A Phaery Named Phredde and Other Stories to Eat with a Banana by Jackie French

Author:Jackie French [Jackie French]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780730491262
Publisher: HarperCollins

Phredde’s Dragon

‘Stink!’ exclaimed Mum suddenly.

‘Or fetid, or maybe reek,’ answered Phredde’s mum consideringly. ‘No, they don’t have enough letters.’

‘How about musty?’ demanded Mum.

‘That’s not enough either.’

‘Stench!’

Phredde’s mum shook her head. ‘It has to begin with P unless we’re wrong about twenty-five down being Pterodactyl—’

‘Pungent!’

Phredde’s mum ran her biro down the crossword. (It was the smallest biro I’d ever seen, except for the one Phredde uses in class. Does some factory make special small Phaery size biros or do they have to conjure them up? I must ask Phredde).

‘And it ends in d,’ said Phredde’s mum.

Mum peered down at her side of the crossword again. She’s getting awfully shortsighted but she won’t go and get glasses.

‘Impossible. There is no word in the English language that means “bad smell” that begins with p and ends in d. We really must have got pterodactyl wrong.’

Phredde’s mum slowly flapped her wings, the way Phredde does when she’s considering something. ‘How about malodorous, fusty, tainted…’

‘Rancid, rank…’ muttered Mum.

Dad looked up from the phaery chess game he was playing with Phredde’s dad. ‘Putrid,’ he said.

Mum looked annoyed. She often gets miffed when Dad helps her with her crosswords.

‘I thought you weren’t listening,’ she said.

‘I’m not,’ said Dad. ‘Your turn Jim.’ (Jim isn’t Phredde’s dad’s name. It’s just what he’s called. Phredde’s dad’s real name is The Phaery Valiant…which is really embarrassing, even if it is a traditional phaery name, like Ethereal…so he decided he’d be called Jim instead.)

We’d all come over to Phredde’s castle for dinner—well, all except Mark, who was over at Tracy’s.

The snow was fluttering down outside the castle. It wasn’t fluttering down anywhere else, of course, just around the castle. Magic snowflakes look just like giant feathers—only spongier.

There was a big fire crackling in their enormous fireplace—I suppose it was big enough to roast an ox, but I’ve never seen an ox. I don’t think they’re the same as bulls. I must ask Mrs Olsen, she knows things like that.

(We’d had roast gryphon for dinner, not roast ox—there’s a phaery who has a gryphon farm just out of town. Gryphons taste like chooks, but better.)

The flames were licking and snickering up the chimney and Phredde’s dad had conjured away the dishes (he and Phredde’s mum had had a discussion about whose turn it was to do the washing up).

And after dinner, Mum and Phredde’s mum had got out their latest crossword and Dad and Jim had settled down to phaery chess (which is like ordinary chess, except the king and queen and stuff are real and there isn’t a board—the pieces just hang there in mid-air till you put them somewhere else and I think the moves are different too—so I suppose it’s not really the same as ordinary chess at all).

And Phredde and I were working on our Japan project for school. Phredde was conjuring up cherry blossoms to twine all through the information, which looked really pretty (we got 78% for it by the way).

We were doing all this stuff because Phredde’s family don’t have a TV.

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