The Grunts In a Jam

by Philip Ardagh

  It goes without saying that you should never, ever, EVER walk around with a firework in your pocket or anywhere else for that matter. You could badly injure yourself, quite apart from other people, pets, livestock and wildlife, as well as damaging property. It’s stupid and dangerous.* [*EDITOR’S NOTE: He’s not joking.] But, while we’re on the subject of don’ts, I could add:

  DON’T sit on a guess-the-weight-of-the-cake cake.

  DON’T smash locally-made pottery.

  DON’T tamper with the settings on other people’s knitting machines.

  DON’T blow up toilets, whether it’s with fireworks, a stick of dynamite or plastic explosives.

  Is that clear? I do hope so. I wish it had been for Mr Grunt. If, from the start, all the different people he’d upset had realised that Mr Grunt had been responsible for all those other people’s upset, dotted about the field, then he’d probably have been chased away from the country fair, or arrested much sooner. As it was, to begin with most victims thought they were the only ones who’d had the misfortune to have a visit from Mr Grunt.

  Mr Grunt, Mrs Lunge, Sunny, Mimi and Ace eventually came across each other. Sunny, Mimi and Ace were eating toffee apples on sticks. Mrs Lunge was pacing around, staring at her orange-toenailed feet, and fretting about the Preserves, Jams and Jellies Competition and how she was bound to lose because Edna Tuppenny was bound to have cheated somehow or bribed the judges. Mr Grunt was busy picking off bits of cake from his clothing (popping each piece in his mouth, of course). They met, by chance, by a big round tent made of animal skins. Such tents are called yurts. Mr Grunt had been in a yurt just once before and had found it very dark and very smelly.

  “Hello, waste-of-space,” said Mrs Lunge to Mr Grunt.

  Mr Grunt wasn’t sure how to respond to that so he kicked the nearest thing: the wall of the yurt.

  There was a THUD from inside.

  This was followed by a GROAN.

  This, in turn, was followed by an “Ayyyyyyyyeeeee!” and a little girl – with her face half-painted like a beautiful blue butterfly, but with a thick, jagged line running across her nose and cheek – came screaming out of the tent. She was followed moments later by the face-painter who Mr Grunt must have kicked over as she sat the other side of the yurt wall. Shaken, the face-painter still clutched her paintbrush in her hand.

  Next, the little girl’s father appeared. He looked angry. No, more than angry. He looked outraged. He was trembling with rage. He looked around to see who had caused his precious daughter – his little princess – such upset. His eyes fell on Mr Grunt. The two men locked stares.

  Mr Grunt pointed at Sunny. The dad turned his attention to the boy.

  A second later, Sunny was running for what seemed like his life, with the furious dad in hot pursuit.

  Mrs Lunge looked at Mr Grunt. “What did you do that for?” she demanded.

  “What did I do what for?”

  “Why did you point at Sunny? Why did you make old beetroot face think it was him who’d kicked the tent, not you?”

  “That’s a why not a what,” said Mr Grunt with immense satisfaction. (Wasn’t such witty wordplay proof of what a clever chap he was?)

  “Why then, idiot-chops?” said Mrs Lunge.

  “Sunny can run much faster than me,” said Mr Grunt.

  Mrs Lunge considered the answer, tilting her head to one side and then the other. “You have a point,” she said. Perhaps her son-in-law wasn’t quite so stupid after all.

  As for Mimi and Ace, they were chasing after the dad chasing after poor old Sunny, on the run for a kick he hadn’t even committed.

  Sunny darted this way and that: around tents, through tents, over prize goats, between the legs of a woman on stilts – her performing name was Tall Tanya Lee, in case you were wondering – and over a barrier into another field.

  Sunny risked another quick look over his shoulder to see that, for the first time, the dad (who’d started out bright red with rage and now was unbelievably redder still from all the running) had lost sight of him for a moment and was looking in the wrong direction. Sunny had to act fast. He needed to hide and he needed to hide NOW.

  Without a second to waste, he clambered into the nearest hiding place.

  Guess where that hiding place was.

  Oh, go on. Don’t be a spoilsport. Guess.

  Not in a tree, no.

  He hid in the front cockpit of one of two biplanes parked side by side in the field.

  What do you mean, why I didn’t mention them before? They weren’t important before. They were just two biplanes, one red and one blue, parked side by side in an otherwise pretty much empty field. (Biplanes are those old-fashioned types of plane that have two wings either side, one above the other, held together with struts and supports, and have open-air cockpits with no roofs.)

