更多的是失败的英雄（英文版）

More Heroic Failures Of course, some people are successful — clever, unusual people like Einstein, Mozart, Steven Spielberg. But this book is not for them . . . How badly can people do things, if they really try? In The Book of Heroic Failures you met the world’s worst tourist — Mr Nicholas Scotti, the man who landed in New York and thought it was Rome. You read about the uselessness of Mr R. E. de Bruycker, the spy who gave the enemy more information than he got from them. You read about the famous Mr Philip McCutchcon, the man with one eye and one leg who became one of the world’s poorest thieves. These are some of the greatest failures of all time, people who have been better at doing things badly than anyone else in the world. They are more than ordinary failures — they are heroes. Now, in More Heroic Failures, you can read more great examples of how not to do anything right. There are the British football players who lost 21-0 to SVW Mainz of Germany. There is the great Norwegian, Mr Teigan, singer of the worst European Song Show song of 1978. And Dr Brian Richards of Deal, England, one of the unluckiest lovers there has ever been. Stephen Pile wrote The Book of Heroic Failures in 1979 and said immediately, “I will never write another book about failures.” Soon after that, he wrote More Heroic Failures. Mr Pile decided never to become a writer many years ago, not long before he began writing for newspapers and wrote his first book. He lives in Richmond, a part of London. He once tried to live outside of London, but failed. He is unable to do a great many things. OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES Level 1 Level 4 Girl Meets Boy The Boys from Brazil The Hen and the Bull The Breathing Method The Medal of Brigadier Gerard The Danger Detective Work Level 2 The Doll's House and Other Stories The Birds Dracula Chocky Far from the Madding Crowd Don't Look Now Farewell, My Lovely Emily Glitz The Fox Gone with the Wind, Part 1 The Ghost of Gcnny Castle Gone with the Wind, Part 2 Grandad's Eleven The House of Stairs The Lady in the Lake The Locked Room and Other Money to Burn Horror Stories Persuasion The Mill on the Floss The Railway Children The Mosquito Coast The Room in the Tower and Other The Picture of Dorian Ghost Stories Gray Strangers on a Train Simply Suspense White Fang Treasure Island Under the Greenwood Tree Level 5 The Baby Party and Other Stories Level 3 The Body Black Beauty The Firm The Black Cat and Other Stories The Grass is Singing The Book of Heroic Failures Jude the Obscure A Catskill Eagle The Old Jest Channel Runner The Pelican Brief The Darling Buds of May Pride and Prejudice Dubliners Prime Suspect Earthdark A Twist in the Tale Jane Eyre A Twist in the Tale King Solomon's Mines The Warden Madame Doubtfire Web The Man with Two Shadows and Other Ghost Stories Level 6 Mrs Dalloway The Edge My Family and Other Animals The Long Goodbye Rain Man Misery The Reluctant Queen Mrs Packletide's Tiger and Other Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery Stories of Boscombe Pool The Moonstone The Thirty-nine Steps Presumed Innocent Time Bird A Tale of Two Cities Twice Shy The Thorn Birds Wuthering Heights More Heroic Failures STEPHEN PILE Level 3 Retold by Stephen Waller and Deirdre Taylor Series Editor: Derek Strange PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lanct London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U SA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books. Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4 V 3B2 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road. Auckland 10, New Zealand Penguin Books Ltd. Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England First published by Routledge & Kegan Paul 1979 This adaptation published by Penguin Books 1995 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright © Stephen Waller and Deirdre Taylor 1995 Illustrations copyright © Clive Collins 1995 All rights reserved The moral right of the adapters and of the illustrator has been asserted Illustrations by Clive Col l ins Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic Set in 11 /13 pt Lasercomp Bembo by Datix International Limited. Bungay, Suffolk Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser To the teacher: In addition to all the language forms of Levels One and Two, which are used again at this level of the series, the main verb forms and tenses used at Level Three are: • past continuous verbs, present perfect simple verbs, condi- tional clauses (using the ‘first’ or ‘open future’ conditional), question tags and further common phrasal verbs • modal verbs: have (got) to and don’t have to (to express obligation), need to and needn’t (to express necessity), could and was able to (to describe past ability), could and would (in offers and polite requests for help), and shall (for future plans, offers and suggestions). Also used are: • relative pronouns: who, that and which (in defining clauses) • conjunctions: if and since (for time or reason), so that (for purpose or result) and while • indirect speech (questions) • participle clauses. Specific attention is paid to vocabulary development in the Vocabulary Work exercises at the end of the book. These exercises arc aimed at training students to enlarge their vocabulary systematically through intelligent reading and effective use of a dictionary. To the student: Dictionary Words: • When you read this book, you will find that some words arc darker black than the others on the page. Look them up in your dictionary, if you do not already know them, or try to guess the meaning of the words first, without a dictionary. Before you read: 1 Look at the words below. Put them into groups of four words about: LOVE, WORK, SPORT, WAR. football factory girlfriend enemy husband gun soldiers game fight marry fishing job office players boss kiss 2 Which words can have the same meaning? unhelpful supermarket pleased thief 3 Which words have the opposite meaning? happy enemy clever robber win boring useless exciting lose shop stupid friend 4 The stories in this book are about people