LITMIR.BIZ

      When a new baby arrived at the orphanage, all the older children would come up with a name for them. They liked to work their way through the alphabet so their names would be as different as possible. The night the baby in the potato sack was left on the steps, they had reached E. If she had been found the day before, she might have been called “Doris”. A day later, she could have been a “Frank”. Instead, she was named “Elsie”.

      This prison of an orphanage was run by an evil old boot named Mrs Curdle. Her face was usually fixed in a permanent grimace, and she was covered from head to toe in warts. She had so many warts even her warts had warts. The only thing that made her smile was the sound of children sobbing.

      Mrs Curdle would scoff all the food donated for the orphans, so the children in her care had to eat cockroaches for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

      “Creepy-crawlies are good for you!” she would chuckle.

      If any of the orphans spoke after “candles out”, she would stuff one of her pus-sodden old stockings in their mouth. They would have to keep it there for a week.

      “That’ll keep you quiet, windy wallet!”

      When the children were sleeping on the cold stone floor, she would put wiggly worms down the backs of their shirts so they would wake up screaming.

      “ARGH!”

      “HO! HO! HO! HORNSWOGGLER!”

      Mrs Curdle would sneeze over the orphans…

      “HACHOOOOO!”

      …and blow her nose on their hair.

      “HOOMPH! GONGOOZLER!”

      A weekly “bath” involved her dunking the orphans one by one into a barrel full of maggots. “The maggots will nibble off the dirt, you muck snipes!” Mrs Curdle would snigger.

      To dry off afterwards, she would peg the children to the washing line by their ears.

      TWANG!

      Once, when Elsie was found with a pet rat in her pocket that she had befriended, Mrs Curdle used it as a ball in a game of cricket.

      THUD!

      “EEEEEK!”

      WHIZZ!

      If she felt one of the orphans had given her a funny look, Mrs Curdle would poke them in the eye with her dirty, stubby finger.

      “OUCH!”

      “TAKE THAT, GIBFACE!”

      As a special treat at Christmas, the orphans would line up for their present, a whack on the bottom with

      “Merry Christmas, child!” Mrs Curdle would exclaim with glee on each strike.

      Elsie endured ten long, hard years at The only thing that kept her going was the dream that one day her ma would magically appear and whisk her away. But she never did. As the girl grew up, she would invent more and more incredible stories about her.

      Perhaps her ma was a jungle explorer?

      Or an acrobat with a travelling circus?

      Even better, a lady pirate off having adventures on the high seas?

      Every night, Elsie would make up bedtime stories for her fellow orphans. Over time, the girl became a magnificent storyteller. She had all the other children in the palm of her grubby little hand.

      “Then Ma found herself in a dark, dark place. It was the belly of a huge blue whale…”

      “Ma escaped from the tribe of cannibals, which wasn’t easy as they had already gobbled up her left leg…”

      “Boom! Ma had thrown the bomb into the Thames just in time, so no one was killed. It was all in a day’s work for a secret agent. The end.”

      When that night’s story finished, the other orphans would cry out…

      “Another!”

      “We don’t want to go to sleep yet!”

      “PLEASE, ELSIE, JUST ONE MORE!”

      One night, the children cheered so much at Elsie’s story that they woke up Mrs Curdle.

      “NO! MORE! STORIES!

      YOU! NASTY! LITTLE! BEAST!” raged the woman, beating Elsie with a broomstick on every word. The pus-sodden stocking she stuffed in the girl’s mouth only half muffled her screams.

      “ARGH! ARGH! ARGH!”

      The beating was so severe that Elsie wasn’t sure she was going to survive. Her little body was black and blue with bruises, and the girl knew she had to escape or die.

      

      Elsie loved all the rats and pigeons that would find their way inside If she had any food, she would share it with them, and tend to any broken wings and legs. In return, they would snuggle up to her, which made her feel less lonely. In her heart, Elsie felt a deep connection to these animals that Mrs Curdle called “vermin”. To her, they were little creatures all alone in the world just like her.

      Elsie had noticed how the rats got into the orphanage by scuttling along a leaky pipe that came down from the ceiling.

      One thing that set Elsie apart from her fellow orphans was her feet. Elsie didn’t have ordinary feet. She had monkey feet.

      The advantage of having long, thick toes that could grip like fingers was that it made climbing easy-peasy. So one night, when everyone else was asleep, Elsie scaled the pipe to see where the rats scrambled in. Just as she had thought, there was a small rat-sized hole at the top of the wall.

      After that, every night after candles out,

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