Authors: A. F. Harrold
Fizzlebert Stump
For Daisy
Yates
Contents
in which the hero is introduced and in which he is described
There are many boys in the world, all slightly different from one another, and most of them are referred to by names. These are often John or Jack or Desmond, but sometimes they are James or Philip or Simon. Once, and once only, there was a boy whose name was Fizzlebert. (In actual fact, because, like most boys, he had a surname that came after the Fizzlebert bit, he was known in full (for example, when someone was cross with him) as Fizzlebert Stump.) Most often he was just called Fizz.
So that you can get an idea of what this particular boy looked like, I’ll tell you that he had unruly red hair. (To be fair, most boys have unruly hair, but only the especially brilliant ones have red hair.) He wasn’t short for his height, and he knew how to juggle four balls at once, though not for very long. Usually he wore jeans and a t-shirt like most kids, but over the top he pulled on an old coat that the circus Ringmaster had outgrown. (Did I mention Fizz lived in a circus?) It was red with brass buttons, unpolished now, and in the rear it dangled down to the backs of his knees. It fitted pretty well because his mother had taken it in at the waist and shortened the sleeves, but the shoulders with their gold brocade epaulettes were still a bit broad on him. To my mind (and to Fizzlebert’s) it made him look dashing, but to most people it looked a bit . . . well, shall we say, silly?
Fizzlebert’s mother was a clown. That’s not to say she messed about and made jokes all the time (although she did), but rather that her job, the thing she was paid to do, was being a clown. The sort with a painted face, big trousers, long shoes, a bucket of whitewash, a ladder and an unfortunate sense of timing.
It was because his mother was a clown that Fizz lived in a circus. And also probably why he was called Fizzlebert, which is the sort of name only a clown would think of.
His father, on the other hand, was the circus strongman. A strongman is a chap who dresses up in a little leopardskin off-the-shoulder loincloth outfit, twirls his pointy oiled black moustache and lifts things up above his head to the marvelling applause of the audience. These things are usually awfully heavy things (the heavier the better), such as great weights or huge boulders or bemused sea lions or particularly fat children from out of the audience who have been volunteered by their parents who believe such experiences are ‘character building’. Occasionally he tried doing the act while lifting up smaller things, such as bunches of flowers, handkerchiefs or imaginary balloons, but the audience’s reaction on those nights was never quite the same as when he picked up a child in one hand and a cannonball in the other, and started juggling them while whistling and dancing the cancan. (The cancan is a dance from France that involves kicking each of your legs up in the air one after the other. The best way to get the idea is to ask your parents or some other suitable grownup to demonstrate. There, see? Got it now? Super. I’ll continue.)
Where have we got to?
There’s a boy and he lives in a circus. What could possibly be wrong with this life?
Wrong? Why should something be wrong? Aha, well, here’s something interesting about a story: if everything is alright, then there
is
no story: it’s just a happy boy with happy parents. It’s a good thing, for sure, of course, without doubt, but it’s not particularly exciting. So, let me share a secret with you . . .
Fizzlebert wasn’t happy.
What? Living in a circus, getting to join in with the acts when they needed help? Hanging out backstage with clowns and acrobats and jugglers, with conjurors and fire-eaters and trapeze artistes, with escapologists and magicians and beautiful girls in sequins who ride the white horses with dazzling feathered headdresses, with performing parrots and dancing dogs and prancing ponies all jumping through flaming hoops at the poot of their trainer’s whistle? Getting to travel from place to place with the whole gang, waking up in a different town each day? How could he not enjoy that? The excitement! The thrills! The magic! The thrills! The excitement! (And so on!)
Well, truth be told, he wasn’t very happy because there weren’t any other kids living in his circus. He was the only one. His best friend was a sea lion. And not only are sea lions unable to play cards (instead of hands they have flippers, which are rubbish at picking things up) and are even worse at playing catch (they never throw the ball back, just balance it on their nose), but they’re also lousy conversationalists. And they smell of fish.
And so this introduction opens (eventually) with Fizzlebert Stump sat out the back of the Big Top late one evening looking dolefully (which means sadly, miserably, gloomily and also slightly boredly) at a sea lion who has just burped a tuna-flavoured burp in poor Fizzlebert’s face. And that’s also where the introduction closes, now that you’ve met the hero.
Let’s hope the rest of the story gets more exciting.
in which a lion eats a child’s head and in which an audience applauds tremendously
Fizzlebert Stump sat out the back of the Big Top late one evening, feeling sorry for himself. That evening’s big performance had just finished. He’d put his head in the lion’s mouth and it had gone brilliantly. The crowd were amazed. At first there was a lot of clapping when the lion sat down and growled. Normal people didn’t often get to see lions and so they were excited, but then when, at Captain Fox-Dingle’s command, the lion leant forward and opened his mouth as wide as it would go the audience hushed down a bit. To a careful ear the noise they made was a bit confused. They were thinking ‘this isn’t much of a trick’ and were wondering what was going to happen next. And then Fizzlebert stepped into the lion’s cage. Some people shouted out warnings, because it’s well known that lions and children shouldn’t mix; some women fainted simply because they imagined what gruesome scene might happen next; and a small boy wet himself, with uncontrollable excitement.
By the time Fizzlebert knelt down beside the lion’s vast open mouth and placed his head inside it, the audience had fallen as quiet as a brick wrapped in cotton wool sat on a table in a sound-proof booth with all the lights out. As the seconds ticked by the circus band played a drum roll that wound the tension even tighter. (You know how when something’s really tense people often say, ‘Oh, I was on the edge of my seat’? Well, usually they don’t actually mean it, it’s just a figure of speech. This evening, however, as Fizz’s head was stuffed between the lion’s toothy jaws, two people in the audience were perched so close to the edge of their seats that they actually fell off and had to be given refunds. The Ringmaster didn’t mind doing this when the tent was so full and the show so good. In fact, people falling off their seats was a sign that everything was going well, so long as they didn’t
all
fall off, because that would have led to financial disaster.)