The crows thought the dog was stupid and shouted to him each day as a joke.

  Past the car was the rabbit warren. The dog didn’t know what to make of the rabbits. He was a gentle, quiet animal and the rabbits were loud and rough, not at all like rabbits are supposed to be. Large eyes peered out of the holes as he went by. Rabbits are supposed to be frightened of dogs but these laughed and whistled and he kept away from them.

  He ambled through the orchard, sometimes eating a fallen apple, before coming out onto the lawn again and wandering up to the back door where he sat and barked until the old lady let him in.

  On summer days the old lady opened the French windows at the back of the house and the dog went out to lie in the sunshine. He lay in the middle of the lawn and got hotter and hotter until he was panting like a steam train. Then he would go to the pond for a drink and come back to lie under the bushes.

  ‘You know,’ he said to a hedgehog as they lay together under a gooseberry bush, ‘my human’s amazing. I’d swear she understands my every thought.’ Across the lawn, the old lady was sitting by the open door knitting a blue blanket.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the hedgehog. ‘She’s almost doglike.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ said the dog. ‘I mean, look at her now. How does she know my favourite colour’s blue? Yet there she is, knitting me a blue blanket.’

  ‘She’s a great credit to you,’ said the hedgehog. ‘You must feel very proud.’

  ‘Well, one does one’s best.’

  When people and animals get old, they need to be cared for. Houses are the same. But as gardens grow old, they become more beautiful each year. The less people interfere with them, the better they become. If a tree falls and someone clears it away, it’s gone forever. If it’s left alone, it becomes home to a thousand insects and creeping plants. Fungus grows and the tree slowly melts back into the earth to feed new trees.

  When the old lady and the house had been young, the garden was already full of ancient trees. Her father had planted more and now they were full grown.

  Beneath the trees and bushes, weeds grew thick in tiny jungles. Nettles and dandelions brought butterflies and birds to the garden and behind the secret leaves mice and frogs lived hidden lives.

  When the old lady’s nephew came he cut the lawn, but apart from that the garden was left to grow its own way. All around, the other houses had neat tidy rows of flowers, sprayed and weeded in lifeless earth, but here was a complete world where nature lived unharmed.

  The lily pond was hidden behind overgrown raspberry canes. The vegetable garden had disappeared under a carpet of grass. When she had been a little girl, the old lady had planted radishes there, in between her father’s lettuces. Now even the brick paths had vanished under a coat of moss. Nature wrapped the whole garden in a beautiful blanket and then started on the house.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said the old lady, when she saw little trees growing in the gutters and ivy creeping across the window sills.

  The dog was very old now and as the summer passed he grew slower and slower. He slept more and more and his dreams of the days when he could jump and play grew faint and quiet. His rubber ball lay behind the armchair collecting dust. The air around him grew still and weary. Nature sighed and waited. The wind slammed the door unheard and the sweet smells of the garden flowed over him unnoticed. In the garden, the animals passed the open doors and saw him lying there far away in his peaceful silence. The mole waited quietly in her tunnel but he no longer took his daily walk. As the first gold leaves of autumn began to fall he climbed into his bed and went to sleep forever.

  He was buried beneath the red apple tree that the old lady had planted as a child, and when her nephew had smoothed over the sad little mound and put the spade back among the dark cobwebs and broken deckchairs in the garden shed, they went back to the house and packed her bags.

  ‘It’s time for a change,’ she said and went to live by the sea. The house stayed behind and went to sleep.

  The lawn grew tall and thick and criss-crossed with the tunnels of animals that had grown up in the shadows and now came out into the open. The creatures that had hidden in the cellars moved up into the empty rooms and as the years passed, the wild garden grew wilder until the house called fourteen lay hidden behind a wall of green.

  The Old Dog

  He sits by the door

  And looks out at the rain

  As it falls soft and warm on the lawn.

  The summer has nearly faded again

  And each winter comes with a little more pain

  And a little less fight for the storm.

  He sits by the door

  Looking right through the rain

  At a spot on the far side of space.

  He’s getting tired of taking the strain,

  There are lights going out in the back of his brain,

  He’s content to withdraw from the race.

  Sid the Mosquito

  Behind the trees at the end of the lawn, the pond lay hidden by overgrown bushes. The trees hung their branches down to touch the water and at the water’s edge tall grass grew full of hidden flowers and butterflies. Birds flashed across the water catching flies and their voices filled the air with music.

  Dragonflies danced in the air like sparkling jewels unseen by anyone except the mice and birds who went to drink at the water’s edge. In the pond itself little creatures lived their secret lives. Tiny snails wriggled in the soft mud at the bottom of the pond.

  Water beetles and worms darted between the roots of waterlilies. Beneath the top of the water, mosquito larvae hung like baby caterpillars waiting to become butterflies. Then very early one morning, before the sun was even up, they all changed into mosquitos and flew off into the jungle of soft grass
that grew beneath the honeysuckle.

  ‘Can I go and bite something now, Mum?’ said a young mosquito called Sid.

  ‘No, dear,’ said his mother.

  ‘Oh go on, Mum,’ said Sid. ‘Everyone knows mosquitos bite things.’

  ‘Not boys,’ said his mother. ‘Boys don’t bite things, only girls do that.’ All Sid’s sisters giggled and nudged each other and pointed.

  ‘But what am I going to have for my breakfast if I can’t bite something?’ cried Sid.

  ‘You have to suck pollen out of buttercups, you do,’ sneered his eldest sister, and they all giggled again.

  ‘It’s not true,’ said Sid with tears in his eyes, but it was. His mother tried to explain as gently as she could that boy mosquitos and girl mosquitos were made differently and that with his delicate mouth he just wouldn’t be able to bite anything.

  ‘You just go and get your head into a nice dandelion,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not sucking soppy flowers,’ said Sid. ‘Everyone’ll laugh at me.’

  ‘No they won’t,’ said his mother. ‘Your father loved pollen. Why, he spent half his life with his head buried in bluebells.’

  Sid felt as if someone had played a rotten trick on him. It had been no fun wiggling around in the pond as a larva, dodging out of the way of the horrid dragonflies and the drinking dog and swimming around with his ears full of stagnant water and hedgehog spit. It had been no fun at all and the only thing that had kept him going had been the thought of biting a nice soft human leg. And now they were telling him that all he was going to get was soppy flowers.