It was the day after The Boy had built his castle on So Long Beach and Little Witch had gathered starberries on the Plateau Of The Long Silence, and both of them had problems.
Little Witch’s problem was that there were six impossible moles outside her house, blocking the path to the Forgotten Forest, which was where she was supposed to meet The Boy. She walked out of her house and put her hands on her hips.
“What’s going on here?” she demanded. “I did NOT expect six impossible moles before breakfast, and ESPECIALLY not blocking the path outside my house!”
The six impossible moles had dug six impossible holes, some of them small, others big, some on their side, some upside down, and one dug straight through a tree.
“And what’s that?” Little Witch demanded, as she noticed the tree. “You can’t dig a hole through a tree like that!”
“Why not?” one of the moles asked. It sounded quite affronted, most likely because it was, in fact, the digger of this particular hole. “Perfectly good hole.”
“Perfectly good? PERFECTLY GOOD? It’s completely separating the trunk and the foliage!”
The tree’s foliage was floating in the air, seemingly undisturbed by the large gap beneath. Little Witch clucked her tongue.
“That’s just—”
“Impossible?” one of the moles suggested.
“No, UNTIDY!”
Little Witch glared at the tree until the hole popped out of existence out of sheer embarrassment, the middle part of the tree returning to how it had been before the impossible moles had arrived.
“Oh, are you a witch?” one of the moles asked.
“What I am, right now,” said Little Witch, “is very, very annoyed. Don’t any of you know the first thing about manners? About proper behaviour? You can’t just go around digging holes wherever you please!”
“Why not?” asked one of the impossible moles.
“Because it’s rude! Look at that impossibly big hole you’ve dug there, it’s completely stopping me from going to the Forgotten Forest!”
The impossible moles looked at the impossible hole.
“I don’t see any problem with it,” one of them said.
“It seems like a fine hole to me,” another put in.
“Impossibly fine,” yet another added.
“It won’t do,” Little Witch said. “I’m going inside to have breakfast and brush my hair. When I come out again I expect every one of these holes to be undug.”
“Undug?” one of the moles said. “You can’t undig a hole once it’s been dug! That’s—”
“Impossible?” said Little Witch. “Well, I should think such a task would be PERFECTLY suited to six ridiculously impossible creatures like yourselves. Come on, get undigging!”
Little Witch went inside while the impossible moles looked at each other, uncertain.
Meanwhile, The Boy was having problems of his own. All of the wild growth he’d expected yesterday had in fact turned up today8, dozens and dozens of the great shambling things crowding the clearing outside of his tree house.
He peered out through his periscope, which came up under a flower pot with a single daisy in it, watching them shuffle and lurch around the clearing. They hadn’t approached his gumdrop bushes yet, but he knew it would only be a matter of time.
And so The Boy prepared to go out and meet them. He put on his metal sieve helmet, and he strapped on his cardboard breastplate. To protect his elbows he used his coconut-shell elbow protectors, and to protect his knees and legs he used a thick, scratchy pair of grey woollen leggings. In his left hand he carried a shield made from a battered wooden platter, and in his right hand he carried his wooden sword. After The Boy had checked that the two bits of string were still firmly tying his sword together, he climbed up from the first basement to the ground level of his house, and he opened his front door, and he walked out.
The wild growths stopped their rustling and their shambling, and those that had heads turned them to look at The Boy. He stood bravely in front of his house, his sword held tightly in his right hand, his platter shield held firmly in his left.
“Go away and leave my clearing alone!” The Boy shouted. “I didn’t invite you and I don’t want you here!”
This didn’t work. It never did, but he always felt he should shout it anyway. The wild growths began rustling towards him, long leafy branch-arms reaching out to grab him.
But The Boy was swift and nimble and keen, and his sword went thwack thwack thwack, and the wild growths recoiled away as he beat them back. As he attacked so did they, the wild growths’ branch-hands scraping against his cardboard breastplate and his coconut elbow protectors, but he used his platter shield to fend them off and from time to time gave them a whack with it for good measure, and some of them had whipping vines that snaked along the clearing floor to tangle around The Boy’s legs, but his thick woollen leggings stopped them from getting a good grip, and again The Boy’s sword went thwack, and again the wild growths recoiled, and soon he was beating them back into the forest, the ground of his clearing covered with leaves knocked loose from all the thwacking he’d done, and before long the clearing was clear, The Boy’s home safe once more.
