by Joan Aiken
With a big swing of his arm Dan Sligo tossed Cooey into the air, while old Mr. Mendelson was still trying to think of a polite way to say, “No thank you, I’d rather you didn’t.”
Up and up, round and round, went Cooey, fluttering and flickering like a white paper bag against the blue of the autumn sky.
Mr. Mendelson watched with great anxiety. His neck felt very bare without the gold chain and the round gold watch hanging from it.
“Cooey won’t drop the watch, will she?” he said.
“Lord bless ye, no!” Dan Sligo said cheerfully, slapping his pocket. “That watch’ll come to no harm. Ol’ Cooey’s as safe as the Newcastle mail coach. Don’t ye fret about Cooey. She’ll bring the watch back sure enough—but it’ll be made o’ pastry.”
Up and up went Cooey, until she seemed to be almost touching the sun, she was so high and far up above the top of the golden oak tree.
Then she began slowly circling down again. Round and round she went, round and round and round, as if she were on a blue stream of water running out of a giant bath plug-hole.
At last she came to rest on Dan Sligo’s shoulder.
And—sure enough—she was holding in her beak a round flat watch made of hard shiny pastry, glazed brown with egg white.
Mr. Mendelson was very amazed. Dan Sligo—who had made the pastry himself—was not so surprised.
“There!” he said triumphantly. “What did I tell ye? Try a bit, Mr. Mendelson! Ye’ll find it rale good pastry—the best ye ever laid lip to!”
And he held out the pastry watch temptingly on the palm of his hand. For, he thought, once it had been eaten up, Mr. Mendelson could hardly ask for his watch back.
Mr. Mendelson, however, looked at the pastry watch very doubtfully. Then he smelt it carefully.
“Oy!” he said. “Who’d have believed it! May a forest grow on my back! What next? It seems the sky does turn things into pastry. Wasn’t I just saying to Bertha and Gertrude that it had remarkable power? But—excuse me—I would rather have my watch back the way it was before. What use to me is a pastry watch, if you please?”
“Oh I’m afraid that’s not possible,” said Dan Sligo cheerfully. “Once pastry, always pastry! D’you think you can turn pastry back into flour and water? Or flour back into corn? Or corn into seed? You think you can turn an oak tree into an acorn? You think you can turn Cooey back into an egg?”
“Vrrrrc, rkkkty coo,” said Cooey.
“Excuse me,” said old Mr. Mendelson very politely. “I don’t know about such things. And in any case, who wants to turn Cooey into an egg? All I want is my gold watch back, for it belongs to the Old Lord.”
“I’m sorry,” said Dan Sligo—he didn’t sound it, however—“but ye should ha’ thought o’ that afore ye asked me to let ol’ Cooey take it up into the sky. Now it’s turned to pastry there’s naught for it but to eat it. Eating’s just about all a pastry watch is good for. But ye’ll find it a rale tempting tidbit, Mr. Mendelson.”
Mr. Mendelson was quite put out.
“Who needs a pastry watch? I want it about as much as I want shoes made out of sugar.”
“Can’t help that,” said Dan Sligo. “You’ve got it now.” And he still held out the watch on the palm of his hand.
When Mr. Mendelson had a problem he always called for his friends Bertha and Gertrude. So now he lifted up his head and whinnied.
“Oyyyy, Bertha! Oyyyy! Gertrude! Would you be so kind as to come here a moment, please, ladies, if you are not otherwise occupied? There’s a pastry watch here I’d like your opinion about.”
Gertrude and Bertha, who had been laying out their bedding (which was made from Mr. Mendelson’s thick furry undercoat) in the sun to air, stopped work and came scampering across the grass.
“Oh-oh,” muttered Dan Sligo. “Here comes trouble! Why do these pesky little nibblers have to come along poking their needle-noses into other people’s business? Who needs them?”
“What’s the matter, Mr. Mendelson?” asked the mice, running up Mr. Mendelson’s tail and along his back on to his forehead.
“You see Dan Sligo here?” said the pony. “He has changed my watch into pastry.”
“How did he do that?” said Gertrude.
