“A hammer! Some thief has been in here.”
Then they noticed the rope dangling and twitching, and they looked up, and saw Prince Coriander far, far above them, climbing as if his life depended on his speed—which indeed it did.
“Shut the door!” roared the Great Kelpie. “Let the tide flow in!”
Back swished the tide through the Black Pot Pipe—flowing in, faster and faster, swirling up through all the racks of the dishwasher. The prince did not dare look behind him, there was no time for that. But he could hear the water below him, rushing and gurgling.
And one of the kelpies came bounding up after him, leaping from rack to rack, like something halfway between a seal and a gorilla, but much faster than either. It shot out a terrible taloned paw, and made a grab for the prince.
I’m done for, he thought. But fortunately the kelpie’s claw only caught the prince’s cork life jacket, which came off and fell into the water. The prince went on climbing.
Now another kelpie, up at the top of the dishwasher, tried to shut the door. If he had managed to do that, the prince really would have been done for. He would never have escaped. But fortunately the long rope had become tangled and snarled and the bottom end of it was jammed in the hinges. So the door would not shut.
With one last despairing leap the prince hurled himself through the narrowing crack, and was outside the dishwasher.
“Oh, well done!” shouted the nixie sisters, who were perched on the taps, and on the edge of the sink, watching to see what happened.
But the prince was not safe yet.
First, a great torrent of water came raging out of the dishwasher after him, right across the kitchen floor.
But he managed to spring to safety, not a moment too soon, on to the kitchen table.
Still he was not safe.
For, though he did not know it, a small piece of the pearl bowl had lodged in his hair, among the rowan twigs. Though he had not meant to steal it, there it was. And so long as he had that on him, the Great Kelpie could follow him, and did so, churning through the frothy water, all horned and dripping and covered with shells, and his teeth gleaming like the points of daggers.
I’m done for, thought the prince again. And I must not lead this monster towards the palace, because then all the other elves will be done for too.
But, very fortunately, at this moment Queen Corasin happened to be looking out of the palace door, and she saw her son being chased by a terrible water-monster.
“Quick!” shrieked the nixies to the queen. “A red-hot wimble! You must get a red-hot wimble to stab the kelpie!”
Queen Corasin was very quick-witted. Faster than thought she rushed into the palace, wrapped her hands in the king’s best mole-fur mantle, and grabbed the red-hot corkscrew which was lying in the fire, heating up, ready to open the great golden flagon of red-hot mead, which was being prepared for the celebration feast.
Clutching the wimble, Queen Corasin ran back to the palace door.
“Hi!” shouted the king after her crossly. “What in the world do you think you are doing?”
But Queen Corasin pushed the wimble, mole-fur cloak and all, into the hands of her son as he came racing up the palace steps, and he turned and thrust it, twirling it as he did so, into the heart of the dreadful Great Kelpie.
And the Great Kelpie groaned and died on the spot, flopping and flapping down the palace steps in a cloud of steam.
“Thanks, Ma!” panted the prince. “I’d surely have been a goner if you hadn’t come out just then.” And then he said, “Here’s your ring back,” and slipped the ring off his finger and on to that of the queen.
“Now I’m going to talk to that nixie girl and ask her to marry me,” he said.
But when he reached the sink, Waterslenda said, “No, prince. I have been thinking it over, and I think my sisters are right. You could never marry a nixie. You can hardly swim! And I should hate to live in a palace. No, things are better as they are. You must marry some elf girl. But we will always be dear friends.”
And so she sent him back to the palace, where all the elves were waiting to welcome him, and to eat ambrosia and honey-cakes and drink red-hot mead.
A Biography of Joan Aiken
Joan Aiken had a very happy childhood, and her memories centered around her two much-loved homes: a haunted house in the historic town where she was born, and a tiny old cottage in a country village where she grew up. These magical places became the settings for many of her stories, as you will be able to easily imagine if you read on …
The house where Joan was born in 1924, nearly a hundred years ago, was in the small medieval town of Rye, in the county of Sussex, England—a place of cobbled streets and red-brick houses jostled tightly together on a high little hill rising out of the flat green plain of Romney Marsh. The English Channel was two miles away. Some of Rye’s castle walls and fortified gates still remained from when the village served as a stronghold against French invaders. Jeake’s House, where Joan was born, stood halfway up the steep, cobbled Mermaid Street. It was built in 1689 and was owned by several members of the Jeake family. One of them, Samuel Jeake, was an astrologer and mathematician; a huge leather-bound book written by him once belonged to the Aikens. Samuel Jeake had invented a flying machine, and, trying it out, he boldly leapt off the high wall of the town. Sadly, it did not work, and he crashed down into the tidal mud of the river Rother, which ran around Rye. Joan certainly included that in one of her stories!
There was a very ghostly feeling about Jeake’s House, which Joan described as follows: “[Its smell was] a delicious blend of aged black timbers, escaping gas, damp plaster, and mildew; I can remember the exact feel of the brass front-door knob turning gently in one’s hand, the shape of the square black banister post, and the look of the leaded windows with their small panes.”
