Poppet, p.1
Poppet,
p.1
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
About the Author
Dick King-Smith served in the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War, and afterwards spent twenty years as a farmer in Gloucestershire, the county of his birth. Many of his stories are inspired by his farming experiences. Later he taught at a village primary school. His first book, The Fox Busters, was published in 1978. He wrote a great number of children’s books, including The Sheep-Pig (winner of the Guardian Award and filmed as Babe), Harry’s Mad, Noah’s Brother, The Queen’s Nose, Martin’s Mice, Ace, The Cuckoo Child and Harriet’s Hare (winner of the Children’s Book Award in 1995). At the British Book Awards in 1991 he was voted Children’s Author of the Year. In 2009 he was made an OBE for services to children’s literature. Dick King-Smith died in 2011 at the age of eighty-eight.
Discover more about Dick King-Smith at:
dickkingsmith.com
Some other books by Dick King-Smith
BLESSU
DINOSAUR SCHOOL
DINOSAUR TROUBLE
DUMPLING
FAT LAWRENCE
THE FOX BUSTERS
GEORGE SPEAKS
THE GOLDEN GOOSE
HARRY’S MAD
THE HODGEHEG
THE JENIUS
JUST BINNIE
LADY DAISY
THE MAGIC CARPET SLIPPERS
MAGNUS POWERMOUSE
MARTIN’S MICE
THE MOUSE FAMILY ROBINSON
POPPET
THE QUEEN’S NOSE
THE SCHOOLMOUSE
THE SHEEP-PIG
SMASHER
THE SWOOSE
UNDER THE MISHMASH TREES
THE WATER HORSE
Chapter One
When Poppet was born, he had absolutely no idea what sort of animal he was.
He looked around, and saw that he was surrounded by a forest of legs. Huge legs they were, thick and tall and greyish in colour, with huge feet on the end of them.
Poppet looked up, and saw, on top of all those legs, huge bodies with huge heads and huge ears and amazingly long, long noses.
He was in fact looking up at his mother, and a number of his aunties who had all come along to inspect this new baby.
“Oh!” said one auntie. “Isn’t he a poppet!”
The baby’s mother looked extremely pleased.
“What are you going to call him?” said another auntie.
The baby’s mother, whose own name was Ooma, said, “I don’t know, I haven’t had time to think,” and then she thought for a bit, and then she said, “But now I do know. I’ll call him Poppet.” And she put the tip of her trunk against one of the baby’s ears and whispered, “Hello, baby. I’m your mum, and your name is Poppet.”
Poppet looked up at Ooma and the other huge animals and said, “Please, what sort of animals are you?”
“Elephants,” said Ooma. “We are African elephants.”
“Oh,” said Poppet. “But you said you were my mum.”
“Yes.”
“So does that make me an African elephant?”
“Yes.”
Poppet looked puzzled. There must be some mistake, he thought. “You’re enormous,” he said, “and I’m very small. We can’t be the same sort of animal.”
“Oh yes we are,” said Ooma. “It’s just that you’re a baby elephant.”
“But you’ll grow,” said one of the aunties.
“And grow,” said another.
“And grow.”
“And grow.”
“And grow,” said all the others.
“Until you’re as big as we are,” said Ooma. “You might even be bigger one day.”
“Tomorrow?” said Poppet.
At this, the aunties all laughed quietly, making snuffly noises in their trunks, before moving slowly and heavily away, leaving mother and baby alone together.
Chapter Two
“No, not tomorrow, Poppet,” said Ooma gently.
“Elephants take a long, long time to grow to full size. But you’ll get there one day. There’s nothing to stop you, for we are too big and our skins are too thick for any other creature in Africa to hurt us. Except two.”
“What are they, Mum?” asked Poppet.
“One,” said Ooma, “is a monkeylike thing called a man. Men kill elephants.”
“Why?”
“For their tusks.”
“What are tusks?”
“Great big long teeth that elephants have. Like these two of mine.”
“I haven’t got any.”
“You will. But you should be all right, because we live in a special place called a reserve, where elephants are protected.”
“Oh,” said Poppet. “But you said there were two creatures that could hurt us. What’s the other one, besides a man?”
“A mouse,” said Ooma.
“Oh,” said Poppet. “Are they even bigger and stronger than us, these mouses?”
“Mice,” said Ooma, “are very small and, what’s more, mice live in holes, and that’s the trouble.”
She stretched out her long, long trunk till the tip of it was right in front of Poppet’s face.
“What do you see, Poppet?” she said.
“A hole,” said Poppet.
Then Ooma, speaking slowly and solemnly, repeated to her newborn child the old elephant-wives’ tale that her mother had told her when she was a baby, a tale in which she had always believed.
“Poppet, my son,” she said.
“First, never have anything to do with mice. Second, if you should be unfortunate enough to meet one, keep your trunk curled up out of the way. Never, never put the tip of it anywhere near a mouse, otherwise the most dreadful thing imaginable will happen to you.”
