Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  “Dad,” said Jem, “it’s alive.”

  Before the Tooting family packed up their things and hit the road, Dad wanted to test the van. “Let’s hope she’s as good to drive as she is to look at,” he said.

  Jem sat in the front passenger seat, and they cruised down the high street and out of town. The van was so curvy, so perfectly finished, that just seeing it rolling down the street made people feel good.

  If seeing it made you feel good, driving it made you feel amazing. Dad felt like a king in a carriage, surveying his loving subjects as they pointed from the side of the road. But while Dad was concentrating on waving and smiling, Jem was listening to the engine. In modern cars, there are lights and dials and alarms that tell you everything that is happening inside. In old cars, there is no such thing. In old cars, you have to learn to listen to the engine, to notice any strange rattles or rumbles and try to figure out what they mean.

  “Listen,” said Jem. “Listen to that.”

  “It sounds all right to me,” said Dad. “A throaty roar, a motor that’s raring to go.”

  “Shh, there it is again,” said Jem.

  “I can’t hear anything.”

  “Exactly. Every now and then, you can’t hear anything. Every now and then, the engine misses a beat. Listen . . .” They both listened. “I think we’ve got a spark-plug problem,” said Jem.

  Dad shrugged. “I’ll clean them out when we get home.”

  “We’ve already cleaned the spark plugs. More than once,” said Jem. “They must be cracked. We’ll need new ones.”

  “Where will we get new spark plugs for a 1960s camper van, I ask. That is an unusual and antiquated spark plug. Surely we can manage. It seems all right to me.”

  “That’s because you’re not really listening. An engine like this, you have to listen carefully. There is a problem with the spark plugs, and we can’t go thousands of miles with damaged spark plugs. I’m going to call Mum.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Mum, when she heard Jem’s voice. “You’ve broken down. Well, never mind.”

  “No, we haven’t. Not yet, anyway. We need new spark plugs. And we thought that as you work in Unbeatable Motoring Bargains, you might know where to get them.”

  “My boss,” said Mum, “Mr. Unbeatable, buys all his spares from Bucklewing Scrap and Salvage. But be very careful. Bucklewing Corner is an accident black spot.”

  Bucklewing Corner is first mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086), where it is called “Bwcle Wynde Crofte”— which means “Caution: Very Sharp Bend.” It was this sharp bend that made the Bucklewing family its fortune.

  In Norman times, farmers going to market found it hard to manoeuvre their wagons around Bucklewing Corner without dropping tons of carrots and turnips and rutabagas into the Bucklewing field. Far more vegetables fell into that field than anyone could possibly have grown in it. Old Guillaume de Bucklewing would order his serfs to collect them all and sell them. One hundred years later, when King John was fleeing from the invading French, he was going far too fast on the approach to Bucklewing Corner and his treasure coach completely overturned, spilling gold and coins and Crown jewels all over the place. The young Bucklewing men did their very best to help him collect it all and get him on his way, but somehow they missed a few hundred gold coins and several large diamond rings. They looked after these carefully in case the king came back, but he never did because he died of a surfeit of peaches. After that the Bucklewing men used the money to build Bucklewing Farm.

  The Corner really began to make money in 1901, when a motorist completely misread the turn and drove his horseless carriage — a Roger-Benz of German and French manufacture — straight through the brambles, did a double backward somersault, and landed radiator down in the field. Mrs. Bucklewing took very good care of the driver, who kept apologizing for ruining her hedge. He bought a dozen eggs and limped on his way, promising to come back and get the car as soon as his courage returned. It seemed that his courage never did return because the car stayed standing on its end in the middle of the field for almost a month, when it was knocked flying by a speeding Humber Voiturette, driven by a young lady who was attempting to escape from an unsuitable marriage and really had no idea how to drive at all. She hid awhile in the Bucklewing barn, and when the unsuitable groom came looking for her, the Bucklewings told him she’d stolen their donkey and ridden away to the coast. A few months later, the runaway bride married the youngest Bucklewing boy — Hornblower Bucklewing II. She never moved her car, either. From time to time, another driver would come flying through the hedge and crash into the field. At first it was just a car or maybe two each year, but as cars became more popular, so did crashes. Soon cars were crashing through the hedge on a more or less weekly basis. It was Hornblower Bucklewing VI who decided there was no point even trying to move them. They should stop calling it a field and start thinking of it as a spontaneously occurring scrapyard. Naturally it was the fastest cars that crashed most often, so the field soon filled up with expensive sports cars — Jensen Interceptors, MGs, E-Type Jaguars. People paid very good money to come and take their tyres, wing mirrors, and other spare parts, or even just to come and look at them. Hornblower Bucklewing IX opened a tearoom in the back of a huge wooden truck that had skidded in on the ice one Christmas. The truck had been carrying hundreds of turkeys, which the Bucklewings kept and cooked. People said the Bucklewings liked living on an accident black spot; that when the government offered to straighten the road, the Bucklewings wouldn’t let them; that when the local council put up a warning sign, the Bucklewings pulled it down. That’s what they said.

