Jack and the Beanstalk
Five beans, a ladder into the clouds, and a boy who climbed it
Page 1
At the end of a green English lane, where the hedgerows ran out into open country, there stood a small thatched cottage with one crooked chimney. A widow lived there with her son Jack. They had very little — a patch of garden, a cracked bucket, and one old cow called Milky-White, who gave the milk they sold at market. But that spring Milky-White stopped giving milk altogether, and the cupboard in the cottage went empty. Jack's mother sat down on the doorstep and said what she had been dreading for weeks: the cow would have to be sold. Jack jumped up at once. He would take her to market himself, he said, and he would get a famous price for her. His mother looked at him for a long moment, because Jack was a kind boy and a clever boy, but he was also the sort of boy who came home with stories instead of money. Still, there was nothing else to be done. She tied a rope round the cow's neck and put it in his hand.
Page 2
Jack had not gone half the distance to market when he came to a crossroads where an old man sat on a milestone, as if he had been waiting there all morning. The old man looked at the cow. Then he looked at Jack with one eyebrow raised, and asked whether Jack knew how many beans made five. Jack, who liked a riddle, said two in each hand and one in your mouth. The old man laughed until his hat shook, and said that was the right answer, and here were the beans. He opened his brown hand, and in it lay five beans — not ordinary beans, but beans that shone faintly, like five small moons. They were magic beans, he said. Plant them at night and by morning they would grow right up to the sky. Jack knew, somewhere at the back of his mind, exactly what his mother would say about this. But five beans that grew to the sky seemed to him a far better bargain than a cow who gave no milk. He handed over the rope.
Page 3
It was dark by the time Jack came home, and he came home with no cow and no money. When his mother asked what he had got for Milky-White, he opened his hand and showed her the five beans, and told her, all in a rush, about the old man and the sky. His mother did not shout. She sat down slowly in the kitchen chair, which was worse. Then she took the beans out of his hand and threw them straight out of the open window into the garden, and told Jack there would be no supper tonight, because there was no supper to have. Jack climbed the little ladder to his bed under the roof and lay in the dark feeling very small indeed. Below him he could hear his mother raking out the fire. He was quite sure now that there had never been anything magic about those beans at all, and that he was the biggest fool in all of England.
Page 4
Jack woke at first light because his little room was strangely green. He looked out of the window and could not understand what he was seeing. Where his mother had thrown the beans, a plant had come up in the night — not a bean row, but a single enormous stalk, thick as the chimney, twisted like a great rope, with leaves as broad as doors. It went up past the thatch, up past the elms, up and up until it disappeared into the morning clouds and was gone. The old man had told the truth after all. Jack ran out into the wet grass in his shirt and stood underneath it with his head tipped right back. His mother came out too, holding her shawl shut, and said not one word. Then Jack took hold of the stalk, which was knotted and easy to climb, and said he was going up to see where it went. His mother told him to come back down this instant. He was already past the roof.
Page 5
Jack climbed until his arms ached and the cottage below was a speck, and then he climbed into the clouds themselves, where everything went white and quiet and cool. And then he came out at the top, and stood up, and found a country he had never heard anyone speak of. There was solid ground under his feet, pale and strange. There was a long straight white road. The sky was a deeper blue than any sky at home, and the sun up here was very bright. He could see no hedges, no villages, no church towers — only that road, running away into the distance, and at the far end of it an enormous grey house with windows the size of barn doors. Jack was hungry, and he had not eaten since yesterday morning, and the house looked like a place where somebody must surely have breakfast. So he set off along the great road, and the nearer he came, the bigger that house grew.
Page 6
The giantess who opened the door was as broad as a cart and had flour to her elbows, and she was so surprised to see a boy on her step that she let him in. She gave him bread and cheese and a cup of milk at the corner of a table the size of a hayfield, and told him, kindly, that he was a very foolish boy, because her husband ate boys on toast and would be home for his breakfast at any moment. Then the whole house shook. Boom. Boom. Boom. The giantess snatched Jack up and popped him into the cold oven and pulled the door almost shut, and Jack put one eye to the crack. In came the giant, four times the height of a man, shaking the dust out of his beard, sniffing the air and grumbling that he could smell something small and fresh. His wife told him briskly that he could smell yesterday's mutton, and set his breakfast down, and the giant sat and ate three loaves and a whole cheese and never found Jack at all.
Page 7
When the giant had finished eating he went stamping off into the next room, and Jack crept out of the oven to follow him and see where he went. Through the crack of the door he watched the giant unlock a great chest and tip out bags of gold coins, and count them, and count them again, slower and slower, until his enormous head sank down on his arms and he began to snore like a sawmill. Jack thought of the empty cupboard at home. He thought of his mother raking out the fire with no supper to cook on it. Then he slipped in, took one of the bags of gold — only one, though there were a dozen — got it onto his shoulder, and walked out of that house as quietly as a boy can walk carrying something that heavy. He ran the whole length of the white road, climbed down the beanstalk hand over hand, and dropped into his own garden with the bag.
Page 8
The gold lasted a long while. There was a new roof on the cottage, and a cow in the byre again, and bread on the table every single day. But gold does not last for ever, and when the last coin was spent Jack went out one morning, took hold of the beanstalk, and climbed it a second time. He talked his way past the giantess once more — she said he was the boldest boy in the whole world, and hid him in the copper pot — and from there he watched the giant call for his hen. It was a plain brown hen. The giant set it on the table and said, "Lay," and the hen laid an egg of solid gold. Then the giant fell asleep over his gold eggs, and Jack came out of the copper, tucked the plain brown hen under his arm, and was away down the road before anyone woke. The hen did not make a sound until Jack was halfway down the beanstalk, and then she clucked, as if she quite approved.
Page 9
Jack should have stopped there. Instead he climbed up a third time, because he had heard the giant had a harp of gold that sang by itself, and he wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything. He waited behind the dresser until the giant slept, and he lifted the beautiful harp off the table — and the harp opened its carved golden mouth and called out loudly, "Master! Master!" The giant came awake with a roar that rattled the windows. Jack ran. He ran the whole length of the white road with the harp calling out in his arms and the ground shaking behind him, and he went over the edge of the cloud-land and down the beanstalk faster than he had ever climbed anything, leaves whipping past, the little green fields of home swinging far below. And above him, the beanstalk began to bend and groan, because the giant had come down onto it after him.
Page 10
Jack dropped the last few feet into his own cabbages and shouted for the axe. His mother brought it running. Jack swung it at the great stalk — once, twice, three times — and the beanstalk cracked like a mast and began to lean. It swayed, and it toppled, and it went up and away into the clouds as it fell, carrying the giant back up to his own high country, where he landed, they always said, in his own soft cloud fields with nothing worse than a bruise and a terrible fright. The cloud road closed over. And that was the end of the beanstalk and the end of the giant, who never came down to our world again, and was very glad of it. Jack and his mother mended the thatch and bought back a cow, and the brown hen laid her golden egg once a week in a comfortable corner of the byre, and the little harp sang in the evenings by the fire, and it did not call for its master any more, because it liked it there.
About this story
- Audience: kids (ages 6–12)
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