My Naughty Little Sister
Dorothy Edwards
illustrated by Shirley Hughes Egmont
EGMONT
My Naughty Little Sister
Text copyright © 1952 The Estate of Dorothy Edwards
Illustrations copyright © 1952 Shirley Hughes
Cover illustration copyright © 2007 Shirley Hughes
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Egmont UK Ltd
239 Kensington High Street
London W8 6SA
Visit our web site at www.egmont.co.uk
First e-book edition 2010
ISBN 978 1 4052 4942 3
For my sister, Phil
Table of Contents
2. My Naughty Little Sister at the fair
3. When my Naughty Little Sister wasn’t well
4. My Naughty Little Sister makes a bottle-tree
7. My Naughty Little Sister cuts out
8. My Naughty Little Sister at the party
9. The naughtiest story of all
10. My Naughty Little Sister does knitting
11. My Naughty Little Sister goes to the pantomime
12. My Naughty Little Sister goes to school
13. When my father minded my Naughty Little Sister
14. My Naughty Little Sister and the good polite child
15. My Naughty Little Sister and the workmen
My Naughty Little Sister Series
A long time ago when I was a little girl, I had a sister who was littler than me. My little sister had brown eyes, and red hair, and a pinkish nose, and she was very, very stubborn.
When you told her to smile for her photograph, she said, ‘No, I don’t want to,’ but if you gave her an ice-cream, or a chocolate biscuit, or a toffee-drop, she said ‘Thank you,’ and smiled and smiled.
So you must try to imagine her with a chocolate biscuit and an ice-cream and a toffee-drop, so that you can see her at her very, very best…
Imagine very hard…There, doesn’t she look a bright, happy child?
Well now, I’m going to tell you some stories about her which I think you will like.
The very first story is called Going Fishing and here it is:
One day, when I was a little girl, and my sister was a very little girl, some children came to our house and asked my mother if I could go fishing with them.
They had jam-jars with string on them, and fishing-nets and sandwiches and lemonade.
My mother said, ‘Yes’ – I could go with them; and she found me a jam-jar and a fishing-net, and cut me some sandwiches.
Then my naughty little sister said, ‘I want to go! I want to go!’ Just like that. So my mother said I might as well take her too.
Then my mother cut some sandwiches for my little sister, but she didn’t give her a jam-jar or a fishing-net because she said she was too little to go near the water. My mother gave my little sister a basket to put stones in, because my little sister liked to pick up stones, and she gave me a big bottle of lemonade to carry for both of us.
My mother said, ‘You mustn’t let your little sister get herself wet. You must keep her away from the water.’ And I said, ‘All right, Mother, I promise.’
So then we went off to the little river, and we took our shoes off
and our socks off, and tucked up our clothes, and we went into the water to catch fish with our fishing-nets, and we filled our jam-jars with water to put the fishes in when we caught them. And we said to my naughty little sister, ‘You mustn’t come, you’ll get yourself wet.’
Well, we paddled and paddled and fished and fished, but we didn’t catch any fish at all, not one little tiny one even. Then a boy said, ‘Look, there is your little sister in the water too!’
And, do you know, my naughty little sister had walked right into the water with her shoes and socks on, and she was trying to fish with her little basket.
I said, ‘Get out of the water,’ and she said, ‘No.’
I said, ‘Get out at once,’ and she said, ‘I don’t want to.’
I said, ‘You’ll get all wet,’ and she said, ‘I don’t care.’ Wasn’t she naughty?
So I said, ‘I must fetch you out then,’ and my naughty little sister tried to run away in the water. Which is a silly thing to do because she fell down and got all wet.
She got her frock wet, and her