Beekle Henry

By Nick Creech













Illustrations: Eric Lobbecke






Text copyright © Nicholas R. Creech
2013

Nick Creech asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or otherwise used without the prior
permission of the author

Set in Times New Roman





For the boys



Contents

ALSO BY NICK CREECH

THE AUTHOR

Foreword  
 
The King of the Ungle  
'Umble Bumble  
Beekle Henry and the Picnic  
The Drought, Part I  
The Drought, Part II  
Beekle Henry and the Thrush  
The Butterflies' Ball  
The Royal Crown  



ALSO BY NICK CREECH

Galiconia
A Way with Dragons
The Blob, the Frog, the Dog and the Girl
Three-P



THE AUTHOR


Nick Creech is a former newspaper journalist. He has two sons, both now successful
and more-or-less responsible adults who still deign to talk to him from time to time in
tones of kindly condescension. He has a wife who does the same, mostly. Since leaving
journalism, he has written extensively for children, young adults and people who just
enjoy a good story.



Foreword

This book was conceived in desperation. Like many parents I found the notion of
telling stories and casting my children as the main characters a useful device to impart
knowledge, attitude and possibly even some wisdom. Foolishly, however, I allowed
these stories to become an item of barter. Vegetables would be eaten without protest if I
would tell a story, baths would be taken without ruinous devastation if I would tell a
story, the television would be turned off if I would tell a story. By the time I had
plagiarised everyone from Enid Blyton to Herman Melville, not forgetting Shakespeare,
Homer and Virgil, I was both a hunted and a haunted man.
Beekle Henry was the eventual result, stories which no longer featured the boys but
which were unapologetically discursive and wide-ranging and which, read aloud more
as a dialogue than anything, I could add to, explain or edit as I went, depending on
mood and time available. They were also stories sufficiently complicated that even
though endlessly repeated there was within always something apparently fresh and
absorbing to be considered.
I have always found that kids, like dogs, are as smart as you expect them to be, so I
saw no harm in expecting my two boys to be very smart. They were, as indeed were
their friends, who somehow seemed to materialise magically whenever Beekle Henry
was being read aloud. Later, unbeknownst to me, my younger son, then aged seven,
nicked a copy of the manuscript and took it to school, as kids do, to show his teacher.
She, to humour him, began to read it to his class and it turned out that the rest of the
kids in his group were very smart too. They may not have understood everything I had
to say but sufficient for them to maintain their interest right to the end, as in due course
and much to my surprise they personally assured me. Many years later, it transpired that
Dan's teacher had kept on using that battered old manuscript as class followed class
until finally she left the school. I like to think that although some of the ideas and
notions that appear here are indeed difficult and may be beyond the grasp of even the
smartest kid, nevertheless they will have a comfortably familiar ring when they come to
be addressed in earnest. Familiarity, after all, must lead to understanding before ever it
can lead to contempt.




The King of the Ungle



Beekle Henry was lazing away the morning in his hammock. It was a particularly
comfortable hammock made from best spider web slung between two convenient stalks
of grass, and Beekle Henry was just the sort of insect to make best use of it. It wasn't
that he was lazy exactly, just that he liked to rest a lot. With his eyes closed. Snoring
gently.
To Beekle Henry's way of thinking, resting was just about the only activity, with the
possible exception of eating, that really befitted his… well, not to put too fine a point on
it… his ellipsoid rotundity. Not that Beekle Henry knew what ellipsoid rotundity
actually meant. Dear me, no. If ever he wanted to think about ellipsoid rotundity, he
would have to ask Slimy to look it up. Helix Aspersa that is, but Slimy for short. I'll tell
you about him in a minute or two.

Upside down in his hammock, you couldn't really say that Beekle Henry was
anything special to look at, just a lot of legs waving in the breeze, with the middle on
the left a touch squashed because it could never quite manage to keep in step and was
always being walked on by the others. But right way up, Beekle Henry was definitely
another matter. He was sort of like a favourite uncle, except that as well as a stripy
weskit and pointy shoes and jolly, pink cheeks, Beekle Henry had two of the most
splendid, bluey-greeny-goldy wing cases you've ever seen. They shimmered and shone
in the sunlight just like… well, just like magic jewels from the crystal mountain.
And the wing cases even held wings, though to tell the truth Beekle Henry most
often forgot to remember that he had them. To tell the absolute truth, Beekle Henry
most often remembered to forget to remember, because Beekle Henry didn't much care
for flying.
Now you and I might think that being able to fly would be just the most thrilling
thing imaginable because we can't do it, not just by ourselves that is, not without an
aeroplane or anything. Just think, we say, if only we could fly… Well, Beekle Henry
would say:
"Just think, if only I could ride a bike… I say, Slimy. Why don't they make bikes
with enough pedals for someone like me? It really is too deciduously aggravating."
Whereupon Slimy would look peeved because he didn't know what deciduously
meant and he would have to dive inside his shell to look it up in the big dictionary;
which would make him even crosser because he would find that Beekle Henry had used
deciduously all wrong. Deciduous means losing your leaves in autumn and while I dare
say this is deciduously aggravating for a tree – I mean just fancy having to sit outside all
winter long without any clothes on – deciduous has got nothing whatsoever to do with
bicycles.
But by then it would be too late. Slimy would pop out again, terribly indignant
because nothing upset him more than the misuse of words, and if Beekle Henry wasn't
already asleep again, he would just say:
"Oh silly me. Did I say that? How stupid of me."
What's that? You lot don't know about snails? Oh yes, indeed. They're most
frightfully intellectual and that's why they move so slowly. You see, a snail's shell is not
just his house. It's something much more important than that. It's also his library. And of
course, it's very hard work lugging all those books around all the time.
Now you and I might think that dragging a whole library with us everywhere we go
would be the most terrible sweat, but any self-respecting snail would feel absolutely
miserable without his books. Books, you see, can tell you just about anything you might
want to know and you never can tell when you might want to know something. These
days we, ourselves, might choose to use a computer to look up a reference, but for a
computer you need to have electricity, even if only to charge your batteries, and who
ever heard of a snail with electricity? Why, if a snail had wires running up to his shell
he would never be able to move, now would he?

