The Complete Polly and the Wolf

by Catherine Storr

  “What happens when it’s my turn to eat you up?” Polly asked.

  “It would take you far longer than forty or fifty minutes to eat me. It might take you hours. Possibly even a whole day. I am larger than you. I am exceedingly tough. And then there’s the hair,” the wolf said.

  “What about hair?”

  “Hair is a great slower-down of fast eating. Hair in the wrong places can make a quick snap almost impossible. I mean in the wrong places for a mouthful, of course. Naturally for a wolf it is right and proper to have hair all over. A great deal of hair, covering most of his body. While you are very nearly quite bald. Your hair all grows in one place, on top of your face. It would be easy to get rid of it in five minutes or so, while it would take you several hours to get rid of mine, I reckon,” the wolf said with pride.

  “But if it had been me that started, you wouldn’t have had a chance to try. I would have eaten you first.”

  “That’s why I should start. After all, as we know that I could eat you faster than you could eat me, there wouldn’t be any point in your trying.”

  “But that wouldn’t be fair!” Polly exclaimed.

  “Life is not fair. Some people are born as wolves, others are only feeble little girls. Some people are born with brains. Others are stupid from the beginning. There’s nothing you can do about that.”

  “You can do something about trying to make a competition fair,” Polly said.

  “What do you mean? You couldn’t make yourself eat twice as fast, could you? Only it would have to be more like a hundred times as fast.”

  “I don’t think anyone could make me eat that much faster. But they could make you eat more slowly. That’s what they do when there is a horse-race,” Polly said.

  “Do you have races where horses eat each other? I never knew. I’d like to see that.”

  “Don’t be disgusting, Wolf. They don’t eat each other. They gallop. The horse that gallops fastest wins the race. If one horse is much faster than the others, it has to carry a heavier weight than the others. They fasten pieces of lead to its saddle, to slow it down,” Polly said.

  “How monstrous! Poor horse. Terribly unfair.”

  “No, it isn’t. It makes the race fairer for the other horses. The slower ones have a chance to win.”

  “Now, let’s stop thinking about boring things like galloping horses. Let’s talk about us,” the wolf suggested.

  “Don’t you see? If we are going to have an eating race, we have to make it as fair as we can, by making you eat more slowly.”

  “I can assure you, Polly, that no amount of heavy weights on my saddle would make any difference to my eating habits. And anyway, I don’t have a saddle. So you will find it all very difficult. Probably quite impossible,” the wolf said. He moved a little nearer to Polly and a long red tongue came out and licked his wicked lips.

  “Of course it wouldn’t be any good putting weights on you. No one wants to stop you from running fast,” Polly said.

  “Right! So what are we waiting for?”

  “We have to think of something that stops you eating so fast.”

  “I should like to see what could do that,” the wolf said.

  “We could put a sort of clamp into your mouth so that you couldn’t open it very wide.”

  “Not wide enough to take a large bite out of a juicy little Polly?” the wolf asked.

  “That’s right. You’d only be able to take a tiny bite at a time.”

  “That wouldn’t be any fun. If you can’t take a really large, refreshing bite out of something you fancy, half the pleasure of eating goes,” the wolf complained.

  “Perhaps a muzzle would be better. You see dogs wearing them over their noses sometimes.”

  “Then I wouldn’t be able to eat at all.”

  “You’d probably be able to drink,” Polly said kindly.

  “While you were crunching away at me? That would be terrible.”

  “Or perhaps . . .? Yes. I think probably that’s what they’d do. That would be much the best way,” Polly said, looking at the wolf’s large mouth full of teeth.

  “What?” the wolf asked, trembling slightly.

  “We could fix your teeth.”

  “What do you mean by fix?”

  “Make them blunt. File them, so that they aren’t sharp enough to bite quickly,” Polly said.

  “File my beautiful, long, sharp teeth!”

  “No. Now I think about it, that would take too long. It would be easier to take most of them out,” Polly said.