“What’s that?” said Poppet.
“The mouse will run up the inside of your trunk.”
Chapter Three
Poppet thought about this for the rest of the first day of his life.
He imagined this thing called a mouse running along inside his little trunk and he did not like the thought of it at all. Suppose one did! How would he get rid of it? Blow it out, he supposed, and every so often, for the rest of the day, he blew very hard, suddenly, down his trunk, just in case one of the awful creatures had somehow crept in.
I don’t even know what they look like, he thought, only that they’re small.
The next morning, while the elephant herd was browsing upon the leaves of some large trees, Poppet was standing beside his mother when he saw a strange animal moving about on the bark of one of the trees.
What it was he didn’t know, but it was certainly small.
Carefully curling his trunk up out of harm’s way, Poppet bent his head towards it. Close up, he could see that the creature, though small, was long, with a great many joints to its dark brown body and a very great many legs.
Perfect for crawling up elephants’ trunks, he thought. I bet you are one.
He said politely, “Excuse me, but are you a mouse?”
“A mouse?” said the creature.
“Yes. I thought you might be.”
“You’re joking! Pull the other one.”
“Other what?”
“Leg.”
What does it mean? Poppet thought. It’s got hundreds of legs. “Well, if you’re not a mouse,” he said, “what are you?”
“I’m a giant millipede,” said the long wriggly creature.
“A giant!” said Poppet.
“Oh, stop taking the mickey,” said the millipede huffily. “You knew all the time, didn’t you? I could tell – I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“I was,” said Poppet, as the giant millipede rippled away.
“But anyway, I’ve learned something. That animal was not a mouse.”
Chapter Four
In the days and weeks that followed, he asked quite a number of small creatures whether they were mice.
He asked beetles and grubs and worms and caterpillars and little lizards and small frogs, and some replied jokily and some replied angrily and some didn’t answer. Till at last Poppet rather forgot about his mother’s dire warning and gave himself up to enjoying the carefree life of a baby elephant. He used his trunk for reaching up and pulling down leaves and twigs, and for sucking up water when the herd went to the river to drink, and then blowing water all over himself. When he was nice and wet, he would go to a dusty place and use his trunk to give himself a dust-bath, so that he finished up beautifully muddy. Then he’d go back into the river and have a lovely bathe, going right under the water, with just the tip of his trunk sticking up above the surface, like a snorkel.
A trunk, Poppet decided, was a brilliant thing to have.
As for mice, he never thought about them any more.
Then one hot afternoon, when he was about a month old, and his mother and all the aunties were standing resting in the shade, Poppet wandered off a little way, exploring.
He was using his trunk to search about in the grass as he went along, when suddenly he saw in front of him an animal that he had not previously met. It was furry and brown, with large tulip-shaped ears, beady black eyes and a longish hairless tail, and Poppet stretched out his trunk towards it and sniffed at it.
Even when the tip of his trunk was right before the creature’s face, it didn’t occur to him that this animal was small, and
“As a matter of fact,” said the animal, “I am. And you know what mice do to elephants, don’t you?”
Chapter Five
Hastily, Poppet raised his trunk.
“Aha!” said the mouse. “Your mum told you, did she?”
“Told me what?”
“That mice run up inside elephants’ trunks.”
“Well, yes,” said Poppet. “She did.”
“And you believed her?”
“Yes.”
The mouse let out a loud squeak, whether of anger or of fright Poppet did not know (in fact it was of delight).
“What are you called, boy?” it said.
“Poppet. What about you?”
“My name,” said the mouse, “is Momo, and I am very glad to meet you.”
“Oh,” said Poppet. “Why?”
“Because,” said Momo, “when I was very young, my mother told me this story about mice and elephants and I didn’t believe her. That’s rubbish, I thought. One day, I said to myself, I’ll meet an elephant and find out if it’s true. And now I’ve met one.”
“But you’re not going to find out,” said Poppet, and he curled his trunk even higher.
“Oh, come on!” said Momo. “Be a sport. Just let me have a look up it.”
“No, no!” cried Poppet. “You’ll crawl in.”
“I won’t, honest.”
“Promise?”
“Cross my heart.”
So, very slowly, Poppet uncurled his trunk and lowered the tip of it towards the waiting mouse. The nearer it got to Momo, the more nervous Poppet became.
I must be mad, he thought, believing a mouse’s promise. Mice probably don’t know the meaning of the word.
Then suddenly he felt the tickle of whiskers at the very tip of his trunk as Momo peered into it, and he gave an enormous sneeze.
Chapter Six
Elephants, like people, shut their eyes when they sneeze, and when Poppet opened his again, it was to see that the mouse had been blown head over heels by the force of the blast.
“Steady on!” cried Momo. “What are you playing at?”
“Sorry,” said Poppet. “I sneezed.”
“Oh. Well, bless you.”
“Thanks. It was your whiskers. They tickled.”
