Harriet Strikes Again. Jean Ure

      “I dunno … could be special sort of earth.”

      “Well, it isn’t. It’s just earth. Get on and dig.”

      Stinky sighed. It was all very well for Harriet. This wasn’t her garden and the grown-ups that were likely to go raving mad weren’t her parents.

      “Dig!” screamed Harriet.

      Harriet dug with her trowel; Stinky dug with a shovel. The trowel was too small and the shovel was too bendy, but it was all they had. Stinky’s dad had meanly put a padlock on the door of the garden shed after Harriet and Stinky had taken the garden hose out and accidentally drenched the next door neighbours, who had complained.

      The trowel and shovel had come from Harriet’s house; they were all she had been able to find. Harriet’s dad, for some strange reason, had locked his garden shed as well. Harriet couldn’t think why. It was hardly her fault if a can of paint had fallen on top of his flower pots and broken them. What had the flower pots been doing there? Right in the middle of the floor. Stupid place to keep flower pots, ’specially if you were going to have great heavy cans of paint balanced just above them.

      She started to say as much to Stinky, but Stinky was just about sick of Harriet and her story of the flower pots. If she hadn’t gone and smashed them her dad wouldn’t have locked his garden shed and they could be digging with a proper spade and fork, instead of a ridiculous hand trowel and a bendy shovel.

      “Never get anywhere at this rate!”

      “Don’t whinge,” said Harriet.

      “Why not?” said Stinky. “You were.”

      “I was not!”

      “Oh yes you were! You were whingeing about your dad.”

      “I wasn’t whingeing about digging.”

      “Well, but I can’t work with this shovel,” grumbled Stinky. “It bends.”

      “Oh, give it here!”

      Harriet threw down her trowel and snatched impatiently at the shovel. For a few minutes, they dug in silence. They had been at it all morning and so far had nothing to show for it but a series of small, deep holes dug by Harriet (she tended to get bored working on the same one all the time) and a bucket-sized pit dug by Stinky, who was more orderly in his methods. The idea, explained Harriet, was that in the end, “We’ll join them up and make one big one.”

      And then they could live in it. Not all the time, of course; just during school holidays or when life at home became more than usually unbearable, such as, for instance, when Stinky’s cousin Giles came to stay and Stinky’s mum kept telling everyone what a dear little boy he was, what wonderful manners he had and how she wished Stinky could be a bit more like him. That was when Stinky was going to go and live in the hole.

      Harriet was going to live in it whenever her mother turned nasty. She had turned nasty just the other day, carrying on like a lunatic about the state of Harriet’s bedroom.

      “Said it was a pigsty!” Harriet set about, indignantly, with her bendy shovel. “Went on and on and on about it.”

      Harriet had been going on and on and on about it, too. Harriet tended to go on about things. If it weren’t cans of paint being left where they could fall on top of flower pots, it was her mum having a go at her about her bedroom. This was at least the fifth time Stinky had heard the tale.

      “I said to her,” said Harriet, “it’s my bedroom. And anyway, I happen to like pigs.”

      “Not indoors,” said Stinky.

      Harriet turned on him. “Who said anything about them being indoors?”

      “You said your mum said your bedroom was like a pigsty.”