  “Take them out!” the wolf repeated. He seemed dazed.

  “We wouldn’t take out the front ones. We don’t want to spoil your looks. Just the back teeth,” Polly explained.

  “But it’s the teeth at the back that do half the work. The grinding up of the meat, the crunching of the bones . . .”

  “That’s why they’d have to come out. I daresay they’d try to do it without hurting you too much. Sometimes they make people go to sleep before they pull out a really big tooth,” Polly said kindly.

  “All my teeth are big,” the wolf said.

  “I can see that. So you could ask the dentist to give you gas and air, and then you’d go to sleep and he could take them all out at once.”

  The wolf shivered.

  “It would be a long time before they grew again,” he said.

  “I don’t think they would grow again. You’re too old. It’s only very young creatures who grow a second set of teeth when the first ones come out.”

  The wolf ran his tongue over his teeth, counting them fondly.

  “I could promise to eat very slowly,” he said.

  “You might forget in the excitement of getting me to eat at last.”

  “I could drink a glass of water between each mouthful.”

  “Very bad for the digestion. You don’t want to ruin your stomach so that you’d never enjoy another meal,” Polly said.

  “Would they be taking out your teeth too?” the wolf asked.

  Polly shook her head. “They wouldn’t need to. Even with all my teeth, I wouldn’t be able to eat faster than you,” she said.

  The wolf considered this.

  “Polly!”

  “Yes, Wolf?”

  “It was a good idea of yours that we should try which of us could eat the other fastest, but now that I have thought the matter over carefully I think it might not work very well. I feel that the end result might not be quite what we expected. I think we had better forget the whole plan.”

  “I understand,” Polly said.

  “I am sorry to have to disappoint you. The fact is that today I happen to be very busy. I have a great many things to attend to at home. Also I happen not to be particularly hungry this morning. I believe that all I shall be able to manage for my dinner will be a lightly boiled egg. Perhaps also a small piece of dry toast. I don’t really feel equal to tackling a whole Polly just now.”

  “That’s quite all right. I don’t really want to eat you today, Wolf,” Polly said politely.

  “Another time,” the wolf called as he turned down the High Street towards his home. As he trotted off he was congratulating himself on his great cleverness. He had quickly seen the dangers into which Polly had tried to entrap him. The horror of having his jaws clamped together! The shame of wearing a muzzle like a dog! Worse still, the loss of any of his useful, long, sharp (and rather yellow) teeth!

  “Foiled again! Who says I am not the cleverest? As well, of course, as much the quickest eater,” the wolf murmured to himself. It was only a pity, he thought, that he hadn’t had the chance to prove it this time.

  3. The Spell

  THE WOLF shut his large book with a loud bang.

  “Of course! What I need is a spell! A spell which would make that stupid little Polly come to see me, asking me to be kind enough to eat her up,” he said.

  He was amazed that the idea hadn’t occurred to him before. In the book he had just been reading there was no shortage of spells.
Beautiful princesses got turned into frogs, frogs turned into handsome princes, kings were trapped and enchanted by witches, several small juicy children were forced, by magic, to work for giants and ogres or other unpleasant characters and were often in the gravest danger of being eaten. If all this could happen to princesses and princes, why shouldn’t a perfectly ordinary little Polly be made, by a spell, to come and look for a very respectable wolf? And even made to ask him to eat her? Without any fuss, and without any of this endless argument. The wolf was bored with argument. All he wanted was a good meal, and to know that at last he had got the better of Polly, clever as she was supposed to be.

  He thought carefully. He had to find a really reliable spell. He didn’t want one which was going to run out at an awkward moment. Or one which never got going. The wolf put some money into a small leather bag which he tied securely round his neck, and trotted off to see what the High Street shops had to offer.

