The Shadow Guests
Page 16
❋ 450g potatoes, peeled and boiled until soft
❋ 50g butter (plus a little extra butter for greasing)
❋ 100g self-raising flour
❋ ½ teaspoon salt
1 Mash the potatoes with a fork or a potato-masher until all the lumps are gone.
2 Add the butter, flour and salt to the mash while it is still warm, and stir until the mixture feels quite thick and doughy.
3 Roll the mixture into even-sized balls and put them on a lightly-floured work surface.
4 Flatten the potato balls with your hands or a rolling pin to make scones of about 1cm thick.
5 Dot a little butter on each side of the scones and fry them in a hot pan for four to five minutes on each side.
6 Carefully transfer them to a plate and eat quickly before any ghosts from the past get them!
Puffin Writing Tips
Write a description of your hometown as if you were arriving there for the very first time.
Joan’s advice to aspiring young writers was ‘Always carry a notebook!’ Then if you see or hear something that would make a good story you can save it for later. When readers asked her where she got her ideas, the answer was often ‘From those notebooks!’
Look at your old family photos – as well as embarrassing haircuts, you might discover something you never knew! Here’s a picture of Joan aged about 13, wearing her green-and-white school summer dress – she would probably be furious that we had shown it to you!
From the Archives
In this unusual School Certificate Exam paper, pupils had to write their own story in French – probably the kind of challenge Joan would have enjoyed! The story was deliberately odd to stop pupils cheating by learning sentences by heart beforehand – there would be no way you could prepare to write a story about a horse tied up to a church steeple …
THE BEGINNING
Wait – you didn’t think that was it, did you?
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PUFFIN BOOKS
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Puffin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
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First published by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1980
Published by Red Fox 1992
Reissued in this edition 2018
Copyright © Joan Aiken Enterprises Ltd, 1980
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Illustrations © Joe Wilson
ISBN: 978-0-241-33737-0
All correspondence to:
Puffin Books
Penguin Random House Children’s
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL
NOTE
Readers may be interested to know that Flatland, referred to in this story, is a real book. Its full title is Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin A. Abbott.