Astrid the Unstoppable Read online

  Contents

  The Letter

  Chapter One: In which Astrid almost skis a somersault

  Chapter Two: In which Gunnvald and Astrid talk about the olden days

  Chapter Three: In which Sledge Test Run No. 1 is launched, and Astrid is threatened with a call to the police

  Chapter Four: In which Astrid doesn’t worry about what Mr Hagen says and letters fall from the sky like snow

  Chapter Five: In which Astrid, Dad and Snorri the Seagull have dinner

  Chapter Six: In which Astrid sets out to find some disgusting snus, and ends up in a real fight

  Chapter Seven: In which Gunnvald tells Astrid about love, and Astrid tells Gunnvald about the teeny-tiniest billy goat Gruff

  Chapter Eight: In which Astrid makes three new friends

  Chapter Nine: In which Sledge Test Run No. 2 is launched, and Gunnvald makes venison stew

  Chapter Ten: In which Mr Hagen goes too far, and the famous story “Do You Remember When Astrid Glimmerdal Drove Her Sledge onto the Ferry?” is born

  Heidi

  Chapter Eleven: In which Gunnvald and Astrid move Gladiator to the summer barn, and there is an accident with a coffee pot

  Chapter Twelve: In which Gunnvald is mightily scared in hospital

  Chapter Thirteen: In which Astrid reads the green book, and Gunnvald gives her a secret mission

  Chapter Fourteen: In which a mysterious woman and a terrifying dog turn up in Glimmerdal

  Chapter Fifteen: In which Astrid has a scary experience and is quite stunned

  Chapter Sixteen: In which Dad reveals something really shocking

  Chapter Seventeen: In which Heidi reveals her awful plan

  Chapter Eighteen: In which life becomes unbearable, and Astrid meets some old friends

  Chapter Nineteen: In which Astrid spies on somebody who disappears

  Chapter Twenty: In which Heidi starts a seagull massacre, and Astrid hatches a plan

  Chapter Twenty-One: In which Astrid can’t reveal what’s going on

  Chapter Twenty-Two: In which old Nils gets drunk and says something very true

  Chapter Twenty-Three: In which Heidi and Astrid engage in a kind of trench warfare that not even Mr Hagen can disrupt

  Chapter Twenty-Four: In which Astrid gets to hear the end of the book, and Heidi reveals more

  Chapter Twenty-Five: In which Astrid is reacquainted with an old man

  Music

  Chapter Twenty-Six: In which Heidi shows Astrid something really fantastic

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: In which Snorri the Seagull gets a seagull castle, and Gunnvald comes home

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: In which Auntie Eira skis a somersault, Astrid almost skis a somersault, and Ola is nowhere near skiing a somersault

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: In which Astrid turns ten, receives a big crate and has a brainwave

  Chapter Thirty: In which Gunnvald makes the most important telephone call of his life

  Chapter Thirty-One: In which everybody, apart from Ola, goes to church

  Chapter Thirty-Two: In which two fiddles play together

  About the Authors

  As soon as you get off the ferry at the quayside, you’ll feel the breeze blowing down from the glen. Even now, when it’s winter and cold, you can still feel it. Close your eyes. You can smell the pine trees, and the spruce. Then just start walking.

  Follow the road straight ahead, past the closed-down snack bar, the shop and Theo’s hair salon, and then carry on along by the river. The road starts off quite flat, with the odd house along the way. There’s a digger parked outside one of the last houses. That’s where Peter and his mum live.

  Then there’s more and more snow and trees, and fewer and fewer houses. The road narrows to half the width and becomes twice as steep. If you haven’t been here before, you might hesitate, wondering if you’ve gone the wrong way. But you haven’t. Because just as you start to wonder, you see a sign. “Glimmerdal”, it says. Then you know you’re heading in the right direction after all.

  The first thing you come to after the sign is a holiday camp. Listen carefully: whatever you do, don’t enter that holiday camp. If you do, then don’t come out saying that you weren’t warned. Klaus Hagen, the owner of Hagen’s Wellness Retreat, is so sour he should be poured down the kitchen sink. He has no sense of humour, and he doesn’t like children, especially if they make loud noises … and especially if they once smashed one of his cabin windows with a catapult, even if it wasn’t on purpose. He thinks those children are the worst. (The child who smashed that window isn’t particularly fond of Mr Hagen either, if truth be told. Sometimes she lies awake at night wondering whether she should smash another one.) So, if you’ve any sense at all, you’ll head straight past Hagen’s Wellness Retreat.

