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First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2018 HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd, HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk Text copyright © David Walliams 2018 Illustrations copyright © Tony Ross 2018 Cover lettering of author’s name copyright © Quentin Blake 2010 David Walliams and Tony Ross assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work respectively. Cover design copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018 A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this eBook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Source ISBN: 9780008164690 Ebook Edition © 2018 ISBN: 9780008164713 Version: 2018-10-31
Dedication
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Thank-Yous
The year is 1899
Map of London
Part 1: London 1899
Chapter 1: Cockroaches for Breakfast
Chapter 2: Monkey Feet
Chapter 3: Pong
Chapter 4: Expert Thief
Chapter 5: Universe of Wonder
Chapter 6: Giant Ghosts
Chapter 7: A Likely Story
Chapter 8: The Unnatural History Museum
Chapter 9: The Devil’s Work
Chapter 10: Hullabaloo
Chapter 11: Human Net
Chapter 12: Sabre-toothed Teeth
Chapter 13: A Sea of Old Men
Chapter 14: Dead as Dead Can Be
Chapter 15: Extinction Business
Chapter 16: Cheeks Ablaze
Chapter 17: Curious Creatures
Chapter 18: Darkest Dark
Chapter 19: Lightning in a Bottle
Chapter 20: Dark Fire
Chapter 21: A Thousand Silk Handkerchiefs
Chapter 22: The Beauty of the Scheme
Chapter 23: The Sticky Fingers Gang
Chapter 24: Handprints
Chapter 25: Pickpocketing on Ice
Chapter 26: A Little Problem
Chapter 27: Thundersnow
Chapter 28: A Giant Catapult
Chapter 29: Dino-ladder
Chapter 30: The Heart of the Storm
Chapter 31: Don’t Look Round
Chapter 32: Knocked Awake
Chapter 33: What’s in a Name?
Chapter 34: Cage
Chapter 35: Eternal Sleep
Chapter 36: Missing Mammoth
Chapter 37: Bang! Bang! Bang!
Chapter 38: A Slap on the Bottom
Chapter 39: An Unwelcome Sight
Chapter 40: Chocolate Balls
Chapter 41: Good Eye
Chapter 42: Back-door Barrage
Chapter 43: A Grave Mistake
Chapter 44: Right Up My Whatsit
Chapter 45: A Lidollop
Chapter 46: Bottom Explosion
Chapter 47: A New Comrade
Chapter 48: North, North, North
Chapter 49: Audacious
Chapter 50: Relic
Chapter 51: One Lonely Medal
Chapter 52: Rampage
Chapter 53: Danger Everywhere
Chapter 54: HMS Victory
Chapter 55: Black Silence
Chapter 56: Titch Stitch
Chapter 57: Revenge
Part 2: The High Seas
Chapter 58: Slicing Through the Ice
Chapter 59: A Diamond Dust of Stars
Chapter 60: Ships Ahoy!
Chapter 61: Open Fire!
Chapter 62: Down But Not Out
Chapter 63: Surrender!
Chapter 64: A Pool of Blood
Chapter 65: Hard Rain
Chapter 66: A Watery Grave
Chapter 67: Heads Bowed
Part 3: The North Pole
Chapter 68: Battered and Bruised
Chapter 69: Some Kind of Machine
Chapter 70: Behind You!
Chapter 71: Smothering to Death
Chapter 72: A Perfect Circle
Part 4: Home
Chapter 73: Headlines Across the World
Chapter 74: A Fleet of Carriages
Chapter 75: An Audience with the Queen
Chapter 76: The Bravest
Chapter 77: Never Forget
Chapter 78: Not a Day Goes By
Afterword
Notes on the Real Victorian World
Footnotes
More from the World of David Walliams
Also by David Walliams
About the Publisher
The year is 1899
and we’re in Victorian London. Meet the characters in the story…
Elsie is a homeless orphan, who lives on the streets of London.
Dotty is the cleaning lady at the Natural History Museum. She is as daft as her brushes.
Private Thomas is Dotty’s boyfriend, the shortest soldier who ever served in the British Army. His fellow soldiers call him “Titch”. He is now retired, and lives at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, making him a “Chelsea Pensioner”.
