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Her daughter-in-law, Mrs Flower, just sighed and said wearily, “I know it’s not good enough Fairy Grandmother, but I just can’t think of another fl ower name, and I’m so tired looking after all eleven of them, that I think we might just have to settle on Eleven”.
“Nonsense”, said Fairy Grandmother, not altogether unkindly, although Mrs Flower could feel tears springing up at the back of her eyes.
Noticing this, Fairy Grandmother
What’s in a Name by Pamela Thornton
The fairy’s name was Stinking Bladderwort. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t pretty, but that’s what it was. All eleven of the sisters were named after fl owers, which made a lot of sense because that was their name, Flower. Mr and Mrs Flower had ten other daughters and they were all called Something Flower. There was Carnation, Poppy, Rose, Nemesia, Mimulus, Petunia, Alyssum, Clematis, Hebe and Mesembryanthemum.
Possibly
thinking of that last name for fairy daughter number ten had used up all of Mrs Flower’s imagination, but when fairy daughter number eleven arrived, all naked as the day was long under the toadstool at the back door, Mrs Flower couldn’t think of a name at all. So for two days, the new baby was just called Eleven.
Mrs Flower was so exhausted that she was beginning to think she might just stick with Eleven as her name, when Fairy Grandmother came to call. Now Fairy Grandmother was the kindest fairy who ever fl itted from tree to tree in the fairy glen, but she was also very, very bossy. She peered into the acorn shell where Eleven was slumbering peacefully and chucked her under the chin. “Very pretty,” she said, “As one would expect of a Flower baby. But I hear she doesn’t yet have a Flower name?”
8
said quickly, “Now, now, now my dear, don’t fret. I know just the answer. I’ll take little, um, Eleven here with me into the magic wood, and say a few spells and such like, and I’ll be back with her and a lovely fl ower name faster than you can sprinkle fairy dust. Sometimes the old ways are the best.” And with that, she scooped up the baby, wrapped her in her gossamer shawl which she tied around herself so that the baby was held snug and safe against her, and fl ew off out the door, leaving a light trail of sparkly dust and the scent of lavender behind her.
“Oh, Lavender”, though Mrs Flower, “that
would have been a nice name”, but it was too late, Fairy Grandmother had already disappeared into the woods with baby Eleven. The other thing about Fairy Grandmother, as well as being very kind and very bossy, was that she was extremely forgetful. She meant well, but she often could not quite remember all of a spell. She could get it nearly right, but just wrong enough to make quite a big diff erence to the end result.
Like the time
she tried to help a young elf who was having troubles with a family of toads who insisted that he had built his house on a right of way and kept hopping through his living room six times a day. Fairy Grandmother got just one line completely wrong and, instead of moving the elf’s house over a bit so that the toads could pass it by, she managed to send it right over the hill and completely out of Fairyland. Unfortunately she sent the elf and the toads too, and the last that was heard was that they were all living happily together on a grass verge on the edge of the M8.
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