So Slimy Snail had to rely on his library and it was most comprehensive indeed. And
you can see what I mean about you never can tell when you might want to know
something. If you had a dictionary, you could look up "comprehensive" in a trice, and
you could look up "trice" too while you were about it. But just for now, I'll tell you.
"Comprehensive" means just about as wide-ranging as you can get, but trice, even
though it's a much shorter word, is a bit more difficult. If we use it as a noun, it means a
very brief time, an instant. So "in a trice" means in a flash. But if we use trice as a verb,
it means to haul up, as you would with a rope. Nouns, by the way, are thing words –
people, places, objects, ideas and actions – while verbs are doing words. It's quite
simple really. We use a verb to do something to a noun, as in stop pinching your brother
or I'll stop reading the story.
And while we're talking about words, ellipsoid means oval and rotund in this sense,
not to put too fine a point on it or to mince matters or, indeed, to beat around the bush,
means round or just plain fat.
Anyway, as I started to say way back at the beginning, Beekle Henry was napping in
his hammock, having just fallen asleep in front of a rather interesting cloud show on the
sky, when who should heave into view all a-puff and a-pother but Slimy Snail.
"Ahoy, Beekle Henry," he shouted. "Beekle Henry! Ahoy there! Wake up!"
That by the way is something you should know about Slimy. As well as being
intellectual, he rather liked to think that he looked like a ship. Well, I mean you'd rather
look like a ship than a snail, wouldn't you? And so, Slimy's conversation could be very
nautical at times. As well as ahoying a lot, he was always saying things like starboard
me larboard, and steady as she goes, and crack on the royals, Mr Mate. Mates are sort of
like mothers on ships. They're always telling you what to do and getting furious if you
don't, though I wouldn't advise you to say Mr Mother, oh dear me no.
Beekle Henry opened one eye and then closed it again in a hurry.
"I saw you," Slimy shouted. "I know you're awake. I saw you open an eye. Come on,
Beekle Henry, or I'll ram you amidships and splice your main brace."
"I haven't got a main brace, whatever that is," Beekle Henry said crossly. "And if you
ever ram me again, I'll… I'll… I don't know what I'll do."
Beekle Henry had tried pretending not to wake up once before but Slimy had got
himself up to ramming speed, ploughed straight into his hammock and upended him on
the ground with a most fearful thump. Splicing the main brace, by the way, is something
you're not supposed to be doing just yet, but as it happens I wouldn't mind splicing mine
right about now. Forgive me for a minute...
Right, cheers... Where were we? Oh yes...
Slimy, however, wasn't going to be miffed and sent off in a huff by anything as
transparent as Beekle Henry pretending to be bad-tempered. His news was much too
important for that, though he did think to himself how exactly the right word transparent
was, and he gave himself a pat on the back for using it. Transparent, you see, means
clear as glass and that means that Slimy had seen right through Beekle Henry's ploy.

And a ploy is when you try to make someone do what they don't want to do by being
devious, which means sneaky, which isn't nice at all, and Beekle Henry should have
been ashamed of himself.
"Well come on, Slimy," Beekle Henry said. "Now that you're here and you won't go
away, what's so exciting? Spit it out."
"Certainly not," Slimy said. "It's particularly rude to spit, particularly to windward.
But if you care to form line astern, I have a discovery to show you."
"A what?" Beekle Henry said. "No, no, wait…" But it was too late. Slimy had dived
inside his shell and Beekle Henry could hear him muttering as he riffled through the
dictionary.
"D-I… D-I-S… D-I-S-C… D-I-S-C-O… Here we are, discovery… The act of
discovering. Bother…"
"Oh do come out, Slimy," Beekle Henry called.
"Just a minute. Just a keel-hauling minute… now let me see… discovery comes from
discover and discover is… here. Are you listening? Discover: to be the first to find or
find out about. And that's me. I'm the first to find or find out about. Are you quite clear
now?"
Beekle Henry was nearly incautious enough to ask what the deuce keel-hauling
might be but stopped himself just in time. So we can get on with the story, I'll tell you
quickly. Keel-hauling was a most unpleasant way the navy had of punishing mutineers
back in the olden days by hauling them backwards and forwards right under the keel of
the ship and probably drowning them or mincing them to death on the barnacles. And
mutineers are people who don't do what they're told, so if your Mr Mother ever
threatens to keel-haul you I would be on my very best behaviour for a very long time, if
I were you. At least a month.
After a moment to put away the dictionary, Slimy popped back outside, polishing his
pince-nez and putting them carefully back in their case.
Snails find it almost impossible to get pince-nez to fit them so if ever they discover a
pair they like they take extraordinarily good care of them. Pince-nez, just by the way, is
spelt like this… P-I-N-C-E – N-E-Z… but it's not pronounced "pince-nez", as you
might think, but "pants neigh", although this doesn't mean they're really horses' trousers.
Dear me, no. Pince-nez, that's French for pinch nose, are special spectacles that sit on
the end of your nose without ear-pieces or anything and which make you look terribly
superior, even if you don't deserve to; which is why snails are particularly fond of them
as it's very difficult to look superior at all when you're a snail.
"Yes, yes, yes," Beekle Henry said, by now dancing with impatience, which didn't do
the middle foot on the left any good at all. "But what is this discovery? What have you
found?"
"Ah," Slimy said. "That would be telling. You'll just have to come and see. And do
try to keep proper station and not go racing off like a corvette."

"What's a…?" Beekle Henry started to say and then hastily changed his mind. "No,
never mind. Come on, old Slimy. Do hurry up."
Of course, Beekle Henry was going to ask about corvettes, and just in case you ever
need to know and don't have a dictionary handy, I'll tell you. A corvette is a fast, cheeky
sort of escort ship that goes racing about all over the place like a hunting dog, and just
as a dog hates waiting for his humans to catch up, corvette captains always hate waiting
about for the bigger, slower ships.
And so, off went Beekle Henry and Slimy Snail, Slimy moving even slower than
usual because he hadn't forgotten Beekle Henry's ploy of a little while ago and was
going to get his own back with a ploy of his own. Which just goes to show that it only
takes one person to be a bit mean for bad feeling to start bouncing about all over the
place like a cricket ball gone crazy – and if you've ever been hit by a cricket ball you'll
know that it hurts like anything. It's really much better for everybody if everybody tries
hard never to be mean in the first place.
"Well," Slimy Snail said at last, after they'd travelled at least a metre. "There it is.
My discovery."
"My goodness," Beekle Henry said, and then: "Gracious." And then: "Strawdinery."
And then: "It really is a discovery." And then: "But what is it?"
Strawdinery, just by the way, is not as you might think short for it's extraordinary.
Dear me, no. That's what comes from saying words too quickly. Strawdinery is quite
different to s'traordinary. A strawdinery is where you get Beekle Henry's favourite food,
that extra-special, aged-in-the-wood, southern aspect, late-picked straw, all buttery
golden and quite delicious. And when he wasn't resting or thinking about resting,
Beekle Henry much preferred to be eating or thinking about eating. So it wasn't really
surprising that strawdinery should pop into his mind when he really meant s'traordinary.
"What is it?" Beekle Henry said again.
Slimy Snail looked down his nose. "It's a plant," he said.
"Well, of course," Beekle Henry replied, a touch tartly. And tartly is an interesting
word. A jam tart is sweet but a tart lemon is sour. Just at that moment, however, Slimy
was much too busy to advise you as to which might be which so I think you'll have to
work out for yourselves just what we mean here. And we do that by using what we call
context. There are lots of words that have more than one meaning and the way to decide
which possible meaning to use is by thinking which meaning best fits the rest of the
sentence. So if you were to guess that Beekle Henry was being sweet, you would be
quite wrong.
"Anyone can see it's a plant," Beekle Henry went on. "But what sort of plant?"
"Hmmmm," Slimy said. "Well, actually, I haven't quite got around to looking it up. I
thought we might see if it was good to eat first. Because I haven't had my lunch. And I
thought you might care to join me."
There was sort of a snuffly squeak, an indignant snuffly squeak…