After sitting down and taking a few breaths, The Boy went and checked his gumdrop bushes. He’d beaten away the wild growths before they could get to them, and thankfully there wasn’t any damage done at all. The firedrops glowed warmly in their clusters of three, the wide leaves around them still healthy and dark. The floatdrops hovered lightly above their bush, held down by long thin stems that remained unbroken. The raindrops glistened amidst the soft leaves of their bushes, not a single one damaged in the wild growths’ attack. The other gumdrops, too, those more normal and those more fantastic, remained untouched.
The Boy was happy about this. He gathered a few of the riper bubbledrops, and some winterdrops for Little Witch, since they were her favourite, and he went back inside to take off his wild growth-fighting gear.
Back at Little Witch’s house, she’d finished eating her breakfast of thick buttered toast and mint-orange marmalade, and she’d brushed her hair one hundred times, and she’d put on one of her sweeping black cloaks and her best most favourite hat, and she’d gone back outside, to see the six impossible moles standing around arguing. The impossible holes they’d dug remained both impossible and very, very holey indeed.
“What’s this?” Little Witch cried. “I told you to undig these holes!”
“We don’t know how!” the impossible moles wailed.
“If you wanted us to DIG a hole, however impossible, then we could easily do that,” said one. “But undigging a hole is, however you look at it, completely and in every way utterly IMpossible!”
“I wouldn’t even know where to begin!” cried another.
“Honestly, must I do everything?” Little Witch said, as the moles wailed together. “Dig BACKWARDS, you odd little creatures!”
The moles stopped wailing.
“Backwards?” one said.
“Backwards!” said another.
“OF COURSE!” they all said together.
Little Witch sighed and watched as the moles got on with undigging—
“No, no, start with the one blocking the path to the Forgotten Forest,” she said. She held up the picnic basket she was holding. “I have an appointment to keep.”
Mr River wasn’t a river at all, although he was sometimes confused for one. He was actually a large tree, tall and rather pointy, who lived on a tiny island in the middle of the river that wound through the Forgotten Forest. This river was called the Mister River, which was, perhaps, the source of at least a little of the confusion surrounding Mr River’s name and identity.
“Why don’t you change your name?” Little Witch had asked him once, but before Mr River had been able to reply, The Boy had done so for him, answering the question in a way that Mr River felt entirely satisfied with. What The Boy had said was this:
“If he changed his name, he wouldn’t be Mr River any more. He’d be someone else. You can’t just go around changing your name willy-nilly. That sort of thing could lead to a lot of misunderstandings.”
“Misunderstandings are the reason he SHOULD change his name,” Little Witch had countered, to which The Boy had said:
“Then changing it wouldn’t CHANGE anything. Misunderstandings before, misunderstandings after. There’s no difference, so why do it? Things shouldn’t change unless there’s a good reason for it, that’s what I think.”
To which Little Witch had been forced to agree, although she did it in a way that made it clear that she thought she was still right, in some difficult to explain but nonetheless very important way.
Although Mr River didn’t eat, at least not things like sausage rolls and apples and pies, he enjoyed it when other people ate near him, and so The Boy and Little Witch often took their lunch on the grassy riverbank near his island, or sometimes they’d wade over to sit underneath him if it was a nice sunny day and the water wasn’t too cold. The Mister River near Mr River was wide but shallow, only coming up to Little Witch’s calves, which weren’t very high at all, and the water didn’t run fast, and the stones were small and not very slippery, so wading wasn’t a chore at all.
“Sometimes I wish the water was deeper here,” The Boy said to Mr River, as he sat on the riverbank waiting for Little Witch to arrive. “Then we could swim from time to time. I like swimming.”
“I’ve never been,” Mr River replied. “Trees don’t. Swim, that is. Not often, anyway. Although I did once hear about a larch living near the Mirror Lakes that enjoys a quick dip every now and then.”