  And Sunny was now hunched up in a ball in the front cockpit – there were two – of the blue plane, and pulling himself as low down and out of sight as possible. He could hear someone coming and hardly dared to breathe. The plane rocked a little as someone climbed into the other cockpit.

  Mimi and Ace were as baffled as the angry dad, who’d given up and was now stomping off in search of his partially face-painted princess. Where on earth had Sunny gone?

  Only, technically, now Sunny wasn’t on the earth… The blue biplane had just taxied down the field and taken to the skies.

  Today was an important day for Alphonso Tubb, MD, doctor to the stars, but – although it involved the country fair and his beloved Jenny Prendergast – it had nothing to do with Jams, Jellies and Preserves, for it was Dr Tubb who was in the other cockpit of the blue biplane, piloting the controls.

  This was no ordinary biplane – if biplanes can be considered ordinary – because this particular biplane was also a skywriting plane: a plane used to write messages in the sky with its vapour trail. And now Alphonso was ready for action! He checked his watch. Jenny would have had to have finished laying out her preserves, jams and jellies by now, in time for the judging, which meant that she would be enjoying herself at the fair.

  All he had to do was to wait for the next meticulously timed moment of his plan. His heart beat with excitement; that self-same heart that was filled with love for dearest Jenny. (Yes, I know. This is all a bit sickening, isn’t it?) There was a loudspeaker system set up around the fair, with outdoor speakers rigged up on special stands. It was mainly used for announcements, such as when the next prizes would be awarded, or when the locally-made-lovingly-made-home-made-pottery stall hoped to reopen, or reuniting a bright-red dad with his daughter with a zigzag-painted face. But suddenly, right on cue, music started playing from the speakers.

  Music always sounds terrible – tinny and thin – coming through this kind of speaker but this music sounded even worse than usual. Firstly, because it was played on Dr Tubb’s battery-operated keyboard, which didn’t sound great at the best of times. Secondly, because the doctor had recorded his playing and singing – yes, I did indeed say singing – on the machine that he usually dictated his doctor’s notes into. It wasn’t designed for music. Thirdly, because Dr Alphonso Tubb had not only been making up the tune as he recorded it, but he’d also written the song’s lyrics himself.

  Remember his poems?

  You do?

  Then you see the problem.

  Here are the words that came wafting out of the public address system speakers and across the country fair field:

  Jenny Prendergast,

  Lift up your pretty eyes,

  Cos up in the sky’s

  A nice surprise!

  Then came the part when he would start writing the actual message with the vapour trail. This was the part he’d been practising in secret for months.

  Up in the skies

  Is a plane that is yellow,

  And the person who is flying it

  Is that man-who-loves-you fellow.

  Unfortunately, as you may recall, the plane was in fact blue but Alphonso had
no idea what colour the plane would be when he wrote the song and he chose yellow because he could think of something that it would rhyme with. He wasn’t that bothered that the plane turned out not to be yellow because of “artistic licence” – where an artist can change the facts to suit his art, as in tell a lie – and the fact that it was unlikely there’d be another plane up above the country fair at the same time. And so the song continued:

  And the message he’s writing

  Is meant just for you!

  Be sure to say “Yes!”

  Doo-bee doo-bee doo! and yes, you’re right, the Doo-bee doo-bee doo! part was particularly dreadful.

  So the music had started playing and it had the desired effect. Hearing her name, Jenny dashed away from the stroke-the-fluffy-bunnies stall to see what was going on, closely followed by Norris Bootle.

  When she saw the plane she squealed in delight. “That’s Tubby up there!” she chirped. (Along with Sunny, of course, but she didn’t know that then.) “My Tubby!”

  Now crowds of people were gathering in clusters, looking up to see what was happening. People spilled out of tents and away from stalls.

  The plane began to write:

  Just then, another biplane came into view. It was the red one that had been parked next to the blue one in the field. This one was piloted by a chap called WingCo Fish. (WingCo isn’t a name but is short for Wing Commander.) He too was on a mission remarkably similar to Dr Tubb’s but on behalf of a certain Mr N Bootle from The Hearty Underwear Company. He did quite a lot of work for Hearty’s (which is what had given Norris his brilliant idea).

  WingCo Fish had a message to deliver but, unlike with Dr Alphonso Tubb’s biplane, this message wasn’t written out in a live-as-it-happened vapour trail but on a long, thin banner pulled behind it.