"Pardon. What did you say?" Beekle Henry and Slimy exclaimed together. And then
they both said: "Nothing. I thought you…"
They looked at each other and then they looked all around but they couldn't see
anyone else there. They looked at each other again. Then they shrugged.
"Well," Beekle Henry said. "I'm sure I don't know what all that was about, but never
mind. I'll be delighted to join you for lunch, Slimy old chap. Why don't you try this bit
here? It looks jolly juicy – almost as good as buttery, golden straw."
"Ugh," Slimy said. "I don't know how you can eat that straw stuff. But yes, you're
right. This does look especially succulent. However, old fellow, as you're my guest, I
insist. You first."
"Well, don't mind if I do," Beekle Henry said. But this time there wasn't just an
indignant squeak, there was a most ferocious roar. Beekle Henry and Slimy were both
stunned, so stunned that Slimy didn't even pop straight back into his shell, which is
what any sensible snail would have done.
"Gracious," Beekle Henry said eventually. "What on earth did you want to make a
noise like that for, Slimy?"
"But-but-but-but…" Slimy said.
"It's quite enough to put a chap off his lunch," Beekle Henry added.
Whereupon there was another great roar. Then a furious voice that somehow seemed
to be floating in mid-air said:
"If I hear any more talk about juicy or succulent or lunch, if I hear one more word
about eating, there's going to be real trouble. Is that clear? I mean, is that quite clear?"
There was a long silence, then Beekle Henry at last plucked up his courage.
"Who said that?" he asked in a very small voice.
"I did," came the stern reply.
"But who are you?" Beekle Henry asked. "Where are you?"
"I," said the terrible voice. "I am Dan de Lion. King of the Jungle. And I'm up here,
dolt."
Beekle Henry and Slimy Snail looked at each other.
"Shall we run away?" Beekle Henry whispered. Then he remembered. "Sorry, old
chap," he said. "Stupid of me. Can't exactly run, can you? Better face the music then.
One, two…"
And I need to interrupt just here to tell you that this was really very brave of Beekle
Henry. He could have fled but he chose to stay with Slimy, who couldn't. That's when
you really know who your friends are, when they choose to stay and support you,
despite the risk to themselves.
"… Three," Beekle Henry said, and on three, they both looked up.
What they saw, if they hadn't been so frightened, would really have been quite
funny: a bright yellow flower on a long green stem, frowning so ferociously that all its
petals looked like sergeant-majors. And if you know anything about sergeant-majors,

you'll know just how ferocious and funny that is. Think of your mother extremely cross
and with bristly whiskers and you'll begin to get the idea. Or think of the expression on
my face when I put my foot in my slipper and found the chewing gum you were
thoughtfully keeping for later.


In the end, frightened though they were, Beekle Henry and Slimy Snail just couldn't
help it. They both began to laugh. And the more they laughed, the more furious Dan de
Lion became.
"When you've quite finished," he said icily. "When you've quite had your little joke,
whatever that might be…" And of course that set Beekle Henry and Slimy laughing
even harder.
At last Beekle Henry wiped his eyes with his blue-spotted handkerchief (beetles
never use red-spotted handkerchiefs out of respect for lady bugs) and said:
"Well I never. What on earth do you make of this, Slimy, old chap. A talking plant if
ever I heard one, and whoever heard of a talking plant? And what's a jungle, anyway?"
"Hmmm," Slimy said. "Lunch, that's what I make of it, talking or no talking. And I
don't much care what a jungle is until I've had it. Lunch that is."
Dan de Lion roared again, this time even more loudly than before, and Beekle Henry
and Slimy both got such a shock that they quite flipped over backwards. And then they
really were in trouble – serious trouble – just as Dan de Lion had promised.
"Oh no," Beekle Henry said after a moment of shock. "I can't get up."
"Oh double no," Slimy said. "Oh double no and discombotheration. Just look what
you've done, you stupid… you stupid flower." Discombotheration, by the way, is a
word Slimy made up all by himself and which he saves for moments when, like now, he
is absolutely so bothered he's discombobulated.
"I warned you," Dan de Lion said. "Oh yes, I warned you. I told you that one more
word about eating and you'd be for it. But you wouldn't listen, would you? You were
going to eat me you were, and it serves you jolly well right."
And Beekle Henry and Slimy Snail truly were in dreadful strife. For you see, there
was Beekle Henry flat on his back and there was Slimy flat on his side, and neither of
them could get up.
Beekle Henry didn't mind being flat on his back in his hammock, snoring gently – I
mean it was absolutely his favourite position in all the world – but being flat on his back
on the ground was quite a different matter. You can't tippy down the side of the ground
and just roll neatly over the edge and on to your feet, now can you?
And as for poor old Slimy, well… If he'd been quicker and not so comprehensively
discombobulated then he might have managed to do a complete back somersault and
land on his foot again. As it was, he had faltered in mid flip and after teetering first one
way and then the other, he had fallen over on his left side or his right, depending on
whether you were looking from the back or the front.