  The truth is, if the government ever really had put up a sign, it wouldn’t have been long before someone crashed into it.

  Dad did not crash, though. He drove through the gates at just the right speed and parked next to a crumpled-up ice-cream van. A man carrying a blowtorch and wearing big gloves and a protective helmet popped out from behind it and introduced himself. “Hornblower Bucklewing the Eleventh at your service. Have you just crashed?”

  “No.”

  “Coming too fast around the corner, I suppose.”

  “The corner was fine.”

  “If you’ve crashed, I’m afraid your car belongs to me. The moment your vehicle comes through the hedge, it becomes the property of Bucklewing Scrap and Salvage. There is a notice about it on the road.”

  “We didn’t crash,” said Dad. “We’ve parked over there.”

  The moment Mr. Bucklewing saw the camper van, he gave a low whistle. “That is a beauty,” he said. “I’ve never seen such a beauty. Where did you get her?”

  “Built it.” Dad shrugged. “Restored it. With the help of young Jeremy here.”

  Jem winced. It had taken him years to trim down his big, curly, old-fashioned name to the smart, streamlined “Jem.” Dad always Jeremyed him when he was showing off. Now this man would be Jeremying him all afternoon.

  “Grand job,” said Mr. Bucklewing, taking off his helmet and gloves and putting down the blowtorch. “A very grand job. That is what you call a head-turner.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “I do, and I know what I’m talking about.” He pulled a crumpled tweed hat out of his pocket and put it on his head. “One thing I know about is beautiful cars. Why? Because foolish motorists keep driving them through my hedge, sir. Sometimes I walk around this place and look at the chrome and the leather and the paintwork and the lovely lines of these vehicles, and then I think about the thickheaded drivers who wreck them, and, sir, it makes me angry, sir — that’s what it does. Oh so . . . angry.” On the last “angry,” he banged so hard on the wing of a nearby Porsche that his fist went straight through it, and Dad had to help him get his hand out again.

  “A 356 Speedster,” said the man, shaking his head sadly as he waggled his hand free. “One of the prettiest little cars ever built, and now look at her. Abandoned and forgotten. What do you call her?”

  “What?”

 
“Your camper van. A motor like that should have a name. It’s not like it’s some run-of-the-mill four-wheel drive with satnav and a super de-icer. That’s a vehicle with heart; that’s one you’re going to need to talk to — to coax her round corners and swear at when she won’t start.”

  “You’re right,” said Dad. “I hadn’t thought of that. Jem, what about a name for our masterpiece?”

  But Jem was thinking of other things. Standing there in the scrapyard, looking around at the heaps of rusty metal and twisted fenders, he was reminded of just how much he liked things to be new and normal. Who in their right mind would want a car that you had to swear at?

  “Dad,” he said, “why don’t we sell the van and use the money to buy a modern car?”

  “Well, it’s a thought . . .” said Dad. He looked around at the piles of battered and crumpled cars. “I could live like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know, taking broken things — things that everyone else thinks are wrecked and finished — and making them look like new. I’d love that. Giving people hope. And cars.”

  “Be my guest,” said Mr. Bucklewing.

  “Really?” said Jem. “You’d give my dad a job?”

