The Gingerbread Man
Run, run, as fast as you can — and the fox who did not have to run at all
Page 1
On a farm at the end of a lane there lived an old woman and an old man who had no children, and one wet afternoon the old woman decided to make a gingerbread man. She mixed the dough with flour and treacle and a great deal of ginger, and rolled it out on the kitchen table, and cut him out with a knife; and then — because she was enjoying herself — she gave him two currants for eyes and a little strip of candied peel for a mouth and three white icing buttons down his front, and a piped icing collar, and cuffs at his wrists and his ankles. He looked very well indeed. She slid him into the oven and shut the door on him and sat down with a cup of tea, and the old man came in out of the rain and took his boots off, and the whole kitchen began to smell of ginger.
Page 2
When the time was up the old woman took the cloth and opened the oven door — and the gingerbread man sat up on his baking tray, put one leg over the edge of it, and jumped down onto the kitchen floor. The old woman screamed. The old man dropped his boots. And the gingerbread man ran straight across that kitchen and out through the door into the wet farmyard, and as he went he shouted back over his shoulder the thing that he was going to shout at everybody he met for the rest of his short and extremely eventful life.
Page 3
The old woman came out after him with her apron flapping and the old man came after her with one boot on, and the pair of them ran across their own farmyard at an age when they had no business running anywhere; and they could not catch him. Nobody could have caught him. That biscuit went across the mud and the straw and under the gate and out onto the lane without slowing down once, and the last the two of them saw of him he was going away between the hedges at a speed that neither of them could account for afterwards, still shouting.
Page 4
Down the lane he met a cow, standing with her head over a gate, chewing and thinking about nothing at all. She watched him come. She watched him go past. And then she heard what he was shouting, and the cow — who had not run anywhere since she was a calf and who could not for the life of her have told you why she did it — put her head down and went along that lane after him at a gallop, with her bell going and her udder swinging, and was blown in about forty yards. He did not even look back.
Page 5
Past the next farm there was a sty with an enormous pink sow in it, lying in the mud with her eyes shut, and she heard him coming before she saw him. What happened next was the most impressive thing that happened in the whole story: that pig got up out of the mud, cleared the wall of her own sty from a standing start, and went after him up the lane at a speed that no pig has any right to — for about twenty yards. Then she stopped, and stood in the middle of the lane breathing like a pair of bellows, and watched him go, and after a while she walked back and got into the mud again. And the gingerbread man added her to his list without even turning round.
Page 6
He went over a stile and straight across a hayfield where a whole line of mowers was working with their scythes, moving together down the field the way mowers do. He ran right along the line in front of them, close enough to touch, and shouted his whole list at the lot of them — and twenty men dropped their scythes in the grass and went after a biscuit across their own hayfield, shouting, falling over the swathes, getting in each other's way. It was the best moment of his life and he knew it. He went out through the far hedge and left them standing in a ragged line in the middle of the field with their hands on their knees.
Page 7
Over the hedge there was a barn with its great doors open at both ends, and inside it a dozen threshers were beating out corn on the floor with their flails in a cloud of golden dust. He went straight through the middle of it. He ran the whole length of that threshing floor shouting his list — which by now was getting long enough to be a nuisance to say at speed — and out of the far door into the sunshine; and twelve men came out after him with their flails still in their hands and got about as far as the gate. By this time there was a procession behind him: an old woman, an old man, a cow, a pig, twenty mowers and twelve threshers, strung out across two fields and all of them a very long way back.
Page 8
And then the lane came out at a river, and the gingerbread man stopped. It was a wide river and it was running fast, and it was the first thing all day that had not been possible. He stood on the bank listening to the shouting getting closer behind him — and a voice beside him said, very pleasantly, that he seemed to be in some difficulty. There was a fox sitting in the long grass at the water's edge. He had been there the whole time. He had not run a single step; he had simply walked along the hedge from the hayfield while everybody else was shouting, and worked out where the lane came to the water, and sat down to wait. He said that he could carry him over, if he liked. He said it as though it did not matter to him in the slightest, which is the only way to say a thing like that.
Page 9
So the gingerbread man got on the fox's tail and the fox waded in and began to swim. And a little way out the fox said that the water was getting deeper and that he had better climb up onto his back; so he did. And further out the fox said that it was deeper still and that he had better get up onto his shoulder; so he did. And in the very middle of the river, with the banks a long way off on both sides, the fox said that the water was over his head now and would he mind very much climbing onto the end of his nose — and the gingerbread man, who had outrun an old woman, an old man, a cow, a pig, twenty mowers and twelve threshers, and had never once in his life had to think about anything, climbed up onto the end of the fox's nose.
Page 10
And the fox tossed up his head and snapped — and the gingerbread man said, in a surprised sort of voice, that he was a quarter gone. And then he said that he was half gone. And then he said that he was three-quarters gone. And then he said, very faintly and from somewhere a long way inside the fox, that he was all gone. And that was the end of the gingerbread man, who was the fastest thing in that whole county and who ran away from everybody in it, and who was caught in the end by the one creature that never chased him at all. The fox came out on the far bank and shook himself, and sat down in the sun. And on the other side of the river the old woman and the old man and the cow and the pig and the twenty mowers and the twelve threshers all stood in a long row at the water's edge, out of breath, and watched him do it.
About this story
- Audience: kids (ages 6–12)
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