And that means you aren't any the wiser at all, which is why sailors invented port
and starboard, because port and starboard are the same whichever way you face. I
suppose you should really look this up for yourselves, but so that we can get on with the
story quickly, I'll tell you. When you're on a boat and facing the bow, which is the sharp
end at the front, the port side is on your left and the starboard side is on your right. And
when you're looking at the stern, which is the back end, the starboard side is on your left
and the port side is on your right. Got it? I should have a little practice, if I were you.
And just so that you know that I know, back in the olden days port was actually
called larboard but because larboard could so easily be confused with starboard when
shouting over the wind and the rain and the pounding waves and because so many ships
were accidentally wrecked what with the confusion and all, seamen finally agreed that it
was vital they think of a different word. Then one foul night when a captain shouted to
his helmsman to turn hard to larboard and the helmsman misheard and turned hard to
starboard, and the ship's boy, seeing the rocks now rapidly approaching, whimpered, "I
wish I were safe back in port," port it became and because the port side was where they
always loaded the cargo in port, port it stayed.
And just so that you really know that I really know, back in the days before rudders
were invented ships used steering oars or boards. Over time, the steer board side
became shortened down to starboard, while fear of damaging the steering oar itself was
the reason ships always docked port-side to.
So now, when I tell you that Slimy was lying on his starboard side, everything
should be absolutely and precisely clear. It was certainly clear that Beekle Henry and
Slimy were in a very pretty pickle indeed. Even Dan de Lion didn't realise just how
parlous their position was.
Parlous is a particularly good word and Slimy tells me that he wishes he'd thought to
use it, so I really think you should look that one up for yourselves, but just quickly,
parlous means perilous or dangerous.
What Dan de Lion did was to cross two of his leaves – just like your mother crosses
her arms when she's telling you lot for the fourteenth time to go brush your teeth – and
then he said:
"All right, you two milksops. You can get up now."
"What's a milksop?" Beekle Henry asked, but Slimy interrupted.
"We can't get up," he said bitterly. "That's just it. We shall very probably starve to
death, and all because of your big mouth, you… you… flower."
"I like that," Dan de Lion retorted. "Whose big mouth did you say? Who was going
to eat me for lunch might I ask?"
"But what's a milksop?" Beekle Henry asked again.
"I don't know and what's more, I don't care," Slimy said, which just goes to show
how overcome and upset he was, not caring about a new word, so I suppose I'll have to
tell you myself. Milksops are pieces of bread soaked or sopped in milk, which people

used to eat quite a lot. These days, however, milksop has come to mean a very weak
sissy, the sort of person who would eat bread soaked in milk.
"What do you mean you can't get up?" Dan de Lion demanded. "Of course you can
get up."
"We can't," Slimy said. "Everyone knows that if a beetle gets turned on his back he
can't get up, he just buzzes around helpless, till he dies of instant starvation. And there's
a rock just where it didn't ought to be and I can't touch ground, and I can't touch
anything, and I absolutely can't move and furthermore I am also instantly starving to
death." And that probably explains why Slimy had slipped into all that bad grammar.
Didn't ought to be, indeed.
"Are you sure you can't get up?" Dan de Lion said to Beekle Henry.
"Well actually," Beekle Henry said politely, "I'm really quite comfortable, thank you.
And I don't really want to get up anyway. This is not the same as my hammock, of
course, but it's really quite adequate."
"And that means he positively, absolutely can't get up," Slimy said, getting crosser
and crosser. "And what sort of a king goes roaring around like that at perfectly innocent
creatures and getting them stuck so they starve to death?"
"I told you," Dan de Lion said with frosty dignity. "I am Dan de Lion and as even
you should know, a lion is king of the jungle."
"Jungle!" Slimy snapped. "Jungle? What's this jungle thing anyway? I don't believe
there's any such word. It sounds most peculiar to me. Most peculiar. I don't believe
there's any such thing at all." Whereupon Slimy disappeared into his library, never mind
that all the books had been tossed here, there and everywhere and were in a simply
disgraceful state, and they could hear him muttering inside.
"Now let me see… Juncaceous. Goodness, what ever is that? Well I never…
Junction… June… Jungian… Here we are, jungle… Harrumph! Just as I thought. Are
you listening out there, you imposter? Jungle: an equatorial forest with luxuriant
vegetation, often almost impenetrable…"
"Goodness," Beekle Henry interrupted, opening one eye. "What's all that in plain
language, Slimy old chap?"
"Not here," Slimy said. "That's what it means in plain language. Not here. This is a
field, a meadow, a pasture. And if this is a field then it can't be a jungle and that means
you can't be a king either," he added, popping back out of his shell and pointing an
accusing antenna at Dan de Lion.
"You're an imposter," he shouted. "Just like I said. You're an imposter."
"I am not an imposter, whatever that is," Dan de Lion said angrily, all his petals
looking like sergeant-majors again. "And I was going to help you up, but I certainly
shan't now unless you stop calling me names."
"But you are an imposter so how can we stop calling you one?" Slimy demanded,
equally angry.

"Then you'll just have to stay there and starve to death," Dan de Lion retorted. "I
know I'm not an imposter and I'm not going to help you up until you stop calling me
one. I am Dan de Lion, King of the Jungle, and that's that." An imposter, just in case
you haven't realised, is someone pretending to be someone he isn't.
Well, now Beekle Henry and Slimy really were in the soup, or caught in a pickle as
we might say. And if you've ever had to eat pickled soup, then you have my very deep
sympathy. And do you lot know what this sort of situation is called? It's called an
impasse, or a deadlock, or a stalemate. But I like impasse best, and an impasse is when
both sides think they're right and no one is ever going to change his or her mind.
Impasses are really very difficult things and cause a fearful lot of trouble. Every
impasse is different so all I can really tell you about them is this: whenever you find
yourself at an impasse you should ask yourself whether you're telling the absolute truth,
and if you're not then you shouldn't be at an impasse in the first place. You'll just have
to be brave enough to admit that you're wrong, and the sooner the better because the
longer you leave it the harder it will be.
You might ask why you should tell the absolute truth when we know that lots of
other people tell lies all the time. Well, the reason is very simple. If you tell lies then
sooner or later you'll be found out and then nobody will ever believe that you're telling
the truth ever again and just think how enormously frustrating that would be.
Why, suppose your house was burning down and you rang the fire brigade but
nobody would come. "Oh, I know him," somebody would say. "He's a liar. I bet his
house isn't really on fire at all. He just wants to cause trouble."
Or just suppose a cricket ball happens to break one of the school windows and some
sneak tells a teacher that you did it to shift the blame away from himself. Well, you'd be
for it, wouldn't you? And most unfairly too. Except, perhaps, when you said: "But
please, it really wasn't me." Then the teacher could say. "Well, as you've always told the
truth in the past I'll believe you this time, too. We'll call it an accident."
And phew, what a relief! But no more than you'd earned by being honest.
Still, none of that could get Beekle Henry and Slimy out of their impasse. Absolutely
frightfully difficult things they are, and sometimes there is just no solution at all,
because if you're sure that you're right – absolutely, positively sure – you should never
give in. If you do, then people will think you've been lying all the time, even though you
haven't been. Giving in, in fact, becomes the lie, if you see what I mean, and I do hope
you do because it's important.
So, if you can't give in and the other person can't give in, what can you do? Well,
there's only one thing really and that's called negotiation. And negotiation means that
you explore possibilities to see if you can't come to what's called a satisfactory
compromise. I'll show you what I mean. Suppose you're absolutely sure that you're
right, and your friend is absolutely sure that she's right. Well then, instead of you
saying, "You're a silly old bag-your-head," and her saying, "Why don't you go jump in a

