by Joan Aiken
When the watch was cleaned, it was as good as new. And the Old Lord hung it on its chain round Mr. Mendelson’s neck.
“There you are. Now, this watch is a repeater—if you press this knob, it will strike and tell you the time. First it strikes the hour—ping. Then the quarters—ping, ping, ping. Then the minutes—ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. So, wherever you are, you will always know the time. You can press the knob with your chin.”
“Oh, hoy!” sighed Mr. Mendelson. “Sometimes I think this time is too much like hard work! Why did they have to invent it?”
But the mice were delighted with Mr. Mendelson’s watch. Bertha polished it every day and Gertrude wound it every night.
Dan Sligo was very angry indeed when he found he had let a perfectly good gold watch slip through his fingers. He went to Mr. Mendelson and said, “You’re wearing my watch!”
“Oh, no, he isn’t!” said Bertha, swinging on the watch chain. “It belongs to the Old Lord, and he has lent it to Mr. Mendelson.”
“But if ever you want to know the time, we’ll be pleased to tell you,” said Gertrude, and she pressed the knob of the watch, which instantly went ping-ping-ping-ping-ping, ping.
“Six o’clock. Music time,” said Bertha, leaping from Mr. Mendelson’s nose to the piano.
“Music time,” murmured Mr. Mendelson, resting his chin on the keyboard. “That’s the best time of all!”
Mr. Mendelson Goes Backwards
IT WAS A WARM, WET, windy day in spring. Cuckoos were seesawing in and out of the trees in Midnight Park.
For some reason old Mr. Mendelson the Orkney pony suddenly began hiccupping. Perhaps it was because he had eaten too much rich, green, indigestible grass. Or perhaps there were too many buttercups and daisies in the grass he had eaten. Or perhaps it was because he had been startled by a cuckoo, which had suddenly burst out of the oak tree just above his head and given a tremendously loud shout of “Cuckoo!” right in his ear, just as he was swallowing a large mouthful of mixed clover and campion. At any rate, for one of these reasons (or some other) Mr. Mendelson, who was having his coat brushed by his two friends Bertha and Gertrude, the field mice, all of a sudden let out such a violent hiccup—“Hckcwkcwhoop!”—that both mice shot six inches into the air, and only saved themselves from falling down on to the grass by hanging tightly to Mr. Mendelson’s long black mane.
“Hckcwkcwhoop!” said Mr. Mendelson again. But this time the mice were ready for it, and hung on to his coat with all their claws.
“I think you’ve got hiccups, Mr. Mendelson,” said Gertrude politely.
“You’ve been eating too much green grass much too fast,” said Bertha, not so politely.
“Hckwckcwhoop!” said Mr. Mendelson.
“Hiccups aren’t caused by grass, excuse me, Bertha,” Gertrude contradicted her sister. “Hiccups are caused when your heart gets out of time with your breath. Mr. Mendelson’s heart is going pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, and he ought to breathe in on the pits, and out on the pats.” She laid her ear against his warm thick shaggy coat to listen to his heart. “Instead of that—”
“Hckwckckwhoop!” said Mr. Mendelson. Gertrude shot several feet into the air.
“That’s not what causes hiccups,” said Bertha.
“Hiccups come from swallowing too suddenly, so that you get a bit of air caught in your swallow-tube—”
“Hckwckwhoop!” said Mr. Mendelson.
“Never mind what causes the hiccups,” said Gertrude, picking herself up from a mossy tree-stump where she had landed. “The important thing is to cure them!”
She picked a large, wide blade of grass, and ran back, up Mr. Mendelson’s long tail and along his back, until she reached a spot just behind his ear. Then, holding the blade of grass sideways between her paws like a flute, she suddenly blew a very shrill ear-piercing note on it—BLEEEE!—It sounded like a loud blast on a small trumpet made from potato peel. Mr. Mendelson nearly jumped out of his skin at the sudden unexpected loud noise right behind his ear.
“The way to cure somebody’s hiccups is to give them a real fright,” Gertrude remarked complacently.
“You see, now he’s better!”
“Hckwckwhoop!” said Mr. Mendelson.
“That wasn’t much use!” said Bertha to her sister.
