Once upon a time, a long long time away (after about a million sleeps), there was this boy. I can’t remember this boys name, but it might have been Tommy or Bobby or Alexander. I don’t remember.
One day when this boy was playing with his father’s telescope he looked up into space and he saw a spaceship. It was a very small spaceship far far away. Inside the spaceship he could see a little girl calling for help.
Oh no! He thought to himself. I have to rescue her! So he found his father’s telephone and called the Emergency Space Services…
Hello, this is the ESS, how can we help you?… What? A girl trapped in a spaceship?… Yes, we’ll send our fastest spaceship straight away!
The problem was that the fastest spaceship wasn’t very fast at all. In fact it was very slow. Very very slow… It was so slow that when Billy or Timmy or Archibald watched it through his father’s telescope he could hardly see it moving.
Danny or Sammy or Frederick was very sad for the little girl in the spaceship far far away. But then he had an idea! He went down into the basement, looked through his mother’s cupboards until he found something. It was his imagination bucket!
The imagination bucket was very old, even older than his school teacher. It was made of wood and had a metal handle. But it was a very special bucket because whenever he imagined something, the something that he imagined would come out of the bucket.
And so Jimmy or Becky or Theodore started imagining things. But all he could imagine was picking strawberries at his grandfather’s farm. Soon the basement was full of strawberries and so the boy went upstairs and imagined some more.
Next he imagined picking potatoes, and as they came out of the bucket his house filled up. Then he imagined picking rhubarbs until there was a mountain of rhubarbs.
Then he imagined that all of his friends were imagining picking imaginary things until soon the pile of imagined things coming out his imagination bucket reached to the sky!
But the little girl was still trapped in the spaceship. And so the little boy (I don’t remember his name) imagined that he crept silently into a dark cave and rescued a super hero from a dragon. And the name of this super hero was CAPTAIN RHUBARB.
Captain Rhubarb flew out of the imagination bucket as fast as lightning. He flew up over the mountain of rhubarbs, around the pile of imaginary imagined things and up into space. He flew past the very slow spaceship of the ESS.
And then, Captain Rhubarb landed on the spaceship where the little girl was stuck. The little girl was very happy to see Captain Rhubarb and she invited him inside to have a cup of lemon tea.
Captain Rhubarb and the little girl then waited patiently for the ESS spaceship to arrive. When they finally got back to earth the little girl gave the little boy a little kiss. And they all ate strawberries and potatoes and rhubarbs for the rest of the month.