  After Hagen’s Wellness Retreat, you’ll find yourself in some woods, where the snow bends the branches almost all the way down to your head. Some call it an enchanted forest. Just beyond it is Sally’s green house, but there’s nothing much enchanted about that. You’ll spot Sally’s purplish perm sticking up from behind a pot plant in her living-room window. Sally will spot you too; you can be sure of that. Sally spots everything. Even if you were to sneak past that green house like a little mouse in winter camouflage, making not so much as a peep, Sally would still spot you. She never takes afternoon naps either.

  Once you’re past Sally’s house, you’ll finally reach the bridge, the one that crosses the River Glimmerdal. If you go over the bridge and walk a short way up the hill to the right, you’ll get to Gunnvald’s farm. But if, instead of going right, you walk a short way up the hill to the left, then you’ll reach Astrid and her family’s farm. There are no other farms up the glen, beneath the mountains.

  So now you’ve arrived. Welcome to Glimmerdal.

  CHAPTER ONE

  In which Astrid almost

  skis a somersault

  Cold February afternoons are very peaceful at the top of Glimmerdal. The river is quiet, because it’s all iced up on top. There are no birds tweeting, because they’ve flown south. You can’t even hear the sheep, as they’re inside, in the barns. There’s just the white snow, the dark spruce trees and the tall, silent mountains.

  But in the midst of this winter quiet, there was a black dot about to make some noise. The black dot was up at the foot of Cairn Peak, at the end of a long and quite uneven ski track. The dot was none other than Astrid Glimmerdal, with her lion’s mane of curly red hair. Her father is a farmer here in Glimmerdal, and her mother is a marine research scientist who goes on expeditions, working along the coast and at sea. Her family have been living in the glen for a long time, which is why they share their surname with the place, as do some other families in the area.

  Astrid was about to turn ten at Easter, and she was planning to have such a big party that it would be heard echoing all the way up the mountains.

  Klaus Hagen, the one down at the holiday camp who doesn’t like children, should really have been pleased with his lot in life. After all, there was only one child in the whole glen, and even Mr Hagen should have been able to put up with just one. But he couldn’t. Astrid Glimmerdal was precisely the type of child that Mr Hagen couldn’t stand. As soon as they met her, all his holiday guests realized that even if they were staying at Hagen’s Wellness Retreat, it was really Astrid’s glen they were visiting. Luckily the little empress of Glimmerdal was particularly fond of visitors.

  “You should have ‘welcome’ printed on your forehead, Astrid,” Auntie Idun had once told her.

  In the winter, Astrid’s ski tracks and footprints traced lines and squiggles all across Glimmerdal.

  “I let her out every morning and hope she’ll come back in the evening,” her da
d, Sigurd, would say when visitors asked him where his daughter was off to now, as people in Glimmerdal always asked.

  The little thunderbolt of Glimmerdal, that was what everyone called her.

  Below Cairn Peak, Astrid shifted her weight a little, pointing the ends of her skis down towards the crag known as the Little Hammer. School had finished early, as it was the last Friday before half-term, so it was still the middle of the day.

  “Ah, what a wonderful thing February half-term is,” Astrid said to herself. “February half-term and downhill slopes.”

  The run down to the Little Hammer was steep. So steep that Astrid really had to steel herself. But this was what Auntie Eira and Auntie Idun did when they were home for Easter. They’d start from the same place, and would set off at a furious speed, kicking up a flurry of snow behind them like a bride’s veil. They’d leap off the edge of the Little Hammer, flying sky-high. Auntie Eira even did somersaults.

  “You need two things in life,” Auntie Eira would say. “Speed and self-confidence.”

  Astrid thought those were wise words. While her aunts were away studying in Oslo, Astrid tried to keep in practice, doing lots of things that required speed and self-confidence.

