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"Quite wild animals" cover

"Quite wild animals"

Chapter 2: GROWP
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About This Book

The book is a collection of short, humorous sketches and verses that introduce a menagerie of fanciful, anthropomorphic creatures, each portrait focusing on a single eccentric trait or predicament - loneliness, laziness, vanity, clumsiness, or timidity. Light, playful narration and occasional rhymes describe how each creature lives, eats, dresses, socializes, and copes with obstacles, often ending with a gentle ironic twist. The pieces mix comic description, imagined habits, and tiny moral suggestions without heavy lessons, creating an imaginative, episodic structure that invites children to laugh at character foibles and delight in inventive, visual detail.

GROWP


GROWP

This is Growp. He is rather dangerous and can run faster than any one else when he is angry, which he often is, so most people keep away from him as much as possible.

If you look at the picture you will see that he has a beak and two wings, but otherwise he is quite an ordinary animal, so for a long time he did not know what to call himself, a beast or a bird. At last a friend said to him, “Why don’t you call yourself a birst?” So that is what he does now.

Growp lives in a large wet and muddy field all alone. He has built himself a house out of old tins and broken saucers that people have thrown at him. It is a most ugly house and has no windows, but he thinks it is very beautiful and no one dares to contradict him.

He has hardly any friends and those he does have do not come to see him very much, because he cannot taste anything, on account of his beak (no one with a beak can, you know, and that is why they eat queer things like worms), so he is very apt to eat his visitors. He says he is getting lonely but I don’t believe him. I think he means he is getting hungry.