CHAPTER 16 - Three Brass Monkeys

Mum came home from shopping one day and carefully put all the things that she had bought onto the table for us to see. At first, I thought everything was made of gold.

“Perhaps it’s pirate’s treasure,” my sister whispered to me. She didn’t want any pirates to hear.

Mum said that it was brass. My dad didn’t know what to say, and my sister and I looked at each other, wondering what all his stuff was for. Mum unwrapped and wiped each piece carefully and then placed it somewhere in the living room. Some stuff she put on the mantelpiece, some things went on the cupboard, and she got dad to hang other stuff up on the wall. It seemed that my mum had become obsessed - there was brass stuff everywhere. We now had a brass poker with a little squirrel as the handle.

We also had brass things called horse brasses and another brass thing with a long handle which mum called a bed-warmer. Mum said that she had saved a lot of money because everything she bought had been in a sale.

My sister was impressed that my mum had saved so much money. “A penny saved is a penny earned,” she chanted.

I wondered why we needed all this brass stuff in the first place.

The last thing my mum unwrapped and wiped clean was a very strange ornament indeed. It was three little brass monkeys. I liked the monkeys. One of the brass monkeys had his hands over his eyes, the middle one had his hands over his ears and the third one had his hands over his mouth. I had never seen a brass monkey before, let alone three of them together.

My dad, on very cold days, would say odd things like, ‘It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.’ I asked him if one of these was the monkey he had been talking about, but he explained what the three monkeys meant - see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.

I wondered what would happen when these three brass monkeys ever got cold.

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