  A shop window piled with saucepans, pails, baskets, cat litter and bottles of different-coloured mixtures first attracted him. A solid-looking stool was labelled “Built to last.” This sounded promising. The wolf didn’t want a long-lasting stool, of course, but if this shop sold reliable stools, why not surefire spells? He was encouraged by seeing that a bottle of purplish liquid was apparently called MAGICLEAN. He went boldly into the shop.

  “I want a spell,” the wolf said to a stupid-looking girl who was leaning against a white kitchen cupboard and reading a newspaper.

  “A what?”

  “A spell.”

  “Don’t keep them. No one asks for them nowadays,” the girl said, without taking her eyes from the page in front of her.

  “Yes, you do. I saw one in the window.”

  “Must have made a mistake. Told you, we don’t keep them. They’re out of date,” the girl said, still not looking at the wolf.

  “I tell you, I saw it. Here. Look!” the wolf said, seeing more bottles of the same purplish stuff on a shelf near by.

  “What, that? Why didn’t you say so?” the girl said. She snatched a bottle from the shelf, and began searching in a drawer for a paper bag.

  “That’ll be seventy-nine pence,” she said.

  “Wait a moment. What does it do?” the wolf asked.

  “What do you mean, what does it do?”

  “What I say. What does the magic do? It might not be what I need. What I want is a simple spell which will make a small girl . . .”

  “I don’t know what you’re on about. Can’t you read? This is for cleaning out ovens. Says so on the label,” the girl said. She put the bottle within an inch or two of the wolf’s nose. The printing on the label was very small and the wolf was unable to read a word.

  “Is that all? Just cleans ovens? Nothing else?” he said, disappointed.

  “What d’you expect for seventy-nine p? A beauty cream? Though it would take more than that to make you fit to look at,” the girl said unpleasantly. She put the bottle back on its shelf and returned to her newspaper. The wolf, insulted, went quickly out of the shop.

  “What a very disagreeable girl. And stupid! Even stupider than Polly,” he thought. He stopped in front of another shop window to examine his own reflection.

  “I don’t know what she can have meant by that remark about a beauty cream. I am a remarkably good-looking wolf,” he decided, and, slightly comforted by what he had seen, went on his way.

  He stopped next to visit a food store. He found it difficult to pass by the containers of frozen meat, though he knew from past experience that you had to wait for hours before you could get your teeth properly into those tempting-looking hunks. He passed the shelves of bread and biscuits. At last he found what he was looking for. A small packet. On the outside was printed “TENDERIZER. FOR ANY KIND OF MEAT.”

  He carried three packets to the check-out desk.

  “Does it really work?” he asked the girl who rang up the cost on the cash register.

  “Like magic,” she said.

  “Have you got any more magic spells?” the wolf asked, interested. But by this time the girl was attending to the customer behind the wolf, and she took no notice of his question, only pushed his three packets of tenderizer towards him.

  Outside the shop, the wolf looked carefully at the instructions on the packets. “SPRINKLE A FEW DROPS ON THE MEAT BEFORE COOKING. LEAVE FOR TEN TO FIFTEEN MINUTES BEFORE PUTTING IN THE OVEN,” he read. He opened the packet. Inside was a small bottle.

  Very carefully the wolf sprinkled three or four drops on to his own front leg.

  “If it makes me tender, it really is magic,” he thought.

  He stood still on the pavement, watching the clock on the clock tower. At the end of ten minutes, he opened his mouth and brought his front leg towards it.

  “Wow! That hurt!” he said in surprise as his teeth met his own skin. He looked quickly round. He would not have liked Polly to see him testing his own tenderness in this way. She might have thought it was stu . . . not a very clever thing to do.

  He continued to walk down the street, looking in all the windows as he went. Presently he stopped outside a shop called simply HEALTH. In the window were two pictures. One was of a miserable-looking woman with a great many wrinkles, bags under her eyes and hair like string. The other showed the same woman, but this time smiling, with a smooth skin and shining hair. In her hand she held a box of globules to which she was pointing. Under the picture were the words, “Magical transformation. I grew ten years younger in a single night.”