“Hm,” said The Boy. He was eyeing a certain rock nearby; it was flat and slim, and looked ideal for skimming. Right now he was just the tiniest bit too comfortable and lazy to get up and actually skim it, and so for the moment he contented himself with just the anticipation of eventually doing so. “I suppose getting your roots dry afterwards must be something of a chore.”
“It’s getting them out of the ground in the first place that’d put me off,” said Mr River. “One of mine is wrapped around a big rock, even the thought of getting it untangled makes me weary.”
“Helloooo!” came Little Witch’s cheery call, and The Boy looked up, pleased, as his friend came into sight along the path. She held up her basket. “Guess what I brought?”
“Could it be a starberry pie?” The Boy wondered, hoping very sincerely that he was correct.
He was. Starberries were coloured red and blue and pink and yellow, and somehow Little Witch had arranged them within the pie so that no berry touched another berry of the same colour. The Boy admired his half-eaten slice.
“This is very clever,” he said. Little Witch beamed.
“Thank you,” she said daintily9. “Presentation is important, you know. I read once that we do eighty percent of our eating with our eyes!”
“I’m fairly certain that I do almost all of MY eating with my mouth,” said The Boy, before taking a bite that was, perhaps, too large, in order to illustrate his point. Little Witch wrinkled her nose at him.
“That is so ‘boy’,” she said. “Take proper bites, please, remember that you are in the presence of a young lady.”
“And a tree,” put in Mr River. “I don’t eat things like sausage rolls or apples or pies, but I like to see other people doing it properly.”
“But my point stands,” said The Boy, once he’d chewed and swallowed his over-large mouthful. “I wouldn’t even know HOW to eat something with my eyes.”
“Well, anyway,” said Little Witch, who wasn’t sure herself, “please remember your table manners, they’re important. Even when there’s no table around.”
“Did you use magic to arrange the starberries like this?” The Boy asked, once more inspecting his (now considerably smaller) slice of pie.
“No, of course I didn’t,” Little Witch said, a little put out by the suggestion. “I like baking, it’s one of my favourite things to do.”
“Don’t you ever get sick of it?” The Boy wondered. “You do it so often.”
“I don’t get sick of it,” Little Witch replied. “Although sometimes I think I should expand my hobbies. Lately I’ve been getting interested in knitting. I’d like to make things that are more permanent than cakes and pies and biscuits.”
The Boy thought about this.
“Would you use magic to help with knitting?” he asked. Little Witch tutted.
“No, you don’t understand my point,” she said. “Using magic would take all the fun out of it.”
The Boy considered this for a moment.
“You use magic to clean up after you bake, don’t you?” he said. “I’ve seen you, all the pots and pans and things jumping in and out of your bathtub.”
“It’s not a bathtub, it’s just a tub,” said Little Witch. “I only use it for doing the washing up, never for baths.”
“But it COULD be used for baths,” The Boy said. “That’s what it was meant to be used for, isn’t it? When whoever made it first made it, they probably thought ‘someone’s going to have a lot of good baths in this nice big tub’.”
“What it was MEANT to be used for isn’t relevant,” Little Witch said. “What I use it for is washing dishes and clothes. I have a smaller tub for baths, that is my bathtub. Anyway, returning to the point, of course I use magic to do the washing up, THAT part of things isn’t fun at all.”
“Ah,” said The Boy. This almost-argument seemed quite familiar to him, but he was enjoying himself so he figured this didn’t matter. “But you do your sweeping yourself.”
“Because I don’t mind sweeping,” said Little Witch. “Besides, a witch should know how to use a broom.”
“Even though you never actually fly on one,” The Boy said. Little Witch sighed.
“Yes,” she said. “Even though I never actually fly on one—honestly, how many times are you going to drop that particular hint? I’m not the sort of witch that can fly. I also don’t have a big nose or green skin or any warts to speak of, thank goodness.”
“You’ve got a nice witchy hat,” said Mr River. “And your cloak is quite witchy, too.”
“Thank you,” said Little Witch.
“And your hat,” Mr River said to The Boy, not wanting to leave him out of things, “is very holey.”
“That’s because it’s actually a sieve,” explained The Boy. “The holes are for water to go through.”
