Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  “Jem! Quick!” she yelled. “Little Harry’s toys have gone nutzoid!”

  They peeled the snake off Little Harry and forced the giraffe back into the corner. They locked the little wooden knights away and tied down the pterodactyls.

  “What happened?” asked Jem once Little Harry had been rescued from his toys.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said Lucy.

  “Home improvements,” said Jem.

  “Dad has got to be stopped,” said both of them.

  Jem and Lucy truly thought that as soon as Mum found out about the head-butting giraffes and melting skulls, she would put an end to home improvements. But that afternoon, as she trudged up the garden path after a hard day’s work at Unbeatable Motoring Bargains, a very refreshing thing happened. The front door opened all by itself, and a bright little voice said, “Do come in. The kettle is on.”

  “What a lovely homecoming,” said Mum, strolling into the kitchen just as the kettle came to the boil.

  “I installed an automatic self-opening on the front door,” explained Dad, “and hooked it up to the kettle.”

  “My genius.” Mum smiled.

  “The word today,” said Dad, “is welcome home.”

  “That’s two words,” said Lucy.

  “Dad made a robot snake that tried to strangle Little Harry,” said Jem.

  “It was a cuddly snake. It was just cuddling him,” explained Dad. “From now on, whenever you come home, the kettle will always be boiling.”

  “Also, Jem’s bedroom is now a death trap,” said Lucy.

  “A work in progress,” said Mum, sipping her tea. “Be patient. Your father can’t improve every aspect of our lives in one day.”

  “He made my skull melt,” said Lucy.

  “Teething problems,” said Mum. “Any man who can get a door to make a lovely cup of tea like this can do anything. Give him time.”

  As far as Mum was concerned, a self-opening front door that made tea was a magnificent home improvement. The only problem was it was magnificent for anyone who happened to be passing. When Mum came down the next morning, the milkman and the paperboy were already in the kitchen guzzling tea and Krispies. The paperboy looked hard at Mum and said, “I know you from somewhere.”

  “I live here,” said Mum. “Those are my Krispies.”

  “Thanks for sharing,” said the paperboy.

  There was a sudden draught of cold air as the front door opened itself and invited in a passing jogger.

  “I,” said Mum, “have to go to work.”

  Off she went.

  The postman, the milkman, and the paperboy all left to resume their work quite soon after Mum, but the jogger was not in any hurry. He was still there when Lucy and Jem came down to breakfast. Still there when Dad came in to cook lunch. Every now and then, he did stand up as if about to leave, but each time he did, the front door would ask another jogger in, and the joggers always seemed to know each other and have plenty to talk about. Slowly the kitchen filled up so that by four o’clock it was an impenetrable mass of joggers. If Jem or Lucy looked in, someone would push a mug at them and say, “More tea, please,” or, “We’ve run out of milk.” The children parked themselves miserably on the bottom stair, waiting for the day to end.

  “I’m hungry,” said Little Harry.

  “We have been excluded from our own kitchen,” said Lucy.

  “I’m hungry,” said Little Harry.

  “So am I, but there’s nothing we can do about it just now.”

  “I’m hungry,” said Little Harry.

  “Yes. You’ve mentioned this. Why can’t we just be an ordinary family like we used to be?”

  “You were ordinary,” said Lucy. “I never was.”

  Outside the house, someone was happily honking a car horn.

  “Who’s that?”

  “It doesn’t matter who it is,” said Lucy. “It doesn’t matter if it’s Lord Voldemort and his wicked stepmother; the front door will still open and ask them in for tea.”

  The front door did open and did ask them in for tea, and when it did, they saw, standing in the road, a dirty blue-and-cream camper van with rusty bumpers and one window missing.

  “Mummy!” yelled Little Harry. For there, behind the wheel, waving and honking the horn, was Mum.

  “What,” said Jem, “is that?”

  They all hurried outside.

  “That,” said Dad, “is a 1966 camper van with twenty-three windows — the kind enjoyed by adventurous families for over half a century now. Am I right?”