“The real way to cure hiccups is to drink water and then throw your head back sharply. Come over to the pond, Mr. Mendelson.”
Mr. Mendelson obediently let the mice lead him over to the small pond. There he took a mouthful of water and threw his head back as he swallowed. But a hiccup came up and met the water as it went down; the water sprayed all over everything round about, including the mice.
“That wasn’t much use,” said Gertrude, rubbing water out of her eyes. “No, no, Bertha, the best way to cure hiccups is to drink water from the wrong side of the glass.”
“But, excuse me, Gertrude, we haven’t got a glass.”
“So let him drink from the wrong side of the pond.”
“Which is the wrong side?” said Bertha.
“The other side from where he is, of course!”
So Mr. Mendelson, standing on this side of the pond, reached across and took a swallow from the other side. (Luckily it was a very small pond—not much bigger than a bathtub.) This time Mr. Mendelson managed to keep the swallow down, but next minute he gave an extra-loud hiccup.
“HCKWCHCWHOOP!”
“This is becoming serious already,” said Gertrude.
“Maybe he ought to eat a dock leaf standing on his head.”
“Maybe he should swallow a pail full of sugar while holding his breath.”
“Maybe he should touch his toes with his nose while saying the multiplication table.”
“Maybe he should sip vinegar from the wrong side of the spoon.”
“Ladies, ladies, please!” said Mr. Mendelson. “Isn’t it bad enough—hckwckwchoop!—that I should have such an affliction which heaven knows— hckwchhckwhoop!—I never asked for—without your thinking of all these other ways to torture me?”
The mice took no notice of Mr. Mendelson.
“Perhaps we should sting his nose with a nettle?”
“Get a squirrel to bite his ear?”
“Give him a spoonful of brandy with pepper in it?”
“Where are we going to get brandy?” objected Bertha.
“The Old Lord might have some.”
Bertha went off to find a nettle. Gertrude went to borrow some brandy from the Old Lord, who lived in an abandoned stable on the edge of the park.
At this moment the gypsy, Dan Sligo, came strolling into Midnight Park from the woods nearby where he had his camp.
Ostensibly, Dan Sligo was pretending to fly a very large kite on the end of a very long rope, for he made kites and sold them, at high prices, to the local children. But in fact he was on the lookout for anything he could pick up, and especially for Mr. Mendelson’s piano, which stood under the oak tree, and on which the mice played beautiful tunes each evening at six o’clock.
Dan Sligo saw no reason why an old pony and two mice should have a piano all to themselves.
“’Morning, Mr. M,” said the gypsy, strolling up to Mr. Mendelson, who was resting his chin on the piano.
“Hckwckwchoop!” said Mr. Mendelson. All the strings inside the piano went twangle-twangle.
“Got hiccups, have-ee, then, Mr. M?” said the gypsy sympathetically.
“Hckw …”
“Arr,” said Dan Sligo. “I knows an easy cure for they hiccups. All you has to do is run as fast as ’ee can, backwards, in a straight line, as far as ’ee can go. That’ll fix they pesky hickets—’tis a sartain cure!”
By this time Mr. Mendelson was getting very tired of the hiccups, and Dan Sligo’s cure sounded more comfortable than the nettle or the brandy-and-pepper which Gert
rude and Bertha were fetching. So he started walking backwards, rather slowly at first, because he had never gone backwards before, and he was over twenty, after all.
“Faster—’ee must go a deal faster than that!” called the gypsy.
Mr. Mendelson broke into a backwards trot.
“Canter—canter! Gallop, if ’ee can!” shouted Dan Sligo.
Mr. Mendelson tried to canter, and splashed heavily into the pond. He was not going at all in a straight line.
“Faster—faster—that’s the dandy! ’Ee be doing fine, real fine!” called Dan Sligo encouragingly. Then he tied the rope of his kite round Mr. Mendelson’s piano.
Just at that moment the mice returned, Gertrude dragging an enormous nettle, Bertha carefully carrying a thimble full of brandy which she had borrowed from the Old Lord.
“Has Mr. Mendelson gone crazy?” she demanded.
“Why is he running backwards?”
