Seventeen Oranges by Bill Naughton: The Children’s Story Where a Boy Eats the Evidence
The Answer: Seventeen Oranges by Bill Naughton
The story is Seventeen Oranges, a short story by British author Bill Naughton. The narrator is a young delivery lad working for the Swift Delivery Company at the docks. A policeman nicknamed Pongo catches him with seventeen oranges stuffed in his trouser pockets — his apron string broke at the worst possible moment. While Pongo goes off to fetch his parents, the boy does the only logical thing: eats all seventeen oranges, pips, peel, and all. Every scrap of evidence, gone.
The story ends with him laid up sick for a week. He never quite fancied oranges again.
Where to Find It
Seventeen Oranges most commonly appears in Naughton’s collection The Goalkeeper’s Revenge and Other Stories, first published in 1961. It’s a set of linked short stories drawing on his childhood in Bolton, Lancashire — street football, odd jobs at the docks, school, and the texture of working-class life in 1920s northern England. The stories are funny and direct, written at a kid’s eye level without being condescending about it.
The collection sat on school reading lists for decades. Still in print, and easy to find secondhand.
Who Was Bill Naughton
Naughton was born in County Mayo, Ireland, in 1910 and moved to Bolton as a small child. He left school around 1924 and worked as a weaver, a coal-bagger, and a lorry driver before turning seriously to writing. That range of jobs shows up in the work — his fiction has the grain of actual manual labour, not a romanticised version of it.
Outside children’s literature he is best known for Alfie, the 1963 play that became the 1966 film with Michael Caine. But his stories for younger readers, grounded in the same Bolton childhood, have their own following — particularly among people who met them in school anthologies and never quite forgot them.
He died in 1992 in the Isle of Man, where he had settled in later life.
Why This Story Sticks
Part of it is the specificity: not just “some oranges” but seventeen, counted out one by one by Pongo and laid on the table. That number is what makes it feel real. Then there’s the image of a boy methodically working through seventeen oranges against the clock — pith, peel, and all — which is both horrifying and genuinely funny.
The eat-the-evidence plot turns up in children’s fiction fairly regularly, but Naughton’s version has a consequence most skip: the oranges make the boy genuinely ill, and his appetite for them is ruined for good. It’s a moral tale that refuses to moralize, which is rarer than it sounds.