who are failures. Can you think of ways in which these people can fail? A man who plans to work quietly in his lunch hour. Three men who plan to rob a post office. Two robbers who try to escape after stealing from a shop. A warship that shoots at an enemy ship in the Arctic Sea. A student who dances with a girl that he likes. A man who tries to kidnap the girl that he loves. Now read the stories and see what really happens. A word from Stephen Pile: For all those writers of terrible books about how to be a success, I have written this book about how to be a failure. I think it’s perfectly all right to be a failure because I am one and all my friends are, too. INTRODUCTION Success is not really important. Everyone loves success. Everyone wants to do things well. But we all know that people are really good at doing things badly. Failure is the thing that we are best at. This is the difference between people and animals and we must not think that failure is bad. Of course, some people are successful — clever, unusual people like Einstein, Mozart, Steven Spielberg. But this book is not for them. It is for us — people who are not very good at anything and who make a lot of mistakes. Here in one book for the first time are the well-known names: the terrible Tito, the stupid Mountnessing robbers, the unlucky Mr Hird, and many more. They are all great failures and people have never forgotten them. They arc an example to us all. 1 The Not Very Good Club of Great Britain I am sure that I am not the only one who is not good at doing things. If you look at other people, you will see that most of them cannot do anything very well. Because of this fact, I think people spend too much time talking about how good they are. It is much more interesting to talk about doing things badly. So, in 1976 1 started a club - The Not Very Good Club of Great Britain. Anyone who belonged to my club had to be not very good at something, for example, fishing, polite conversation, trying to talk like famous people. We all met and talked about our failures. We had some wonderful evenings when people said things like: ‘Yes, sheep are difficult’ (a not very good painter). In September 1976, I asked twenty of the worst failures from the club to meet for dinner at a not very good restaurant in London. The food had to wait in the oven for more than an hour while we talked about ourselves in a boring way. By the time we were ready to eat, the food was terrible. This first dinner was a wonderful failure and so we decided to meet again one evening to play music. We all played so badly that we made a terrible noise. After this, we decided to show people the pictures that we painted. Everyone was able to see some of the worst pictures in the world, one of which was my own 2 Last Supper. I always get hungry when I look at pictures of the Last Supper. So I put real food on to mine. This way other people can also enjoy the supper and have a piece of St Matthew’s bread or one of St Thomas’s chocolate cakes. Many people who belong to my club have given me information for this book. But the worst failures were hard to find because people do not want to talk about these things. They don’t realize that to be very bad at something you need to work hard and see things differently. This book tells the stories of the biggest failures that we were able to find. If you are worse than this, I will be very pleased to hear from you. The Most Unsuccessful Jump When a show came to New York in 1978, the big question was: ‘While moving at seventy-five miles an hour high above the ground, can Tito Gaona finish his jump successfully?’ The short answer to this question was: ‘No’. Every night for nine months Tito tried to do his special jump with four turns sixty feet above the ground. Every night for nine months he started well, then missed his catcher and fell. But he was all right because there was something soft to fall on to. At Madison Square Gardens he was a wonderful failure, because he fell every night. ‘Have you done it successfully anywhere?’ someone asked him. ‘Yes, once,’ Tito replied. ‘Before the show, when only my family was watching.’ 3 The Most Unsuccessful Jump The Most Unsuccessful Rubber Man In August 1978, Janos the Rubber Man was part of a show at Southend in England. People watched him high above them with his legs uncomfortably behind his head. Slowly he came down until he was touching the ground. Then he usually turned over a few times like a ball, before standing up. The children loved it. But one time he just sat there. ‘I couldn’t move,’ he explained later. One of the showmen put Janos in the back of his car and took him to hospital. Doctors took thirty minutes to straighten the Rubber Man and ordered him to lie still for a week. The Most Unsuccessful Lunch Hour One day in June 1978 Mr Stanley Hird was looking forward to working during his lunch hour because he had a lot of work to do. At one o’clock his wool factory outside the town of Bradford was empty and he was hoping to work better in the quiet building. At ten past one a cow fell through the roof. The factory was next to a field and the cow was able to climb on to the roof from there. For thirty seconds both of them did nothing. But then the cow was angry because this was her lunch hour, too. She began to move towards Mr Hird, looking at him in a very unfriendly way with her head down. This continued for some minutes while Mr Hird carefully moved towards the door and the cow knocked boxes of wool across the floor. But then the cow, whose name was Rosie, stopped 5 The Most Unsuccessful Lunch Hour to eat some green wool and Mr Hird escaped from the building. Outside, he met a farmer who was looking for a young cow. The police came and also the firemen, who needed a special lifting machine to get the animal out. The Worst Computer We often say that computers do things better than people. But we have forgotten the computer that the Avon local government bought to help them to pay their workers. The computer’s l i t t le adventure started in a small way, paying a school cleaner £75 an hour instead of 75 pence. Then it decided