style="font-size:15px;"> The Sticky Fingers Gang is a rough and tough band of child robbers, who are infamous for being the greatest thieves in London.
Raj the First has his own confectionery emporium – or sweet trolley.
And last, but certainly not least…
…is the Ice Monster itself, a woolly mammoth that died ten thousand years ago. The lifeless animal was discovered by Arctic explorers, perfectly preserved in the ice.
One bleak winter night, in the back streets of London, a tiny baby was left on the steps of an orphanage. There was no note, no name, no clue as to who this little person was. Just the potato sack in which she was wrapped, as snow fell around her.
In Victorian times, it was not uncommon for newborn babies to be abandoned outside orphanages, hospitals or even the homes of upper-class folk. Their poor, desperate mothers hoped their children would be taken in and given a better life than their birth families could provide.
However, it was hard to imagine a worse start in life for this baby than at
Twenty-six orphans lived there, all crammed into a room that should have slept eight at the absolute most. The children were locked up, starved and beaten. On top of that, they were forced to work day and night. They had to assemble gentlemen’s pocket watches from tiny pieces until they went blind.
All the children were painfully thin, with filthy rags for clothes. The orphans’ faces were black with soot, so all you could see in the gloom were their hopeful little eyes.
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
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.
