The Princess and the Pea a personalised book with your child as the hero

Once upon a time there was a prince who wanted to find a princess. Not just any princess, mind you. He wanted a real princess.

So he saddled his horse and travelled all over the world to find one. He rode over mountains and through forests, across rivers and along the sea, and he visited every castle on every hill. There were princesses everywhere he went, plenty of them. But whether they were real princesses, he could never be quite sure. There was always something that was not quite right.

At last the prince came home again, and he was very sad, because he had so wanted to find a real princess.

One evening a terrible storm blew up. The thunder rumbled and crashed, the lightning flashed across the sky, and the rain came pouring down in buckets. It was a dreadful night to be out of doors.

Right in the middle of it all, somebody knocked at the town gate.

Knock, knock, knock.

The old king went down to open it himself, holding his lantern high. And there, outside the gate, stood a girl.

Oh, what a sight she was, after all that rain and wind! The water ran down from her hair and her clothes. It ran in at the toes of her shoes and out again at the heels.

"Good evening," said the girl. "I am a real princess."

"Are you indeed?" said the old king, peering at her through the rain. But he opened the gate wide and brought her in out of the storm.

Inside the castle the fire was roaring in the great fireplace. The girl sat on a little stool in front of it, wrapped in a warm blanket, while her cloak hung up to dry and steamed like a kettle. The king looked at her. The prince looked at her. And they both wondered the very same thing: could this dripping, shivering girl really be a real princess?

"Well, we shall soon find out," thought the old queen.

But she said nothing to anyone. She went quietly into the guest bedroom and took all the bedding off the bed. Then she laid one single pea on the bare bedstead. Just one small, round, green pea.

Then she called the servants. "Bring me mattresses," said the queen. "Twenty of them."

The servants carried in twenty mattresses and piled them one on top of the other, right on top of the pea. Then the queen said, "Now bring me eiderdowns. Twenty of those as well."

So the servants brought twenty soft, fat eiderdowns and piled them on top of the twenty mattresses. When they had finished, the bed was so tall that it nearly touched the ceiling.

"This is where the princess will sleep tonight," said the queen.

At bedtime the girl put on a long white nightgown. She looked up at the great tall bed. Then she climbed up a long wooden ladder, step by step, all the way to the very top, and snuggled down under the moonlight from the window.

But she did not sleep.

She turned this way, and she turned that way. She lay on her side, and she lay on her back. She plumped her pillow and pulled up the eiderdown. But there was something hard in that bed, and wherever she lay, she could feel it. All night long she hardly closed her eyes.

In the morning everybody sat down to breakfast in the sunny hall, and the old queen asked, "And how did you sleep, my dear?"

"Oh, terribly!" said the girl, rubbing her back and yawning a great big yawn. "I hardly closed my eyes all night. Goodness knows what was in that bed. I was lying on something hard, and now I am aching all over. It was really dreadful!"

The king looked at the queen. The queen looked at the prince. And then they all began to smile.

For now they could see that she was a real princess. She had felt that one little pea right through twenty mattresses and twenty eiderdowns. Nobody but a real princess could have such tender skin as that.

"A real princess!" cried the prince. "At last, a real princess, and she came knocking at our very own gate!"

The king and the queen opened their arms in welcome, a little golden circlet was brought for her hair, and the girl was invited to stay at the castle as their honoured guest for as long as she liked. The prince bowed to her, and from that day on the two of them were the very best of friends.

And the pea? The pea was put in the royal museum, on a little velvet cushion inside a glass case, and there it can still be seen today, unless somebody has taken it.

There, that is a true story!