  “That is something like magic!” the wolf thought admiringly, and he pushed open the shop door and went straight in.

  “I see you have boxes of magic pills. What I want is a spell . . .” he began saying to the anxious-looking woman behind the counter.

  “A smell? Ah, yes. Can I suggest these charming little lavender bags . . . so delicious. You can just sprinkle them about your linen cupboard . . .” she began.

  “No, you don’t understand. I want a magic potion. Something you drink. Or eat. I’ll have a couple of those boxes of globules the lady in the window has in her hand,” the wolf said. Making Polly younger when he caught her would also make her tenderer and possibly stupider. While the worried woman was finding the pills, the wolf wandered round the shop. The more he looked, the more sure he became that this was the right place for spells. So many bottles full of different-coloured fluids! So many small packages done up with gold string, with pictures of herbs outside. When the wolf caught sight of a black cat stalking through the shop, and then saw an old-fashioned twig broom leaning in a corner, he knew he had at last found a witch’s lair.

  “That’s her broom, I suppose,” he said to the worried woman.

  “The besom, yes. We like the old customs here,” she said, making a neat parcel out of the two boxes of pills.

  “Do you use it too? I suppose it’s strong enough,” the wolf said. The woman looked as if she’d be quite a load.

  “I find it far better than any of the modern brooms,” the woman said. “Can I interest you in anything else?” she asked.

  “I’d be very much interested in anything that could make a young girl behave kindly to wol . . . to animals,” the wolf said.

  “Do you mean she isn’t kind to our dumb friends?” the woman asked, shocked.

  “She certainly isn’t.”

  “Treats them badly? Pulls the wings off flies? Doesn’t look after her pets?”

  “Starves them,” the wolf said sadly.

  “But that’s terrible!”

  “Haven’t you got something which would change her? A bottle of medicine? Some more pills?”

  The anxious woman shook her head. “Nothing will change a bad nature like that except education. Someone must take her in hand and teach her. What a terrible story! Perhaps you could give her little lessons and tell her how wickedly she’s behaving?”

  “I’ve been trying for years. But it’s a very difficult case,” the wolf said sadly. He picked up his parcel and le
ft the shop.

  •

  A day or two later, Polly was upstairs in her bedroom when she heard a loud knock on the front door. She thought of going down to see who it was, but she had learned to be careful, so she opened the window and looked cautiously out to see who was below. There was nothing and no one to be seen.

  She went downstairs and saw a small parcel lying on the doormat inside the front door. A label tied on it said simply TO POLLY.

  “A present. But it isn’t my birthday,” Polly thought. She sat down on the mat and tore off the paper.

  Inside was a round pill-box. The piece of paper stuck to the lid had writing on it, which read:

  MAGIC!

  UNTIL YOU TRY THIS MAGIC REMEDY

  YOU WILL NEVER BELIEVE HOW

  THE WRINKLES WILL FADE AWAY

  THE SKIN BECOMES CLEAR AND YOUTHFUL

  YOUR STEP REGAINS ITS SPRING

  LIFE LOOKS PROMISING

  MAKES YOU TEN YEARS YOUNGER.

  TAKE THREE GLOBULES AFTER EACH MEAL

  The pill-box was full of large green globules.

  As Polly was looking at them, she heard the letter box rattle and the end of a long black nose pushed itself a short way through.

  “Am oom om em?” a muffled voice asked.

  “I don’t understand,” Polly said.

  “Bother. Can’t talk with that trap thing round my mouth. I said, ‘Have you got them?’ ” the wolf’s ordinary voice said from the other side of the door.

  “The green globules?” Polly asked.

  “From a friend,” said the voice.

  “What am I supposed to do with them?”

  “Swallow them, of course. How can anyone be quite so stupid?” the voice said, impatient.

  “But it says on the box that they will take away my wrinkles, and I haven’t got any,” Polly said.

  “Perhaps the globules will prevent your getting any.”

  “And they are supposed to make my skin clear and my step springy.”