“That must be inconvenient when it rains,” said Mr River, sympathetically. The Boy shrugged.
“I don’t wear it when it rains, because it’s made of metal and could rust. So it’s not really a big problem for me.”
“Why are you wearing it today?” Little Witch asked.
The Boy stood up and stretched a bit before replying: “I just felt like keeping it on. Sometimes I do that.”
He walked over to the river’s edge, bent to pick up a nice flat stone, then sent it flying out over the water. He got six skips, in response to which Little Witch clapped politely.
“Were you fighting back wild growth?” asked Mr River, after The Boy had sat down again. “Is that why you were wearing your helmet?”
“Yes, it’s getting very cheeky,” said The Boy. “I was expecting it yesterday, but you know how unpunctual wild growth is.”
“Mr River,” Little Witch put in, “do you know what might attract wild growth? I’ve been considering this question since yesterday. I thought that you might know since both you and wild growth could be considered ‘plants’.”
“Hmm,” Mr River said. “I’m not sure. Sunlight, possibly? I like sunlight.”
“So do I,” said The Boy. “Especially on days like today.”
It was a particularly sunny day, the blue sky above almost completely cloudless—there was just one little white puffy cloud shaped vaguely like a doughnut. Sun like this always made The Boy want to lie down, especially after he’d had a large slice of starberry pie, and so he began to stretch out before he remembered something.
“Oh,” he said, sitting up again. “I brought some gumdrop berries.”
“What kind?” asked Little Witch, immediately interested.
“Bubbledrops and winterdrops. Do you want some?”
“I’ll have a winterdrop, please,” said Little Witch, and The Boy fetched one out of his pouch and handed it to her. She admired it for a moment, shaking the small round berry and watching the little white sparkles shift and change on its surface, then she popped it in her mouth.
“Ack, it’s a little unripe,” she said, as a tart chill spread through her, this followed by a tingly kind of sparkly feeling, like sugar-lemon snowflakes falling against her tongue. “Well, maybe not THAT unripe. Could I have another, please?”
The Boy handed her another winterdrop, then took a purple bubbledrop for himself. It burst stickily as he bit down on it, dozens of tiny bubbles popping inside his mouth, each of them tasting like something purple—mostly grape and plum and passion fruit. Purple bubbledrops were usually the safest, because there weren’t many bad ‘purple’ flavours, although the occasional eggplant bubble wasn’t exactly welcome. The Boy had worked hard to try to get his bushes to produce bubbledrops with as few bad flavours as possible, but the odd one did sneak in from time to time.
“You’re going to blow a bubble now, aren’t you,” said Little Witch, without much enthusiasm. In response The Boy poked a little of the gum out with his tongue then blew hard, a huge purple bubble quickly growing in front of his face.
“Please don’t blow that so big it pops all over everything,” Little Witch said, already standing to move a little further away from The Boy. “In fact, I’ll thank you to stop it now, before it’s too late.”
Although part of him wanted to blow the bubble bigger, The Boy stopped it before it burst, pinching it closed instead and then plucking it from his mouth with his fingers. He’d blown it just slightly bigger than his head, and he could feel the lift in it even just sitting there.
“That’s almost as bad,” Little Witch said, a look of mild disgust on her face as she watched The Boy stand up. “Just please don’t—”
The Boy had already jumped into the air, the lift in his purple bubble letting him leap almost as high as the top of Little Witch’s hat. He floated slowly down again, grinning at Little Witch as he did so. She had a decidedly unimpressed look on her face and her arms were crossed.
“Jumping is acceptable,” she said. “Barely. But whatever you do—”
“Whoops,” said The Boy, as a sudden gust of wind blew strongly, plucking the slippery bubble from between his fingers. He made a jump for it but was just a little too slow, the winds swooping the bubble away from his hand and up into the deep blue sky.
“That’s EXACTLY what I was trying to warn you about, that’s going to make SUCH a mess when it pops,” Little Witch said. “Honestly, please try to be just a little more careful when it comes to bubbledrops.”
“Do you want one?” The Boy asked, already taking another for himself, red this time.
