A young shrimp is perplexed as to why all his family walk backwards. He wants to walk forwards, so decides to teach himself. The first day is a disaster: he trips over his tail and crushes one leg with another. Undefeated, he practises. “My son!” weeps his mother. “Get a grip,” his dad says, “and walk like your family, who love you so much.” Now, the shrimp loves his family, too, but knows he must walk on. After a while, he meets three frogs. One tells him the world is going wrong, another that what he is doing is dangerous, while the third simply says: “Oh dear, oh dear.” But the shrimp continues until he hears a voice: “I was like you,” an old shrimp tells him. “Thought I could teach shrimps to walk forwards, but they turned their backs on me. Go back, or end up alone like me.” The young shrimp stays silent; he knows he is doing the right thing, and walks forwards.
I first heard the story of the young shrimp at a children’s theatre in Rome. It is from a collection called Favole al Telefono (Telephone Tales), by Gianni Rodari. Later, it became a bedtime story, read so often it got under our skin. And now it bobs up at the very mention of prawns, and especially when I pull off 10 legs and feel like the trouble in the tale. But I put them to good use, along with the shells and heads, and make a broth for risotto. There is a telephone tale for chopping, too: Cipollino, a little onion boy who leads an uprising of garden vegetables – courgette, radish, leek – against their tyrannical landowner, Prince Lemon.
