Noosum Foosum

by J. M. Harris

  Noosum Foosum

  Noosum Foosum

  J.M. Harris

  Copyright © 2013 J.M. Harris

  @JMHARRISUK

  Illustrations by J.M.Harris.

  Cover Illustration by Ruth Harris.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299

  Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277

  Email: books@troubador.co.uk

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  ISBN 978 1780887 562

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typeset by Troubador Publishing Ltd, Leicester, UK

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

  For my son, daughter and loving wife.

  Contents

  How to summon a dragon

  A trip to the fair

  Introducing Noosum Foosum

  The secret of the dragon’s cave

  A friend comes to the rescue

  Mew’s accidental adventure

  Afterward

  How to Summon a Dragon

  Chapter 1

  You know the kind of day that you get in early autumn, where the leaves crunch underfoot as you walk but there’s still enough warmth left in the sun so there’s no need for a coat? Where there are blackberries to pick and acorns and horse chestnuts to gather and collect and to count up, to see who has the most? The kind of day that makes up for the fact that the summer wasn’t quite as sunny as it might have been?

  Well it was on a day such as this that the children found themselves alone under the dappled shade of an ancient horse chestnut tree. Scattered around their feet were dozens of discarded spiky green brown cases, now split open and empty. It was conker season and they were ensuring that the choicest of this season’s crop were safely stowed in their pockets, away from the clutches of competing conker gatherers.

  The little boy, Danny, was slight, with short brown hair and an inquisitive nature. His heart was kind and he laughed easily and often. His sister Katie was the same height, with blonde hair that reached halfway down her back. She too was kind, especially where animals were concerned. If you didn’t know her, you could make the mistake of thinking her quiet. But to those who knew her well she was far from it, often narrating a constant stream of thoughts at such a pace it was hard to keep up.

  Danny stuffed conker after conker into his bulging pockets, whilst Katie was more selective, seeking out only the tiniest for her collection; little brown dots that for some reason hadn’t managed to swell and fill the pithy white of their cases.

  Cramming the last of the conkers into his pocket, Danny stood up and called to his sister. Their parents were disappearing around the corner of the footpath ahead and it was time to catch up.

  As they started off, Katie noticed a narrow snicket in the hedgerow. It was an intriguing little snicket, the kind which seemed to demand immediate exploration; the kind which Katie found impossible to ignore.

  It was an intriguing little snicket, the kind which

  seemed to demand immediate exploration

  Slipping quietly through it, Katie found herself at the beginning of a path which wound its way through trees and bushes before disappearing deeper into the woods. She called to her brother and once he too had crawled through, they raced down the path, hand in hand, eager to discover what lay at its end.

  Not long after they had started out, they heard the trickling of a stream in the distance and, sure enough, as they emerged from the woods there it was, a delightful little brook gently babbling and gurgling. Its shore was dappled with rocks to balance on and reeds to hunt amongst.

  Katie immediately kicked off her shoes and started laughing and splashing around, while Danny got a stick and started poking in the rushes on the bank.

  After a few happy minutes they began to think that they really should catch up with their parents. But just as they were about to go, Danny noticed something small amongst the reeds. Getting closer, he saw that it was something small and red and blue, floating in the water near the bank.

  It was a boat!

  Now Danny had a toy boat or two that came out at bath-time and so knew what toy boats normally looked like. But this one! This one was altogether different. It was exquisite. It was unlike any toy boat he had ever seen, or for that matter, any toy anything he had ever seen. It had a beautiful white cabin on the top where the captain would sit, complete with radio aerial and fog horn. If you looked carefully inside, you could see the steering wheel and all the controls. And, if you squinted to look really, really carefully, you could even see all the tiny numbers on the dials on the controls. It didn’t look like a toy boat at all – it looked like an actual boat that just happened to be very, very, small.

  It looked so real that Danny resisted the urge to pick it up in case something got broken and instead called over Katie for her to take a look. They sat down on the bank of the stream and looked at it together, drinking in every perfect shiny surface, each one intricately made and faultlessly put together. They started to play at being sea captains, calling each other ‘ship mate’ and shouting ‘land ahoy.’ They pretended to look through binoculars to spot other ships in the distance and imagined they were blowing the ship’s whistle. In fact, Danny knew how to make a kind of whistle by putting a piece of grass between his two thumbs – and so he grabbed a nearby blade and did just that!

  Now, if you had told him what was about to happen, Danny would not have believed you. When he put that blade of grass to his lips and blew, it made a sound that no-one in the whole world had ever heard before. Not once had any other little boy blown any other blade of grass and heard any sound anything like the sound that met their ears.