Before Little Witch could reply, there came another gust of wind. Fortunately The Boy hadn’t even begun blowing another bubble when this gust came, but less fortunately it plucked the metal sieve helmet from his head, and Little Witch’s best most favourite hat from hers.
“My hat!” Little Witch cried, clutching for it as the winds swirled it up and away. “Mr River, try to catch it! Please!”
Mr River’s branches were long and pointy, but the winds were clever and quick. They blew Little Witch’s hat well-clear of his grasp, though he tried his very best to stretch his branches out to snag it. The Boy’s helmet came next, heavy and slower to be blown, but before Mr River could do a thing the winds swept it up past his reach.
“Sorry!” Mr River called. “Those Magnetic Winds are too cunning for me!”
They watched as the hat and the helmet were blown away, over the trees on the other side of the river and out of sight.
“They’re not usually this cheeky,” The Boy said, before blowing a small bubble. “The Magnetic Winds, I mean.”
“Why aren’t you more concerned?” Little Witch demanded, turning on The Boy. “Our hats were just stolen!”
“Mine isn’t a hat,” The Boy said, before letting the bubble pop and sucking the gum back into his mouth. “It’s a helmet.”
“This isn’t any time to be arguing that sort of nonsense!” Little Witch cried. “We have to go after them!”
The Boy considered this for a moment.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because they’re our things and they were stolen!”
“It’s just a helmet,” The Boy said. “I don’t NEED it. And I’m sure I have something in one of my basements that will do just as well as that old sieve. Besides, chasing after it seems like just the sort of thing that could take me away from my home and my gumdrop bushes for longer than I might like.”
Little Witch glared at The Boy, then she turned away, sweeping her cloak behind her.
“Well, I’m going,” she said. “That’s my best most favourite hat, I’m not letting some cheeky winds just steal it! Mr River, thank you for trying to catch it. As for you, The, you can just do whatever you like, just sit around at home enjoying your gumdrop bushes for all I care. Good day to you both!”
And with that Little Witch stormed off, down the path and out of sight.
“Perhaps you should have gone with her,” Mr River suggested. The Boy blew another bubble and let it pop.
“No,” he said. “It’s just headgear, after all. I have to get back to my tree house, anyway, in case the wild growth has come back. See you later, Mr River.”
Little Witch stomped along the path leading to Cliff Face’s clearing, grumbling under her breath.
“Hello-o-o!” Cliff Face called, when he spotted her. “I just saw the most interesting bird—”
“I’m very sorry to interrupt you, Mr Face, but I have a very serious problem on my hands right now,” Little Witch said, stopping beside the little tree stump table and looking up at Cliff Face. “My best most favourite hat has been taken by the Magnetic Winds. I don’t suppose you saw where it went, did you?”
“Mm,” said Cliff Face, considering the matter thoughtfully. “Well. Ah! Didn’t I warn you that this sort of thing—”
“You did, and I’m sorry to interrupt again, but I am in rather a hurry, so if you could just tell me—”
“Ah!” Cliff Face said. “Aha! Do you know, I was wrong!”
“No, your warning was quite pertinent, I just—”
“Oh, ‘pertinent’, I was thinking about that word just earlier today. What was its meaning?”
“It means ‘relevant, but more strikingly so’,” Little Witch said quickly, getting just a little impatient now. “But really, I do need to chase my hat. Could you please tell me if you’ve seen it?”
“That’s what I was wrong about! Not about warning you—as you say, that warning was rather pertinent—but rather about seeing a rather interesting bird. You see, the interesting thing turns out to be that it wasn’t a bird at all!”
“Yes, that is interesting,” Little Witch said, her impatience growing, “but I really—oh! You mean that the ‘bird’ you saw was ACTUALLY my hat!”
“Pertinently!”
“Precisely,” Little Witch corrected.
“Precisely!” Cliff Face said. There was a loud grinding noise as he turned his face to indicate a direction. “It went that way, Little Witch, over the Fancy Plains and towards Mushroom Valley.”
“Thank you VERY much,” Little Witch said. “Please excuse me now, I have to follow it. Thank you again!”
