A short story I tell my youngest daughter.

Amazing!

Once there was a little girl called Charlotte who was very clever, very curious and very brave.

Her teacher, Miss Burgess was a colourful, smiley young girl who wore striped tights and loved telling stories. She had a big shelf behind her desk with all her clever teaching books on it with titles like “How to think in shapes and numbers” and “Count the stars”.

One afternoon Miss Burgess handed the children their Maths books to take home for the weekend.

“Now remember children, you mustn’t work any further than the page I told you” she said “Or your brains will be full!”

After the class had gone Charlotte went over to the shelf of books and looked at the ones on the top which were covered in dust and very thick. They had gold lines down their spines and old fashioned embossed letters. Checking that nobody was looking, she climbed onto Miss Burgess’ desk and took down the first book.

It was titled “Very Clever Maths” and was full of pictures of revolving spheres and levers and graphs and shapes and other things that made Charlotte’s eyes widen.

She slipped the book into her bag and ran to catch up with the other children.

That night, with a torch under her bed clothes, Charlotte read the whole book and then did all the test questions at the end so that the next morning she could show her answers to Miss Burgess.

At first her teacher was very cross that Charlotte had taken the book but when she read the test she said:

“Amazing!” and ran off to show the Head Teacher.

“Amazing!” said the Head Teacher and ran off to show the Governors.

“Amazing!” said the Chairman of the Governors and took it to show the Mayor…

When the Mayor saw Charlotte’s hard work in the Maths test he decided he had to show the Prime Minister.

“Amazing!” said the Prime Minister and set off at once for the United Nations where he read out the results of Charlotte’s Maths test to all the nations of the world, and they all nodded to each other smiling and clapping gently. All agreed that it really was amazing.

That night as Charlotte was doing her homework there came a knock at the door. When she opened it there were five scientists dressed in white lab coats, each with spectacles and a clipboard and all scribbling away attentively.





“We are from NASA the space people!” said the tallest one with the bright yellow tie “come with us!”

So Charlotte followed them to their shiny rocket ship, which was parked in her back garden and they flew her off to NASA’s base in the United States of America.

The scientists took Charlotte into a big room where there was one desk in the middle and lots of others in a big circle around it where even more scientists sat, all with glasses and clipboards and bright coloured ties.

“Please” said the man with the yellow tie “Can you try and help us? We want to land a space ship on Mars but the Maths equations are just so difficult!”

Charlotte looked at the piece of paper he handed her and scratched her chin “hmmm…” she said and then sat down at the desk in the middle.

“It’s quite easy...look” she said and explained the equations to the scientists whose eyes were getting wider and wider. Then suddenly they all began shouting “Of course!” and “Eureka!” and “That’s it!” and ran back to their own desks in feverish excitement.

This continued for some time. Then, at last, the scientist with the bright yellow tie stood on a chair and shouted “We’ve done it!” and all the other scientists stood up and applauded Charlotte who did her best curtsey, in recognition of their kindness.

“How can we ever thank you?” said the scientist with the yellow tie.

“Well, you could give me a ride home” said Charlotte.

And they did.

It was several months later when Charlotte and her classmates were all gathered around the screen in her classroom watching the first ever humans landing on Mars. The astronauts bounced and wobbled about in their big space suits and planted a flag, and lots of famous people on Earth gave speeches and clapped.

The day came for the ship to come home. The last astronaut was just about to board the shuttle when he stopped and began scratching something in the dry, red dust on the planet’s surface. Nobody knew what he was doing.

He climbed in and slowly the great space shuttle lifted off to rejoin the Mother ship and return the astronauts safely home. As they began to lift off, the astronauts switched on a camera on the bottom of the shuttle. It was looking back down at the surface of Mars, so everyone could see.

And there, written in the dust, were the words

“Thank you Charlotte!”

“Amazing!” thought Charlotte (…and continued working on her idea for a ship to fly to the stars!)