  It is not possible to describe the sound using normal sound words like ‘quiet’, ‘loud’, ‘high’, or ‘low’. You can’t describe it by saying it sounded like a flute or a trumpet or a horn. The only way you can get close to describing it is by using feeling or seeing words. Then you could say: It sounded like the feeling you get in your tummy when you go down a really big slide. Or it sounded like how a beautiful rainbow would sound if it was a sound and not a sight. Or maybe, just maybe, if you had to use sound words to describe it, you could say it sounded like the song … of an angel.

  Chapter 2

  The dragon landed just behind them.

  He looked around and saw the children, both still staring at the blade of grass that now lay at their feet glinting in the sunlight. The blade of grass that they could now see looked quite unlike any of the other blades of grass around. The blade of grass which had produced a sound unlike any sound they had ever heard before. The blade of grass which had summoned … a dragon!

  The dragon felt a bit embarrassed. He thought that dragons should be noticed when they land behind people. He gave a little cough. A ring of smoke drifted out of his nose and landed a little way upstream. Still no reaction. The children were mesmerised by what they had just heard. The dragon gave anoth
er cough, this time a bit louder. This time quite a large billow of smoke came out, together with a lick of fire which singed a nearby tree. Its scorched leaves spiralled slowly down and landed at Danny’s feet.

  The children turned around.

  They looked at the dragon.

  They stood and stared. They stared and stood.

  They had never seen a dragon before.

  They had been to the zoo and seen crocodiles from Australia, elephants from Africa and rhino from India. They had been to the museum and seen pictures and fossils of mammoths and dinosaurs. But they had never ever seen a real, live, actual dragon. A real, live, actual dragon with wings and scales and talons and smoke and all the things that dragons are meant to have and which this one definitely did have!

  The dragon smiled. Or at least the dragon thought he was smiling. Actually he looked more like he was feeling hungry and had just seen lunch. This made the children stand and stare even harder.

  The dragon thought that there had been enough standing and staring and so he decided to break the silence.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked.

  Danny stole a sideways glance at Katie. He had been trying to work out what he should do when the dragon tried to eat them. He hadn’t given any thought at all as to what to do if the dragon just said ‘yes?’ to them. He had been trying to think whether dragons were maybe allergic to something that they could quickly grab and rub on him so that he would come out in a nasty rash and have to fly off. But to try and work out what to say when the dragon just stood there asking ‘yes?’ was quite another matter.

  The dragon thought he would give them a bit more help. ‘What is your wish?’ he asked.

  The children stared at each other. Their eyes (which were already as wide as you might think eyes could possibly get) widened even more.

  Katie whispered something to Danny while the dragon patiently watched. Danny nodded in agreement and looked at the dragon. Mustering all his courage, he spoke:

  ‘Dragon, we wish for you not to eat us.’

  The dragon roared with laughter. He clapped his talons to his sides and his belly heaved with mirth. This was by far the funniest wish he had ever heard! He decided to definitely write it down in his diary tonight. He realised that the children had probably never met a dragon before, and so decided to introduce himself properly.

  He stopped laughing, crouched down so that he wouldn’t seem quite so big to them, and explained that he had no wish to eat them. He had just heard their whistle and come flying, thinking that someone had a wish that might need magicking.

  ‘So, you’re a friendly dragon then?’ asked Katie.

  The dragon smiled, this time taking care not to show any of his teeth and answered gently, ‘Yes, I am.’

  The next hour or so found the three of them happily chatting; the children explaining that they had never met a dragon before and the dragon explaining that he had never met a little boy or a little girl before and it soon became clear that no-one was going to be eaten by anyone.

  Eventually the dragon sat up and declared ‘Well, we really need to be doing this wish of yours, as I need to get going.’

  The children this time didn’t even need to discuss it. As their gaze fell once again on the little blue and red boat that lay at the water’s edge, they held hands, closed their eyes and chanted: ‘We wish, we wish, we wish … to be small!’

  Chapter 3

  The children opened their eyes to find themselves in a comfortable room overlooking a wide river. The room was airy and light and had two easy chairs and a curious array of controls and dials at one end. The chairs sported little brass plaques on their backs and these were embossed with two sets of initials – ‘C.F.’ on the smaller and ‘N.F.’ on the larger. Danny stared thoughtfully at the letters, running his fingers carefully over the embossing, especially the larger ‘N.F.’, trying to guess what it could mean. Katie gazed out of the window and as she did, suddenly realised where they were – this room was the cockpit of the boat! Not only had the magic made them small but it had also magicked them straight into the boat!

  Danny ran up to a window and looked out – the grasses and reeds, which just an hour or so earlier he had been poking with a stick, now towered above him. The babbling stream was now a fast flowing river. And, of course, the boat itself was now easily big enough for them to fit inside.

