Harry the Poisonous Centipede’s Big Adventure. Tony Ross

or cockroaches (of which there were so many in his house he didn’t bother adding them to his collection) or else dug into ants’ or termites’ nests. Nearly every day he brought a whole mess of ants or termites and their eggs into his room on a shovel, and with the help of a large spoon, dumped them, along with bits of their nests, into the glass jars. Usually right on top of the prisoner underneath.

      This was fairly all right for Harry and George, though they got a bit tired of eating the same thing every day. But for the caterpillars, who ate leaves, and only the leaves they liked at that, it was starvation time, and all but one of them stopped. (The one that didn’t stop, stopped in another way: it turned into a pupa. George and Harry agreed that that caterpillar was lucky. Fast asleep and out of it.)

      The stopping of the caterpillars made all the other creatures – including those who would gladly have eaten the poor caterpillars, under ordinary circumstances – really angry with the Not-So-Big Hoo-Min.

      “It keeps us here in woe and fear, so feed us good is what it should!” signalled the lady dung beetle angrily. She wouldn’t eat the ants, or their eggs, or the flies either – what she liked was dung and all the tasty bits of seed that it contained, and she was having a pretty thin time.

      Harry, scoffing cockroaches and termites’ eggs, felt uneasy about her. To tell the truth, though he felt a little odd about it since he’d been brought up to think of her as food, he was getting to like her. It wasn’t very nice to think of waking up one night to find her on her back with her six legs in the air.

      He and George signalled endlessly about how to escape.

      They remembered the earth-pile that had helped them get Up the Up-Pipe. They piled the earth and remains of ants’ nests against the clear walls of their prisons, and tried to climb up it. But the lids were firmly in place and the holes in them were too small to creep through.

      “We’ll just have to stick it out,” Harry signalled to George. “At least we’ve got enough to eat.”

      “We’ll get out somehow!” said George staunchly.

      These signals, which some of the others picked up, had a cheering effect. Even the stick-insect sat up and grabbed a fly.

      The spiders, meanwhile, were all right (as long as the Not-So-Big Hoo-Min caught enough flies for them), except that they couldn’t fix their webs on to the slippery hard air, so they were bone idle and bored to death. But the tarantula – which was very big – simply wasn’t getting enough to eat.

      She would leap on everything that was dropped into her jar, becoming a blur of whirling stripy fur, and in a matter of moments, every fly, ant, termite, egg or cockroach had been seized and sucked dry or stuffed into her gaping jaws. Then she would fold her long hairy legs up under her and lie still until her snack was digested. Then she would rise slowly on to the tips of her legs and look around at them all through the hard-air and send this sinister signal:

      “I am still ravenous, and if I could get at you, I would gobble up every last one of you!”

      The scorpion would retort, “I’d like to see you try!” He would pinch his claws and bring his poison-tail up slowly and menacingly over his back as if he’d love to stick it into the tarantula’s body. Then they’d do a sort of threatening dance towards each other, while the others watched.

      It was extraordinary how well they could understand each other’s signals now. Harry began to feel it might be rather difficult for him, if he ever got out, to make a meal of certain creatures, ever again – dung beetles for instance. He was very glad that there were no crickets or locusts (his favourite food) in the collection, or he might have got to like them.

      Being a prisoner certainly made him think differently about all kinds of things.

      For one thing – his mother.

      He found himself thinking about her a lot. The comfortable, safe home she’d made for him. All the treats she’d brought him. And he thought about the not-so-good things too, how she fussed about danger, and her crossness when he fussed about his food (he hated termite eggs and wouldn’t touch them at home. Now he had to eat them and had realised they weren’t so bad after all).

      He thought about all her warnings, which had seemed so tiresome at the time. How many times had she told him never to go out to the no-top-world without her? But George did, so Harry did, whenever Belinda’s back was turned. And now look what had happened. She’d been right all along.

      He only wished he had the chance to tell her that. To say he was sorry. Because she must be so worried about him! Harry hated thinking about that because he knew it was his own fault he’d been caught.

      Now it was Too Late.

      But what Harry did most was, he watched all the other creatures in their clear prisons, where they had no way to hide themselves and no proper, natural life. And sometimes he despaired. Unless something happened, the Not-So-Big Hoo-Min would keep them all in prison until they stopped, and he would never see his mama or his home again.

      This was a terrible thought.

       5. Crash!

      And then quite suddenly everything changed.

      Since Harry was caught, only the Not-So-Big Hoo-Min had ever come into the room where the collection was. The Big Hoo-Min never did. But one day – and it was daytime, Harry and George were asleep, their heads dug into the earth to hide them from the light – another Hoo-Min did come in.

      It was the Not-So-Big Hoo-Min’s mother.

      The reason she didn’t come into this room much was because she was scared to death of all the creepy and poisonous creatures in her son’s collection. She hated them.

      But she was a very house-proud woman. She couldn’t go on for ever, not cleaning her son’s room, which was just as messy and dirty as most boys’ rooms are if they’re not cleaned.