“By having Cooey fly up into the sky with it. And now he says he can’t change it back.”
“That sounds like rubbish to me,” said Bertha.
“Is it good pastry?” said Gertrude, and she ran down Mr. Mendelson’s nose towards Dan Sligo’s hand, which once more held out the pastry watch invitingly.
But just at that moment the real watch, which Dan Sligo had hidden in his waistcoat pocket, let out three silvery notes—ting, ting, ting! Three o’clock! For as Dan bent forward, the knob of the watch had pressed against a silver snuffbox, which he also kept in his pocket.
Both mice knew that sound as well as they knew their own voices.
“Humph!” muttered Bertha. “We certainly do seem to have a few mysteries around here! For a start, we’ve got a watch that can throw its voice.” Quick as butter in a hot pan she ran down Mr. Mendelson’s nose, skipped across on to Dan Sligo’s cuff, ran up his shirtsleeve, and dived head first into his waistcoat pocket.
In a moment she reappeared, dragging Mr. Mendelson’s gold watch by its handle.
“Oy, oy, just look what I found!” she shouted triumphantly, panting with her efforts. Then she added with great politeness, “I think you perhaps made a little mistake, Mr. Sligo? Gertrude, just step over here a moment, could you, and pull out the chain? That’s in here as well. Maybe Mr. Sligo forgot he had them in his pocket.” Gertrude sprang from Mr. Mendelson’s nose to Dan’s waistcoat button, and pulled out the long gold chain.
“That’s odd,” murmured Mr. Mendelson. “That’s very singular. How did my watch and chain get into Dan Sligo’s waistcoat pocket?”
Red-faced, very much annoyed, Dan Sligo dumped the two mice, with the watch and chain, down on the grass. He dropped the pastry watch at the same time.
“Mice!” he muttered. “Why the plague, I ask you, doesn’t some cat gobble them up? I never could abide the nasty little creatures.”
And he turned and stamped off across the grass, grumbling to himself all the way, while the mice fastened the watch and chain round Mr. Mendelson’s neck once more.
Then they ate up the pastry watch, since Dan Sligo did not seem to want it.
“Very good,” they said, nibbling quickly round the edges. “Won’t you try a bit, Mr. Mendelson?”
But Mr. Mendelson was not to be tempted.
“Eat and enjoy it my dear friends. But don’t ask me to touch anything that comes out of the sky. Didn’t I tell you there was something very peculiar going on up there?”
Managing Without the Moon
ALL THE THINGS I AM going to tell you about happened more than a hundred years ago, in a big old park far to the north of England. This park—which was called Midnight Park—belonged to an old lord, who lived in a stable because his house had burned down. And in the park there also lived an old Orkney pony called Mr. Mendelson. Mr. Mendelson had two friends who were field mice. And he was also lucky enough to have a piano, which the Old Lord had given him.
Mr. Mendelson could not play the piano himself—who ever heard of a horse playing the piano?—but his friends the mice could play very well indeed, and so every evening they had a concert, and Mr. Mendelson listened.
Besides beautiful music, Mr. Mendelson was particularly fond of the moon. He loved to watch it when, sometimes, in daytime, it floated across the sky like a white balloon, looking puzzled and lost, as if it were not sure of the way home. And, even better, Mr. Mendelson loved the moon at night, when it shone bright as silver and made all the trees in the park throw long shadows across the grass. Every day Mr. Mendelson’s two friends, the field mice Bertha and Gertrude, used to spend sever
al hours brushing and combing him all over, pulling the prickles and burrs out of his thick shaggy coat, plaiting his mane, teasing and stroking out his long tail with their tiny clever claws.
While the two mice tidied up Mr. Mendelson they held long argumentative conversations.
The mice were much better informed than Mr. Mendelson because they sometimes went out of the park and under the town, in their tunnels, and they talked to the town mice and heard all the news.
Whereas Mr. Mendelson never went anywhere, now that he was so old; sometimes he just stood in one spot for hours together. But he thought a lot, all the time he was standing still.
“So what is the moon?” he asked Bertha one day, when she was brushing out his forelock.
