Let Sleeping Sea-Monsters Lie-And Other Cautionary Tales (Short Story Collection)

Once upon a time there lived a worm. Not an earthworm – earthworms are smooth and pink and soft with purple bulges in the middle. Not a tapeworm – tapeworms are white and flat and slippery and like to live inside people’s stomachs if they can. Not a lugworm either – lugworms, which people use for fishing, stay buried in the sand.

No, this was a very different sort of worm. It was a great, long, hairy worm, and when I say “long” I mean as long as a train or as two football pitches or as four thousand, three hundred and fifty pork sausages laid end to end. This worm had a forked tongue like so many monsters and a poisonous breath but it didn’t have wings; it just slithered. Dragons have wings; worms don’t. What it did have was the power to join itself up again when it was cut into pieces. It also had blue eyes which is unusual in a worm.

One day this worm was lying peacefully in a field. Its head was by the gate and its body was looped round and round and round the field it was in, and a bit over into the next field. And as the worm lay there, just thinking its own thoughts, the gate opened and a Princess walked in.

The Princess looked at the worm and the worm looked at the Princess. Then the worm lifted its head, with its cornflower-blue eyes, and said:

“Good morning.”

It did not say “Good morning” because it thought it was an enchanted prince and wanted the Princess to kiss it and turn it back into a prince. It knew perfectly well that it was not an enchanted prince. It said “Good morning” because it was a polite worm and that is what you say to people – and certainly to princesses – when they come through your front gate.

But the Princess did not say “Good morning” back. She made a rather rude gesture and then she said:

“Phooey!”

Now “Phooey” is not a nice thing to say to a worm when it has just said “Good morning” to you. The worm was amazed. It thought it had misheard. So it lifted its head to speak again.

“I said ‘Good morning, Princess’,” said the worm.

“And I,” said the Princess, making an even ruder gesture, “said ‘Phooey!’.”

Now this worm was not particularly ferocious or troublesome but it was a worm. Worms are like dragons or serpents: they are monsters and able to be fierce. So when the Princess said “Phooey” to it a second time, the worm did the only thing it could do. It shot out its forked and poisonous tongue, wrapped it round the Princess, pulled her into its mouth – and swallowed her. Then it went back to lying peacefully in the field.

Well, you can imagine the fuss in the palace when it was discovered that the Princess had disappeared.

“Where is the Princess?” shouted the King, and:

“Where is my little girl?” wailed the Queen, and:

“Where is Her Royal Highness?” yelled the servants.

Actually, the servants weren’t at all sorry that the Princess had gone because she’d been a very naughty child. She’d begun as one of those babies that turn purple from screaming and kick people in the stomach, and gone on to be the sort of little girl who yells with temper if she’s asked to put on a pair of plain knickers instead of lace ones. Later she was faddy about her food and snobby with the children who came to play with her and rude to the servants. “Princess Toffee-Nose” they called her because that’s just what she was.

But when it was discovered that the Princess had not only vanished, but been eaten by a worm, something had to be done. So the King sent out a proclamation to say that anyone could have half the treasure in his kingdom if he would go out and slay the loathsome monster who had devoured his daughter. He would also have offered his daughter’s hand in marriage but of course he couldn’t because she had been eaten by a worm.

Then he waited for lots of princes to come flocking to the palace, but nobody came at all. This was because the Princess had been rude to so many people that no one cared what happened to her and nobody wanted to risk being killed.

But at last they found a tired old Knight who said, “All right, I’ll see what I can do.”

So the Knight rode off on his rather battered old horse in his rather rusty armour to the field where the worm was still lying peacefully with his head by the gate and his body coiled round and round the field. And because the Knight was a very fearless knight he began at once to chop pieces off the worm, starting at the tail. He chopped off one piece and then another and another. And every time he chopped off a piece he threw it as far away as he could, over a hedge or into a duck pond, because he thought that if he did this the worm would not be able to join itself up again. He didn’t know, you see, that he was dealing with a very clever worm.

At first the worm did not notice what was happening. This was because worms like that are so long that it takes ages for messages to get from one end to the other.

But in the end it did notice and then a long and bloody fight began. The worm reared round and snapped at the Knight with its teeth and blew at him with its poisonous breath and roared horribly. But the Knight, though old, was nimble and the Knight’s armour, though rusty, was poison-proof and he just went on leaping out of the worm’s way and chopping more and more bits off the worm and throwing them away so that the poor worm got weaker and weaker and weaker.

The Knight had got almost to the head end of the worm when something odd happened. He had just chopped off a rather fat and bulgy bit and was picking it up to throw it over the gate when there was a slithering, slurching kind of noise and out on to the grass fell the Princess!

She was in an awful mess! You know what the insides of squashed animals are like. Little bits of mince stuck to her all over. She was wet; she was crumpled; and she was bald, too, because the Knight had chopped so close to her head that he had cut off her hair. What’s more, she was covered in bright red spots because inside the worm she had got the measles.

Still, she was alive. So the Knight shook her out and dried her and when he had finished chopping up the worm he put her over his saddle and rode back to the palace.

The King was terribly pleased. “You brave and noble Knight,” he said. “I offer you my daughter’s hand in marriage.”

“No, thank you,” said the Knight. “Your daughter is not at all the kind of person I should like to marry and anyway I am too old.”

“She looks better when she’s cleaned up,” said the Queen.

“And when she hasn’t got the measles,” said the servants.

But the Knight went on shaking his head. He didn’t want half the King’s treasure either because it was too heavy and would tire his horse. He just took three gold pieces and rode away.

But what of the poor worm? There it lay in the middle of the field with its sore, sad head chopped off in a pool of blood and its cornflower-blue eyes full of tears, and everywhere – strewn over the hedges and the haystacks and the bushes – its hacked-up pieces of body.

Slowly, bravely, all that day and the next day and the next the worm went about joining itself up and joining itself up and joining itself up. It would get three bits that fitted together and then the fourth bit would roll away into the ditch and get lost and it would have to hunt everywhere to find it. Once, it had thirteen bits of its tail all together but the fourteenth just couldn’t be found because the Knight had thrown it into a tree and some rooks had used it to hold meetings on. And the bit the Princess had been in was particularly difficult to fit on because it had got stretched and flabby at the edges. But the worm just worked and worked and worked . . .

Just before noon on the third day it finished joining itself up and then it slithered away over the fields and hills and valleys till it came to a clear, deep lake because it wanted to see what it looked like. But when it stared into the water and saw its reflection, the worm gasped with surprise.

It had made a sort of mistake. It had put its head in the middle and stretching away to either side of it, as long as half a train or one football pitch or two thousand, one hundred and seventy-five pork sausages, were its two bits of body. It had a body to the right of it and a body to the left of it and in the middle was its head.

For a while the worm just stared into the water and then a pleased and happy smile spread over its face and its cornflower-blue eyes danced with joy. And it said to itself: “It was a bad day when the Princess came and said ‘Phooey’ to me and I swallowed her and the Knight chopped me up but now I am probably the only worm in the whole world with a head in the middle of my long, long body – and thus I shall remain until the end of time!”

And thus it did.

As for the Princess, no one ever came to marry her – not a prince or a plumber or a roadmender or a window cleaner – not anyone, because if you start life by kicking people in the stomach and go on by yelling with temper if you are supposed to wear plain knickers instead of lace ones and then say “Phooey” to a worm, you are going to have a very lonely life. Which is what she did, and serve her right.