THE CHOCOLATE RABBIT

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22121, 17 June 1937, Page 5 (Supplement)

THE CHOCOLATE RABBIT

(By Helen Shaw)

Dreena and Toyla fingered two blue saucers striped with innumerable red and yellow lines, not because of the unusual pattern or the gay colouring for six more saucers, eight cups and plates and a teapot, also blue, red, and yellow, stood in neat rows on the kitchen dresser, but because in the centre of each saucer sat a chocolate rabbit, staring at them with a pair of green jelly eyes. They seemed so real, almost alive, that Dreena moved her hands round the edge of the saucer to prevent her rabbit from leaping on to the table cloth and scampering out of sight. • Toyla gently touched the small, I •white tail. A flake of coconut stuck to her thumb. Yes, it was just a sweet after all, made by their mother as an Easter present. Other people bought chocolate eggs wrapped up in silver and cellophane paper or fluffy, yellow chickens made of cotton wool. The rabbits were more exciting. Their chocolate bodies, jelly eyes, and round lumpy coconut tails would be good to eat. "I shall eat my rabbit's tail first, Dreena. It will taste sweet, and soft, and crumby," said Toyla. "I shall not eat any of mine. I shall call him Benny and keep him on my windowsill for ages and ages," said Dreena. "But he will melt there. His eyes will drip on to the saucer, and spot it. with green. The coconut will drop off and the chocolate crack." Dreena lifted up her saucer. "No. I shall draw the blind while the sun shines." "But chocolate animals are meant to be eaten," said Toyla. "The Amberlys,- next door, have already eaten their Easter chickens and eggs." But Dreena ran determinedly away. Toyla walked through the house, and Silt into the garden. The marigolds and michaelmas daisies were full of bees. The sun shone. The

grass had just been cut. At the bottom of the }awn the gardener had left a huge heap of mown grass. It smelt sweet. On other days, Toy la would have thrown herself into the middle of it, covered up her legs, tossed armfuls into the air, scooped tunnels which collapsed almost as soon as they were completed. But to-day it might just as well have been raining, for what was the good of playing at tunnels or sticking daisy heads over the mound so that it looked like an Italian hill dotted with flower gardens, or of bouncing a ball, or riding in the gardener's wheelbarrow, for Dreena had named her rabbit Benny, would keep him until Easter itself was forgotten, would show it to her friends, would probably talk to it at night, while she, Toyla, could scarcely prevent herself from breaking off the soft lumpy coconut immediately, and after that, the green eyes, and before she tucked the sheets under her chin at night, the chocolate body. There would be only a brownish smudge left on the saucer. She leaned over the laurel hedge. Why could she not forget about it, or why, if she ate it would she wish that she had left it whole? A grey cat climbed up the branches. Its eyes gleamed between two of the polished leaves. Toyla stroked its fur. Four little boys passed her in the street sucking raspberry drops out of a crumpled paper bag. Within half-an-hour her rabbit sat tailless, its body squeezed out of shape, and one eye shedding green on to its nose. _^ Toyla lay in a hammock under an old sycamore tree pulling off bunches of seeds, throwing them into the air one by one, so that they fluttered to the ground like a fleet of aeroplanes landing. She had placed the striped saucer at the foot of the sycamore where she could watch, yet not touch it. One eye had melted away. The rabbit looked like a pirate who had lost his eye in a cutlass fight. A warm wind swung the hammock to and fro. Toyla tried pretending that she was in a boat, but as it was only a make-believe game she could not sail away from the chocolate rabbit, could not quite forget how much she wanted to pull off the second eye, and let it melt slowly in her mouth. She thought about Dreena playing with Jennifer. She thought it would be fun to make windmills with the sycamore wings and run down the hill in the wind, and, lastly, she thought about a clover field they had discovered in the country earlv one summer morning. The clover was full of dewdrops and wet silvery spider webs hung on matagoun bushes. She and Dreena had climbed over a gate and crept on their hands and knees underneath the spiky matagouri. Shw-5 ° ther Slde 20 or 30 rabb its nibbled grass, scampered, pricked up their ears and popped in and out of their burrows, some of them brushing against the clover leaves so that their brown fur was specked with silver They had all had such £"?* white tails. As soon as Dreena had stood up sayin? "There must be 30 here, Toyla" ho?e y Pabbit disa PP eared into its Toyla looked at the striped Th + t Sec £ nd e * e was trickling over the chocolate face. She W w d "Sr 1 eat u y et - P°or little rabbit. He could not escape from her for he had no snug brown hole in the ground. His whole home was a red and yellow saucer. Suddenly Toyla jumped out of the hammock. She would lose him' She would give him a cotton wool tail and pin two beads where his

jelly eyes had been. She would send him floating down the river which flowed past the back of tneur garden. ~ At 9 o'clock Dreena pulled up vae blind in her bedroom, for.there wa s no longer any sun to melt the sweet, sticky body and eyes of Benny. Toyla tucked the eiderdown ana sheets under her chin. ... And a long, long way down tne river, where the water floweo lazily, trailing russet-coloureo weeds had caught the wooden do* which Toyla had given to her raPbit. Moonlight shone on to tne pair of green bead eyes wnica stared at a second pair, reflected «* the water.