  Katie tried both chairs in turn, swivelling them round and round and declaring that now she really was the captain of a boat. Danny’s attention turned to the controls – there was a big lever labelled with such titles as ‘Full ahead’ and ‘Hard-a-stern.’ There was a steering wheel, of course, a radio, a compass and something called a ‘bilge-pump.’ He contemplated how he might use the controls. He didn’t know what a bilge was and he very much hoped it wouldn’t need pumping. He was just trying to decide whether to move the lever to full ahead when Katie noticed another button which simply read ‘Tour.’ Thinking to herself that a tour sounded nice, she quietly pressed it.

  Immediately the button was pressed, all the other controls started moving by themselves! The big lever went onto ‘slow ahead,’ the steering wheel turned, the compass needle started to swing around and they felt the boat begin to move.

  A voice came over a loudspeaker: ‘Welcome to the river tour. Please take your seats and help yourselves to refreshments.’

  Katie looked around to see that a cubby hole had popped open, spilling out all sorts of sweets and snacks: Chocolate, popcorn, crisps and cakes, ice cream tubs and lolly pops. She pounced on a lemon dibber and a strawberry cream cake and snuggled back into her seat as the tour began.

  Danny sighed a sigh of the deepest satisfaction. Not only had they been made small … by magic… by a dragon … that he had called using his whistle … but they were now on this tiny boat with all sorts of goodies, just about to go on a tour down the river. Life didn’t get any better than this …

  Chapter 4

  … it got better!

  The boat manoeuvred out of the rushes and reeds at the side of the river and picked up speed. The children munched their snacks and gazed out of their windows. As they sped along, jets of water crashed against the sides of the boat and cascaded along the windows. They crested wave after wave, their tummies fizzing with delight at each gentle fall. The engine hummed as the boat bobbed in and out of reeds, weaving between rocks and startling water boatmen and pond skaters, sending them skittering out of the way. Upstream, newts popped their heads out of the water to catch their next parcel of air – just managing to disappear again before the bow of the boat found them.

  Of course all this water life looks totally different when you’ve been magicked small – the pond skaters looked more like carnival stilt-walkers than insects and the newts looked more like the dragon himself than tiny water dwellers. The children consumed the changing scene as heartily as they did their refreshments.

  Danny finished his food and got down from his chair to look out of the cockpit. He looked down over the controls and noticed a very tempting button, patterned with ocean blue and coral green waves. It seemed to whisper to him, more than any of the others – ‘Press me! Press me!’ So what else could he do?

  As soon as his finger left the button, a blue light started flashing in the cabin and a gentle siren sounded. The voice announced: ‘Starting underwater tour. Please return to your seats.’

  Danny scrambled back to his seat, while the lights continued to flash and the siren sounded the warning. They heard the sounds of metal sliding against metal, the easy clunks and clicks of attachments being gracefully and perfectly slotted into place and machinery carefully and precisely doing its job. The boat’s windows, which had been half-open, automatically closed tight shut and the windscreen wipers were retracted out of sight.

  Katie felt a moment of panic as she could see that the boat was sinking lower and lower and the water level rising higher and higher. Soon it reached the bottom of her window, then half-way, then all the way and then she lo
st sight of it altogether. Suddenly her view had been replaced by the most amazing underwater wonderland! Shards of sunlight picked out every feature, from the weeds that grew on the rocky bottom, to the creatures that made their living amongst them.

  The little boat was just as skilful at steering underwater as it had been above water, weaving in and out of the weeds which now swayed majestically around them. It dipped beneath the newts which they had last seen breathing up at the surface and then it rose again, skimming the heads of the bemused sticklebacks and minnows.

  The children marvelled at the most amazing panorama they had ever seen. Shoals of minnows parted in front of them, crayfish scuttled below them and a pike with malevolent intent was deftly evaded as the boat sped past.

  A panel in the floor of the boat, mysteriously labelled ‘Environmental hatch,’ slid open to expose what looked to be a glass window in the floor. Katie knelt at the side of it and looking down saw the water going past below the boat. She was staring at the rocks and the weeds at the river bottom when to her delight a shoal of tadpoles came into view! They looked more like a pod of dolphins now she was small. She went to press her hand against the glass of the hatch to get as close to them as she could.

  As she got closer, she realised that there wasn’t any glass – and as she dabbled her hand in the water, one of the friendly tadpoles poked his head right out!

  Before she could ponder this marvel any further, two more tadpoles swam up into the hatch, and poked their heads right through it.

  …and as she dabbled her hand in the water, one of the friendly

  tadpoles poked his head right out!

  The tadpoles each made a kind of braying noise and Katie chatted to them softly about this and that, giving each one gentle strokes, whilst trying to make sure that they took turns so no one got more strokes than the other two. She named them ‘Itsy’, ‘Bitsy’ and ‘Mew’.