Let Sleeping Sea-Monsters Lie

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Eva Ibbotson, in common with some of my other favourite writers such as E. Nesbit and Roald Dahl, writes with a delightful mixture of wild imagination and down-to-earth common sense, tempering her flights of fancy with a satisfying sense of justice. These are the sort of stories I enjoyed as a child, which my children enjoyed and which I’m sure my grandchildren will enjoy too.

Once upon a time there lived a worm. Not an earthworm — earthworms are smooth and pink and soft with purple bulges in the middle. Not a tapeworm — tapeworms are white and flat and slippery and like to live inside people’s stomachs if they can. Not a lugworm either — lugworms, which people use for fishing, stay buried in the sand.

No, this was a very different sort of worm. It was a great, long, hairy worm, and when I say “long” I mean as long as a train or as two football pitches or as four thousand, three hundred and fifty pork sausages laid end to end. This worm had a forked tongue like so many monsters and a poisonous breath but it didn’t have wings; it just slithered. Dragons have wings; worms don’t. What it did have was the power to join itself up again when it was cut into pieces. It also had blue eyes which is unusual in a worm.

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