Chapter One The Picture In The Bedroom THERE was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

His parents called him Eustace Clarence and masters called him Scrubb.

I can't tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none.

He didn't call his Father and Mother "Father" and "Mother", but Harold and Alberta.

They were very up-to-date and advanced people.

They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes.

In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on beds and the windows were always open.

Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card.

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

Eustace Clarence disliked his cousins the four Pevensies, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.