prickle bush?" you both could say, "Just supposing that we're both right, or that we're
both wrong, what would happen then?"
Anyway, back to the impasse in the meadow. There was Slimy quite sure he was
right and starving to death for the principle of the thing, and there was Dan de Lion
quite sure he was right and not about to give into anyone, and there was Beekle Henry,
just resting, with his eyes closed, snoring gently. Slimy had actually ducked back into
his library to pass the time while he was dying of starvation by reading the
encyclopaedia, but at last he got so hungry that he couldn't concentrate, even on
something as interesting as protozoa. Protozoa, by the way, are tiny organisms, mostly
so small that you can't see them, and an organism is a living or animate thing, as
opposed to an inanimate object, which is not. Living that is.
"Hey! Ahoy! Beekle Henry!" Slimy called. "What are we going to do? I really am
starving to death."
"What?" Beekle Henry said, rather grumpy at being woken up from a nap for the
second time that day.
"I said, what are we going to do?"
"Sensible creatures always take every opportunity to rest," Beekle Henry said, and
closed his eyes again.
"I can't rest," Slimy said plaintively. "I'm starving. We haven't had any lunch and
breakfast was ages and ages ago – so long I can't even remember it."
"Well, you could always give in and call him King of the Jungle," Beekle Henry
said.
"But he's not," Slimy protested. "And I'm shocked at you for suggesting it, Beekle
Henry. It's a matter of principle and you ought to know better."
"He might be," Beekle Henry said.
"Rubbish," Slimy snapped. "This isn't a jungle so he can't be a king."
"But he might be king of a jungle somewhere else," Beekle Henry said quietly.
"Oh!" Slimy said. "Oh!" he said again. "I hadn't thought of that."
And that just goes to show that you have to be very careful that you have thought of
everything before you go and get yourself into an impasse and have to starve to death
for a principle.
"Well, are you?" Slimy said at last to Dan de Lion. "Are you king of a jungle
somewhere else?"
"I live here," Dan de Lion said. "I have always lived here. I always will live here.
Plants aren't like snails, you know. We can't go gadding about all over the world eating
anything we fancy. No. I'm not king of a jungle somewhere else. I'm King of the Jungle
here."
"There you are," Slimy said to Beekle Henry. "Just as I said. This isn't a jungle so he
can't be a king."

"Really Slimy," Beekle Henry said with some irritation. "You're interrupting my
resting. Why don't we call him King of the Meadow?"
"But he's not that either," Slimy said.
"Well, he says he's a king," Beekle Henry said. "And I don't see why he can't be king
of something. He looks the type. And he especially sounds the type, always roaring at
people. That's what kings do, isn't it?"
"I don't care," Slimy said. "I know he can't be King of the Jungle, and I know he's not
King of the Meadow or we would have heard about it."
"Well then, perhaps he's King of the Ungle," Beekle Henry said.
"Ungle? Ungle? What's this ungle?" Slimy said. "Just a minute. Just a leaf-munching
minute. I want to look this up…?"
"But Slimy couldn't find "ungle" anywhere, not in the dictionary, nor the
encyclopaedia, nor even in the Oxford Companion to English Literature, which is a very
important book indeed.
"Ungles do not exist," Slimy said after a very long time during which Beekle Henry
had thankfully dozed off again. "Ungles positively, absolutely, definitively do not
exist."
"There you are then," Beekle Henry said. "That must be what he's king of. It stands
to reason." Slimy looked doubtful but there really wasn't any arguing with that sort of
logic.
"What do you think?" Beekle Henry asked Dan de Lion with careful politeness.
"Would it be all right if you were King of the Ungle?"
"Hmmm," Dan de Lion said slowly. "I don't suppose one letter makes very much
difference. All right, yes, I'll be King of the Ungle."
"Is that agreed then, Slimy?" Beekle Henry asked him in turn.
"Oh, all right," Slimy said, with rather bad grace for someone who was still starving
to death. "It doesn't seem quite right somehow, but very well, I agree."
Whereupon Dan de Lion swooped down on his stalk and, neat as you please, inserted
a delicate petal under Beekle Henry and flipped him right way up, and then he did the
same thing for Slimy Snail.
So there you are. The impasse became what's called a compromise, and if it doesn't
seem quite right to you either, then just remember that most often life itself isn't quite
right or fair or even what it seems, and we can only try to do our best, and never to do
less than our best.
Meanwhile, this compromise did save Beekle Henry and Slimy from starving to
death and it also saved Dan de Lion, King of the Ungle, from a most severe case of hurt
feelings.
And just one more thing. If you ever find a beetle buzzing around helpless on his
back, or a snail tipped on his side with his foot all wavy in the breeze, then I require
you, very gently, to turn them right way up. And if you're feeling particularly helpful,

you might offer to assist the snail to put all the fallen books back on the shelves of his
library.



'Umble Bumble



Beekle Henry, Slimy Snail and Dan de Lion quickly became fast friends. Now don't
go putting your foot in it by asking how they could quickly become slow friends. Fast
does not always mean quick, especially when you're talking about poor old Slimy.
Sailormen, and sailorsnails for that matter, like to say "make that line fast" when what
they actually mean is "tie that rope up". So you can see what fast really means in this
sense: friends tied firmly together like mountaineers roped up on a climb. And this is a
very good way to think of being friends; if one slips the others will catch him and won't
let him fall.

You might also like to ask why sailors, whether snails or men, would say "make that
line fast" when it makes no sense to anyone but a sailor. And that is actually, precisely
the reason they do it. You will find as you grow older that every group has its own
special language, or dialect, or jargon as we say, and that if you want to be part of that
group then you will have to learn the jargon. It's sort of like wearing a secret uniform. If
you don't speak the jargon then you're not wearing the uniform and that particular group
will ignore you.
But back to the story which you haven't even let me begin yet. Beekle Henry, with
great effort, much huffing and puffing and altogether too many helpful directions from
Slimy, actually went so far as to unsling his hammock and set it up again right next to
Dan de Lion. His new address, should you ever want to write to him, was The Third
Tussock of Grass north-east as the crow flies from the end of the old trough in the South
40. As the crow flies, incidentally, just means in a straight line and I expect I don't need
to explain why, but who knows what north-east means? Thought so.
Well, it's a way we have of giving directions. The sun, you might have noticed,
always rises in more or less the same place and we call that the east. Also, it always sets
in more or less the same place and we call that the west. Now, if you stand with east
exactly to your right and west exactly to your left, we call the direction you're now
facing north, and if you stand with west exactly to your right and east exactly to your
left then you're facing south. We call these directions, north, south, east and west, the
four cardinal points. So once you know that, it's not very hard to work out that north-
east must be half way between north and east and exactly the opposite of south-west,
which, of course, is half way between south and west. And what do you think half way
between west and north would be called? And half way between east and south? Very
good, but I know that one of you smarties is going to say but what if it's a cloudy day
and you can't see the sun? What then? We'd all be lost.
Well, you might be, but I have a compass and my compass always tells me where
north is, which you might think is magic but actually is magnetism.
Back in the olden days if you sailed a boat out of sight of land and if it was cloudy
and you couldn't see the sun or the stars, you would have no idea which way to go to get
safely back to harbour. You might sail in circles for all you could tell until you starved
to death or died of thirst, which happened to more sailors than Slimy likes to think
about. Then someone in China noticed that a particular sort of rock, often called
lodestone, always pointed in the same direction if it was suspended on a thread, say, and
allowed to swing freely. And so the compass was invented. Nowadays, of course,
compasses are much more sophisticated and we understand that the lodestone isn't
really magic rock but simply magnetised rock, which means it always points to the
magnetic north pole, which is near enough to the real north pole not to matter. And the
real north pole, just so that you know, is that point on the surface of the earth from
where, whichever direction you choose to go, you are heading south. And from the
south pole, whichever direction you choose to go, you are heading north. Think of an
orange. That dimple where the stem used to be is the north pole, so you can see that

