Still, she was alive. So the Knight shook her out and dried her and when he had finished chopping up the worm he put her over his saddle and rode back to the palace.
The King was terribly pleased. “You brave and noble Knight,” he said. “I offer you my daughter’s hand in marriage.”
“No, thank you,” said the Knight. “Your daughter is not at all the kind of person I should like to marry and anyway I am too old.”
“She looks better when she’s cleaned up,” said the Queen.
“And when she hasn’t got the measles,” said the servants.
But the Knight went on shaking his head. He didn’t want half the King’s treasure either because it was too heavy and would tire his horse. He just took three gold pieces and rode away.
But what of the poor worm? There it lay in the middle of the field with its sore, sad head chopped off in a pool of blood and its cornflower-blue eyes full of tears, and everywhere — strewn over the hedges and the haystacks and the bushes — its hacked-up pieces of body.
Slowly, bravely, all that day and the next day and the next the worm went about joining itself up and joining itself up and joining itself up. It would get three bits that fitted together and then the fourth bit would roll away into the ditch and get lost and it would have to hunt everywhere to find it. Once, it had thirteen bits of its tail all together but the fourteenth just couldn’t be found because the Knight had thrown it into a tree and some rooks had used it to hold meetings on. And the bit the Princess had been in was particularly difficult to fit on because it had got stretched and flabby at the edges. But the worm just worked and worked and worked…
Just before noon on the third day it finished joining itself up and then it slithered away over the fields and hills and valleys till it came to a clear, deep lake because it wanted to see what it looked like. But when it stared into the water and saw its reflection, the worm gasped with surprise.
It had made a sort of mistake. It had put its head in the middle and stretching away to either side of it, as long as half a train or one football pitch or two thousand, one hundred and seventy-five pork sausages, were its two bits of body. It had a body to the right of it and a body to the left of it and in the middle was its head.
For a while the worm just stared into the water and then a pleased and happy smile spread over its face and its cornflower-blue eyes danced with joy. And it said to itself: “It was a bad day when the Princess came and said ‘Phooey’ to me and I swallowed her and the Knight chopped me up but now I am probably the only worm in the whole world with a head in the middle of my long, long body — and thus I shall remain until the end of time!”
And thus it did.
As for the Princess, no one ever came to marry her — not a prince or a plumber or a roadmender or a window cleaner — not anyone, because if you start life by kicking people in the stomach and go on by yelling with temper if you are supposed to wear plain knickers instead of lace ones and then say “Phooey” to a worm, you are going to have a very lonely life. Which is what she did, and serve her right.
Never Steal Milk from a Frid
Mostly when you climb a hill or scramble through the heather and come across a large rock it will be just what it seems: a large rock.
But sometimes — just sometimes — you might come across a rock that is not exactly what it seems. Such a rock will look strange and sinister and different.
A rock like that will be a Frid rock and inside it there will be a Frid.
What a Frid looks like is very hard to say because Frids never come out of their rocks, but what they do is nasty (as you shall see).
Once there was a Frid rock on a hill above a village in which there lived about two hundred people, some cows, some chickens, some pigs — and five dogs. All the people in this village were very careful not to upset the Frid. They spoke politely and quietly when they went near the rock and they put out crumbs by it and bowls of milk because crumbs and milk are a what Frids like. And the dogs were even more well behaved than the people, because an old story said that the last time a Frid had been angered it was by a dog and though no one could remember what had happened to the dog they knew that it was bad.
The five dogs in the village were friends.
There was an Old English sheepdog with wise eyes, which peered out under his grey and white fringe of hair. There was a liver-coloured spaniel who loved everybody and wanted everybody to love her, and spent a lot of time on her back with her legs in the air so that people could stroke or scratch her or even kick her if they wished. There was a basset hound with a body like a hairy drainpipe and ears that were full of little spiders and beetles which had climbed in as he trailed them along the ground. There was a poodle who had once belonged to a travelling circus. And there was a mongrel called Fred.
Every one of these dogs was a sensible dog. They knew that a Frid lived in the rock above their village and though they often went for walks together they took care to keep well away from the rock and if they did have to pass it, they did so quietly with their tails down. As for lifting their legs against anything within half a mile of the Frid rock, they would rather have died. Nor did the mongrel, though he was as tough as they came, ever make any jokes about a Fred not being afraid of a Frid because he knew that anyone who was not scared of a Frid was, quite simply, a fool.
And so for many years the people and the dogs in the village lived in peace with the Frid and the Frid lived in peace with them, taking his crumbs and his milk at night and bothering no one.
Then one day a completely new dog arrived in the village. She came in a carriage with a rich and important lady who was staying in the inn and her name was Winsome Wilhelmina III of Bossybank Snootersloop, from which you will see that she was a pedigree dog and very, very grand. Winsome had long blonde hair, masses and masses of it. She had hair on her back which flowed down to the ground on either side. She had hair on her legs and hair rippling along her tail and hair on her head, where it was gathered into a topknot and tied with a pink satin ribbon. When Winsome Wilhelmina walked (which she didn’t very often because she preferred to be carried) she looked like a blonde wig on castors and all you could see apart from her hair were her snappy black eyes and her snooty black nose and, of course, her ribbon.
The other dogs saw her come and saw her carried into the inn, but they did not expect to see her again. She was obviously not the kind of dog who would mix with ordinary dogs like themselves. But it is no good being terribly grand and pure-bred and important if there is no one to see how grand and pure-bred and important you are and on the third day of her visit, Winsome Wilhelmina trotted out of the back door of the inn, found the five dogs lying in a patch of shade under a tree — and began at once to boast.