A lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.
Old Dutch Proverb
There we have it: the boy's version, and much good may it do us. It is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese, a sieve, a MOTH-EATEN OLD… something or other. Carpet. I mean, he has given us all this STUFF (hardly a tenth of what he told me) and you'd require to pick the truth out of it, if there was any, like currants from a BUN.
Oh, dear, I am getting carried away again. I can feel it. I mean, I ask you: bandits – tigers – TROLLS. All that business with the raft. I have been to the river, both banks. Searched high and low. There is no raft. That boy, that Percy – is Perseverance really his name, I am beginning to wonder – has a truly (!) vivid imagination. Or as his little sister was later to say, ‘That Percy, he is a big fibber.’ I would scarcely trust him to tell me what socks he was wearing. There again, on the other hand (or foot), the Wolf, the Sheep and the Lettuce, that bit's true, sort of. I mean, they WERE in the cart and he DID take them.
Incidentally (I should've mentioned this earlier), this text, these pages you are presently (pleasantly?) reading, is based on a mountainous amount of notes made within a week or so of the alleged events, interviews mostly, with the participants themselves. The book itself, however, has taken much longer to complete. I am a slow worker. Sometimes days passed when all I had to show was minus fifteen words, crossed out, that is, from the day before. Such is the writer's lot.
Let's move on.