James and the Giant Peach (5 page)

‘We’re off!’ someone was shouting. ‘We’re off at last!’

James woke up with a jump and looked about him. The creatures were all out of their hammocks and moving excitedly around the room. Suddenly,
the floor gave a great heave, as though an earthquake were taking place.

‘Here we go!’ shouted the Old-Green-Grasshopper, hopping up and down with excitement. ‘Hold on tight!’

‘What’s happening?’ cried James, leaping out of his hammock. ‘What’s going on?’

The Ladybird, who was obviously a kind and gentle creature, came over and stood beside him. ‘In case you don’t know it,’ she said, ‘we are about to depart for ever from the top of this ghastly hill that we‘ve all been living on for so long. We are about to roll away inside this great big beautiful peach to a land of… of… of… to a land of–’

‘Of what?’ asked James.

‘Never you mind,’ said the Ladybird. ‘But nothing could be worse than this desolate hilltop and those two repulsive aunts of yours –’

‘Hear, hear!’ they all shouted. ‘Hear, hear!’

‘You may not have noticed it,’ the Ladybird went on, ‘but the whole garden, even before it reaches the steep edge of the hill, happens to be on a steep slope. And therefore the only thing that has been stopping this peach from rolling away right from the beginning is the thick stem attaching it to the tree. Break the stem, and off we go.’

‘Watch it!’ cried Miss Spider, as the room gave another violent lurch. ‘Here we go!’

‘Not quite! Not quite!’

‘At this moment,’ continued the Ladybird, ‘our Centipede, who has a pair of jaws as sharp as razors, is up there on top of the peach nibbling
away at that stem. In fact, he must be nearly through it, as you can tell from the way we’re lurching about. Would you like me to take you under my wing so that you won’t fall over when we start rolling?’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ said James, ‘but I think I’ll be all right.’

Just then, the Centipede stuck his grinning face through a hole in the ceiling and shouted, ‘I‘ve done it! We’re off!’

‘We’re off!’ the others cried. ‘We’re off!’

‘The journey begins!’ shouted the Centipede.

‘And who knows where it will end,’ muttered the Earthworm, ‘if
you
have anything to do with it. It can only mean trouble.’

‘Nonsense,’ said the Ladybird. ‘We are now about to visit the most marvellous places and see the most wonderful things! Isn’t that so, Centipede?’

‘There is no knowing what we shall see!’ cried the Centipede.

‘
We may see a Creature with forty-nine heads

Who lives in the desolate snow
,

And whenever he catches a cold
(
which he dreads
)

He has forty-nine noses to blow
.

‘
We may see the venomous Pink-Spotted Scrunch

Who can chew up a man with one bite
.

It likes to eat five of them roasted for lunch

And eighteen for its supper at night
.

‘
We may see a Dragon, and nobody knows

That we won’t see a Unicorn there
.

We may see a terrible Monster with toes

Growing out of the tufts of his hair
.

‘
We may see the sweet little Biddy-Bright Hen

So playful, so kind and well-bred;

And such beautiful eggs! You just boil them and then

They explode and they blow off your head
.

‘
A Gnu and a Gnocerous surely you’ll see

And that gnormous and gnorrible Gnat

Whose sting when it stings you goes in at the knee

And comes out through the top of your hat
.

‘
We may even get lost and be frozen by frost
.

We may die in an earthquake or tremor
.

Or nastier still, we may even be tossed

On the horns of a furious Dilemma
.

‘
But who cares! Let us go from this horrible hill!

Let us roll! Let us bowl! Let us plunge!

Let’s go rolling and bowling and spinning until

We’re away from old Spiker and Sponge!
’

One second later… slowly, insidiously, oh most gently, the great peach started to lean forward and steal into motion. The whole room began to tilt over and all the furniture went sliding across the floor, and crashed against the far wall. So did James and the Ladybird and the Old-Green-Grasshopper and Miss Spider and the Earthworm, and also the Centipede, who had just come slithering quickly down the wall.

Outside in the garden, at that very moment, Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker had just taken their places at the front gate, each with a bunch of tickets in her hand, and the first stream of early morning sightseers was visible in the distance climbing up the hill to view the peach.

‘We shall make a fortune today,’ Aunt Spiker was saying. ‘Just look at all those people!’

‘I wonder what became of that horrid little boy of ours last night,’ Aunt Sponge said. ‘He never did come back in, did he?’

