Polly Brown

by Tricia Bennett

  However, the prince’s mother was not entirely convinced that this young girl was a princess, and it was, after all, most essential to have a girl who knew how to behave in such a manner as princesses do. They must have perfect table manners, be able to sing as shrilly as a bird, and have the ability to curtsy correctly. She therefore decided to do what all good mothers put in her situation would have done; she interfered! So the prince’s mother thought up a plan, which Polly desperately hoped would fail. “What a grouchy old misery-guts. Are they ever satisfied?” thought Polly ruefully, feeling more than a little disgruntled.

  The mother put a pea under the poor girl’s mattress. If she had a rough night, it meant she really was a princess. If she slept well, unaware of the pea’s presence, then good old mother would know for sure that she was indeed a ruthless young impostor. The young maiden indeed had a terrible night and was quite unable to sleep, for she felt something very hard under the mattress.

  Now this should have satisfied the prince’s mother, but on this occasion it didn’t. “Does it ever?” thought Polly, feeling decidedly disgusted. As a result, his mother decided that she needed more proof before she could give her blessing to this potential marriage. So she decided to try the pea trick again, only this time she placed it under ninety-nine mattresses! Polly believed this was a heartless and mean thing to do. She knew only too well that sleep is a very important part of a young girl’s beauty routine, and lack of it produces spots! The poor young girl not only had to endure another night of torment, but was also forced to clamber up one hundred mattresses before she could even lie down and close her eyelids.

  By this stage in the story, Polly felt so sorry for the young girl and very angry with the mother, whom she felt deserved a good slapping! For being royalty did not excuse her disgraceful behavior. That night, just like the last, the poor and now-exhausted young urchin complained bitterly that she had once again suffered a very bad and sleepless night. On hearing this latest piece of news, the prince’s mother finally threw in the towel. She agreed that, having passed this most dreadful test, the young girl really was a princess, and therefore her son could go ahead with the wedding plans.

  Polly felt greatly relieved by the good news, for she felt truly convinced that, should the poor girl be required to undergo any further sleepless nights, she would more than likely require cosmetic surgery to remove the dark bags from under her eyes! The happy couple went on to have a very large and extremely expensive wedding due to the thousands of people who lived in the land and were invited to attend. Afterwards they went on a luxurious honeymoon before going on to live happily ever after. “The end,” sighed a very sad and freshly tormented Polly.

  Having finished the book, she slammed it shut before flinging it violently across the floor of the dormitory, feeling quite discouraged that, yet again, she had been given a book that had a happy ending. Luckily for Polly, all the other girls were sound asleep and were therefore not rudely awakened by her noise. “Oh, how pathetic! I really hate fairy tales,” she thought angrily to herself as she switched off her torch and cuddled up to Eton and Langdon. She could not imagine what had possessed her friend Hodgekiss to yet again give her another book that provoked such deep torment to well up from within. Did he have a mean streak like her roommate Gailey Gobbstopper, who took great pleasure in tormenting her day-in and day-out? If so, fine friend he’d turned out to be. Polly turned over in the bed and tried very hard to sleep, but no amount of sheep counting did the trick, for the story she had just read would not go away!

  She could have done with the help of matchsticks to keep her drooping eyelids from entirely closing as she sat slumped in her chair through a double math lesson the next morning. She was so tired that she was really struggling to pay any attention at all to the teacher as he droned on and on. Finally the bell rang. She had never been so grateful to hear that bell, for it signified that morning lessons were finally over and it was now lunchtime. As she sat at the table with her dinner tray in front of her, she found herself staring at all the food on her plate. She was pleased to see it was one of her favorite dishes—liver and bacon casserole with a small portion of mashed potatoes, cabbage, and peas. Polly was delighted.

