The Ladybird and the Centipede Down Under

By Philip Smith

The next instalment for Ladybird and the Centipede carries on three months after returning home from their first adventure (2020's The Ladybird and the Centipede).

Packed full of fun and colourful new characters, this new adventure starts with Ladybird and Centipede finding themselves trapped in a jam jar, forgotten about and with

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Smith
• Release date: Apr 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780646837543

Philip Smith

Philip Smith is associate chair of liberal arts and professor of English at Savannah College of Art and Design. He is author of Reading Art Spiegelman and Shakespeare in Singapore: Performance, Education, and Culture. He is coeditor of The Struggle for Understanding: Elie Wiesel’s Literary Works and Gender and the Superhero Narrative, published by University Press of Mississippi.

Book preview

CONTENTS

  1: HOME, (NOT SO SWEET) HOME

  2: FAR, FAR AWAY

  3: ESCAPE PLAN

  4: THE FLIGHT

  5: THE WRONG BACKPACK

  6: GUM TREE FAIRIES

  7: BILBY BURROW

  8: THE CAVE OF SPIDERS

  9: BACK TO THE LAND OF TINGLESWAY

10: RAIN

11: FIELD OF FLOWERS

12: THE LADYBUG AND THE CENTIPEDE

13: AFTERWARD

Home, (not so) Sweet Home

Rain was lashing against the window of Simon’s bedroom. It had been raining constantly now for weeks.

The last of the autumn leaves had fallen from the trees that lined

Burleigh Road, where Simon and his parents lived and it was beginning to look very wintery, with an endless bleak grey sky stretching as far as the eye could see above the grey tiled roof tops.

Summer was all but a distant memory now for Ladybird and Centipede. When their epic adventure had ended and they had found their way back home, Simon had spent hours every day in his bedroom listening over and over to stories of their adventure, wanting to know every detail so that he could then write them down and include them in the story he had spent the summer holidays writing.

Simon’s favourite subjects at school were English and Art and he wanted to impress his new teachers on his return to school with a storybook full of wonderful adventures and illustrations. He dreamt of one day becoming a famous author.

As the weeks past, the book was completed and the school term grew closer, Simon’s interest in Ladybird and Centipede faded, to the point now where they were almost totally forgotten about.

From the jam jar on his windowsill where Simon kept them, Ladybird and Centipede could look out to the miserable day outside and despite being warm and dry, they longed to be back out in the vegetable patch and most of all, far away from each other.



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When Simon had first put Ladybird and Centipede into the matchbox basket of his homemade hot air balloon, they were total strangers, but their adventure had bought the two of them together and by the time they had found their way back to Simon, Ladybird had actually grown very fond of Centipede and he of her, although neither would admit this to each other.

Being stuck in a small jar together for months on end though had definitely taken its toll on their friendship. A lack of mushrooms for Centipede to eat had made him very irritable, and poor Ladybird was the one he took it out on.

They were now living in separate halves of the jam jar; Ladybird at the top and Centipede on the bottom. Neither had spoken to the other for weeks and you could cut the atmosphere in half.

Centipede would pass the days by walking in circles around the bottom of the jar, daydreaming that he was walking through a field of endless amounts of mushrooms, his favourite food, leaving a trail of dribble in his path.

Ladybird would spend hours each day on top of the twig Simon had placed in the jar for them to climb on. From up there, she was away from Centipede and his drool, could get a better view of the street below and it also enabled her to look at her own reflection in the glass walls of the jam jar, as if it were a mirror. She loved looking at herself. Using her feelers, she would comb the small hairs on her head into different, more and more extravagant styles each day.

Both of them secretly wished that the other would start up a conversation to break the silence, but neither of them did, as they were both as stubborn as each other.

One morning, Simon’s mother came bursting into Simon’s room, eagerly pulling back the curtains with so much force that it almost sent Ladybird and Centipede’s jam jar flying across the room. Outside was yet another wet and miserable day. Simon couldn’t understand what was so urgent that his mum would have to wake him up so suddenly.

What is it? Simon yawned, still waking up.

His