from there the only possible way to go is south until you reach the little black bit at the
bottom, from where the only direction you can go is north.
You might wonder why we don't have an east pole or a west pole, and this is because
our planet, Earth, is actually spinning towards the east all the time, just like a wheel on
an axle. One end of that axle, or as we would say in this case, one end of that axis, is the
north pole and the other end the south pole. And once we understand this, I can tell you
that the sun doesn't really rise or set at all. It's not moving. We are, just like we were
sitting on a merry-go-round passing the candy-floss stall every time we go around.
Slimy says that as an experiment, and just to prove that we know what we're talking
about, you might like to make your own compass some time. It's quite easy. Ask your
mother for a needle, being most careful not to prick yourself, which is what Slimy
usually manages to do. Then we also need a magnet – there's one in the bottom drawer
of the tool cupboard. Now, what we have to do is magnetise the needle, and we do this
by stroking it over and over again with one end of the magnet – it doesn't matter which
– in the same direction, always the same direction. You can test when the needle is
magnetised by touching it with a screw-driver or something made of iron or steel, but
not stainless steel. When the needle sticks to your screwdriver like… like magic, we're
ready.
We now need a dish full of water and a small piece of thin paper slightly bigger than
the needle. What we have to do is use the paper to float the needle very carefully on the
surface of the water. Then when the paper becomes saturated it will sink, leaving the
needle floating all by itself. And guess what will happen now? The needle will swing
round until it is pointing north and however you turn the dish, the needle will always
point in the same direction. So there you are. You've made a compass and
congratulations, because now you need never be lost at sea and starve to death again,
which as you might imagine is a huge relief to Slimy at least.
While we're on the subject you might want to ask why the needle, being steel, doesn't
sink when the paper, being paper, does. The answer is that the paper sinks when all the
air has been forced out of it by the water working its way in and saturating it, leaving
the needle to be held up by what's called the surface tension of the water, which is
another way of saying the tendency water has to hold together. And it is this property
which allows creatures like water bugs to walk over the top of a pond without sinking or
having to swim; more magic that has a perfectly simple explanation.
And I bet you think I've forgotten about sophisticated, which is a particularly lovely
word. Try it. Just trips off the tongue, doesn't it? Well, it can mean having a lot of
worldly knowledge and culture, but in this case it means developed to a high degree of
complexity, which just means complicated.
Anyway, enough of all that. Beekle Henry's new address was a particularly
salubrious location, and if Slimy had to look up "salubrious" so that I could spell it
correctly I think it only fair that you lot should look it up to see what it means, but as
you've been interrupting so much and we're way behind I'll tell you quickly so that we
can get on with the story. "Salubrious" means encouraging good health, wholesome or

just plain nice. And indeed, the view from Beekle Henry's new home stretched all the
way to the creek and the trees beyond and the vista was indeed extremely pleasant. "The
trees beyond", you should understand, was a very long way indeed for someone of
Beekle Henry's ellipsoid rotundity, and for someone who moved as slowly as Slimy, it
was just about the end of the world. Everything is relative, you see, to everything else.
You and I would think nothing of walking to the trees beyond, but we'd probably
baulk a bit at walking to the mountains beyond the trees. A horse, on the other hand,
would gallop over the mountains without even stopping to pack some oats for lunch, but
when the horse came to the ocean beyond the mountains beyond the trees beyond the
creek then that would be a different kettle of fish, if you see what I mean. Relatively
speaking, horses are not particularly good swimmers; but then again, fish are absolutely
terrible gallopers and they don't like wearing saddles one little bit, I can assure you.
Relativity is, in fact, so interesting that a very great man by the name of Albert
Einstein had two of the best ideas of all time as a result of thinking very hard about it.
These are the Special Theory of Relativity and the General Theory of Relativity, which
are about time and gravity and light and space. Now we all know what time and light
and space are, or we think we do, but who knows what gravity is? That's right. If you
take a running jump, what brings you crashing back to earth is the force we call gravity,
or weight, and what we're actually doing when we weigh something is to measure its
gravity, and gravity is the force that pulls things together. The heavier something is, or
to put it another way the more mass something has, then the more it pulls other things
towards it.
Think about two little specks of dust up there in space in the middle of nowhere in
the middle of nothing. Know what those two little specks of dust are doing? They're
pulling each other together, and when they join up they'll start pulling more specks of
dust towards themselves, and then more, and then more until eventually you might end
up with a planet like this one, the one we live on, which has so much mass that when we
jump up in the air, instead of pulling the planet up to us, it brings us crashing back down
to it.
When Albert Einstein was quite a young man, much younger than me and not much
older than you, which just goes to show that it's never too early to start thinking, he
predicted amongst other things, and it turned out to be true, that gravity actually bends
light. This means that space is curved and that time is really not what we might think it
is at all. And Einstein also formulated the very important equation E=MC2 , by which he
meant energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light multiplied by the speed of
light. This is all probably a little difficult to explain to you right now but tuck it away in
the back of your minds for when you're a bit older. It's all quite fascinating to think
about and thinking, as Slimy often says, is even more fun than eating. These ideas of
Einstein's are called theories, incidentally, because they haven't altogether been proved
to be true and maybe they won't turn out to be entirely correct. However, that doesn't
make them any the less valuable. Dear me, no.

