The Flat Stanley Collection. Jeff Brown

of politeness and careful speech. ‘Hay is for horses, Arthur, not people,’ Mr Lambchop said as they entered the bedroom. ‘Try to remember that.’

      ‘Excuse me,’ Arthur said. ‘But look!’

      He pointed to Stanley’s bed. Across it lay the enormous bulletin board that Mr Lambchop had given the boys a Christmas ago, so that they could pin up pictures and messages and maps. It had fallen, during the night, on top of Stanley.

      But Stanley was not hurt. In fact he would still have been sleeping if he had not been woken by his brother’s shout.

      ‘What’s going on here?’ he called out cheerfully from beneath the enormous board.

      Mr and Mrs Lambchop hurried to lift it from the bed.

      ‘Heavens!’ said Mrs Lambchop.

      ‘Gosh!’ said Arthur. ‘Stanley’s flat!’

      ‘As a pancake,’ said Mr Lambchop. ‘Darndest thing I’ve ever seen.’

      ‘Let’s all have breakfast,’ Mrs Lambchop said. ‘Then Stanley and I will go and see Doctor Dan and hear what he has to say.’

      The examination was almost over.

      ‘How do you feel?’ Doctor Dan asked. ‘Does it hurt very much?’

      ‘I felt sort of tickly for a while after I got up,’ Stanley Lambchop said, ‘but I feel fine now.’

      ‘Well, that’s mostly how it is with these cases,’ said Doctor Dan.

      ‘We’ll just have to keep an eye on this young fellow,’ he said when he had finished the examination. ‘Sometimes we doctors, despite all our years of training and experience, can only marvel at how little we really know.’

      Mrs Lambchop said she thought that Stanley’s clothes would have to be altered by the tailor now, so Doctor Dan told his nurse to take Stanley’s measurements.

      Mrs Lambchop wrote them down.

      Stanley was four feet tall, about a foot wide, and half an inch thick.

CHAPTER 2

       BEING FLAT

      When Stanley got used to being flat, he enjoyed it.

      He could go in and out of rooms, even when the door was closed, just by lying down and sliding through the crack at the bottom.

      Mr and Mrs Lambchop said it was silly, but they were quite proud of him.

      Arthur got jealous and tried to slide under a door, but he just banged his head.

      Being flat could also be helpful, Stanley found.

      He was taking a walk with Mrs Lambchop one afternoon when her favourite ring fell from her finger. The ring rolled across the pavement and down between the bars of a grating that covered a dark, deep shaft.

      Mrs Lambchop began to cry.

      ‘I have an idea,’ Stanley said.

      He took the laces out of his shoes and an extra pair out of his pocket and tied them all together to make one long lace. Then he tied the end of that to the back of his belt and gave the other end to his mother.

      ‘Lower me,’ he said, ‘and I will look for the ring.’

      ‘Thank you, Stanley,’ Mrs Lambchop said. She lowered him between the bars and moved him carefully up and down and from side to side, so that he could search the whole floor of the shaft.

      Two policemen came by and stared at Mrs Lambchop as she stood holding the long lace that ran down through the grating. She pretended not to notice them.

      ‘What’s the matter, lady?’ the first policeman asked. ‘Is your yo-yo stuck?’

      ‘I am not playing with a yo-yo!’ Mrs Lambchop said sharply. ‘My son is at the other end of this lace, if you must know.’

      ‘Get the net, Harry,’ said the second policeman. ‘We have caught a cuckoo!’

      Just then, down in the shaft, Stanley cried out, ‘Hooray!’

      Mrs Lambchop pulled him up and saw that he had the ring.

      ‘Good for you, Stanley,’ she said. Then she turned angrily to the policemen.

      ‘A cuckoo, indeed!’ she said. ‘Shame!’

      The policemen apologised. ‘We didn’t get it, lady,’ they said. ‘We have been hasty. We see that now.’

      ‘People should think twice before making rude remarks,’ said Mrs Lambchop. ‘And then not make them at all.’

      The policemen realised that was a good rule and said they would try to remember it.

      One day Stanley got a letter from his friend Thomas Anthony Jeffrey, whose family had moved recently to California. A school holiday was about to begin and Stanley was invited to spend it with the Jeffreys.

      ‘Oh, boy!’ Stanley said. ‘I would love to go!’

      Mr Lambchop sighed. ‘A round-trip train or aeroplane ticket to California is very expensive,’ he said. ‘I shall have to think of some cheaper way.’

      When Mr Lambchop came home from the office that evening, he brought with him an enormous brown-paper envelope.

      ‘Now then, Stanley,’ he said. ‘Try this for size.’

      The envelope fitted Stanley very well. There was even room left over, Mrs Lambchop discovered, for an egg-salad sandwich made with thin bread, and a flat cigarette case filled with milk.

      They had to put a great many stamps on the envelope to pay for both airmail and insurance, but it was still much less expensive than a train or aeroplane ticket to California would have been.

      The next day Mr and Mrs Lambchop slid Stanley into his envelope, along with the egg-salad sandwich and the cigarette case full of milk, and mailed him from the box on the corner. The envelope had to be folded to fit through the slot, but Stanley was a limber boy and inside the box he straightened up again.

      Mrs Lambchop was nervous because Stanley had never been away from home alone before. She rapped on the box.

      ‘Can you hear me, dear?’ she called. ‘Are you all right?’

      Stanley’s voice came quite clearly. ‘I’m fine. Can I eat my sandwich now?’

      ‘Wait an hour. And try not to get overheated, dear,’ Mrs Lambchop said. Then she and Mr Lambchop cried out ‘Goodbye, goodbye!’ and went home.

      Stanley had a fine time in California. When the visit was over, the Jeffreys returned him in a beautiful white envelope they had made themselves. It had red-and-blue markings to show that it was airmail, and Thomas Jeffrey had lettered it ‘Valuable’ and ‘Fragile’ and ‘This End Up’ on both sides.

      Back home Stanley told his family that he had been handled