  She glanced over at her fellow diners and was very relieved to see they were all deep in idle conversation. She seized the moment to scoop up the peas from her plate and quickly plunge them into the waist pocket of her blazer, pleased that nobody had noticed. Then picking up her fork, and with a smile on her face, she proceeded to demolish every morsel that remained on her plate. She would have picked the plate up and licked it clean if there had been no one else around. But Polly had manners and knew this would not be considered a polite thing to do. She therefore hoped that she would be offered the leftovers from other pupils who did not eat every scrap of their meal. She wasn’t to be disappointed.

  Later that same day, Polly found herself in the geography room. She waited until the end of class and, once all the pupils had left along with the teacher, quickly sprinted across the classroom towards the globe. She twirled the globe round and round inspecting every inch of it. She pored over America and Australia, followed by Russia and then China. Her in-depth search took her from the Adriatic all the way to the Pacific, then from the Baltic to the Bahamas. Polly scrutinized every inch of the globe as she continued on with her thorough search. Try as she may, she could not find Piadora.

  Polly was beginning to feel very discouraged and bitterly disappointed, but then she had the bright idea of fetching the teacher’s magnifying glass from her desk drawer. With all the names on the globe now magnified, her searching was made considerably easier. But still, even with the help of the magnifying glass, she was unable to locate Piadora. Just as she was about to give up, her eye caught sight of what she believed she was looking for. She moved in to take a closer look.

  “Yes!” she cried out loudly, punching the air with her fist. “Piadora does exist, and I have finally found it. Oh, this is such good news,” she cried as she began dancing around the classroom in a state of pure elation.

  She could not help but sing and skip all the way to the train station. She was so blissfully happy. Now, for the first time in her young, troubled life, she had real hope. For if Piadora existed, then so did the Hubber Blubber and Hoolie Koolie trees. She could hardly contain her newfound joy. These feelings were totally new to her, and although they were strange, Polly felt grateful to be feeling something other than the usual deep sorrow, or worse still, numbness. She wanted to give Hodgekiss a great big, sloppy kiss on his whiskery cheek.

  That evening after tea she made her way to the dormitory and upon placing her hand in her jacket pocket, pulled out a few peas. As she positioned one lone pea under her rather thin mattress, she prayed with all her heart that she would feel it. She then headed for the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth before bed. This done, she gathered up her two friends, Eton and Langdon, and with great expectancy, crawled under the covers to wait.

  Polly, waited and then waited some more. It was not too long before she felt panic rising inside. Although she was wide awake, she definitely could not feel the pea. “Maybe the pea is more to the left?” she thought to herself as she then quickly moved over towards the wall. Nothing! “Maybe I need to be more over to the right?” she reasoned, turning over and almost falling out of the bed and onto the floor. Still nothing! “Maybe having both Langdon and Eton in bed with me is at the root of my problem,” she considered before throwing both of them out of the bed and onto the cold, hard floor. Still, try as she may, she felt nothing. She wiggled backwards and forwards, huffing and puffing, hoping that by repositioning herself she might get to the precise point in the mattress where the pea lay directly under her body. It was useless, for wherever she lay in the bed, the result was just the same. She could not feel the jolly pea!

  Such was her desperation that she even resorted to standing on her head in the bed in the vain hope that this might do the trick, but all he
r futile efforts were useless. There was not one trick in the book that Polly did not attempt that night. She bounced and flounced on her bed as though it were a trampoline in her ridiculous and sorry attempt to feel the pea.

  Eventually, her noise woke up all the other girls in the dormitory, who then threatened to throw her out of the window if she did not shut up and let them get back to sleep. Polly obeyed, for she took most threats very seriously. Pulling up the blanket to cover her head, she gave up considering any new ideas and closed her eyes. A lone tear slid down her cheek as she tried to face the bleak truth that her experiment had not only failed dismally but had also proved, beyond all reasonable doubt, that she was not after all the princess she secretly hoped she might be. The next morning she crawled miserably out of bed and, upon lifting the thin mattress, all she discovered was one lone and now-hideously unrecognizable squashed green pea!

