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Until he was four years old, James Henry Trotter had a happy life. He lived peacefully with his motherand father in a beautiful house beside the sea. There were always plenty of other children for him toplay with, and there was the sandy beach for him to run about on, and the ocean to paddle in. It was theperfect life for a small boy.
Then, one day, James’s mother and father went to London to do some shopping, and there a terriblething happened. Both of them suddenly got eaten up (in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowdedstreet) by an enormous angry rhinoceros¹ which had escaped from the London Zoo.
Now this, as you can well imagine, was a rather nasty experience for two such gentle parents. But inthe long run it was far nastier for James than it was for them. Their troubles were all over in a jiffy.
They were dead and gone in thirty-five seconds flat. Poor James, on the other hand, was still very muchalive, and all at once he found himself alone and frightened in a vast unfriendly world. The lovelyhouse by the seaside had to be sold immediately, and the little boy, carrying nothing but a smallsuitcase containing a pair of pyjamas² and a toothbrush, was sent away to live with his two aunts.
Their names were Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, and I am sorry to say that they were both reallyhorrible people. They were selfish and lazy and cruel, and right from the beginning they started beatingpoor James for almost no reason at all. They never called him by his real name, but always referred tohim as ‘you disgusting little beast’ or ‘you filthy³ nuisance’ or ‘you miserable⁴ creature’, and theycertainly never gave him any toys to play with or any picture books to look at. His room was as bare asa prison cell.
They lived – Aunt Sponge, Aunt Spiker, and now James as well – in a queer ramshackle house onthe top of a high hill in the south of England. The hill was so high that from almost anywhere in thegarden James could look down and see for miles and miles across a marvellous landscape of woods andfields; and on a very clear day, if he looked in the right direction, he could see a tiny grey dot far awayon the horizon, which was the house that he used to live in with his beloved mother and father. And justbeyond that, he could see the ocean itself – a long thin

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