The moon was floating overhead at the time, like a large white soap-bubble.
“The moon?” said Bertha, holding a tuft of forelock between her strong little claws, while she pulled out a thorn with her teeth and spat it away. “Pffft! Excuse me! The moon’s a silver coin.”
“Excuse me!” said Gertrude, who was brushing Mr. Mendelson’s ears, “but the moon is not a silver coin. It is a cream cracker. That’s why it gets smaller all the time. Somebody is eating it up there. You could not eat a silver coin.”
“Pardon me: it is a coin.”
“No, Bertha. It is a plain biscuit.”
“Whichever it is,” said Mr. Mendelson, “why doesn’t it fall down?”
“Because the sky is sticky. Like honey.”
“Sticky like jam,” said Gertrude. Both mice were agreed about that. “The sky is so sticky that all kinds of things get stuck up there. Like sheep’s wool on bramble bushes. In fact there is quite a lot of sheep’s wool in the sky.”
“That’s true,” said Mr. Mendelson looking at the clouds floating past.
“There you are, Mr. Mendelson! Now you’re done for the day,” said Bertha, sliding down his tail, while Gertrude gave a last polish to his shoes. “Go and look at yourself in the pond.”
There was a tiny round pond in the park where Mr. Mendelson lived with the mice. It was not much larger than a round table, and the grass came right to its edge.
Mr. Mendelson walked slowly over to the pond and looked into it. There were some red and brown leaves floating about on the water, for autumn had come. Mr. Mendelson could see his own reflection looking up at him. His coat was all black and shiny, because the mice had given him such a good brushing.
And then, suddenly, he saw something else in the pond.
“Bertha—Gertrude!” he called anxiously. “Come here—quick! A bad thing has happened! The moon has fallen into the pond!”
Both mice came scampering to the water’s edge and looked in. But now a whole patch of dead leaves had floated across the pond. There was nothing to be seen. The moon’s reflection had gone.
“Oh, the moon has sunk down to the bottom, right into the mud!” mourned Mr. Mendelson. “We shall never see it again.”
He looked up at the sky, where clouds were beginning to gather. Sure enough, no moon was there.
“It will float up again,” prophesied Gertrude.
“Biscuits do float, after all.”
“No, excuse me, Gertrude. It is a coin, and coins do not float.”
That night it was very cold. Even inside his warm, thick coat, Mr. Mendelson felt the cold in his old bones, and shivered in his sleep. Although the cold did not wake him, it made him dream. He dreamed about the gypsy, Dan Sligo, who lived in the woods on the edge of the park, and caught rabbits and cut clothes pegs and stole vegetables from people’s gardens. Dan Sligo had a very clever lurcher dog called Jess, who was trained to pick up anything she found and take it back to her master. Jess had been taught to catch fish, too, and could snap a trout from the stream in her jaws without breaking a single one of its scales.
In the old pony’s dream he saw Dan Sligo by the pond with a fishing net; he saw the dog Jess dash into the water and come out with the moon in her teeth and give it to her master. Then the gypsy dropped the moon into his net and slung it over his shoulder and walked away.
“Oy, moy, Dan Sligo has stolen the moon!” mourned Mr. Mendelson in his sleep, and woke himself up. He was so cold, and so worried by his dream, that although it was hardly morning yet, he made his way to the pond, which was some distance from where he had been sleeping with his chin resting on the keyboard of his beloved piano. The weather was bitterly cold. As Mr. Mendelson moved along, his hoofs went scrunch, scrunch, through the grass, which was white with frost. When Mr. Mendelson came close to the pond, what did he see? He saw Dan Sligo, with an axe, very busy, hacking away, all round the rim of the pond. The strokes of the axe made a loud splintering sound in the silent frosty park, which was all gray with early-morning light.
Dan Sligo saw the old pony coming slowly across the white crisp grass.
“How do, Mr. Mendelson!” he called cheerfully. “Up early, ain’t ’ee? Don’t sleep so good these sharp nights, eh? Ancient bones gets to creaking in the frost, divvn’t they? Best ask the Old Lord for a blanket.”
