Half-Past Bedtime - Version 2

MP3 Audio CD. I



MR JUGG



The name of the town doesn't really matter; but it was a big town in the middle of the country; and the first of these adventures happened to a little girl whose Christian name was Marian. She was only seven when it happened to her, so that it was rather a young sort of adventure; but the older ones happened later on, and this is the best, perhaps, to begin with.

Marian's house was in a street called Peter Street, because there was a church in it called St Peter's Church; and some people liked this church, because it had a great spire soaring up into the sky. But Marian's daddy didn't like spires, because they were so sharp and so slippery. He liked towers better, because the old church towers, he said, were like little laps, ready to catch God's blessing. But Marian's daddy was a queer sort of man, and nobody took much notice of what he said.

At the other end of Peter Street there was a field in which some people were beginning to build houses, and Marian used to love going into this field to watch the builders at work. But one afternoon she became tired of watching them, and so she climbed over a gate into the[Pg 14] next field. Here the grass was so tall that it tickled Marian's chin. There were great daisies in it, taller than the grass, and they looked into Marian's eyes. They had calm faces like Marian's mummy's nurney's face, and they didn't mind a bit when Marian picked them. There were also buttercups, shiny and fat, like the man in the butcher's shop who was always smiling.

This was such a big field that when Marian came to the middle of it the voices of the builders were quite faint, and the tinkle of their trowels on the edges of the bricks sounded like sheep-bells a long way off.