Mrs Curdle is the nasty old boot who runs
Mr Clout is the brute of a security guard at the museum, infamous for his hobnailed boots.
Commissioner Barker is the fearsome head of the London Metropolitan Police, famous for his tiny moustache.
Many years ago, the Professor was the top scientist at the museum, until one of his experiments went catastrophically wrong.
Lady Buckshot is an aristocratic big-game hunter. Across Africa she shoots elephants, giraffes and lions and brings their bodies back to the museum to be stuffed and put on display.
The admiral is the only sailor to live at the hospital. He was thrown out of the old sailors’ home for being drunk and disorderly.
The colonel and the brigadier are also Chelsea Pensioners.
The one-eyed sergeant major is in charge of everyone and everything that comes in and out of the hospital, and don’t you forget it.
All the Chelsea Pensioners are overseen by the Royal Hospital’s formidable Matron.
Queen Victoria is the ruler of the British Empire. In 1899, she had been on the throne for what was the longest reign in British history, a staggering sixty-two years.
Abdul Karim is always at the Queen’s side. He is her handsome young Indian attendant, also known as “Munshi”.
Sir Ray Lankester is the museum’s portly director.
The sandwich-board man roams the streets, trying to convince everyone that “THE END IS NIGH”.
The captain is in charge of what was, in 1899, one of the Royal Navy’s most modern warships, HMS Argonaut.
The Sticky Fingers Gang is a rough and tough band of child robbers, who are infamous for being the greatest thieves in London.
Raj the First has his own confectionery emporium – or sweet trolley.
And last, but certainly not least…
…is the Ice Monster itself, a woolly mammoth that died ten thousand years ago. The lifeless animal was discovered by Arctic explorers, perfectly preserved in the ice.
One bleak winter night, in the back streets of London, a tiny baby was left on the steps of an orphanage. There was no note, no name, no clue as to who this little person was. Just the potato sack in which she was wrapped, as snow fell around her.
In Victorian times, it was not uncommon for newborn babies to be abandoned outside orphanages, hospitals or even the homes of upper-class folk. Their poor, desperate mothers hoped their children would be taken in and given a better life than their birth families could provide.
However, it was hard to imagine a worse start in life for this baby than at
Twenty-six orphans lived there, all crammed into a room that should have slept eight at the absolute most. The children were locked up, starved and beaten. On top of that, they were forced to work day and night. They had to assemble gentlemen’s pocket watches from tiny pieces until they went blind.
All the children were painfully thin, with filthy rags for clothes. The orphans’ faces were black with soot, so all you could see in the gloom were their hopeful little eyes.
When a new baby arrived at the orphanage, all the older children would come up with a name for them. They liked to work their way through the alphabet so their names would be as different as possible. The night the baby in the potato sack was left on the steps, they had reached E. If she had been found the day before, she might have been called “Doris”. A day later, she could have been a “Frank”. Instead, she was named “Elsie”.
This prison of an orphanage was run by an evil old boot named Mrs Curdle. Her face was usually fixed in a permanent grimace, and she was covered from head to toe in warts. She had so many warts even her warts had warts. The only thing that made her smile was the sound of children sobbing.
Mrs Curdle would scoff all the food donated for the orphans, so the children in her care had to eat cockroaches for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
“Creepy-crawlies are good for you!” she would chuckle.
If any of the orphans spoke after “candles out”, she would stuff one of her pus-sodden old stockings in their mouth. They would have to keep it there for a week.
“That’ll keep you quiet, windy wallet!”
When the children were sleeping on the cold stone floor, she would put wiggly worms down the backs of their shirts so they would wake up screaming.
“ARGH!”
“HO! HO! HO! HORNSWOGGLER!”
Mrs Curdle would sneeze over the orphans…
“HACHOOOOO!”
…and blow her nose on their hair.
“HOOMPH! GONGOOZLER!”
A weekly “bath” involved her dunking the orphans one by one into a barrel full of maggots. “The maggots will nibble off the dirt, you muck snipes!” Mrs Curdle would snigger.
To dry off afterwards, she would peg the children to the washing line by their ears.
TWANG!
Once, when Elsie was found with a pet rat in her pocket that she had befriended, Mrs Curdle used it as a ball in a game of cricket.
THUD!
“EEEEEK!”
