And he comes back with a
handful of beans!
(A cunningly disguised new
swim visualisation).
Jacks mother calls her young son into the kitchen and tells him that the family cow has stopped giving milk and it is a disaster. She goes on to explain that selling the milk the cow has given them everyday is the only source of income for the two of them. She sends Jack to market to sell the cow and get some money for them to buy food with.
On the way to market Jack meets a mysterious old man who talks Jack into giving him the cow in exchange for a bag of beans. The man tells Jack that these are magic beans and that they will make his fortune. At the thought of all the wealth and fortune that the man said would rain down upon him, Jack turns for home with the bag of beans.
Jack is a young and uneducated and is overjoyed that he has fallen upon such a great trade but when he gets home and tells his mother, she is distraught and gives Jack the beating of his young life and sends him to bed with any dinner.
(OK now Hold your horses and read on a little longer…..Here comes the latest swim practice).
After she has sent the innocent Jack to bed, his mother goes outside and throws the beans away. However….. They really are magic beans and they start to grow over night and by morning there is a bean stalk so high they you cannot see the top of it.
Jack wakes up hungry after not having anything to eat because his mother thought him a fool. He looks out of the window and sees the bean stalk out in the garden and runs out to look at it. He remembers the words the old man spoke about making his fortune and even though he finds it hard to believe; here in front of him is the huge plant and as he looks at it he sees that it would be easy to climb because the alternate branches are like a huge ladder. Slowly he starts to raise arm and then the other grasping a stem every time. The monster plant is still growing and there are tendrils that try to wrap themselves around his legs and feet. He kicks at the soft tendrils to keep them from stopping him as he climbs higher and higher reaching up for each stem one after the other. Amazingly he does not get tired because he is pacing himself and climbs to a rhythm in his brain; one and two and three and four and his legs kick away at the soft tendrils, kick-kick- kick…kick-kick- kick, on and on and on further and further he climbs up the bean stalk. Until soon enough until he is above the clouds, way up in the sky, he feels so happy that he has come so far so easily.
Illustration by Arthur Rackham
Gradually the bean stalk starts to get thinner and thinner and he sees in the distance a massive castle in the sky. He jumps off the beanstalk onto the draw bridge and goes inside looking around in wonder. For he sees piles of gold coins of a big table at the end of the great hall and runs along a fills his pockets with glinting gold and thinks how happy his mother will be and how sorry she will be that she punished him when she saw all the gold in his pockets.
Then he heard a booming voice of a giant saying:
Fe Fi Fo Fum
I smell the blood of and English man
Be he alive or be he dead
I’ll grind his bones
To make my bread
Jack hides behind one of the stone columns’ until the giant has his dinner and falls asleep and then runs out of the castle and jumps back on the bean stalk and slides all the way to the bottom on the leaves of the plant and runs in to show his mother the gold he has found and she hugs and kisses Jack because she is so happy that they are not poor any longer.
Over the next few weeks Jack
climbs up the bean stalk everyday until they have so much gold that every pot
in the house is full.
Then one day the giant spots
Jack as he slides down the smooth leaves of the plant and starts to chase him
and attempts to climb down after him but he is so enormous that the beanstalk
breaks and the giant falls to his death.
The End
Of this swimming lesson!
Yes I have got a funny way
of catching the imagination of children and adults alike!
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