  “A job?” said Mr. Bucklewing. “Who said anything about a job? Do you think I’m made of money?” He thumped the rusty Porsche again. Once again he went straight through the metal, so now his other hand was stuck in the car.

  “Dad could fix the cars,” said Jem. “You could sell them for a fortune.”

  Mr. Bucklewing looked at the ground. “It doesn’t really work like that around here,” he said. “I don’t like paying people.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “People like to be paid money. I don’t like to pay them. That leads to disagreements, and disagreements make me uncomfortable. No offence.”

  “Offence?” Dad laughed. “Of course there’s no offence. I’m not against jobs, you understand, but I don’t have time to take one now. We’ve got bigger fish to fry. We’re going to travel round the world in our van here. Isn’t that right, Jem? Just as soon as we can find some new spark plugs.”

  “Then be my guest.” Mr. Bucklewing smiled. “Take a look around. If you can find any, they’re yours. It’d be an honour to supply parts for a vehicle like that. We did have a camper van crash here once back in the early seventies. Orange, it was. Some hairy young people heading for Marrakech. Like so many others, they only got as far as Bucklewing Corner. As I recall, they crashed into a tree. Car is probably still up in the branches somewhere. Take a look.”

  As he said, “Take a look,” he finally managed to get his hand free of the rusted metalwork. Looking at the two jagged holes he’d punched in the Porsche, Jem thought that Mr. Bucklewing probably wasn’t the best person to have as your boss, anyway.

  Bucklewing Scrap and Salvage is a vast labyrinth of broken and rusting vehicles. Trucks lie on top of vans, and cars lie on top of trucks in tottering piles of wheels and pipes and radiators. Columns of used tyres mark each corner. Herds of lorries lie about the place like dozing dinosaurs.

  Jem and his dad wandered down boulevards of broken-down buses, along avenues of wrecked racers, and streets of smashed-up sedans until they came to a strange patch of woodland — where oak trees and 4×4s seemed to be growing side by side, fenders and tyres hanging from the branches like blossom and fruit.

  “There,” said Jem. The unmistakable back end of a camper van was sticking out from a tangle of brambles. The van had flowers painted on it, and the brambles were covered in blossoms. The boot was open, and Jem could see the spark plugs sitting in the rear-mounted engine like a row of milk bottles. All they had to do was pick them out and go.

  “What’s that?” said Dad, staring up into the fork of the fattest oak. “There’s something up there.”

  “Leaves?” said Jem. “Twigs? Squirrels? Come on, we’ve found the spark plugs. Let’s take them and go.”

  Dad was already pulling a ladder from the remains of an ancient fire engine. He propped this against the trunk of the oak and clambered up.

  “Dad, come down.”

  “Jem, come up and look at this.” Lying among the leaves like a fat sleepy cat, Dad had found an engine, but it wasn’t the engine of a camper van. It was something much, much bigger. He tore the branches and leaves aside and hoisted the biggest branch over his shoulder, opening up a kind of green cave of leaves and twigs. Lying in that cave was something that looked more like a petrol-driven dragon than a car component. Honeysuckle curled in and out of its twisty complication of steel pipes and brass pistons. Moss obscured something that looked like a huge dark mouth. Squirrels and robins dodged in and out of its corners and chambers, as though the engine had simply grown here and this oak was actually a car-parts tree.

  “What is it?” gasped Jem, who had finally climbed up after his dad.

  “That is an engine,” said Dad. “That is an engine and a half.”

  “But how can it be an engine? It’s huge. It must be from an aeroplane.”

  “No. Look. There’s the steering wheel.”

  Dad crawled out along the branch.

  “Careful, Dad. Be careful,” warned Jem.

  Dad kept crawling along, snapping twigs and pulling away leaves. It really was more than just an engine. It was the whole insides of a vast vanished car. There was the steering rack, the starter mechanism, the axles, the exhausts . . .

  “Jem, come and see this. . . .”

  There was a twisted metal bar sticking out of the front of the engine, with a kind of handle on the end. “Do you know what that is?” asked Dad.

  “No.”

  “It’s a hand crank. This engine must be seriously old. Instead of putting a key in the ignition, you grab hold of this and you crank it like so until the engine gets going. . . .”