You see, even if the ideas prove to be mistaken Einstein has still saved everybody
else the trouble of having to think of them, which means they can spend their time
looking in different directions. Ideas, in fact, are just about the best things of all, but
with certain exceptions of course. If I ever find out who had the idea of putting a squirt
of shaving cream on my toothbrush all ready for me to clean my teeth… well they'd
better look out, that's all, because they'll find themselves very relatively uncomfortable
about the posterior. Another new word? Well you try sitting down on it when you've
just been spanked.
By the way, did you make a note of Beekle Henry's address? I should if I were you.
Notes can be very useful when you're trying to remember something and I bet you've
forgotten where he lives already. Dan de Lion's address was more or less the same as
Beekle Henry's, so you can make a note of that too, but Slimy was another matter.
Up to now he had lived wherever he happened to find himself, which is what comes
of dragging your shell about with you all the time like a sort of caravan. And while you
might think it's a nice idea to have a warm bed-sock and a hot cup of chocolate and a
good book right there whenever you might want them, lugging everything about
wherever you go is an awfully tiring business, I can assure you. It tends to explain why
snails prefer modest establishments.
Most of them find a simple residence – or schooner in Slimy's case – with all mod
cons and, say, a sauna and a billiard room with, of course, the all-important library,
quite enough to cope with. Mod whats? Modern conveniences like kitchens and
bathrooms. And a sauna? Oh yes, indeed. Snails regard saunas as pretty much essential
for working up a good slime and they much prefer billiards to darts for obvious reasons.
Well, you wouldn't play darts inside yourself, now would you?
And who can tell me what a schooner is? Well, a schooner has two or more masts,
unlike a sloop which has only one, and if all the masts aren't the same height then the
one nearest the stern is always the biggest. Ketches and yawls have two masts too, but
the one nearest the stern is always the smaller. Slimy says I also have to tell you the
difference between a yawl and a ketch but I often find it very difficult to tell myself, so
I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you really want to know, you'll have to look it up
for yourselves.
All this tends to explain why Slimy was now more or less content to settle down
more or less permanently under one of Dan de Lion's leaves. And a very pleasant
arrangement this was, though Beekle Henry did get rather tired of Dan de Lion's
humming, which he liked to do by moving his petals just so whenever there was any
breeze, rather like a conductor who is also his own orchestra. And Dan de Lion did
often find himself rather put out that Beekle Henry always seemed to be asleep
whenever he felt like a nice chat. And both of them got very tired indeed of Slimy
forever correcting their grammar. Slimy, for his part, naturally found this a very painful
duty and was usually furious with the two of them because of it. All of which just goes
to show that nobody's perfect, and even if they were we would most certainly hold that
against them too.

One bright morning early in summer, Beekle Henry was having a deliciously sinful
nap just in case he hadn't had quite enough sleep the night before, Dan de Lion was
humming in a key of C angry, and Slimy was busy shooting the sun with his sextant.
What's that? Dear me, no. Of course Slimy wasn't trying to knock the sun out of the
sky. We say shooting the sun when someone is using a sextant to measure its altitude or
angle to the horizon, and once we know that then we can calculate our position
anywhere on earth. As it happened, Slimy was worried that he was about to hit a reef in
the cannibal islands or, at the very least, run into a fleet of pirates.
Anyway, one bright morning as I said, they were all very busy in their various ways
when suddenly a dreadful hubbuzz rent the air. You might think I mean hubbub – which
is lots of loud shouting and carry-on exactly the same as when your teacher is silly
enough to leave the classroom for a minute – but I don't. I mean hubbuzz.
"What's that racket," Slimy said indignantly. "Tell it to pipe down or I'll reef the
mizzen."
"And then it will be mizzen in action," Beekle Henry said, opening one eye. And
that's such a dreadful pun I don't know if I can begin to explain it. It's so bad I think I
need to splice the main brace again to recover. Forgive me a moment...
Right! Cheers…
A pun is when you make a word say something quite different to its usual meaning
and Beekle Henry had made "mizzen", which is a particular sort of sail, mean
"missing". And of course, he thought he was being fearfully clever. Punsters always do.
"Shsh," Dan de Lion whispered anxiously. "Don't frighten him."
"How can you frighten a noise like that?" Beekle Henry wanted to know, but Dan de
Lion ignored him, and very rudely too, to Beekle Henry's way of thinking. Dan de Lion,
however, was totally absorbed in watching the sky and then sighed in anticipation as a
large bumble bee circled overhead, landed on his face and began to search for nectar.
"Oi!" Beekle Henry shouted, and at the same moment Slimy bellowed:
"All hands repel boarders! Pitlasses and custols, me lads, and have at him!"
Of course, what he really meant was "pistols and cutlasses" but he had got his words
all muddled up in the excitement. When that happens, it's called a spoonerism after a
silly old man by the name of William Archibald Spooner who used to eat his food with
fives and knorks. A really good spoonerism turns two proper words into two different
but equally proper words. For instance, suppose I meant to say Mum and Dad but what
came out was Dumb and Mad… Oh dear. Just as well it was me who said that and not
you. My best advice is to stay well away from Spoonerisms or you could end up talking
a rot of lubbish.
Cutlasses, incidentally, are a special sort of curved sword developed for fighting on
board ship.
"Oi!" Beekle Henry shouted again.
"Oh do be quiet," Dan de Lion said crossly, but it was too late. The bumble bee
started with surprise and shot up into the air.

"Oh excuse me, your worship," he said. "I'm ever so sorry."
"Come back," Dan de Lion said. "Please come back."
"Don't you dare," Slimy roared. "You leave our friend alone."
"Yes sir," the bee said. "Of course, sir. Right away sir."
"Oh do shut up," Dan de Lion shouted at Beekle Henry and Slimy in an agony of
frustration and then he said to the bee, speaking in a wheedling sort of voice:
"Please pay no attention to them. It's none of their business and they don't know what
they're talking about. Now do come back, please."
"Just a minute here," Beekle Henry said. "Do we understand this correctly? You
actually want this… this…"
"This great black-and-yellow-striped buccaneer boarding your face?" Slimy butted
in.
"Of course I do," Dan de Lion roared. "You silly great insects…"
"I am not an insect," Slimy snapped with offended dignity.
"Aren't you?" Beekle Henry said, surprised. "Then what are you?"
"P-please," the bee said. "While we're all asking questions and if you don't mind… of
course, if you do, say no more… but what's a buccaneer? I've never been called
anything so grand before."
"A thieving pirate, that's what," Slimy said. "A thieving pirate up to no good. And
for everybody's information I am most certainly not an insect, I am a gastropod mollusc.
And that means," he added importantly, "That my stomach's on my foot."
"My dear fellow," Beekle Henry said, "how most unfortunate for you. I shouldn't talk
about it if I were you."
Whereupon Slimy was so insulted that he couldn't speak, only splutter. He even
forgot himself so much that he actually tried to stamp his foot, which for a snail is a
remarkably stupid thing to do. He teetered very dangerously, fizzing like a kettle all the
while, and the bee drew back in alarm.
Teetering, incidentally, is a wonderful word because the sound of it gives you a very
good idea of what it means, which is: swaying and tilting in imminent danger of falling
over. And when a word sounds like what it means we call that onomatoepia. Buzz, for
instance, is a very good example. And imminent, in case you don't know, means very
close to happening – sort of one back from immediate.
"Now look here," Dan de Lion said, seizing the moment and speaking in his most
regal voice. "This bee and I have important business to transact. Absolutely vital
business. And I will thank you two to keep quiet and not to interfere. Now bee, what's
your name."
"Err, Bumble, sir," the bee said. "They call me 'Umble Bumble, if it please your
worship."
"Majesty," Beekle Henry said helpfully. "This is Dan de Lion, King of the Ungle,
correctly addressed as Your Royal Majesty."

