A Story

I don’t know if you, as a kid, ever had to share a room with a sibling but I, as one of twelve children did. What I found quite often was that when you were supposed to be going to sleep you often ended up doing something quite different. Now if you, as I say, have had the aforementioned privilege then you may have played that game that for want of a name of any sort I will call ‘mixed up sentences’. This game consists of one person saying a word followed by a word by the other person. Of course both of you have your own ideas for what the sentence should be and try to direct it in the desired direction only for it to turn out rather funny or nonsensical.

Now I was babysitting two bored brothers the other day. David, who is eight and Samuel who is ten.
They were getting a bit rowdy and I wanted to occupy them so I said “let’s make a story”.
So we did. Each of us would tell as much of the story as we felt like, after which the next person would continue. I thought it turned out quite funny.

(C) means Caleb (me)
(D) means David
(S) means Samuel

(C) once upon a time there was a tree. (D) This tree bore apples and oranges and lemons and grapes. (S) This tree was awesome!
(C) It was a very strange tree because most trees can’t grow more than one type of fruit.
(D) Many people came and ate the fruit; when they came there were chocolate sheep all around the tree.
(S) The sheep were very fuzzy and had black chocolate heads and white chocolate wool.
(C) There were thorn bushes near the tree and when the sheep brushed against their sharp spines they left some of their chocolate wool behind for the people to grab and eat!
(D) When the people came and grabbed and ate there were heaps of gingerbread cats all around and they ate the chocolate wool as well.
(S)There were also cockatiels flying around, landing on people and pooing on them. (C) all the people said yuck! and pushed the birds away because they were pooing too much. (D) But I forgot! there were liquorice cows too!

(S) Now one of the people happened to be named ‘Sir Donald Bradman’. (C) In this story Sir Donald Bradman is really bad at cricket and was always bowled out first thing, so everyone called him ‘Sir Donald Duck’.
(D) there were little bits of chocolate that you could blow up like balloons and they were balloons of course! Chocolate balloons!
(S) There were also wild-flowers around the tree and everyone picked them for their mothers. But of course they were also made out of lollies.
(C) As soon as they were picked, the flowers would become as solid and hard as a boiled sweet.
(D) Before that there were white chocolate flowers and when it was really really hot they were very very hard with ice cream at the centre. (this was rather strange chocolate and ice cream because the hotter the sun got the harder they became – ED)

(S) When Sir Donald was young, people used to call him ‘the light’ because he stood out from all the cricket players because he was so bad at it. But anyway he won lots of prizes at school because he collected teaspoons.
(C) Now at this time, which was when the chocolate flowers bloomed and before there were any lolly flowers people were so greedy that they would pick the chocolate flowers and eat them straight away without giving any to their mothers. To fix this the chocolate flowers were dug up and replace with normal flowers. People weren’t that happy because some people actually had brought the chocolate flowers back to their mothers and why should they be punished as well as the greedy people?
So the gardeners came again and and dug up the normal flowers and replaced them with lolly flowers. These could be eaten slowly but if eaten quickly and greedily the hard, sharp candy petals would cut the greedy peoples’ mouths. (D) there were also lights made with toffee that appeared as if from nowhere at dusk.
(S) Next to the tree flowed a river and up and down that river were ferries that always dropped people off and picked people up from the tree. On the opposite side of the river from the tree stood a castle. The castle and the land around it were rule by Sir Donald Duck.
In the castle, Sir Donald had fifty dogs and by himself at six O’clock in the morning he went for an early morning walk with his dogs.
These were the kind of dogs he had:
He had German Shepherds and Dalmatians, and big black fluffy dogs that could be mistaken for sheep and he had little poodles that had their hair done in such a way that they looked like skin and pom-poms.
(C) Now these were actually ordinary dogs; they were made of meat and hair and bones.
(D) And then one morning as his dogs slurped up their rose-hip tea from their bowls as they did every morning (S) an evil witch came came and tried to put poison in their tea.
The Dogs sensed that there was danger and the smartest one, a German Shepherd named Smarty went down the stairs to alert Sir Donald.

At this point it was David’s bedtime and I sent him off to brush his teeth. So this is all so far.