“Just testing. A mouse can go into any hole that’s wider than its whiskers.”
“And was it?”
“It would have been a very tight fit,” said Momo. “Might be possible with a full-grown elephant, but I shouldn’t have cared to try it with you, Poppet my lad. Anyway, to be quite frank, it looked pretty damp and uninviting up there, even before the sneeze. As it is, I’m soaked.”
“I’ll dry you,” said Poppet, and he pointed his trunk at the mouse and blew long slow hot breaths over him.
It was while he was doing this that he suddenly heard his mother’s voice, and a very angry voice it was. Ooma had walked up behind him, quite silently, as elephants do on their great cushioned feet, only to see her son with his trunk outstretched, the tip of it only centimetres from a mouse!
She let out a furious trumpet, and Momo vanished from sight.
“What did I tell you?” screamed Ooma. “Keep away from mice, d’you hear me? Get out of my way now and I’ll squash this one flat.”
“Oh, don’t, Mum!” cried Poppet. “He’s my friend!”
“Your friend!” snorted Ooma. “You’re not just a bad child, you’re a mad child.” And she went stamping about in the grass till she’d flattened a big patch of it.
“That should have fixed the horrid creature,” she said, and she moved away to rejoin the herd, grumbling to herself.
Poppet stood sadly beside the trampled patch.
“Alas, poor mouse!” he said. “It’s all my fault that he’s dead.”
“No he isn’t,” said a voice, and out of the grass poked a little brown head, whiskers twitching.
“Momo!” cried Poppet. “You’re not hurt?”
“Got a bit of a headache.”
“How on earth did you survive?”
“Under earth. Went down a hole, sharpish,” said the mouse. “But not before I heard what you said. Which was nice of you, Poppet. You are my friend too.”
Chapter Seven
Meanwhile, Ooma was telling the aunties about her naughty child.
“One of the first things I told him,” she said, “was to keep away from mice. We all know that every mouse is just waiting for a chance to run up the inside of our trunks.”
“We do,” said the aunties.
“And no doubt you all gave your kids the same warning.”
“We did,” said the aunties.
“And what have I just found? Only my boy with the tip of his trunk right beside a mouse, that’s all. I told him off, I can tell you. No doubt you’d have done the same?”
“We would,” said the aunties.
“Children!” said Ooma. “They just don’t listen.”
“Grown-ups!” said Poppet to Momo at about the same time. “They don’t treat children fairly, grown-ups don’t. I could have explained to Mum if she’d let me. I could have told her, ‘You’re wrong. Mice don’t run up elephants’ trunks. I know. My friend told me.’ But no, I never got the chance. She just yelled at me.”
“I heard it,” said Momo.
“Let’s just hope we’re more understanding when we’re grownups,” said Poppet.
“Actually,” said Momo, “I’m a grown-up already.”
“Oh, sorry! I didn’t realize. You’re so … um …”
“Small?”
“Well, yes.”
“Tell you what, Poppet,” said the mouse. “Do you agree that it would be a good thing if elephants stopped being frightened of mice?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And do you agree that it would be a good thing if elephants stopped trying to squash mice?”
“Oh yes, I do.”
“Right then. This is my plan. Listen carefully.”
And so it was that later that day, when the herd had been down to the river to bathe and the elephants were all standing in the shade, resting, Poppet said to Ooma, “Mum, will you promise not to yell at me if I tell you something?”
“Of course I won’t,” said Ooma, who was already rather ashamed of losing her temper with her little one.
“Of course you won’t promise?”
“No. Of course I won’t yell at you.”
“All right then,” said Poppet. “It’s this. Mice do not run up inside elephants’ trunks. They never have and they never will.”
Ooma snorted.
“Come and listen to this,” she called to the aunties, and when they had all gathered round, she made Poppet repeat his words.
“Silly boy,” said one auntie, and, “Stupid child,” said another, and a third said, “You had a narrow escape this morning. You might not be so lucky another time.”
“Wait here, please,” said Poppet, and he disappeared into some bushes. When he emerged again, Ooma and the aunties could see that he was holding something in the tip of his trunk, something furry and brown, with large tulip-shaped ears, beady black eyes and a longish hairless tail – a mouse!
Chapter Eight
How horrified they all were! They formed a circle around Poppet, their trunks held high out of the reach of the dreaded creature that he carried, and they shifted anxiously from foot to foot, fanning their great ears.
Poppet put the mouse carefully down upon the ground.
“This is Momo,” he said to Ooma and the aunties. “My friend, like I told you, Mum. I know I am only a child, but Momo is a grown-up, even though you may think he’s not grown very far. However, he has a grown-up brain, I can tell you, and he wishes to address you all, if you will be kind enough to listen to him.”
So astonished were the elephants, first to see Poppet carrying the mouse, and then to hear him make such a speech, that they stopped fidgeting and stood, silent, except for the rumbling of their tummies, which they couldn’t help.