Cliff Face smiled as Little Witch ran off. “Have fun and be careful!” he called after her. Little Witch turned to wave back at him as she ran.
“I will!”
There were a few wild growths hanging around at the edges of The Boy’s clearing when he got home, so he fetched his sword and beat them back harshly. Once they were gone he went to check on his gumdrop bushes, which, to his dismay, had been somewhat damaged in his absence. The cloverberry bush had most of its leaves torn off and dozens of berries lay smashed on the ground, their luck lost forever.
“This just goes to show,” The Boy said to himself, as he used a broom Little Witch had given him to sweep away the leaves and the smashed berries.
After a minute of this, there came a voice from behind him:
“Goes to show what?”
The Boy turned, to see the funny little bearded man he’d met on So Long Beach the previous day.
“Oh, hello,” The Boy said. “And sorry, I didn’t realise there was anyone around. You see, I said ‘this just goes to show’ out loud, but then I continued the thought inside my head. If I’d known you were there then I would have continued it out loud, and said ‘that sometimes I’m very right and sometimes Little Witch is very wrong’.”
“Oh, I see,” said the funny little bearded man. “Who’s Little Witch?”
“Just my best friend,” said The Boy. “I thought I mentioned her to you yesterday?”
“Yesterday?” said the funny little bearded man. “I didn’t talk to you yesterday, did I? I’ve come here from the southern end of So Long Beach, and I haven’t met anyone on the way except for six-thousand one-hundred and forty-seven crabs. I certainly didn’t talk to you yesterday!”
The Boy thought about this for a little while, as he continued sweeping.
“Ah,” he said, finally. “I know why. You’re another of the thirty-six unspecial funny little bearded men, aren’t you?”
“Thirty-seven,” the funny little bearded man corrected. “There are thirty-six others, so including me that makes thirty-seven in total. But yes, you’re correct, I’m just another unspecial funny little bearded man.”
“So that means that I haven’t met you before?” The Boy asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” said the funny little bearded man. The Boy stopped sweeping.
“Then I should introduce myself. I’m The Boy, but you can just call me The if you like.”
“It’s nice to meet you, The,” said the funny little bearded man. “Out of curiosity alone, may I ask where the other funny little bearded man went?”
“Towards the centre of the island,” said The Boy, as he started sweeping again. “He wasn’t sure where to go, so I thought that might be a good place to start.”
“That was helpful of you,” said the funny little bearded man. “That’s where I’m going, too. At least, I think I am. I’m not really sure, I don’t have much of a direction yet. What I’m really doing is looking for a purpose.”
“That’s what the other funny little bearded man was doing, too,” said The Boy. He bent down to get a few snapped twigs out from under the cloverberry bush. “I wasn’t sure where he might find one, but since most people who have just arrived here head towards the centre of the island, I thought he might find one there.” The Boy straightened again. “Or along the way, I suppose.”
“That does seem to make some sense,” said the funny little bearded man. “But tell me, why is your best friend Little Witch wrong?”
“Very wrong,” The Boy corrected, politely, as he tossed the twigs out of his clearing and into the forest beyond. “Well, the Magnetic Winds stole her hat and my helmet, you see. She decided to chase after her hat, and she got cross at me when I wouldn’t chase after my helmet.”
“Why didn’t you chase after your helmet?” the funny little bearded man asked.
“Because it’s just a helmet,” The Boy replied. He picked up his broom from where he’d leant it against a handy tree. “I like it, but it’s not special.”
“Like me!”
“Yes, I suppose like you,” said The Boy, as he began sweeping the last of the loose leaves and crushed berries towards the edge of the clearing. “I’m sure there are lots of metal sieves like it in the world. You could certainly call it ‘unspecial’. And I have lots of things in my basements, I thought that probably one of them would make for a decent helmet. I was thinking of using a wooden bowl this time. That way I could wear it even when it was raining.”
“I suppose with a sieve the holes would let the water in,” said the funny little bearded man. “That’s what the holes in a sieve are for, after all.”
“Well, for letting water out, actually, but I know what you mean,” said The Boy. “Also because it’s made of metal I thought it would probably rust if I got it wet.”
“If it’s made to let water out, wouldn’t it be rustproof?”
