Fizzlebert Stump by A. F. Harrold

the gruesome punishments that awaited him in the library, but he also didn’t fancy the punishments that might be waiting back at the circus, if they ever found out he had got into trouble at the library. His mum and dad had taught him not to lie (well, his dad had; his mum had taught him to pour custard down people’s trousers), and they’d be hugely disappointed to find out how exactly he’d gone about joining the library.
    He was so confused and worried that it didn’t occur to him that they’d probably be more upset to find out he’d been kidnapped by two nasty old people and taken off to who knows where in order to do who knows what.
     
    When they eventually got to the Stinkthrottles’ house Mrs Stinkthrottle opened the front door and pushed Fizz in ahead of her.
    What met his eyes was awful. (What met his nose was worse, but we’ll get to that shortly.)
    He’d grown up in quite a small caravan in the circus and his parents had never collected a lot of stuff. Living in a little place you had to be extra careful about that, as it could very quickly become cluttered. All you had to do was leave a couple of plates out after dinner, put a magazine down on top of them, put a half drunk cup of tea on top of that, and the next thing you knew you couldn’t get through the passage to the front door (which was usually, in a caravan, the only door) without knocking it all over.
    While you probably think it’s a big job tidying your room when your mum nags you, Fizz didn’t have that problem. He didn’t have a room of his own, just a bed that folded down in the front caravan’s living room, and so everyone did their bit to keep it tidy as they went along, which meant it never got out of hand.
    The Stinkthrottles, however, lived in a much bigger house and they had no such compunction. (When I first wrote that I thought a ‘compunction’ was a sort of small antelope, but when I checked in the dictionary I saw that it actually means ‘feelings of guilt’, which, now I think about it, fits the sense of what I was saying better. I should add, though, that although their house was a mess, they didn’t have any small antelopes either. So my first guess was right too. A double win for me. (The author takes a bow.) Thank you very much.)
    Their house looked like the set of a disaster film, just after all the big action has happened. To call it untidy would be an understatement of monstrous proportions. In fact, to call it untidy would be a bigger lie than the fib Mrs Stinkthrottle had told Fizz about the library. If there is a word that describes quite how much like a tip their house was I don’t know it (I looked), but I imagine it would be spelt with a lot more letters than just six that make up the unsatisfactory word ‘untidy’.
     

     
    Fizz was stood in a hallway which seemed to be made out of piles of newspapers, not just stacked up at either side (where the walls probably were), but slumped and drifting like blown snow all across the room. There was unopened post covering the carpet and when he moved his feet it all slipped and slid about. Something crunched and squeaked underfoot but even though he looked down he couldn’t see what had made the noise.
    There was a dead typewriter (all its keys were bent up and out of place like the legs of a dried-up woodlouse) on what he guessed was the hall table and in it was stuffed, headfirst, a stuffed fish. It might have been a halibut, but Fizz was no expert. (If Fish was here, he’d know, Fizz thought.)
    The stairs were directly in front of him and in the dim light of the hall he could see a narrow passage heading up. The once wide stairs were crowded on both sides by stacks of books and boxes and old lamps and apple cores and teddy bears and coat-hangers and wicker donkeys and crisp packets and old tomato ketchup bottles that hadn’t been washed out and were now growing blue-green moulds. It was as if these old people had just dumped all their rubbish on the