Yvonne Higgins' website

What If? The house that Jack built

What if the house that Jack built wasn’t a house at all, but a spaceship to take him on a solo trip to Mars?

Jack had always loved chocolate and had made an exciting plan. He was going to visit the far reaches of the Milky Way, across the Galaxy. He really hoped to spot some Magic Stars on the way.

But, he had reckoned without his Mum demanding he do something about the enormous beanstalk growing outside her french windows.

‘It’s getting bigger every day, Jack, and it’s blocking out the sun when I’m sitting in the garden.’

His Mum did have a point. The tendrils of the beanstalk were even now eating their way across the roof of their cottage and creeping every upwards. The trunk was sturdy enough to climb and so Jack decided that after school he would get some rope and shimmy up the trunk to take out the growing tip.

However, he had not figured on falling down that hill with Jill. It was her fault really as she had insisted they take a detour after school to buy some fizzy pop. He cracked his head open and rather than getting any sympathy from his Mum, she had grounded him for a whole week! With a bandage wrapped around his head and feeling a proper plonker, he went up to his room to sulk.

But once upstairs he was reminded about the beanstalk, as he couldn’t see anything out of his window, it had grown that much.

Leaving his plans for the spaceship on hold, Jack crept down the stairs and, taking hold of a rope he heaved himself up onto the first branch. Because the beanstalk had grown so strong, he had little trouble negotiating the climb. Fortunately he had a good head for heights, well not a good head exactly, as it still hurt him from the tumble he had taken earlier.

When he had climbed to the very top, he could hear something rumbling. It took him a while to work out that it was a very deep voice. Now you might be expecting at this point in the story, that the sound came from a giant, with a thirst for human blood, but how wrong you would be.

As Jack edged closer he could see that the sound was coming from the tiniest of creatures. Its body was no bigger than a thimble, its head a pea and its arms and legs only as long as an eyelash.

‘Goodness me!’ said Jack, not meaning to have spoken aloud. ‘And who or what may you be?’

‘Why, I’m Thomas Thumb, of course,’ said the diminutive creature, in a deep bass tone, quite at odds with his shape and size.

Over the next hour, perched legs akimbo across one of the highest branches, Jack listened with eyes getting wider and wider, to the fascinating tale which had been Thomas Thumb’s life thus far.

Born no bigger than a thumb, hence his name, Thomas has been put into a pudding, by mistake, been swallowed by a cow and pooped out again, captured by a raven and then swallowed whole by a giant. Along the way he had acquired from the Queen of Faeries no less; an enchanted hat of knowledge, (‘but I lost it in a bet’) a ring of invisibility, (‘couldn’t find the darn thing when I took it off,’) and shoes that would take him anywhere he wanted to go, (‘infernal things gave me blisters so I stopped wearing them’).

By this point, Jack was beginning to wonder what on earth might happen next, when he remembered the beanstalk on which they both were sitting.

‘Magic beans,’ replied Thomas Thumb to the unspoken question, tapping his nose with his forefinger. He would not, however, be drawn on where or from whom, he had acquired said magic beans.

‘To be truthful I’m getting a bit fed up with how quickly this beanstalk keeps growing. The more it grows, the further away I get from the ground. And the further away I get from the ground, the hungrier I become.’

At this point in the story, Jack decided to confide in his new friend about his spaceship, which for all intents and purposes, resembled a house.

‘I’ve built it out of bits of old broken furniture,’ he said. ‘It’s taken me ages and ages.’

Jack pointed to the ground and Thomas could just make it out. From up there, it looked the perfect size for Thomas Thumb to live in.

‘It looks like a fantastic feat of engineering,’ he said.

Jack nodded with pride.

‘Would you like to come down and see it?’ he asked.

‘Well, I must be due my next adventure by now,’ Thomas Thumb replied, without hesitation.

Jack opened up the left pocket of his coat and Thomas Thumb jumped right in.

As he made his way back down the beanstalk, Jack explained to Thomas Thumb about his proposed mission to Mars.

‘Might you need a very small co-pilot? One that takes up hardly any room at all?’

Jack thought for a moment about the long hours he would be exploring the Milky Way on his own, and how the Galaxy might prove to be a delicious, but lonely place.

Once back on the safety of the earth, he turned to Thomas Thumb, his tiny new friend and said that he would be delighted to have some company.

‘But just before we go,’ he said, ‘I do have one thing that I promised my Mum.’

Jack pointed in the direction of the beanstalk, which was even now climbing up towards the moon.

‘Oh yes,’ responded Thomas Thumb, reaching into the jacket of his coat for the tiniest spade you could ever imagine. ‘Let me assist you with that particular predicament.’

Jack watched as the tiny little man pushed the even tinier implement into the ground, just below where the first shoots had protruded. The trunk was by now enormous and far too big for a miniature spade to make any mark. Nevertheless, after a few digs with the spade, out of the ground appeared a miniscule yellow coin, no bigger than a speck of dust. Straight away the beanstalk started to shrink and before you could say ‘Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack has a miniature sidekick’, the beanstalk had completely disappeared! Thomas Thumb then pocketed the magic bean, saying as he did so, ‘well you never know when one of these beanstalks may come in handy.’

And of Jack and Thomas’s adventure into the Milky Way? Well that is most definitely another story.