Just as clearly, Joan remembered the stories she first heard at the house, which were read aloud by her mother and her older brother and sister, John and Jane: “First there was Peter Rabbit, and then The Just-So Stories, fairly milk-and-honey stuff; then Pinocchio, rustling with assassins, evil plots, death, moonlight, and irony; then Uncle Remus, told in a mysterious dialect, full of wild characters, with the wicked Br’er Fox.” No wonder this house haunted her memories!
When Joan was five, her father, the American poet Conrad Aiken, returned to the United States, and her mother, Jessie, married an English poet. Along with her mother and new stepfather, Joan went to live near the rolling green hills of Sussex Downs, five miles away from the closest town. John and Jane were sent away to boarding school, but for the next six years, until the age of twelve, Joan was homeschooled by her mother.
This new home was a different kind of paradise for Joan. Now she could roam the wild garden, climb trees, and explore the little village of Sutton, which had no “sidewalks”—as her Canadian mother called them—just one road with grass banks and little scuffed paths along the top where children had made tracks of their own. Sutton had one tiny store, which sold everything from bread to postage stamps. A four-minute walk from the shop was a forge, where the blacksmith, Mr. Budd, worked at his roaring bellows or clanged shoes onto the great, fringed feet of farm horses. In those days, a carter would go into the town once a week with his pony and trap and bring back goods for the village families. Joan’s household did not have a radio or a car—or even electricity! Water was pumped by hand from a well, and at night they lit oil lamps and candles. Much of their food came from the garden’s vegetable patch and fruit bushes; milk and cream or meat came from farms nearby. Even the poorer families in the area had help in their houses, and a village girl called Lily came to Joan’s to scrub and wash dishes. When she had finished her work, she sometimes took Joan to climb the slopes of the Downs, half a mile away, or pick cowslips and kingcups in the marshy meadow behind Lily’s mother’s cottage. Sometimes, Joan and Lily would walk two mile
s in the summer heat to a shallow pond where they could bathe.
Jessie quickly taught Joan how to read, and gave her lessons in French, Latin, English, history, arithmetic, geography, and even Spanish and German. With no school friends to play with, books became Joan’s friends—she read everything in the house! First, she went through the novels from Jessie’s Canadian childhood: Little Women and the Katy series. Then, she read all of the fairy tales, The Jungle Book with its stories about Mowgli, and the books her older brother and sister left behind. When these ran out, she moved on to ghost stories or books about history, such as stories about the Three Musketeers and the Princes in the Tower. Joan’s mother would read longer works aloud before they had radio or television; this was their main entertainment. Every night at bedtime, or when the family went on picnics, or as they sat stringing beans for supper, Joan would be listening to stories, so it was not surprising that she soon started writing some of her own. She saved up her pocket money and bought herself a notebook at the village shop, then set to work writing exciting tales with titles like “The Haunted Cupboard” or “Her Husband Was a Demon.” She was so proud of them that she kept those pages for the rest of her life.
It wasn’t until several years later that Joan had the company of a baby brother, David, and as soon as he was old enough, it was Joan who took him exploring on the Downs, and told him stories to cheer him along as he began to tire on the way home. Some of these short tales were published in her very first book many years later, such as “The Parrot Pirate Princess,” which she gave to David as a birthday present. Joan used to say that it was only by racking her brain to answer her little brother’s constant question of “What happened next?” that she learned how to write the exciting fiction she is known for today.
I was lucky enough as Joan’s daughter to have many more of those stories told to me as she was writing them quite a number of years later. Then I was the one asking “And what happened next?” When the tales were finished, she would type them out and send them away to her publishers, and I would enjoy the excitement of seeing them come back as printed books with pictures, just as you are able to see these stories today on your own screens—wouldn’t it have amazed Joan to imagine that all those years ago?
—Lizza Aiken, 2015
Joan’s birthplace, the little town of Rye, England. This is a page from the picture timeline on the Joan Aiken website.
Joan, age two, with her mother, Jessie, in the garden of Joan’s birthplace, the Jeake’s House, in 1926.
Mermaid Street in Rye. They didn’t have many cars in those days!
Some of Joan’s first picture books.
Some of the stories were quite scary. Joan loved this one in which Pinocchio meets some robbers in the woods.
Joan’s mother, Jessie, married again and the family moves to a small village. This is another page from the Joan Aiken website.
The small cottage where Joan’s family lived. It was called Farrs.
Joan’s family could only reach the nearest town of Petworth by horse and cart.
Mr. Budd, the blacksmith, shoes carthorses in the village smithy.
May Day in the village was a grand day. The little girl (at left) in a long coat is Joan watching the May Queen’s procession go by.
Joan’s first notebook, where she wrote her stories. She kept it all her life!
One of Joan’s early poems and a drawing of her cat Teglees.
Joan (upper right), age ten, with her big brother and sister, John and Jane; her mother, Jessie; and her younger brother, David, who loved to listen to her stories.
Where Joan and David took walks, up on the Sussex Downs.
When she was older, Joan would go back to Rye to visit her father over the holidays, before she went away to school. Like Joan, he loved cats, and one year the family cat had kittens!
All images courtesy of the Joan Aiken Estate.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 1983 by Elizabeth Delano Charlaff for the Joan Aiken Estate
Illustrations copyright © 1983 by Jo Worth
Cover design by Jesse Hayes
978-1-5040-2094-7
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Joan Aiken, The Kitchen Warriors
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