From acorn to sapling 5/13

Jennifer Jane was already up to her knees in mud, while the water began pouring over the edge and started to wash away the face of the dam below her. In a minute or two the whole face would give way and not only would she be swept away with it, but the village might be swamped as the water poured down the valley!

There was only one thing she could think of to save herself. She patted herself on the head and reduced her weight as quickly as she could. For one horrible moment nothing seemed to happen and then she felt her feet moving in the mud.

The next second, to Ermintrude’s great astonishment, she was hurtling up in the air. She’d obviously overdone the weight reduction and carefully corrected herself, until she was floating gently down to firm ground again. She ran back to her scooter as soon as she could and with Erm on the pillion, flew over the dam to see how badly it was leaking.

To her amazement it was perfectly all right. The leak had stopped and the top of the wall had rebuilt itself. She couldn’t believe it. Only five minutes ago the whole village had been threatened by a wall of water from the dam and now it looked solid enough to last for hundreds of years.

Ermintrude was crying with relief, while Jennifer Jane sat and thought for a moment.

“I’m going to try an experiment,” she said at last. “We’ll both fly over the wall of the dam, then you get off and stand on it, but hold on to the scooter just in case there’s a problem. Then we’ll change places and see what happens. If I’m touching the scooter I’m sure I can keep it flying, so we should be quite safe.”

Ermintrude thought over the plan very carefully. “Sounds alright I suppose, but I’m not too sure about the ‘should be safe’ bit.”

She bravely climbed on to the scooter and then put her feet carefully on the upper surface of the wall, at the same time keeping a firm hold on the handlebars. Nothing happened, so she jumped up and down. Every thing stayed in place.

Then the girls changed places. Immediately Jennifer Jane’s feet touched the earth, it started to crumble, just as it had before. She climbed back on board the scooter and flew back to the shop.

“Don’t say anything to Esme or Dulce; I have a funny feeling I’ve got to sort this out for myself. But first of all I think I’ll go and have a word with Abigail.”

Abigail didn’t seem too worried when Jennifer Jane told her what had occurred that morning.

“I think you’ll find it’s all perfectly normal. After all it’s to the advantage of the village and it’s bound to get muddy up there, especially if you were jumping on it near the water.” She thought for a moment before going on with her assessment. “As to the top getting higher while you were watching, I think you’ll probably find that the farmers all opened their taps at the same time and the water level really went down. It only looked as if the top was getting higher. Nothing else makes any sense, why would anybody want to go to the trouble of building a dam for no reason?”

Jennifer Jane went home that night in a thoughtful mood. Everything sounded so normal when Abigail explained it, but she still had a funny feeling that there was something wrong.