“The thing to do is simply hold on,” she said, but the stem drooped and swayed with her weight, the tight frock made her clumsy, and she lost her grip and fell out of the window.
The postman was just coming to the steps of No. 6 when the mouse plummeted into his post-bag. The postman already had the letters for No. 6 in his hand. He hadn’t seen the mouse fall into the bag and he didn’t put his hand into the bag until he was coming down the steps.
When the mouse saw the postman’s great big hand coming at her she was very frightened. She bit his finger, and not knowing what else to do, she kept her teeth closed on the postman’s finger and held on.
“Ow!” yelled the postman. He flung up his arm and the mouse shot up into the air like a rocket.
The mouse flew through the air into the plane tree on the edge of the common. It was a Monday morning, and the owl in the plane tree was dozing where he always dozed on Monday mornings.
The mouse thudded into the owl and knocked him off the branch he was sitting on. “Oof!” said the owl as he went off the branch with his eyes still shut and his wings folded.
“Oof!” said the owl again as he hit the next branch ten feet down.
“Love!” shouted the owl as he grabbed the branch and opened his eyes. “Love has hit me like a thud in the stomach! Love, love, where are you? Who, who, who is it?”
He looked up and saw the mouse looking down at him. Not knowing what else to do, she was holding on to the branch the owl had fallen from.
“Love!” shouted the owl. “The breakfast of your eyes!” He meant to say ‘brightness’.
The owl flew up and the mouse ran down the tree trunk as fast as she could, across the street, up the steps, under the door, and into No. 6.
Once inside the front door she stopped to catch her breath. “What a morning this has been,” she said.
The mouse looked up at the letter basket on the door and saw among the letters a small brown-paper packet. She was very fond of brown-paper packets. “What harm can it do to look?” she said.
The mouse climbed up into the letter basket. “There’s a corner of that packet just the least little bit torn open,” she said. She sniffed the open corner and smelt something sweet. “It’s not as if I opened it myself,” she said, and began to nibble.
She nibbled her way into the packet and found a marzipan pig. “Lovely,” said the mouse, and ate up the pig. The pig was fresh from the confectioner’s and had no experience of life whatever. There was not a single thought in him, just marzipan. The mouse was tired from the morning’s hurly-burly, and the sweetness made her drowsy. She fell asleep inside the brown-paper packet.
The little boy who lived at No. 6 came to the letter basket and saw the packet. That day was his birthday and the packet had his name on it. “Perhaps it’s another marzipan pig from Aunt Constantia,” he said. He saw the hole in one corner of the packet. “Perhaps someone’s been here before me,” he said.
He opened the packet. The tearing of the paper woke the mouse. She sprang out of the packet, leapt to the floor, and ran into the nearest hole in the skirting board.
As the mouse sat there breathing hard, she heard the boy’s mother call from the kitchen, “Any letters?”
“Three for you and one for Dad,” said the boy, “and a mouse in a pink frock for me but she ran off.”
“A mouse in a pink frock!” said his mother.
“Maybe she wanted to be a hibiscus,” said the boy.
“Not any more,” said the mouse as she sat behind the skirting board. She did not take off her hibiscus-petal frock, though. She went out that evening and did not get eaten by the owl. She was seen at three o’clock in the morning dancing on the Embankment by the Albert Bridge.
•
RUSSELL HOBAN (1925–2011) wrote more than seventy books for children and adults. He grew up in Pennsylvania with two sisters (one of whom, Tana Hoban, became a noted photographer and children’s book author) and attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, where he met his future wife, Lillian Aberman. Hoban worked as a commercial artist and advertising copywriter before embarking on a career as a children’s author while in his early thirties. Soon the Hobans were collaborating on books, Russell writing the text and Lillian drawing the pictures. During the 1960s the couple worked at a prodigious rate, producing as many as six books in a single year—many inspired by life with their own four children—including six stories about Frances the Badger, The Little Brute Family, Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, The Mouse and His Child, and The Sorely Trying Day (which is published in the New York Review Children’s Collection). Russell Hoban’s other books for young readers include Trouble on Thunder Mountain and two books about Captain Najork. Among his novels for adults are Turtle Diary (available as an NYRB Classic), Riddley Walker, The Bat Tattoo, and My Tango with Barbara Strozzi.
QUENTIN BLAKE is one of the most celebrated children’s book illustrators working today, having illustrated more than three hundred books by such authors as Joan Aiken, J. P. Martin—several of whose Uncle books are available from The New York Review Children’s Collection—and Roald Dahl. A prolific writer of books for children himself, Blake was appointed the first Children’s Laureate of England in 1999.
Russell Hoban, The Marzipan Pig
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