2 The Return of Aunt Severe
Aunt Severe actually was Great Aunt Emily. She was his mum’s auntie. But Daniel called her Aunt Severe because the first time he met her she’d been a crabby old crackpot who fed him cold spinach sandwiches and woke him up at dawn to collect rubbish from the streets. Life with her had been grim and exhausting until, one day, he found four small dragons hiding in a tree in her back garden.
In the frantic adventures that followed, evil zookeeper Gotcha Grabber kidnapped the dragons, Daniel helped rescue them and a secret book of dragon spells was located. When the dragons’ mums arrived to take them home, Aunt Severe was reunited with her long lost fiancée, the Colonel, and became happy and giggling Great Aunt Emily once more.
And that's what Daniel and his parents thought she still was. It was certainly the way she'd been when they'd made the final arrangements for his visit. But the woman waiting for him wasn’t happy. And she certainly wasn’t giggling.
She looked him up and down and frowned.
‘I thought you'd be bigger,’ she muttered. ‘You've hardly grown at all.’
‘It's only been five months, Aunt,’ said Daniel. ‘I don't think anybody grows a lot in five months.’
‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Aunt Severe. ‘I expect you were just being lazy. When we get home you will write I must be taller five hundred and twelve times.’
Off she marched and not another word was said until they reached the street where she lived. That was when Daniel got his second big shock of the day.
'Where's the Colonel, Aunt?' he asked. 'Is he waiting at home?'
Aunt Severe fixed him with her most forbidding glare.
'The Colonel,' she said, 'is not at home. He's vanished again! He's vanished into thin air!'