  “Exactly right.” Mum smiled, climbing down from the driver’s seat. “Twenty-three windows. Counted them myself. Bargain of the week at Unbeatable Motoring Bargains.”

  “Half a century?” said Jem. “Are you sure? It looks a lot older than that. It looks medieval.”

  Dad peered inside. “Look at this gorgeous old steering wheel,” he said, “and the old-fashioned gauges. I bet the horn sounds like a choir.” He honked the horn, and the front bumper fell off and broke into pieces on the pavement.

  “That kind of thing does happen with old cars,” said Dad, “but it’s nothing that can’t be fixed. Look, it’s got the classic split windscreen. It looks like two big eyes. When you see it from a distance, it’s like a big smiley face. Go on. Take a look.”

  “If you look at it too hard,” said Jem, “it will fall completely to pieces.”

  Dad ignored him. “It’s got a pop-up roof compartment for extra sleeping space and a pull-out awning. Ideal for picnics on rainy days. That’s the handle just over the door. All you have to do is give it a hearty tug.” He gave the handle a hearty tug. The door fell off.

  “Oh,” said Mum. “Oh, dear.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Dad.

  “I knew it,” said Mum. “I’ve bought a wreck. It’s just that when you talked about us all going round the world together in a car, it sounded so exciting. I thought if we had a car . . .”

  “But that’s not a car,” said Jem. “Cars have four-wheel drive, satnav, and super de-icers. This has . . .”

  “Charm,” said Mum.

  “Exactly,” agreed Dad, looking at it sideways. “It has charm. And character. Also the classic split windscreen.”

  “What is charming,” asked Jem, “about a bucket of rust in the shape of a van?”

  “I’ve been so silly,” said Mum. “I thought that you might be able to improve it — the way you’ve been improving the house. I thought you might be able to fix it, but I can see now that this is beyond even your talents.”

  “Well,” said Dad, walking round the van and looking at it a little bit harder, “I’m not sure about it being completely beyond my talents.”

  “Oh, it is,” said Mum, “completely beyond. It would take someone much cleverer than you to fix a van like this.”

  “Well, you know, I am pretty clever.”

  “Not that clever.”

  “Let’s see.” He walked round the van again, the opposite way this time. “You know,” he said, “this car does need work. But a car like this is not just a heap of components. A car like this is more than the sum of its parts. Bits can fall off. You can put new bits on. The car — the heart of the car — will stay the same.”

  “Cars don’t actually have hearts, Dad,” said Jem.

  “They do have history. A car like this, it has meant something to someone.”

  “Great,” said Jem, “so you’re going to put it in a museum?”

  “The word today is give it a go.”

  “Which is four words,” said Lucy. “Not meaning to be picky.”

  Dad was already busy poking about in the engine. Mum looked at Lucy and Jem and winked. Then she chased all the joggers out of the kitchen, and Little Harry cheered as they ran into the road, as though it was the start of an Olympic event.

  In bed that night, Jem was lying awake, listening to his dad still working on the engine outside, when Lucy slid around the door with an armful of Little Harry’s soft toys. “He
’s scared that they’re going to try and cuddle him to death again. You’ll have to keep them in your room.”

  “Can’t you keep them in your room?”

  “Their faces are too smiley,” she said. “Happy faces depress me.”

  “You don’t think they’re really going to make us go round the world in that old van, do you?” said Jem. “I mean, even if he fixes it, it will still be an old van. No interior climate control, no airbags. It doesn’t even have central locking.”

  “Of course not.” Lucy was laughing. “Who’d steal it, anyway? Don’t you get it? Listen, Mum is worried about Dad. He’s lost his job. He’s lost his car. But he hasn’t lost his cleverness. He’s got to find something to do with it. So he’s been going round ruining my bedroom and turning Little Harry’s toys against him. He’s got to be stopped. You said so yourself. And that’s what the camper van’s for. It’s a total wreck. He’ll never be able to fix it really. But it’ll keep him busy, keep him out of trouble, keep him happy, and stop him from doing his home improvements.”