  The next day as she traveled home from school, she resolved to give it another try. After all, she reasoned, it was fairly common knowledge that most scientists often had to make numerous attempts before their experiments succeeded. She must be equally resilient and work just as hard to find a scientific solution to her pea problem. With a new pea securely positioned under the mattress, she went through the same procedure as she had the day before. Still she could not feel the pea, and another extremely squashed green pea lay as evidence of her failed experiment.

  Despite being extremely disheartened, Polly still refused to give up. Being the determined young lady that she was, she went deeper into scientific mode, reasoning with herself that if she were to leave the peas a few days longer, they would go from soft to very hard, and a hard pea would be so much easier to feel. So a few nights later she placed a new but hard, shriveled-up pea under her thin mattress. The next morning found Polly’s tender spirit as squashed as the pea as she headed for school, feeling utterly inconsolable. Despite another bad night with a pretty solid pea under her mattress, she had still been unable to feel a jolly thing! It was all very troubling.

  Over the next few days, Polly found it hard to concentrate on anything, for the pea problem sought to dominate her every waking moment and therefore overshadowed everything else. Her need to feel like a princess simply overwhelmed her, and soon she began to hate Hodgekiss for ever having given her the book. She was now convinced that he had been rather wickedly stringing her along with false hope. However, even this didn’t stop her. For some days later, in what could be considered as a final act of desperation, she scooped, not only her own peas from off her plate, but also every pea that lay abandoned on all other pupils’ plates, delicately placing them in her blazer pocket. She made every attempt to keep them safe from being squashed as she went through the afternoon lessons and finally journeyed home.

  Once she was back at the castle, she emptied her pocket of peas into an empty plastic bag before giving it a sharp twist. On this triumphant note, she then headed for the freezer section of the fridge, constantly checking the bag on the way to ensure there was no hole for rebel peas to escape. She then proceeded to place the bag deep into the freezer section of the refrigerator. Many days later she returned to the freezer, and with a new and light spring in her step, she took the bag of recently frozen peas and emptied the whole lot under the thin mattress. The frozen peas rolled everywhere. “This has surely got to work,” she happily and very optimistically thought to herself.

  That night she got into bed, leaving her faithful friends Eton and Langdon on the floor. She apologized to both of them and assured them that they still meant the world to her, but cruel as it may seem, she considered what she was doing to be very necessary. Again Polly suffered a sleepless night, tossing and turning and jumping and bumping around all over the bed before reluctantly surrendering to tiredness and falling asleep. She awoke the next morning and crawled out of bed with a most heavy heart. For despite putting a whole bag of peas under her mattress, and frozen ones at that, she had not felt one of the now-very mushy miserable things! Polly felt very, very angry and disappointed!

  That morning she was left to clear up what could only be considered an awful mess of disgustingly mashed up peas from under her mattress, which now rather insultingly bore the most dreadful bright green stain. Polly then headed off to school, feeling the same deep despair that had become her daily experience. For a moment, in the short history of her young and troubled life, she had actually been crazy enough to believe that she might be a princess after all. Now she knew for certain that she was not. She also knew that if she saw Hodgekiss, she would tell him he was a rotten fraud. When she thought of Hodgekiss, she felt so explosive that she made the choice to forget he ever existed. She would never think of him or speak of him ever again! She believed this to be the best solution to the problem. However, this resolution only served to make her feel sadder than ever.

  At precisely 11:00 a.m. the next morning, Polly found herself sitting in the geography room, and, once her lesson had come to an end, she chose to linger and wait until all the other pupils had left the classroom, heading for the canteen. Polly found that she couldn’t help but take one more peep at the revolving globe, even though it was against her better judgment. She waited until all was quiet on the western front before creeping over to where the globe stood and picking up the magnifying glass from her teacher’s desk.

  Polly then rolled the globe round and round, her search becoming more frantic by the minute.

  “Piadora, come on, Piadora, where are you?” she muttered to herself as the globe whizzed around over and over again. “Arctic…Atlantic…Pacific…come on, Piadora. I know you are hiding, and I’m not leaving here until I find you.”

