Spiky, Spunky, My Pet Monkey

The world of Spiky, Spunky, My Pet Monkey is one of smiles and shadows, giggles and grunge, where nothing stays dead for long, and most things explode.
Nearly all the rhymes have stings in the tail. It’s a collection of vintage gallows humour for all ages, but mainly The Middle Ages.

‘If I were stranded on a desert island with just two books, this is the one I would eat.’ Magda Szubanksi.

This is a book of creepy verse, with cover and illustrations by the talented Craig Smith. Verse is tricky to write and very hard to teach. Kids get annoyed if their first attempt at writing a poem is lousy, and it probably will be. Mine certainly was. Would it make you feel better if I showed you one of the first poems I wrote? Grandma kept it in her scrapbook, which I inherited when she died. I really hate to inflict this on you, but fellow writer Elizabeth Honey, who is a poet herself, told me I had to.

Hm. I suppose the use of the word ‘gay’ is quite brave. And I’ve even made three rhyming lines in a row. But because ‘soda pop’ is an American word (certainly one I never used), I suspect I might have stolen this bit from someone else’s book.

Most of the verses in Spiky Spunky My Pet Monkey were written out quite a few times before I was happy with them. Here is the first one in the book:

Home

I miss the place where I was born,
The creeping toadstools on the lawn,
The giant hedge that tore the skin
And ate small boys that blundered in.

The pond where we would fish all day
Till something dragged our nets away.
(Just what it was I couldn’t tell,
But once it dragged off Dad as well.)

The poison ivy on the fence,
The quicksand that devoured our tents,
The garden gnomes that roamed at night
In search of other gnomes to fight.

I miss the house where I was raised
They say it screamed the night it blazed.
The eeriest address in town –
I’m almost sad I burned it down.

Craig Smith worked hard on this book, as did Karen Trump the designer. It ended up winning a design award. One of Craig’s many skills is coming up with pictures for poems that are impossible to illustrate. The picture he drew for The Monster Bra is one of my favourites.

The Monster Bra

It first appeared in London Town
In eighteen-ninety-eight.
It hunted folk and struck them down,
A cruel and vicious fate.
And pretty soon the story spread
To corners near and far
That everyone had come to dread
The fearful Monster Bra.

It started on a foggy night –
A sailor walked the cobbles,
When suddenly he saw a sight
That filled him with the wobbles.
It hovered there before his face,
As frightening as hell –
A massive bra with fancy lace
And giant cups as well.

The sailor ran and ran, poor chap,
The Monster Bra pursued him.
Then, with its pink, elastic strap,
The frightful thing lassoed him.
He struggled with the underwear,
It muffled all his cries,
And left its victim lying there
With very large black eyes.

The Mayor of London said next day,
‘It truly is a pity
That such enormous lingerie
Should terrorise our city.
But troops have rallied to my call,
It doesn’t have a chance!’
That night, the Monster squashed them all
And headed off for France.

Salaciously, it lingered there
To have some extra fun
By giving foreigners a scare –
But here it came undone.
For, though the English regiment
Was conquered by a bra,
The people on the continent
Were bolder folk by far.

Police from France and Germany
Together fought and fussed.
They ambushed the adversary,
They shouted, ‘It’s a bust!’
Along came Turkey, Poland, Spain,
And others on the map.
To end the Monster’s dreadful reign
They used a booby trap.

The Londoners were overjoyed,
The world was safe once more.
The Monster Bra had been destroyed
Upon some foreign shore.
And though the records overlook
This episode exotic,
It wound up in a children’s book
By someone idiotic.

There’s also a poem called Déjà vu. I had no idea how to illustrate it. Only Craig could have come up with this solution.

Déjà vu

As I climb the attic stair
And I reach the door
On my eyesight I could swear
I’ve been here before.
Please call it déjà vu,
Is it superstition?
Could it possibly be true?
Endless repetition?
As I climb the attic stair
And I reach the door
On my eyesight I could swear
I’ve been here before.
Please call it déjà vu,
Is it superstition?
Could it possibly be true?
Endless repetition?
As I climb the attic stair
And I reach the door
On my eyesight I could swear
I’ve been here before.
Please call it déjà vu,
Is it superstition?
Could it possibly be true?
Endless repetition?
As I climb the attic stair
And I reach the door
On my eyesight I could swear
I’ve been here before.
Please call it déjà vu,
Is it superstition?
Could it possibly be true?
Endless repetition?

Here are some of the pictures that Craig drew for the book, but which were rejected for various reasons. I think they’re rather good, don’t you?

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This next picture wasn’t rejected, it was altered slightly by the art director, as you can see. The poem is about Lewis Carroll, the man who wrote Alice in Wonderland. He died in 1898, which was a long time before McDonald’s existed, but Craig liked the idea of having the famous author meet his editor at a Macca’s restaurant. (This might have been a sly comment on how hard it is to get publishers to take you to nice restaurants.)

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Craig’s first design for the cover was rejected too. This is rough artwork to give the publisher an idea of what the finished cover will look like. Half of me likes this original version, half likes the final version and the other half is very bad with fractions.

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Here are two nice short verses from the book:

Freaks

My father’s feet have thirteen toes,
He thinks it’s rather fine.
My mother’s even happier,
For she has twenty-nine.
My sister has a hundred toes,
All growing in a line
While Uncle Paul has none at all,
Just lobster claws, like mine.

Games

Girls and boys, beware of toys.
Marbles make you stumble,
Jungle gyms can break your limbs
Hobbyhorses tumble.
Roller skates can lead to fates
Gruesome, grim and graphic.
Come with me and safe we’ll be –
Playing in the traffic.

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I tried to include as many extra little jokes as possible in Spiky, Spunky, My Pet Monkey. You’ll find some odd things on the imprint page if you look closely. And I supply readers with a list of my other titles (although I have to confess that the last one is from the Bumper Edition of Sister Madge’s Book of Nuns):

The Unpleasant Adventures of Sputum Girl
The Saddle Club Goes Sick
Poo Bum Fart: A Critical Guide to Australian Children’s Literature in the Early 21st Century
Varnish Your Mum
Eat That Car!
So, You Want to be a Twig?
Awful Scotland
Teach Your Baby to Weld
Allergies Ahoy!
Interesting Things For a Boy to Smell
A Treasury of Objects You Shouldn’t Sit On
A Time to Gargle
Insane Rubbish my Grandma Told Me
Our Enemy the Panda
Learn to Love Your Balloon
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Kindly Put Your Trousers On