Nonsense! Said the Tortoise

By Margaret J. Baker

Margaret J. Baker began writing children's books in 1948 and published her first book, Nonsense Said the Tortoise, in 1949. This book was also the first in a series of books about a talking, intellectual tortoise named Homer.
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473351806

Book preview

RETIREMENT

CHAPTER I

MY NAME IS HOMER

THEY were a perfectly ordinary family living on a farm in Sussex; that was why it was strange such an extraordinary thing should have happened to them. Their names were certainly a little different from other children’s but this was because Mr. Brown, their father, was a poet as well as a farmer, and he had chosen them himself while shaving in the morning.

Dulcibella’s was the worst because she was the eldest, and her father had been waiting to use the name for a long time, after seeing it as a boy while taking a brass rubbing in a country church. And it was impossible to shorten without making something worse. However, it didn’t matter very much because Dulcibella had long legs and fair plaits that never grew untidy, and the sort of skin that glowed as if she had been out of doors on a spring day running in the wind. It looked the same even when she had spent all the afternoon at the cinema in the nearby market town.

Lettice, her sister, had thin nobbly legs, red hair, and the kind of skin that burns red in the sun. She was so shy that it made everyone she met feel uncomfortable as well, so that they talked a great deal and laughed a lot when there really wasn’t anything funny to laugh about at all. But Lettice was never afraid of meeting animals. She didn’t mind picking up worms, and beetles, or even daddy-long-legs. She rescued flies from milk-jugs, released jam-jars filled with wasps outside kitchen windows after carrying them a safe distance from the house, and spent a long time on any walk launching bees into the air who were too heavy with pollen to fly, or helping worms and furry caterpillars across the road if they seemed in danger of being run over. Lettice liked animals because they didn’t expect her to talk to them, and most animals seemed to like her in return: even wasps and cows with calves.

Mouse was their youngest sister. Her real name was Daphne, but as Dulcibella said that wasn’t the sort of name anyone would need except for school reports and music exams., unless they were tall and beautiful and Mouse was small and fat. She had two teeth missing in front because the new ones hadn’t grown and she had pulled her baby teeth out early as she wanted the sixpences which her mother gave for every lost tooth. enever she was allowed to do so Mouse wore a stained pair of grey shorts and no socks or shoes. Once in a ’bus a kind lady had offered Lettice some money to buy shoes for her poor little sister and Lettice had had to explain that Mouse always went barefoot except to church and in the rain.

Their parents were quite ordinary too. Mr. Brown didn’t look in the least like a poet or different from any other farmer. He had sandy red hair like Lettice and an ink stain on his second finger where his pen rested which even pumice-stone wouldn’t remove, but no one outside the family would have noticed it.

Mrs. Brown was like Mouse only grown-up. She made really light pastry for cherry tarts and never said—I told you so, or Mummy knows best, if anything went wrong. She had played the violin in an orchestra before she was married and still played the organ every Sunday in church.

It was to these children in the middle of their ordinary lives that something they had never dreamt could happen, did happen.

It began when Lettice received a postal order for her birthday and went by ’bus to spend it in the market town. She had meant to buy seeds for her garden and a new fountain pen, but the stationers were out of stock of the only cheap pens which will hold ink, and the seed merchant’s card of 2d. packets was empty except for mustard and cress and wallflowers, which don’t come up until the year after when you have forgotten where they were planted.

And then, as she was passing the pet shop and trying not to look in the window at the kittens who were too young to have left their mother, and the puppies who weren’t very well-bred spaniels or scotties but still cost far more money than she had in her purse, Lettice saw in the window at the side a great many ’small land tortoises. They were crawling sleepily over one another in the sawdust among a few pieces of wilting cabbage. She stood and stared into the window. Inside, scrambling at the glass with his small, club-like feet was a tortoise rather smaller than the rest. The other tortoises pushed and jostled against him as he looked for a second straight into her eyes, asking her to rescue him.

Four and sixpence to you, my dear, said the man in the shop. Real Greek they are—Margined tortoises. Just come over. First lot this year. Make a nice pet they will.

He picked out the tortoise she showed him in the window and gave it to her wrapped in a paper bag.

It’s a bit sickly-like after the journey, he said, but he’ll soon chirp up.

The tortoise was the first animal she had ever owned. Lettice held him carefully on her lap all the way home on the ’bus. At intervals she looked inside the bag to see if he was all right but the tortoise was always hidden inside his shell. He certainly looked sad and sick after his long journey from Greece.

You might have brought a rabbit or even white mice, said Dulcibella when Lettice showed her sisters the tortoise in the greenhouse. It won’t do anything but bury itself half the year in the garden.

Tortoises are dull, said Mouse. You can’t take them out for a walk or anything. There’s one in that awful fable we had to do at school about the hare. You can’t like tortoises if you’ve done bits about them for dictation.

Do shut up, said Lettice, "you’ll hurt