The Piper Who Refused to be Swallowed by a Shark

The Piper Who Refused to be Swallowed by the Shark

In another world, in another time, there were other children quite a lot like you children, sitting not in a classroom at nursery but inside a boat. They were in a boat on the sea, rocking side to side. They were waiting to find land. They had come on board with lots of grown-up pirates. But these grown-up pirates had all been thrown overboard and fed to the shark! The shark that had been a shark that followed their boat everywhere they went. The shark only ate grown-ups. You never knew when the shark got hungry until he’d begin trying to jumping up and snapping at the sails with his big ferocious jaws! That was when the children knew the shark was getting hungry again. And the more he got hungry, instead of becoming weak and unable to jump, the stronger he became and the higher he could jump! What the shark really had been wanting to eat the whole time it was following this boat was the sails. Sails are made of canvas. They’re really strong, really tough. And if the shark would only swallow the sails of this big boat, it would stay in his tummy the rest of his life and never become digested. Then he would never get hungry ever again. He would never have to eat a single thing ever again in his life.

Well, the children of course did not want the shark to eat the masts of their sails. Without masts, the sailboat wouldn’t move in the water. And this was a great big ocean, they wanted to get to the new country they needed to get to. They wouldn’t arrive anywhere without sails. They had been escaping their country which had been covered up all in lava, the whole entire country – lava from a volcano. They desperately needed to find another country to live. They couldn’t count how many days, weeks or months they had been sailing on the seas. The sun was always in the same place in the sky. It didn’t rise in the East and set in the West, moving across the sky throughout the day like we know it in our world. Night time came only whenever it wanted to. Night time, in this world, was when a funny bird that flew across the sky, flying from one side of the horizon to the other. He just came whenever he liked, making his nest right in front of the sun a while and covering its light completely so that everything turned dark. That was how night time came to be in this other world. Sometimes it came again after only three hours! You could look up in the sky and see how far the bird had flown closer to the sun, or if he was yet out of sight. And living in the boat, there was no electricity. Just candles and lamps that burned by kerosene – which is a fuel kind of like petrol. Everybody on boat had to get ready when it was going to turn dark and there be no more daylight.

And when it was night, there were three moons in the sky instead of just one! Can you imagine! How bright it became in the night, how the three moons shone over the water! You know moonlight is so beautiful when it shines over the water!

But the shark was still somewhere in the water! Look! You could watch the shark’s fin circle around, and come close! The children living in the pirate boat weren’t afraid because they knew the shark didn’t like the taste of children, but they still were scared nonetheless!

Not all the grown-up pirates had been thrown over board. There was still one left. It was the Piper who played music! The children didn’t want to throw him over board to be eaten by the shark. He kept playing wonderful music for them to stop the children from throwing him over board. And so the shark had nothing to eat and got hungrier and hungrier, and would keep trying to snap off the sails of the boat! And the shark grew bigger and bigger! While he was sleeping, he suddenly grew so big that the sails of the boat became far to small for him to eat! It became as small as a little crumb of bread. And in the morning, when he opened his mouth for a very big yawn, the entire pirate ship went down its throat by accident!

When the pirate ship was inside, all the children began to miss the sunlight and seeing the beautiful water in the sun, all blue, and they missed the three moons at night and they missed seeing the beautiful moonlight over the water . . . But now they didn’t have to worry about the shark anymore! They didn’t have to worry about feeding it so that it wouldn’t eat the masts of their sails. They didn’t have to lose their Piper, he was still there and played songs. The worst had happened and they were inside the belly of the whale! They didn’t get digested because they were so small inside this big huge belly. The grown-ups weren’t inside this belly of course because they had all been digested.

It looked like this boat with the children in it and the Piper were going to have to stay inside forever! But then, one day, inside the belly of the whale, some of them went exploring and they found little stairs made of wood that went up and up and up. And some of them decided to go on an excursion and climb those stairs. Then, when they were up, they were in that country they had been journeying in the boat for the longest time to reach – they had been journeying so long that many of them had already grown three centimetres taller, and a few of them had lost some of their baby teeth. That’s an awfully long time to be riding a boat.

It was just magic, they didn’t know how these stairs winding up led to this other country. That was just how it was. And they didn’t see the shark anymore. They could go back to the stairs, which looked like a trap door in the ground by the beach, surrounded by tall grasses and coconut trees. Sometimes they did but who really wanted to go back inside the belly of a shark.

It was a beautiful country, this new one, and nobody living there. Just lots of friendly animals – parrots that talked, kangaroos that hopped and could take you in their pouch wherever you wanted to go. And the children played and started their own school to learn and teach just for fun – it was someone else’s turn to be the teacher whenever the teacher wanted to be a student again! And the children also sang songs by the three moon moonlight and their singing was so beautiful it floated over the ocean so far because it was so beautiful that it began to form stars in the sky, twinkling tears.

By Gudrun Sabrina Hirt