Writing for Children Competition - Money - Runner Up

It was a sad day for the Hubbards when Martha went to the cupboard to fetch their poor dog a bone. Not a real bone, obviously – you wouldn’t want one of those stinking out your kitchen shelves, would you? That would be totally grimsome. I mean one of the bone-shaped biscuits from the dog biscuit tin, tucked away behind the peanut butter and blackcurrant jam. Yes, it was a sad day for the Hubbards and an even sadder one for their nameless dog.  
The dog had been whinging and whining all morning (apart from a quick break to chew some homework and wee on the carpet) and had worked itself up to a full-scale howl by lunchtime.  
“Do me a favour, Jack,” called Mrs Hubbard, from behind a teetering pile of laundry. As a washerwoman she spent half her life behind laundry piles, in varying degrees of teeter. “Give the dog a bone.”
“I can’t,” called Jack. “I’m doing my homework.” By ‘homework’, of course, he meant digging a bear trap in the back garden, with his best friend, Goldie.
Mrs Hubbard tried again. “Feed the dog for me, will you Martha?  He’s driving me crazy.”
Martha really was busy doing homework (rewriting her essay on the Hundred Year Sleep to replace the one the dog had eaten earlier) but she stopped what she was doing and went to the cupboard. And when she got there she found – shock, horror (plus a little bit of astoundment thrown in for good measure) – the cupboard was bare! No more bone biscuits, no more peanut butter and no more jam.   
‘Uh-oh’, thought Martha. ‘It looks like the elves are back’. Some people had nice elves, who stayed up all night making shoes for them. But the Hubbard family always seemed to end up with nasty thieving ones, who had slug races up their windows and robbed them blind. Martha sighed. ‘And it looks like I’m going shopping.’ But when she went to her mother’s purse to fetch some money she found – shock, horror and a sprinkling of despair – the purse was empty! And so was the piggy bank on the kitchen windowsill. The elves had taken everything. Uh-oh indeed.
Now, if the Hubbard family had been lucky enough to own a cow, this would probably have been a good time to think about selling it. Or they could have made some fancy organic cheese out of the cow’s milk and sold that instead. Unfortunately, the Hubbards weren’t very well blessed in the cow department. It was just the three of them – Mum, Jack and Martha – and a noisy, annoying dog. Oh, and some nasty elves. I’d forgotten about them.
“Do me a favour, Jack,” called Mrs Hubbard, from behind an even more teetering pile of laundry. “Take the dog down to the market and see what you can get for him.” “I can’t,” yelled Jack. “I’m still doing my homework.” And by ‘homework’, of course, he meant trying to pull his best friend, Goldie, out of the freshly-dug bear trap in the back garden.
“I’ll go,” said Martha, who’d rather gone off the dog anyway after the essay-eating incident, not to mention the surprise ‘present’ she’d just spotted in one of her shoes. If only the Hubbards had some nice shoe-making elves they could have rustled her up a replacement pair before she set off. But they didn’t, as we know, so poor old Martha trudged off to market in her bare feet instead.

***

“The sooner we get rid of you the better,” Martha told the unfortunate hound, her stomach rumbling almost as loudly as the carts carrying away freshly sold cows. But there was nothing ‘soon’ about it – no one, it seemed, wanted to buy a whining dog with a taste for homework. No one, that is, apart from a bearded old man with bad breath, offering a single magic bean in exchange for the mutt.
“One bean?” said Martha, wondering if she’d misheard.
“Yep,” said the old man. “Five beans for a cow and one for a dog. But that’s all right. One’s all you need.”
“No. We need money,” said Martha. “Cold hard cash. Not a bean. Beans won’t buy us peanut butter or blackcurrant jam. Or replacement shoes.”
“I’m afraid it’s a magic bean or nothing,” said the old man. “Take it or leave it.” Martha glanced around the empty market place. Everyone else had already sold up and gone home. “Fine. I’ll take it. But this magic had better be good.”
“Nothing but the best,” promised the old man. “Just pop this little beauty in the ground and wait…”
“For what?” asked Martha.
“You’ll see,” he said.

***

Martha waited.  
Mum waited.  
Jack waited.  
Everyone waited for the magic to happen. Even the nasty elves crept out of their elfish hideout to see what the fuss was about, only to fall headfirst into a waiting bear pit, never to be seen again. Hooray! Good riddance to the little mischief-makers. Martha would have cheered too if she could, but she was too hungry for cheering. Too tired of waiting, and waiting, and waiting… Eventually she gave up and went to bed, her stomach growling with hunger and disappointment, plus a little bit of trapped wind from the essay she’d just tried to eat. (It didn’t taste very nice, in case you’re wondering.)
But the next morning – shock, horror, and double helpings of disbelief – Martha woke to find an enormous beanstalk snaking past her bedroom window into the clouds.
“Do me a favour, Jack,” called Mrs Hubbard, from behind her first teetering laundry pile of the day. “Climb up that beanstalk and see if you can find us some treasure.  You know, maybe a giant hen that lays golden eggs? We could do with some of those.”
“I can’t,” said Jack. “I’m doing my homework.” By which he meant having another chew of his pillow (everyone was getting really hungry by now) and then going back to sleep.
“I’ll go,” said Martha, slipping her coat and shoes on over her nightclothes. Ugh, yuck! She’d forgotten all about the ‘present’ waiting inside. “I’ll just give my feet a quick wash and then I’ll go.” Which is exactly what she did. She washed her feet – three times in a row, just to be on the safe side – and set off up the beanstalk in search of some money-making treasure. Up and up and up and up…
“Fee, fi, fo, fum,” came a deep rumble as she finally reached the top. For a moment Martha thought it was a terrible bloodthirsty giant coming to gobble her up… and then she realised it was her own tummy rumbling. She was so hungry by this point that her stomach had started complaining in proper words. Well, not words exactly, more like funny sounds beginning with ‘f’, but we won’t argue about that just now.   
“Be quiet,” she told her tummy. “I’m trying to look for treasure.” But there was no treasure to be found. Just wispy wet clouds and the occasional passing seagull. Oh, and beans of course. There were plenty of beans.
“Wait, that’s it!” cried Martha. She cried it so loud, in fact, that one of the passing seagulls got distracted, flying headfirst into the gnarly trunk of the beanstalk. “What do you get from a magic beanstalk? More magic beans!”  
And with that she set about picking as many as she could, dropping them back to earth (narrowly missing the bear pit of nasty elves) to land in a neat pile in the garden.  
“Beans?” said Mrs Hubbard when Martha got back home. She looked at the teetering tower of vegetables and sighed. “We need money, not beans. Didn’t they have any golden eggs?”
“The beans are our money,” said Martha. “You’ll see.”  
She chomped a few of the tastiest looking ones on her way to market (just to keep her stomach from making any more embarrassing fee fi fo fum speeches) and swapped the others for as much food as she could carry: ten jars of peanut butter and seventeen pots of blackcurrant jam, plus a new pair of ‘present’-free shoes and a lovely looking cow called ‘Treasure’. The old man was right – it really was good magic.

***

By the time the bean-growing season (and this story) was over, the Hubbards’ cupboards were filled to bursting. Mrs Hubbard gave up her badly paid washerwoman job to become a full-time organic cheese-maker and Martha now sported a different pair of shoes for every day of the week. (Who needs shoe-making elves when you’ve got a money-making beanstalk?)  
Yes, thanks to that one magic bean, they all lived happily ever after. All except Jack, that was, who was too busy doing his homework for happy endings. And by homework, of course, I mean digging a wolf pit in the woods with his new best friend, Red Riding. But that’s another story…