WHIZZ!
If she felt one of the orphans had given her a funny look, Mrs Curdle would poke them in the eye with her dirty, stubby finger.
“OUCH!”
“TAKE THAT, GIBFACE!”
As a special treat at Christmas, the orphans would line up for their present, a whack on the bottom with
“Merry Christmas, child!” Mrs Curdle would exclaim with glee on each strike.
Elsie endured ten long, hard years at
Perhaps her ma was a jungle explorer?
Or an acrobat with a travelling circus?
Even better, a lady pirate off having adventures on the high seas?
Every night, Elsie would make up bedtime stories for her fellow orphans. Over time, the girl became a magnificent storyteller. She had all the other children in the palm of her grubby little hand.
“Then Ma found herself in a dark, dark place. It was the belly of a huge blue whale…”
“Ma escaped from the tribe of cannibals, which wasn’t easy as they had already gobbled up her left leg…”
“Boom! Ma had thrown the bomb into the Thames just in time, so no one was killed. It was all in a day’s work for a secret agent. The end.”
When that night’s story finished, the other orphans would cry out…
“Another!”
“We don’t want to go to sleep yet!”
“PLEASE, ELSIE, JUST ONE MORE!”
One night, the children cheered so much at Elsie’s story that they woke up Mrs Curdle.
“NO! MORE! STORIES!
YOU! NASTY! LITTLE! BEAST!” raged the woman, beating Elsie with a broomstick on every word. The pus-sodden stocking she stuffed in the girl’s mouth only half muffled her screams.
“ARGH! ARGH! ARGH!”
The beating was so severe that Elsie wasn’t sure she was going to survive. Her little body was black and blue with bruises, and the girl knew she had to escape or die.
Elsie loved all the rats and pigeons that would find their way inside
Elsie had noticed how the rats got into the orphanage by scuttling along a leaky pipe that came down from the ceiling.
One thing that set Elsie apart from her fellow orphans was her feet. Elsie didn’t have ordinary feet. She had monkey feet.
The advantage of having long, thick toes that could grip like fingers was that it made climbing easy-peasy. So one night, when everyone else was asleep, Elsie scaled the pipe to see where the rats scrambled in. Just as she had thought, there was a small rat-sized hole at the top of the wall.
After that, every night after candles out, Elsie scaled the pipe, using her monkey feet. Once at the top, she would scrape away at the brickwork with her fingernails. Night after night she scraped and scraped, making the hole bigger and bigger.
SCRATCH! SCRATCH! SCRATCH!
Eventually, the hole was just large enough for Elsie to squeeze her tiny, underfed body through it. However, she couldn’t leave
“Wake up!” she called softly. Little eyes began to appear out of the dark. “I’m going to run away tonight. Who’s coming with me?”
S I L E N C E.
“I said, ‘Who’s coming with me?’”
There were murmurs of, “I’m too scared,” and “Curdle’ll kill us,” and, “They’ll catch us and beat us to death.”
The littlest little’un of the lot was named Nancy. She looked up to Elsie like she was a big sister. Nancy whispered, “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” replied the girl. “Anywhere but here.”
“Please don’t forget about us.”
“Never!”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” said Elsie. “I’ll see you all again one day – I know it.”
“I’m going to miss your stories,” said another orphan, Felix.
“Me too,” added Percival.
“Next time I see you I’ll tell you the greatest story of all.”
“Good luck, Elsie,” said Nancy.
“You’ll always be in ’ere,” replied Elsie, patting her chest.
The girl gave one last shimmy up the pipe with her monkey feet. She squeezed herself through the hole in the wall, and with one final
Elsie ran and ran and ran, as fast as she possibly could. She didn’t dare look back. She was free but alone, and now she had to fend for herself on the streets of London, even though she’d never been outside the orphanage before. The big city was a scary place, especially for a little girl.
Soon enough, though, Elsie taught herself how to steal food from the market stalls. As for a bed, she found an old tin bath to sleep in, and used old newspapers as sheets. In her mind, Elsie pretended that it was a grand four-poster bed fit for a queen.
With no home or family, Elsie was what was known as an “urchin”. Victorian London was teeming with them.
Elsie didn’t look much like a hero.
However, as you will soon discover, heroes come in all