The Boy considered this as he swept the very last leaf out of his clearing.
“That’s a very good point,” he said. “I never thought of that, but I suppose it might be. I never tested it because I didn’t want a rusty helmet. It would certainly make a lot of sense for a metal sieve to be rustproof.”
“There you go, then!” said the funny little bearded man. “But one thing seems strange to me. Perhaps it doesn’t matter about your helmet, because it’s unspecial and can easily be replaced, if not with another sieve then by something as good or even better. But Little Witch, who is your best friend if what you said is true, and I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t be telling the truth about something like that, had her hat stolen, too. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, it is,” said The Boy, as he opened a cupboard in the side of a large tree and put his broom away. “Why? Is that important?”
“Well, I was thinking, if Little Witch is, as her name suggests, a witch, then wouldn’t her hat be important to her? Because the easiest way to tell if someone is a witch or not is by their hat.”
“I suppose that’s true,” The Boy said. “In a way, her hat is part of what makes her a witch and not just little. And also, now that we’re talking about this, I seem to remember that the hat which the Magnetic Winds stole was her best most favourite hat, too.”
“Ah. Her best most favourite hat. That would make it VERY special,” said the funny little bearded man. “I can certainly understand why she chased it.”
“Hm,” said The Boy, who was beginning to get the not-so-nice feeling that perhaps he wasn’t quite so very right about this whole situation after all, and that perhaps Little Witch wasn’t quite so very wrong, either. “Of course, I had other reasons not to chase my helmet. If I did that, it might take me a long time to find it. I’ve never been away from my tree house for a long time, not that I can remember, anyway. I like being here, it has everything that I need. And if I’m away for too long then the wild growth might take over my clearing and wreck my gumdrop bushes. I have to be here to beat them back, you see.”
“Those do seem like very good reasons not to chase your helmet,” the funny little bearded man admitted. “It is a very fine tree house, and I’m sure you have many wonderful things inside it. And these gumdrop bushes are very nice, except for the cloverberry bush, which seems to have seen better days.”
“That’s what happens when the wild growth isn’t beaten back quickly enough,” The Boy explained. The funny little bearded man nodded.
“Hmm,” he said. “Yes, so it certainly seems important that the wild growth be beaten back. But, if I might make one small observation, speaking as someone who is not in any way special, would not the task of ‘beating back wild growth’ be something that anyone could do? Not just you? To clarify, is it ‘beating back wild growth is something that only The Boy can do’, or is it ‘beating back wild growth is something that anyone could do’?”
“I suppose anyone could do it,” The Boy admitted. “As long as they were good at thwacking things.”
“And going back to the other point,” said the funny little bearded man, “is there anything here in your tree house that you would miss dearly?”
“I suppose there isn’t,” The Boy conceded.
“And moving on to a further point, if Little Witch is your best friend, won’t you miss her if she’s away for a long time?”
“I suppose I might,” The Boy acknowledged.
“And given all of these points, isn’t there only one conclusion to come to?” asked the funny little bearded man.
“I suppose there might be,” said The Boy. “But actually, I think the important thing here is completely separate from all of those points. It doesn’t matter that I’m comfortable in my home, or that the wild growth might wreck my gumdrop bushes if I leave them alone, or even if I get my helmet back or not. What matters is that my friend asked me for help, and I said ‘no’.”
For a moment The Boy simply stood there.
“Now that I realise this,” he said, his voice a little lower than before, “I feel very bad that I didn’t do so sooner.”
“Never mind, better late than never!” said the funny little bearded man, cheerily. The Boy looked at him.
“You’re looking for a purpose, aren’t you?” The Boy asked.
“Yes, that’s right,” said the funny little bearded man. “Finding a purpose is unquestionably what’s most important to me.”
“Do you think that ‘keeping wild growth out of a clearing’ could be a possible purpose?” asked The Boy.
“I think that it could be,” said the funny little bearded man. “Why do you ask?”
“Because,” The Boy said, his voice firm and definite, “I have a favour to ask of you.”
8Wild growth is rarely punctual.
9The Petite Book Of Proper Behaviour was very clear about ‘graciousness’.