"Gracious," said the bee. "Please forgive me, Your Most Worshipful Royal Majesty.
I 'ad no idea. I've never met a king before."
"That's all right, Bumble," Dan de Lion said grandly. "Now kindly get on about your
business."
"But what is his business?" Beekle Henry said. "What on earth is he doing here?"
"I…" Dan de Lion said with great satisfaction, "I am about to be pollinated."
"Polli-whated?" Beekle Henry demanded.
"Pollinated," Dan de Lion said, and Slimy, who had now stopped spluttering and
who was grateful for the excuse, dived inside his shell and headed straight for the
library.
"Well I'll be a hornswoggled pollywog," he said after a bit, his voice rather muffled.
"I thought it was pollinate, not pollywog," Beekle Henry said, a trifle wearily. "I
wish everyone would stop talking Greek."
And I expect you lot knew all the time that gastropod is really Greek, gastro meaning
stomach and pod meaning foot, and that you didn't begin to have to look it up. But what
about mollusc, and hornswoggled pollywog, if it comes to that? Well. A mollusc is a
soft-bodied creature without a skeleton but often with a shell, like a snail. A pollywog is
a sailor who has never crossed the Equator, and I bet you know what the Equator is,
while to be hornswoggled, which is one of Slimy's very favourite words of all time, just
means to be tricked. Not sure about the Equator? Well that's very simple. It's the
imaginary line we draw around the world, half way between the north pole and the
south pole, right around the middle of our orange, in other words.
"Are you listening out there, Beekle Henry?" Slimy said. "Pollination is actually very
interesting. It's how plants have children."
"Well I never," Beekle Henry said. "But what have bees got to do with it?"
"They carry the pollen," Slimy said. "You see, what the bee is mostly after is nectar
to make honey. So the flower provides the nectar to attract the bee and while the bee's
searching for nectar he brushes against the flower's pollen and carries it on to the next
plant."
"Are you sure you're reading this properly?" Beekle Henry said. "I don't believe a
word of it. If a plant already has pollen why does it need somebody else's? And what
does the pollen do anyway?"
"The pollen," Slimy said importantly, "combines with the plant's ovules to form
seeds and the seeds grow into new plants."
"Well of course seeds grow into new plants," Beekle Henry said. "But why can't a
plant use its own pollen?"
"Because," Slimy said. "If it did, its children would all be exactly the same as their
father, or is it their mother? Nothing would ever change. This way, because every plant
even of the same sort is a little bit different, the differences can be combined and one
day you might end up with an entirely new plant."

"Well it all sounds very strange to me," Beekle Henry said suspiciously.
And I expect it all sounds very strange to you too, but it's really quite a simple idea
and it's called the theory of evolution. This was first set out in a most important book
called On The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin and explains how we came to be
who we are. It works like this:
Suppose you had a bowl of ice-cream – no, you may not eat it, at least until we're
finished – and suppose you were to divide your bowl of ice-cream in half. What would
you have? You'd have two bowls of ice-cream, only half full of course, but the ice-
cream would be exactly the same in each plate. Now, suppose you add chocolate sauce
to one bowl and strawberry sauce to the other. Well suddenly the two bowls, even
though the ice-cream stays the same, are rather different aren't they? And bags me the
strawberry.
Or, you might have a thistle with extra long prickles pollinated with the pollen from
a thistle with short prickles, but twice as many. And the children, if we were very
unlucky, might have twice as many prickles twice as long, or then again there might be
half as many prickles half as short. But if the latter were the case, the thistles with not
very many, very short prickles would probably all be eaten by goats and so wouldn't be
able to have children in their turn. Usually, only the thistles with the best prickles –
twice as many, twice as long – live to have children. Or putting it another way, if only
red-haired people were sensible enough to look both ways before crossing the road, then
pretty soon there would only be red-haired people. We call this survival of the fittest, or
natural selection, and when you add natural selection to the changes that can be caused
by such things as pollination, then you can begin to understand how life evolved from
very simple bacteria, or germs, all the way to very complicated organisms like us. And I
do hope you remember what an organism is.
Just then, Beekle Henry sneezed. And again. And again. Slimy popped his head out
to see what all the noise was about and immediately his nose began to wrinkle too. And
oh dear, when the sneeze came it was at least force 9 on the Snifter scale, followed
straight away by a force 11.
Now, when you or I or Beekle Henry sneeze, it's mildly inconvenient. Sometimes a
good sneeze can even be quite enjoyable, but when a snail sneezes, it's quite another
matter. It is so serious that snails even invented the Snifter scale to describe it. They
copied it, of course, from the Richter scale which we use to measure earthquakes, and
truth to tell, your average snail would much prefer an earthquake to a sneeze, let alone a
force 11 sneeze.
Poor old Slimy could feel the most dreadful things happening inside his shell. All the
books fell off the shelves in his library. The ink bottle was shaken off the desk and
broke on the floor, and so did the glue bottle, and the ink and the glue mixed themselves
together. And if you think that was a mess, you should have seen the kitchen, which
naturally Slimy called the galley. There was jelly and sherry trifle everywhere.

Oh yes. You might think that snails only eat plants and suchlike but they actually
have a very sweet tooth and all sorts of secret cravings. It probably explains why some
people, particularly the French, like to eat snails and why the only French words that
snails know are very rude indeed. I wouldn't care for the taste of all those books myself
– very dry and dusty I should think – but the trifle bit might be all right.
Earthquakes, incidentally, are most interesting phenomena. A phenomenon is
anything you can see, hear, taste, touch or smell, which means just about anything and
which makes it a very useful word indeed when you can't think of something a bit more
precise. And phenomena is how we say more than one phenomenon.
Now you might think the earth – our world, our planet – is just about as solid as you
can get, but you'd be quite wrong. Go outside and jump up and down on the ground as
hard as you can. Doesn't move, does it? Feels absolutely rock-hard firm, doesn't it?
Well,