  “But he’s working really hard on it. He’s still out there now.”

  “So Mum’s idea is working, isn’t it? You see, Jem, Dad is very clever, but Mum is cleverer.”

  If Lucy had put all her thoughts into an essay and a teacher had marked this essay, she would have got eight out of ten. And the marks would have broken down like this:

  Jem was woken by the sound of tapping and hammering out in the street. Dad was already up and working on the camper van — yanking long curly wires out from somewhere under the chassis, sorting screws and cogs carefully into piles, sometimes standing back and scratching his head, sometimes pouncing on some tiny nut or bolt and holding it up for closer inspection. Glancing round, he saw Jem looking down at him from his bedroom window and gave him a big smiley thumbs-up.

  He really did seem very happy.

  Which made Jem feel very bad.

  There was Dad — all busy and excited — working away at something everyone else thought was hopeless. He really believed the rest of his family couldn’t wait for him to get that van fixed, when all they wanted was for him to stay outdoors and leave their stuff alone. When Dad looked up and waved at Jem for a second time, Jem could stand the guilt no longer. He went down to the kitchen and made Dad some tea and toast.

  “Thanks,” said Dad, without looking up. “Put it over there, will you? If you just take this . . .” He pushed a long, greasy piece of piping into Jem’s hands. “Hold it still, please, while I . . .” He picked up something that looked like a squashed baby’s potty made of dirty metal and tried to fit it to the end of the pipe. “Oh, yes!” he said. “Those two bits definitely go together.”

  “Dad, are you sure this is going to work?”

  “I’m going to take the whole thing apart,” said Dad, “and then put it together again, only better. What could be simpler?”

  “Shouldn’t you have a manual or a diagram or something?”

  “This is so old, I imagine there are no manuals left. If there are, they’re probably written on papyrus or stone tablets or something. I think I just have to take this one screw at a time. It’ll be hard, but it’ll be worth it when it’s done. This is very important to your mother.”

  “Are you sure? She probably wouldn’t mind, you know, if you’d rather do something else. You could hook the front door up to the toaster as well as the kettle so that it could make a whole breakfast.”

  “She was so disappointed when they took the car away. I’m going to make it up to her.” Then he turned back to the van and started whistling.

  His whistle was so loud and so happy that Jem couldn’t bear to listen. Instead he ran into the house, jumped on to the Internet, and searched and searched until he had found an intensely detailed diagram of the inner workings of a 1966 camper van. If the van was a puzzle, here was the solution. He printed it out and gave a copy to Dad. Dad stared at it as though it was a treasure map. “This,” he said, “changes everything. Now we know what we’ve got and what we haven’t got. Look. That weird thing that looks like a rubber millipede, that’s the carburettor seal. I would never have guessed that. And these things like vicious paper clips, they’re for the interior wiring and there should be fourteen of those and . . . there are!”

  “These springs,” said Jem, “are for the awning-release mechanism. Those little wheels go under the seats so you can move them around . . .”

  Before the diagram, all the bits of metal and rubber spread out on the driveway were nothing but dirty old junk. After the diagram, they were pieces of the biggest, most complicated jigsaw puzzle ever. The thing about jigsaw puzzles is that no matter how boring the final picture might be, if you walk past one that someone else has started, you can’t help but pause to see if you can spot a missing piece. In a puzzle, every single piece is important. The rustiest, tiniest screw is brighter and more valuable than the brightest, most valuable treasure if it’s the screw you’re looking for. That’s how it was for Jem. He couldn’t help looking. When he found the right place for the right piece, he couldn’t help being excited. After all, this was not any old jigsaw. They were not just making a picture of Buckingham Palace or the Alps in spring. They were building something that would make a noise and move around and take you places.