‘He probably fell down in the dark and broke his leg,’ Aunt Spiker said.

‘Or his neck, maybe,’ Aunt Sponge said hopefully.

‘Just
wait
till I get my hands on him,’ Aunt Spiker said, waving her cane. ‘He’ll never want to
stay out all night again by the time
I‘ve
finished with him. Good gracious me! What’s that awful noise?’

Both women swung round to look.

The noise, of course, had been caused by the giant peach crashing through the fence that surrounded it, and now, gathering speed every second, it came rolling across the garden towards the place where Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker were standing.

They gaped. They screamed. They started to
run. They panicked. They both got in each other’s way. They began pushing and jostling, and each one of them was thinking only about saving herself. Aunt Sponge, the fat one, tripped over a box that she’d brought along to keep the money in, and fell flat on her face. Aunt Spiker immediately tripped over Aunt Sponge and came down on top of her. They both lay on the ground, fighting and clawing and yelling and struggling frantically to get up again, but before they could do this, the mighty peach was upon them.

There was a crunch.

And then there was silence.

The peach rolled on. And behind it, Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker lay ironed out upon the grass as flat and thin and lifeless as a couple of paper dolls cut out of a picture book.

And now the peach had broken out of the garden and was over the edge of the hill, rolling and bouncing down the steep slope at a terrific pace. Faster and faster and faster it went, and the crowds of people who were climbing up the hill suddenly caught sight of this terrible monster plunging down upon them and they screamed and scattered to right and left as it went hurtling by.

At the bottom of the hill it charged across the
road, knocking over a telegraph pole and flattening two parked cars as it went by.

Then it rushed madly across about twenty fields, breaking down all the fences and hedges in its path. It went right through the middle of a herd of fine Jersey cows, and then through a flock of sheep, and then through a paddock full of horses, and then through a yard full of pigs, and soon the whole countryside was a seething mass of panic-stricken animals stampeding in all directions.

The peach was still going at a tremendous speed with no sign of slowing down, and about a mile farther on it came to a village.

Down the main street of the village it rolled, with people leaping frantically out of its path right and left, and at the end of the street it went crashing right through the wall of an enormous building and out the other side, leaving two gaping round holes in the brickwork.

This building happened to be a famous factory where they made chocolate, and almost at once a great river of warm melted chocolate came pouring out of the holes in the factory wall. A minute later, this brown sticky mess was flowing through every street in the village, oozing under the doors of houses and into people’s shops and gardens. Children were wading in it up to their knees, and some were even trying to swim in it and all of them were sucking it into their mouths in great greedy gulps and shrieking with joy.

But the peach rushed on across the countryside – on and on and on, leaving a trail of destruction in
its wake. Cowsheds, stables, pigsties, barns, bungalows, hayricks, anything that got in its way went toppling over like a ninepin. An old man sitting quietly beside a stream had his fishing rod whisked out of his hands as it went dashing by, and a woman called Daisy Entwistle was standing so close to it as it passed that she had the skin taken off the tip of her long nose.

Would it ever stop?

Why should it? A round object will always keep on rolling as long as it is on a downhill slope, and in this case the land sloped downhill all the way until it reached the ocean – the same ocean that James had begged his aunts to be allowed to visit the day before.

Well, perhaps he was going to visit it now. The peach was rushing closer and closer to it every second, and closer also to the towering white cliffs that came first.

These cliffs are the most famous in the whole of England, and they are hundreds of feet high. Below them, the sea is deep and cold and hungry. Many ships have been swallowed up and lost for ever on this part of the coast, and all the men who were in them as well. The peach was now only a hundred yards away from the cliff – now fifty – now twenty – now ten – now five – and when it reached the edge of the cliff it seemed to leap up into the sky and hang there suspended for a few seconds, still turning over and over in the air.

Then it began to fall…

Down…

Down…

Down…

Down…

Down…

SMACK!
It hit the water with a colossal splash and sank like a stone.

But a few seconds later, up it came again, and this time, up it stayed, floating serenely upon the surface of the water.

At this moment, the scene inside the peach itself was one of indescribable chaos. James Henry Trotter was lying bruised and battered on the floor of the room amongst a tangled mass of Centipede and Earthworm and Spider and Ladybird and Glowworm and Old-Green-Grasshopper. In the whole history of the world, no travellers had ever had a more terrible journey than these unfortunate creatures. It had started out well, with much laughing and shouting, and for the first few seconds, as the peach had begun to roll slowly forward, nobody had minded being tumbled about a little bit. And when it went
BUMP !
, and the Centipede had shouted, ‘
That
was Aunt Sponge!’ and then
BUMP!
again, and ‘
That
was Aunt Spiker!’ there had been a tremendous burst of cheering all round.