“What are you doing, Dan Sligo?” asked Mr. Mendelson. He was very worried at seeing the gypsy working by the pond where the moon lay drowned. His heart went geflip, geflap.
“What am I a-doing?” The gypsy winked. “Best ask Mr. Brown the pastry cook how he makes his ice cream! A frozen tongue can’t tell ’ee no lie, Mr. Mendelson!”
And at that, Dan Sligo did an amazing thing. He gave a tilting push to the surface of the pond with his foot. He gave a pull with his arms. And the whole pond seemed to tip sideways in a great white circle. Dan Sligo tipped up the white circle on to its edge, and began to roll it away over the grass.
Mr. Mendelson watched him go with starting eyes. “Stop! Stop! Come back, Dan Sligo!” he called faintly. But the gypsy took no notice. He rolled his round of white over the grass to the park fence where he had a hand-barrow waiting, tipped forward on its wheel. He rolled the white circle straight into the barrow. And then he pushed the barrow away down the hill into the town.
When the two mice arrived, later in the morning, to brush Mr. Mendelson’s coat, they found the old pony very sad and silent.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Mendelson?” said Bertha, running up on to his nose, for his head hung down so low that it was an easy jump from a frosty clump of grass. “Why are you so gloomy?”
“Dan Sligo was here early this morning, and he has stolen the moon out of our pond, and rolled it away down the hill.”
“You’re pulling my tail!” gasped Gertrude. “Stolen the moon? Dan Sligo? Oy, what a scoundrel! Why has he done that?”
“Why ask why? That sneak would steal the egg from his mother’s breakfast if he thought he could get it away without her noticing,” said Bertha. “Of course he’ll sell it to somebody. But who would buy the moon?”
“He said something about Mr. Brown the pastry cook,” said Mr. Mendelson sadly. “He said, ‘Ask Mr. Brown how he makes his ice cream.’ What do you think he meant by that? What is ice cream?”
Even the well-informed mice didn’t know that. But they promised Mr. Mendelson that they would find out, when they had finished tidying him for the day; they would go and visit their cousins Martha and Charlotte, who lived under Mr. Brown’s shop and made use of his cake crumbs.
All day Mr. Mendelson wandered sorrowfully about the park. It was a gray cloudy day, very cold. He hardly did more than nibble at the frosty grass.
Many, many times he peered sadly into the pond.
Often, often, he gazed up at the sky. But no moon was to be seen in either place.
At six o’clock the mice returned and climbed up Mr. Mendelson’s tail on to the piano, for it was time to play their evening concert. But first, Mr. Mendelson was anxious to know what they had found out from their cousins.
“Well? Well? How does Mr. Brown the pastry co
ok make his ice cream?”
“He has a big wooden machine, as big as a barrel, and he turns a handle round and round and round. And then he opens the top and scoops out the ice cream.”
“Yes? So what is this ice cream?” “Charlotte and Martha stole a crumb for us to try.
It is round and cold and white, and it melts on your whiskers before you have a chance to taste it,” said Bertha.
“I’m afraid it’s quite clear that ice cream is made from melted moon,” sighed Gertrude.
“Oy, moy!” lamented Mr. Mendelson. “We shall never see our beautiful moon again. Dan Sligo has stolen it and Mr. Brown has ground it up and made it into ice cream.”
The two mice looked at each other and shook their heads.
“For once, Mr. Mendelson,” said Bertha, “I’m afraid you are right.”
They all sat grieving for the moon in silence. Then Gertrude said, “Well, tears won’t fry pancakes. Let’s play a bit of music and try to cheer up. Just because the moon is gone, is that a reason to mope?”
“No—you are right,” said her sister. “We’ll have to learn to manage without the moon.”
And without waiting any longer, the two mice began scampering up and down the keyboard of the piano, pressing down the black notes and the white, using their noses, their feet, and even their tails, with terrific dexterity and energy. They made such brilliant and glorious music that the Old Lord, who lived in the stables, heard it, and came rolling himself across the park in his wheelchair to listen and enjoy it at closer quarters.
“Now play the moonlight piece,” said Mr. Mendelson, when it was nearly time to stop.