  So that’s how Jem and his dad spent those first long days of summer, prowling through the piles of van components, looking for just the right parts, scrubbing them with wire wool, oiling them, comparing them, swapping them, fitting them together. Sometimes they spent half a morning discussing and scrutinizing one length of tubing. Other times they didn’t say a word for hours on end. Through it all, Little Harry sat in the front seat, swinging from the steering wheel, pretending to drive, imagining the world whizzing by. When Mum left home for work, they were usually already out there. When she came home from work, they were always still out there. When the sun went down, they barely noticed but kept on going until they couldn’t see a thing. Sometimes they forgot to eat lunch. Sometimes they sat with a pile of sandwiches and spent the whole afternoon chewing and thinking. The days rolled into each other, though one or two stood out as the dates of some great victories:

  Dad and Jem and Little Harry sat down in the shade of the awning and talked for the very first time about the places they might go when the van was ready. Mum came out with tea and biscuits and said, “That is a horrible awning.” It was tatty, with green and blue stripes. “No one will want to sit under that. Wait there.” She went to the loft and found, hidden among the junk and souvenirs, the curtains that had hung in Lucy’s bedroom before she swapped them for black blinds. They were a bright, sandy yellow with pictures of sandcastles and parasols. They made the perfect awning.

  Of course, once the awning was perfect, it became obvious that certain other things were far from perfect. The seats had holes in them. The bodywork was covered in dents and scratches. The tyres were encrusted with mud and oil.

  They polished headlights, buffed chrome, touched up paintwork, and blackened tyres. They even repaired the bumper that had fallen to pieces that first day and shone it up till it looked as good as new.

  Once the outside was done, they started on the inside. There were seats that turned into beds and a table that you could make bigger or smaller. They found fresh linen cloths for the table, and flowery duvets and pillow slips for the beds, with curtains for the windows. They hung the pterodactyl mobile from the ceiling. They pillaged the loft and the cellar for reading lamps, storage boxes, shelves for books, and Travel Scrabble. They made sure the little gas cooker was in working order. Outside, it was a camper van. Inside, it was a country cottage on wheels.

  One afternoon, Jem and his dad had just finished fitting thick red carpet in the back when they both looked up, looked around, and both thought the same thought at the same time — namely, That’s it. We’re done. We’re finished.

  “We should get the others to come and see,” said Dad. “We should have a bit of a ceremony.”<
br />
  So Mum and Lucy and Little Harry were brought down and shown around the van, where it stood gleaming in the road.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Mum. “You are clever.”

  “I preferred it before,” said Lucy. “When it was battered and dented and ruined. It was much more romantic.”

  “Well, it wasn’t all me,” said Dad. “Jem helped a lot.”

  “So,” hissed Lucy, glaring at Jem, “it’s all his fault that we’ve got to cram ourselves into there and drive around for months on end.”

  “I couldn’t have done it without your mum, either,” said Dad.

  “I didn’t help!” said Mum. “Definitely, definitely not. It was all you.”

  “Yes, but you believed in me,” said Dad. “You believed that I could do it.”

  “Actually, no, I didn’t,” said Mum.

  “She really, really didn’t,” said Lucy. “And neither did I.”

  But Dad was too busy admiring the wonderful job he’d done to listen to them. He just thought everyone would be as happy as he was.

  “So now, thanks to you,” Lucy went on, still glaring at Jem, “we have to gather our belongings, squeeze ourselves into this old van, and leave all our friends and hopes behind to wander the earth like ghosts. Or refugees. Or some other wandery thing. Lost, lost, lost. Like a tragedy.”

  “Lucy,” said Mum, “you love tragedies.”

  “Not,” said Lucy, “when they happen to me.”

  “The word today,” said Dad, “is ignition.” He climbed into the driver’s seat. Jem held his breath. A few weeks ago, this had been a pile of junk cluttering up the pavement. Could it be that he and Dad had turned that junk into something that really worked? Dad turned the key. Jem bit his lip. Dad touched the accelerator. The engine roared. The van shook, but it didn’t fall apart.