The Fleeting Fame of Benjamin Sprockett
“If you don’t behave the fairies will come and carry you away!” Benjamin Sprockett is told by his mother at bedtime.
But Benjamin does not behave and, just as his mother warned, he is stolen one night by a grey fairy with a crumpled face who lands at the foot of his bed.
She carries him off to the Seven Humped Hills, where more grey fairies, dim as dawn, help her untangle Benjie from between her great wings.
In the Seven Humped Hills he is fed on dry brown berries and looked at a lot. Very slowly, his face begins to wrinkle and just below his shoulders, wings start to sprout.
Soon they are large enough to flap and before long, he is wobbling on them in the air, until one day, when the wind is blowing behind him, he flies right over the Seven Humped Hills.
He is about to fly back, when he finds the wind still whirling behind him. It blows him backwards, over the tangled trees and the red-tiled houses of the town; BANG into the Big Top where a circus is being performed.
Out walks the ringmaster, dressed in red and whistling a circus song and looking up, he sees Benjie, holding onto the tent pole with both hands and billowing like a forgotten piece of washing in the wind.
“Hey, you there - let go!” shouts the ringmaster and, alarmed at his loud voice, Benjie lets go and shoots down the canvas into his arms. Blinking at him in surprise, the ringmaster says, “You’re a curious creature - I’ve seen nothing like you before. What are you?”
Benjie blinks his strange grey eyes at the ringmaster and mutters, “I’m Benjie and I live with the grey fairies in the Seven Humped Hills.”
At this, the ringmaster chuckles and his red jacket ripples. “Well you have a sense of humour, young man and you ARE very odd. How would you like the join my circus and become Clown Number One?”
Not knowing what a circus is, let alone the meaning of Clown Number One, Benjie, tired of so much flying, says, “Yes.”
Benjie accidentally joins the circus
Two days later he begins learning tricks, like balancing three cups on his head and turning fast somersaults in the air. After four days he is declared CLOWN NUMBER ONE and moving like magic round the ring.
One night, Benjie’s grey fairy mother, wondering where he is, slides on her snapdragon slippers, flaps her great grey wings and rises in flight above the Seven Humped Hills.
Over the tangled trees and red-tiled houses she glides, carried on the early evening wind, until she sees the bright lights blinking round the Big Top. And from the flap where the performers go in and out, she sees Benjie appear and turn somersaults all the way to his caravan.
“But he’s as big as a boy!” she says to herself.
And, sure enough, Benjie, now five years old, is beginning to look like a boy again. He no longer lives on dry brown berries, but cream cakes, lollipops and sponge pudding full of jam. He even eats the chocolate-coated peanuts dropped by children near the ring and bits of left-over dog biscuits fed to the performing poodles.
All the buttons have shot off the yellow jacket given him by the ringmaster because it will not meet round his tummy. He has great difficulty even getting into his check trousers and some of his somersaults get stuck in mid-air.
Benjie is in his caravan finishing a supper of baked beans and mashed potato when his grey fairy mother arrives, her face flushed red with so much flying.
Benjie blinks his strange grey eyes at her, then smiles and offers her a saucer of soggy baked beans. She turns up the end of her long grey nose, closes her wings with a snap and shakes her head.
Then she says, “I don’t mind you performing in a circus - you will soon grow tired of that and come home, but if you eat any more, Benjie, your wings will never work again.”
Now Benjie knows no one else in the circus has wings and that he could be a star turn, but he wants to be like the other circus children, so each day he hides his wings carefully inside his yellow jacket.
His mother sinks like a large bird onto the floor, so only her grave grey face can be seen and says, “Oh, Benjie, what will become of you?”
“I shall become the smallest fat man in the country and travel round like an exhibition,” says Benjie.
His grey fairy mother sighs again. “Very well then, if your mind is made up. I shall return to the hills. But I’ll be watching you Benjie. Remember.”
She rises like a bad-tempered rain cloud from the floor, shakes the dust from her great grey wings and disappears in a huff of feathers down the caravan steps.
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