  “Dad, don’t! What if it . . . ?”

  But it already had. As Dad turned the crank, the engine spluttered, then coughed, and finally roared.

  “Dad! Look what you’ve done!”

  Dad let go of the crank, but it carried on spinning, faster and faster like a propeller.

  “Listen to that!” yelled Dad. “That is a beautiful sound. That is music.”

  It sounded more like an earthquake. It also felt like one. The branches of the tree shook. Squirrels scattered. Birds fled. A storm of leaves and acorns whirled around Jem’s head. “Stop! Dad! Turn it off!”

  “Here’s the pedal. I’m going to rev it. . . .”

  The engine roared louder than ever. Branches snapped. Under Jem’s feet the ladder whipped left and right. “Please, Dad! Stop!” Branches splintered. There was a terrible noise, a noise like a massive old engine falling out of a tree onto a dilapidated fire engine. And the cause of that noise? A twelve-cylinder possibly aeroplane engine falling out of a tree onto the roof of a dilapidated fire engine and squashing it like an old concertina.

  “Dad!” shrieked Jem. “Dad? Are you dead?”

  “Not dead,” Dad called, “but very, very excited.”

  It wasn’t long before Mr. Bucklewing came along to see what the noise was. He walked around the engine, stroking his chin. “Now, that,” he said, “is what I call a beast. A Beast! Think of the power, the strength of an engine like that, and now what is it? Just an overcomplicated squirrel nest. A car like that,” he said, sniffing, “should be running free, out on the road, guzzling petrol, pouring out smoke. But look at it, lying there. What a waste.” He took his hat off and clasped it to his chest as a sign of respect. “Why, why, why? All because some thickheaded motorist drove too fast into the corner — that’s why.” He pulled back his foot as if to kick the engine with his steel-capped boot.

  “No!” said Dad. “Stop! Just because something has been cast aside, abandoned, thrown on the scrap heap, does that mean it’s of no use? What if . . . ?” Mr. Bucklewing’s boot came nearly but not all the way down again. He was keeping a kick in reserve just in case. “What if we saved this engine? What if we
gave it a new life? What if we took this beautiful, neglected old engine and used it in our camper van?”

  “What?” shrieked Jem. “No, no, no, no. This engine’s bigger than the van!”

  “Well, just looking at it”— Mr. Bucklewing bent down for a closer look —“the engine in the camper van is usually fitted sideways in the rear, but what if you lifted up the whole chassis and slipped the engine underneath? What if you just made the van a bit taller so the engine could lie along the bottom? I could help you.”

  “No,” said Jem. “Every kind of car has its own kind of engine, and this is not the kind of engine for our kind of car.”

  “The word today,” said Dad, “is customize.”

  It occurred to Jem that no one ever asked him what the word of the day was.

  “This is a great opportunity,” Dad said with a smile, “to give our van a new engine. This beautiful, redundant engine a new body.”

  “This is a great opportunity,” agreed Mr. Bucklewing, “for you to make me happy”— he stared hard at Jem —“or sad.” He stared harder at Jem. Jem decided it was probably best to say nothing.

  Jem was right, by the way, about the right kind of engine for the right kind of car. The twenty-three-window camper van normally has a flat-four engine. This means it’s got four little pistons in facing pairs. They go in and out at the same time, so when it’s working, it looks as though they’re playing pat-a-cake.

  The engine that Dad had found had twelve big pistons in a line, worked by a mighty crankshaft. When it’s working, it doesn’t look like a game of pat-a-cake. It looks like a battalion of furious robots punching each other to death.

  The flat-four engine has a capacity of 1.5 litres.

  The engine that Dad found had a capacity of TWENTY-THREE litres.

  The flat-four engine was built to power a camper van.

  This engine was built to power a fighter plane.

  Putting an engine like that into a camper van was like putting the heart of a Tyrannosaurus rex into a hamster. Dad did it anyway. In spite of all that Jem could say. And Mr. Bucklewing helped him. He used his own crane to help lift the chassis and his blowtorch to weld everything into place. The chassis fitted over the engine surprisingly well, except for the two huge exhaust pipes sticking out of the back and the massive radiator at the front.