  One thing was for certain, though – Astrid Glimmerdal would never even do so much as a tiny, sneaky little ski jump unless Gunnvald was sitting at his kitchen window, watching her. For a start, it’s no fun jumping unless somebody’s watching; and besides, it’s a good idea to have somebody who can call the mountain rescue service if you don’t get up again after landing.

  Gunnvald lived quite a long way from the foot of Cairn Peak, but he had some fantastic binoculars. Now Astrid waved her arms to signal that she was ready.

  And then the silence in Glimmerdal was broken.

  “Old MacDonald had a farm!” Astrid sang, bellowing out the words and launching herself forward.

  It is important to sing when you’re skiing. Every time she jumped off the Little Hammer, Astrid sang so loudly that she started mini-avalanches in the hollow near the top of the Glimmerhorn.

  “E–I–E–I–OOOO!”

  She curled up with her hands in front of her and her head down to reduce the drag.

  “And on that farm he had a cooooow!”

  The edge of the Little Hammer was growing larger. Astrid began to sing extra loudly to stop herself from suddenly changing her mind, which might not end well.

  “E–I–E–I–OOOO!” she sang so loudly that the words echoed off the mountains of Glimmerdal.

  Holy muskrat, she was going fast! The Little Hammer was looming closer and closer. Good grief, why did she never learn? Why did she never, ever, ever learn? She was almost there. Soon she’d be going up…

  Astrid closed her eyes. There was the edge. She had butterflies in her stomach and her legs were tingling.

  “With a moo-moo here and a moo-moooooooooooo…!”

  Astrid was flying. She had never sung so much of “Old MacDonald” in mid-air. Blinking badgers, it was almost the whole chorus. If she’d known how to do somersaults, like Auntie Eira, then she would’ve had time to do three in a row.

  But I don’t know how to do somersaults yet, Astrid thought to herself while in mid-air. Or maybe I do, she thought next, when she noticed that her head was where her legs were supposed to be, and her legs were where her head was supposed to be.

  Then, after flying quite an impressive trajectory, Astrid crash-landed like an upside-down jelly baby in a cream cake with far too much cream. It was white and cold, and she didn’t know whether she was alive or dead as she lay there. Gunnvald was probably wondering the same thing, down at his kitchen window. Astrid lay still until she could feel her heart beating. Then she shook her head a little, as if to put everything inside it back in place.

  “Does that count as a somersault?” she wondered aloud.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In which Gunnvald and Astrid

  talk about the olden days

  Gunnvald lives in an enormous house and has a barn and sheep, like Astrid and her family. But there’s always some kind of commotion with Gunnvald’s sheep. They run off, and they die, and they eat Sally’s tulips. Gunnvald also has a workshop. There he makes the most of his old age, earning some extra money to top up his pension by doing a bit of joinery. He’s seventy-four years old and Astrid’s best friend.

  “Imagine being best friends with a stubborn old mule like him,” Astrid says when she’s feeling low. “Blinking badgers, there’s not much of a choice here in Glimmerdal.”

  But deep inside, Astrid knows that Gunnvald would be her best friend even if there were ten-year-old children living on every little patch of grass in the glen. She is so fond of Gunnvald that her heart creaks and groans at the thought of him. He’s actually her godfather too. Astrid thinks it was brave of her mum and dad to let an old grumbler like him carry her at her christening. He might have dropped her slap-bang in the middle of the church if he’d been feeling like it. You see, Gunnvald can be so stubborn sometimes that you wouldn’t believe it. Still, Astrid’s mum and dad wanted it to be Gunnvald and nobody else. They put Astrid in his gigantic hands, and he hasn’t let go of her since.

  “What would you do without me, Gunnvald?” Astrid often asks him.

  “I’d dig myself a big hole and jump in it,” Gunnvald answers.

  When Astrid came gliding across the farmyard on her skis, Gunnvald moved the kitchen curtains aside with his binoculars and stuck his tousled head out into the winter air. He’s as tall as a troll, with a slight stoop. In his prime, he was even taller – he’s shrunk a bit over the past few years, what with his age and his arthritis and everything, but he never goes to the doctor. He’s petrified of doctors. Besides, all Gunnvald needs is his fiddle under his chin, then he’s as perky as a newborn calf. Gunnvald says there’s no better medicine than that fiddle of his. What do you need doctors for when you’ve got a fiddle? A fiddle and a pinch of snus under your lip. Where Astrid and Gunnvald live, some grown-ups suck a kind of yucky tobacco powder called snus.