“Nay, ’tis a certain cure for the hiccups,” Dan Sligo, said, grinning.
“He’ll hurt himself—he’ll bump into a tree!” exclaimed Gertrude. “Watch out, Mr. Mendelson!” Both mice laid down the things they were carrying and began to scamper after Mr. Mendelson. But he was a long way off, by now, almost at the other end of the park, where the windmill stood. He was not keeping any kind of straight course, however; he would veer off very fast in one direction, then become anxious, rolling his eyes backwards in their sockets to try and see where he was going, and suddenly change his tack, so that he went along in a series of zigs and zags, hiccupping all the way.
“Wait, Mr. Mendelson!” shouted the mice. “Wait for us!”
At last, rushing as if the devil were after them, the mice caught up with Mr. Mendelson, and ran up his legs. (It is not at all easy to climb up the legs of a pony who is running backwards, but they managed it, holding on grimly with their strong little claws.)
Then, perched precariously on his rump, they were able to shout directions.
“More to the right, Mr. Mendelson—haystack coming up on the left.”
“Straight—left a little—mind the cowpat!”
Mr. Mendelson, who had great confidence in the mice, went much faster, and broke into a backwards gallop.
Meanwhile Dan Sligo had first drunk the thimble full of brandy, then taken two more turns of his rope round the piano, and let the kite out a little farther. The kite was high in the sky now, rollicking on a long slope of wind, way up among some white clouds. It lifted the piano two feet off the ground. Dan Sligo’s plan was that the kite should carry the piano out of the park for him, while Mr. Mendelson and the mice were kept distracted and a long way off by his cure for hiccups.
But just at this moment the Old Lord came rolling out of the stables in his wheelchair; he was curious to see if the brandy-and-pepper cure was working.
He did not notice Mr. Mendelson and the mice, who were nearly at the windmill by now—but he did see the piano, six feet up in the air at the end of the rope, and Dan Sligo guiding it along with his crooked stick.
“HEY!” shouted the Old Lord. “You put that back!” Dan Sligo, terribly startled, let go of the stick, and the kite twitched the piano up into the boughs of an oak tree, where it stuck. The rope snapped, and the kite sailed off on the wind, who knows where.
Meanwhile the two mice, just as startled as Dan Sligo by the Old Lord’s shout, had turned their heads to discover what was going on at the other end of the park. And the result of that was that Mr. Mendelson, galloping backwards at full tilt, went straight through the open door of the windmill and ran slap into a pile of flour sacks. One of them burst, letting out a suffocating cloud of white flour, which blew all over the mice and Mr. Mendelson.
“Atchoo!”
“Bless you!”
“Katischoo!”
“Bless me!”
“Kertchoff!”
“Bless you!”
Sneezing, gasping, and blinded, white with flour from tail to whiskers, the three of them finally managed to grope their way into the outside air, and shake some of the whiteness out of their eyes and noses.
When at last they got back to where Dan Sligo had been, they found the Old Lord, indignantly looking up at their piano, which was perched twenty feet out of reach among the branches of the oak tree.
“I shall have to send for Jim Thatcher and Robin Hedger to get it down with ladders,” he said.
“Oy, moy!” said Mr. Mendelson. “How did it get up there? Did the wind blow it up?”
“Wind?” said Bertha. “More likely it was that thieving Dan Sligo! There he goes—over the park fence.”
“At any rate,” said Mr. Mendelson, “his cure has stopped my hiccups.”
Which was quite true!
Pastry in the Sky
OLD MR. MENDELSON THE ORKNEY pony spent a great deal of his time gazing at the sky. It was not very comfortable doing this, for his big head was balanced for looking down at the grass, or straight ahead; but just the same, he did it. When Gertrude or Bertha, his friends the field mice, said, “Watch out, Mr. Mendelson! You’ll trip over that dead branch! You’re walking straight into the pond!” he would look down for a minute or two, but soon his head would go up again, and he would be staring at the clouds, which were shaped like fish bones—or like pancakes—or like leaves—or like loaves of bread—or like faraway hills.
“What gives them that shape?” he would murmur.”
“What are they doing up there?”