But as soon as the peach rolled out of the garden
and began to go down the steep hill, rushing and plunging and bounding madly downward, then the whole thing became a nightmare. James found himself being flung up against the ceiling, then back on to the floor, then sideways against the wall, then up on to the ceiling again, and up and down and back and forth and round and round, and at the same time all the other creatures were flying through the air in every direction, and so were the chairs and the sofa, not to mention the forty-two boots belonging to the Centipede. Everything and all of them were being rattled around like peas inside an enormous rattle that was being rattled by a mad giant who refused to stop. To make it worse, something went wrong with the Glow-worm’s lighting system, and the room was in pitchy darkness. There were screams and yells and curses and cries of pain, and everything kept going round and round, and once James made a frantic grab at some thick bars sticking out from the wall only to find that they were a couple of the Centipede’s legs. ‘Let go, you idiot!’ shouted the Centipede, kicking himself free, and James was promptly flung across the room into the Old-Green-Grasshopper’s horny lap. Twice he got tangled up in Miss Spider’s legs (a horrid business), and towards the end, the poor Earthworm, who was cracking himself like a whip every time he flew through the air from one side of the room to the other, coiled himself around James’s body in a panic and refused to unwind.

Oh, it was a frantic and terrible trip!

But it was all over now, and the room was suddenly very still and quiet. Everybody was beginning slowly and painfully to disentangle himself from everybody else.

‘Let’s have some light!’ shouted the Centipede.

‘Yes!’ they cried. ‘Light! Give us some light!’

‘I‘m
trying
,’ answered the poor Glow-worm. ‘I‘m doing my best. Please be patient.’

They all waited in silence.

Then a faint greenish light began to glimmer out of the Glow-worm’s tail, and this gradually became stronger and stronger until it was anyway enough to see by.

‘
Some great journey!
’ the Centipede said, limping across the room.

‘I shall
never
be the same again,’ murmured the Earthworm.

‘Nor I,’ the Ladybird said. ‘It’s taken
years
off my life.’

‘But my dear friends!’ cried the Old-Green-Grasshopper, trying to be cheerful. ‘We are
there!
’

‘Where?’ they asked. ‘Where? Where is
there?
’

‘I don’t know,’ the Old-Green-Grasshopper said. ‘But I’ll bet it’s somewhere good.’

‘We are probably at the bottom of a coal mine,’ the Earthworm said gloomily. ‘We certainly went down and down and down very suddenly at the last moment. I felt it in my stomach. I still feel it.’

‘Perhaps we are in the middle of a beautiful country full of songs and music,’ the Old-Green-Grasshopper said.

‘Or near the seashore,’ said James eagerly, ‘with lots of other children down on the sand for me to play with!’

‘Pardon me,’ murmured the Ladybird, turning a trifle pale, ‘but am I wrong in thinking that we seem to be bobbing up and down?’

‘
Bobbing
up and down!’ they cried. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘You’re still giddy from the journey,’ the Old-Green-Grasshopper told her. ‘You’ll get over it in a minute. Is everybody ready to go upstairs now and take a look round?’

‘Yes, yes!’ they chorused. ‘Come on! Let’s go!’

‘I
refuse
to show myself out of doors in my bare feet,’ the Centipede said. ‘I
have
to get my boots on again first.’

‘For heaven’s sake, let’s not go through all that nonsense again,’ the Earthworm said.

‘Let’s
all
lend the Centipede a hand and get it over with,’ the Ladybird said. ‘Come on.’

So they did, all except Miss Spider, who set about weaving a long rope-ladder that would reach from the floor up to a hole in the ceiling. The Old-Green-Grasshopper had wisely said that they must not risk going out of the side entrance when they didn’t know where they were, but must first of all go up on to the top of the peach and have a look round.

So half an hour later, when the rope-ladder had been finished and hung, and the forty-second boot had been laced neatly on to the Centipede’s forty-second foot, they were all ready to go out. Amidst mounting excitement and shouts of ‘Here we go, boys! The Promised Land! I can’t wait to see it!’ the whole company climbed up the ladder one by one and disappeared into a dark soggy tunnel in the ceiling that went steeply, almost vertically, upward.