  Polly missed lunch altogether as she rolled and searched the globe in her seemingly fruitless endeavor to find Piadora for a second time. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Finally she fell to the floor clutching her head.

  “I must be going out of my mind,” she said out loud. “I definitely saw Piadora the last time I looked, and now it is nowhere to be found!” she wailed bitterly.

  Polly could hardly face the afternoon classes, for she was not only decidedly depressed, but also tired and hungry. As she lay in bed that cold, damp night, unable to sleep, her mind and heart in great torment, she felt a thick, suffocating blanket of darkness shroud her. She had no idea what was happening to her, and this really frightened her. Was she on the brink of going mad? After all, she had been warned many times by her guardians that madness ran in her family, and now it seemed as though they had been right all along. The real truth was that she, Polly Brown, was experiencing the dark night of the soul.

  Weeks passed without any strangers visiting the castle, and Polly gave up all hope of Hodgekiss returning. She began to believe the reason he had not made any further visits was because he secretly knew he could no longer string her along with his little fantasies about mysterious places and trees that did not exist. He had not returned because he did not want to face the music. However, deep inside she desperately wanted to be proved wrong.

  As time went by Polly grew more and more anxious for her brother Thomas, for she had not seen him for a long time but heard many rumors and whisperings that his health was rapidly deteriorating. Her need to see him therefore was growing by the day. As the boys’ dormitories were on a different wing and her brother was confined to his bed, she had no idea what to do. She just had this awful sense of urgency that would not leave her.

  Finally, there came a day when she decided to throw all caution to the wind and take the big risk of sneaking onto the boys’ wing to pay him a visit. She was well aware of the serious consequences that would befall her if she were caught. However, she was missing him so badly that she believed the risk was well worth taking. She waited until nobody was around, and then, despite shaking and trembling all over, she braced herself and, after taking a deep breath, stealthily crept up the hallway and through a door into the dormitory where Thomas slept. Polly was visibly shaken when she reached his bedside
, for he was barely recognizable! He was so terribly gaunt. His hair had grown long and was badly matted. His eyes were bloodshot and seriously swollen, and his face was a sickly ashen grey. Polly knelt down by the bed and took hold of his hand. Thomas slowly opened his eyes and then in barely a whisper said, “Polly, is that you?” Polly squeezed his hand before whispering back that it was.

  “I am not feeling well,” he softly wheezed, his voice crackling as he struggled to take a breath.

  “I know, Thomas. I know,” she said, fighting back the tears as she spoke.

  It was no use. Seeing her brother in so much suffering really was much too painful for her to bear. Polly began to weep unashamedly.

  “Polly, please don’t cry,” begged Thomas. “For you know full well that I hate to see you cry.”

  “I’m so sorry, Thomas,” she whimpered. “But I can’t help myself. I cannot stand to see you in this terrible state. I have begged them to take you to the hospital or at least to a doctor, but they simply refuse, saying you’re not sick at all and that it’s all in your head. Oh, how I hate them!” she cried most piteously.

  “Polly, dry your eyes,” Thomas begged. “I know that I won’t be here much longer and then all my pain will be gone forever.” Thomas paused and attempted to squeeze her hand. “It’s you that I truly worry about since I’m your older brother and I am supposed to protect you.” Tears slid down Thomas’s face. “I’m so sorry I have failed you, Polly, for it is you that has tried to look after me when it should have been the other way around.”

  Polly gently placed her finger on his lips to prevent him from carrying on.

  “Enough, Thomas,” she gently ordered him. “Brothers and sisters are meant to look out for each other,” she said in little more than a whisper and in an attempt to reassure him that she really did not mind. “What really matters is that we have each other. Besides, you have had to put up with so much more than I have. So don’t you dare start believing that you have failed me, for that’s a downright lie,” she sniffed, giving his hand a tight squeeze. “I can say with my hand on my heart that it has been my privilege to have you in my life. It really has.”