  “Was that a somersault?” Astrid asked as she reached him.

  Gunnvald huffed so hard that the curtains tugged at their rails. “If that was a somersault, Astrid Glimmerdal, then I’m an elk.”

  He asked if Astrid always had to land head first so that he thought she was dead. Astrid said that was exactly what she had to do.

  In Gunnvald’s kitchen, Astrid has a chair where she always sits, a peg where she always hangs her woolly hat, and a mug in the cupboard she always drinks from.

  Hulda, Gunnvald’s black and white cat, slunk past Astrid’s legs as she made herself at home.

  “It’s finally half-term! Do you remember the olden days, Gunnvald?”

  “Which olden days?” Gunnvald asked, putting a plate down in front of her.

  Gunnvald had lived so long that, to him, the olden days could mean anything.

  “The olden days before Klaus Hagen moved to Glimmerdal, when it was just a normal campsite down the road,” said Astrid.

  Yes, Gunnvald remembered those days well. “There was a heavenly hullabaloo every time people came on holiday,” he reminisced.

  “Children came in bucketloads,” Astrid remembered. “All you had to do was go down to the campsite and children were as easy to find as bilberries.”

  Gunnvald remembered that too. But then along had come the bad-tempered Klaus Hagen.

  He came and saw Glimmerdal and thought it was a fantastic place. In fact, Mr Hagen thought Glimmerdal was such a fantastic place that he went and bought the whole campsite. He’s stinking rich. He built new cabins down there and it looked so smart that Astrid and everybody else in Glimmerdal thought it was brilliant. When he had finished, he reopened it as a holiday camp. “Hagen’s Wellness Retreat: the quietest in Norway”, it said in his brochures. It was for people who wanted peace and quiet. To begin with, Astrid thought that was genius. Lots of people booked who needed a rest, and there was nothing nicer than visitors comin
g up to see where they lived in the mountains. But then Astrid began to wonder why on earth no children ever visited.

  Astrid doesn’t normally spend too much time wondering about things, so one day she cycled down to Mr Hagen and asked him.

  “Hey, Klaus, how come there’s never any children at your holiday camp?”

  “Children aren’t allowed at Hagen’s Wellness Retreat,” Mr Hagen answered.

  “Huh?” said Astrid.

  “My guests want to hear the rushing river and the fresh breeze blowing through the spruce trees, not some horrible racket,” Mr Hagen explained, glancing at his watch.

  Astrid looked at the holiday-camp owner, dumbfounded. She decided that what he’d just said was the worst thing she’d ever heard in her whole life. But no sooner had she decided that than Mr Hagen broke his own record by saying something even worse.

  “Actually, what I said about horrible rackets applies to you, Asny.”

  “It’s Astrid,” Astrid corrected him.

  “Astrid, right. Can you please stop singing at all hours of the day and night?”

  Astrid scratched her ear. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  “You destroy my guests’ peace and quiet when you come screeching past on your bike,” Mr Hagen told her, putting on something that was possibly supposed to resemble a polite smile.

  “Do you mean you want me to stop singing in my own glen?” she asked. Just to make sure.

  “It’s not exactly yours,” Mr Hagen muttered, annoyed. “In my advertisements I say that my holiday camp’s the quietest in Norway, and I would ask you to respect that.”

  That was probably the moment Mr Hagen really took a wrong turn. You don’t just go asking the little thunderbolt of Glimmerdal to stop singing. Anybody could have told him that. If only he’d asked them.

  “No, sorry,” Astrid replied. Then she plodded back up the glen, her opera singing practically flattening the trees by the side of the track.

  Astrid kept on singing after that. In fact, she might even have started singing a bit more, if truth be told. Especially when she was cycling past the holiday camp. Mr Hagen looked at Astrid almost as if she were some kind of small vermin. Things got even worse in the autumn, when Astrid was unlucky and broke a window at the holiday camp with her catapult. She didn’t mean to; she was aiming at the flagpole. It makes such a good sound when you fire your catapult at flagpoles, and it’s incredibly difficult to do. Even Astrid doesn’t always score a direct hit when she aims at flagpoles.