“And I’ll tell you another peculiar thing,” he said to Bertha and Gertrude (who were putting in their daily two hours of brushing and combing Mr. Mendelson’s thick shaggy coat). “The sky has an amazing power. There’s magic about it.”
“Rubbish!” said Bertha, briskly scrubbing out Mr. Mendelson’s ear with a bunch of dry grass. “There’s no such thing as magic.”
“Excuse me,” said Gertrude, polishing the gold watch that hung round Mr. Mendelson’s neck on a chain.
This watch had a tiny glass window in front, about as big as your thumbnail, through which you could see its face. And if you pressed the knob on top of the watch, it would tell you the time in a series of loud, sweet tings—first for the hour, then for the quarters after the hour, then for the minutes after the quarter. Mr. Mendelson could not see the watch where it hung on his chest, but he had learned to press the knob with his chin and so he could tell the time. The mice were very fond of the watch. They were always running up Mr. Mendelson to have a look at it. And they kept it wound for him. Gertrude gave it a wind now, as she was talking.
“Excuse me, Bertha, but how do you know there isn’t any magic? There are plenty of things we don’t understand. Maybe this watch is magic. What makes the hands go round? We don’t know. What makes you think there’s magic in the sky, Mr. Mendelson?”
“You see that oak tree?” said Mr. Mendelson. “What color is it?”
“Bright yellow,” said Bertha, looking up into the tree, which was gently dropping its leaves on them, for autumn had come to the big park where they lived. “Right!” said Mr. Mendelson triumphantly. “And yet I can remember a time, long long ago, when it was dark green. And before that, it seems to me, it was pale green. And even longer ago, it seems to me, I can remember a time when there were no leaves on it at all.”
“So?” inquired Bertha, combing out his forelock with her tiny strong claws.
“So there’s a magic in the sky which keeps changing the tree. Something we don’t understand happens up there. And besides that, all kinds of things come out of the sky.”
“What things?” said Gertrude, brushing away at Mr. Mendelson’s coat with a bunch of thorn twigs.
“Water. Bits of ice. Leaves,” said Mr. Mendelson, as one fell on his nose. “Birds. Branches. You never know what’s going to come next.”
And he went on staring up at the stretches of blue, an
d the clouds moving across.
When the mice had finished tidying Mr. Mendelson for the day, and had gone about their other affairs, the gypsy, Dan Sligo, came strolling over the grass, with a white pigeon sitting on his shoulder.
“Arternoon, Mr. M!” said Dan Sligo. “That surely is a handsome watch of yourn.”
“It belongs to the Old Lord really,” said Mr. Mendelson. “But he said that I could borrow it, as he has another.”
“I know that,” said Dan Sligo, who had found the watch, lying in a wood, all covered with mold, and had given it to Mr. Mendelson as a joke. But when the Old Lord had it cleaned and mended, Dan Sligo was very annoyed to find what a valuable object he had allowed to slip through his fingers. Now he had a plan to get it back again.
“Did you know,” said Dan Sligo idly, “that if you carry a thing high enough up into the sky, it will turn into pastry?”
For Dan had overheard a bit of Mr. Mendelson’s conversation with the mice.
“What sort of things?” said Mr. Mendelson.
He didn’t entirely trust Dan Sligo, but he couldn’t help being interested.
“What sort of things? Well—your watch, for instance. If that watch was carried high into the sky, it would turn into pastry.”
Mr. Mendelson was sorry that Bertha and Gertrude were not there. He felt sure that Bertha would say, “Rubbish!” But he himself was not quite certain about it.
“How could you take my watch up into the sky?” he said doubtfully.
“Why,” said Dan Sligo, stroking his white pigeon. “My old Cooey could do it in a minute, couldn’t you, Cooey?”
“Vrrrc, rrrrkty coo,” said Cooey.
“I’ll show you, shall I?” said Dan Sligo. “We’ll just take your watch off—” and he did so, unfastening the gold chain, “I’ll put the chain in my pocket, that’d make it too heavy for Cooey—” and he did this too, very quickly, so that Mr. Mendelson could hardly see his hands move, “now Cooey takes the watch in her beak—I toss her up high, to give her a start—and you’ll see!”