First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Ltd in 1978
First published by HarperCollins Childrenâs Books in 2017
HarperCollins Childrenâs Books is a division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd,
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins Childrenâs Books website address is
www.harpercollins.co.uk
© The Estate of Helen Creswell 1978
Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2017
Cover illustration © Sara Ogilvie 2017
Helen Cresswell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Source ISBN: 9780008211707
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780008211721
Version: 2017-03-17
The whole thing started when Uncle Parker won a cruise in the Caribbean for two after filling in a leaflet he had idly picked up in the village shop. The minute the news was known in the Bagthorpe household disbelief, annoyance and downright jealousy began to degenerate into what became, inevitably, an All Out Furore.
The company who had promoted this competition sold SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS breakfast cereal. Mr Bagthorpe immediately stated that Uncle Parker should refuse the prize on moral grounds. Uncle Parker, he said, had never consumed so much as a single SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALL in his entire life, and was thus automatically disqualified from reaping a reward for doing so. Mrs Bagthorpe did not agree. Daisy Parker, she said, ate a lot of SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS, she ate them every day of her life.
In that case, Mr Bagthorpe said, Daisy should have filled in the competition form. He then turned on his own children.
âDonât you lot ever eat SUGAR-COATED PUFFBALLS?â he demanded. âWhatâs the matter with you?â
âI do,â said Jack promptly. âI really like them.â
âSo why didnât you go in for this thing?â
âI havenât got a leaflet,â Jack said. âAnd even if I had, I wouldnât have bothered. Nobody ever wins those things.â
âOn the contrary, somebody does win them,â said Mr Bagthorpe in a tight voice. âWe know that.â
âWhy didnât you tell me there was a competition?â asked William. âThen I couldâve won a prize.â
âYou donât automatically win by filling in a form, you know,â Tess told him. âUsually some kind of skill is required. And usually the deciding factor is a slogan.â
âSo?â said William.
âIâd be better at slogans than you,â said Tess.
She turned not a hair as she spoke. In the Bagthorpe house everybody boasted. It was not called boasting, it was called âhaving a just pride in oneâs own talents and achievementsâ â a phrase coined by Mrs Bagthorpe, who was very strong on Positive Thinking. The only ones who did not go in for it were Jack and his mongrel dog, Zero. They just kept quiet and lay low, mostly.
âI,â interposed Mr Bagthorpe now, âwould be better than anybody at slogans, I believe. And how that layabout insensitive parasite managed to string so many as half a dozen words together is beyond me.â
âPerhaps Aunt Celia helped him,â said Rosie. âShe can do The Times crossword three times as quickly as you can, Father. And she doesnât use dictionaries and things.â
Honesty, especially of the tactless variety, was also a common trait of the Bagthorpe family.
âNothing to do with it,â said Mr Bagthorpe. âAny fool can do crosswords. Itâs creativity that counts.â
âBut Aunt Celia writes poetry,â said Rosie, who could be as incorrigible as anyone if she chose, even though she was only just nine.
âAunt Celia writes poetry,â repeated Mr Bagthorpe. âSo she does. And does anybody ever understand a single word of it?â
No one answered this.
âI spend my entire life wrestling with words,â went on Mr Bagthorpe. (He wrote scripts for television.) âI live, breathe, sleep and eat words.â
(This was not strictly true. One thing Mr Bagthorpe never did was eat his words.)