  The banner that Norris had supplied the pilot with was supposed to read:

  but somehow there had been a mix-up. The banner that was now unfurled behind the plane and stretched out like a fluttering ribbon was the one WingCo Fish often used for the company. It read:

  There was laughter from the crowd.

  There was a gasp of horror from Norris Bootle.

  Jenny Prendergast looked from the banner up in the sky down to Norris Bootle at her side. Then back up again. She burst into tears, running into the nearest tent to hide her upset and her shame.

  Now, I’m rather hoping that at least some of you are wondering how poor Sunny was doing while all this was going on. You’re probably well aware how important it is to wear a seatbelt in a car, so imagine how important it was for him to be wearing a seatbelt in an open cockpit of a biplane being flown by a part-time pilot. And not just flown but whooped and swooped and loop-the-looped as Dr Tubb formed the letters of his skywriting message.

  When Alphonso Tubb first spotted Sunny in the cockpit in front of his, as the boy nervously raised his head from hiding, he let out a surprised, “What the devil?” but Sunny heard none of it. The doctor’s words were snatched by the wind and whisked away behind him, rather than in the direction of Sunny’s ears.

  When Sunny turned and looked at him and gawped, clinging on to the rim of the cockpit until his knuckles were white, Dr Tubb recognised those ears at once. “Sunny Grunt!” he gasped in amazement.

  Under just about any other circumstance, Dr Tubb would probably have turned the plane round and gone in to land immediately, but he was at the start of a meticulously planned mission where timing was everything and he may never have the opportunity again. And anyway, if the boy had stowed away for a bit of adventure, where was the harm in that? Sunny had seemed a sensible boy back at the surgery and was bound to have strapped himself in good and tight.

  What Dr Tubb didn’t know, of course, was that Sunny had had no idea the plane was about to take off. To him, it had just been a hiding place. Strapping himself in had been the last thing on his mind.

  Sunny was in for a bumpy ride.

  With most people on the ground distracted by the aeroplanes up in the air, Mrs Grunt decided that now was a good time to make sure that her dear little mum – Mrs Lunge to you – beat the dreaded Edna Tuppenny in the Preserves, Jams and Jellies Competition. Of course, the only way she could make sure that her mother’s food tasted better than her arch-rival’s was by making sure that Edna Tuppenny’s entries tasted truly dreadful. But how could she do that?

  Simple! Sabotage (which is a great word for “deliberately destroy, obstruct or damage”). Hmmm. Well, Mrs Grunt certainly didn’t plan to destroy Edna’s preserves, jams and jellies – it would be a bit of a giveaway if Edna’s jars were smouldering shards of exploded glass – but she might obstruct their chance of winning by causing some damage though!

  Mrs Grunt had come out of the caravan to see what all the music, “Ooooh”-ing and “Aaaaah”-ing, and aeroplane-engine noises were about, and decided that now would be the perfect time to strike. She clambered back up the caravan steps in her bunny slippers.

  Once inside, she flipped up the cushion of the very sofa where she’d been napping not ten minutes previously (clutching her favourite cat-shaped doorstop, Chocolate Biscuit). Space was hard to come by in the caravan, so any extra storage room was very useful indeed. The sofa was where Mrs Grunt kept, among other things, what she called her Rummage Bag (a cloth bag full of odds and ends). Tossing aside a half-rotten melon, she pulled out the bag and thrust her hand inside it. There was a terrible snapping noise and she yelped.

  She pulled out her hand to find her fingers stuck in a mousetrap. Stuck to the other side of the trap was a note. It read:

  in Mr Grunt’s handwriting. Mrs Grunt chuckled at the cleverness of her husband while at the same time planning her revenge!

  She freed her hand from the mousetrap and stuffed it back in her Rummage Bag, this time de-snapped and harmless. She slipped the strap of the bag over her shoulder and was ready to go.

  Little did she know that she’d been watched all this time by someone crouching outside the caravan, peering through a window, the top of their head hidden beneath a baseball cap. Now that Mrs Grunt set off in search of the Competition Marquee, the coat-wearing figure followed at a distance.

  When Mrs Grunt reached the tents, just about everyone was outside watching the planes. Looking left and then right, she got down on to the grass on all fours, pulled up a section of canvas wall at the side of the Competition Marquee, then crawled inside it on her hands and knees.

  There was no one else in sight. She looked along the rows of tables and spotted the jars of preserves, jams and jellies on three long tables about halfway down, between the tables of Most Overweight Pumpkins and an Under-12s competition for Vegetables Looking or Smelling Most Like Famous People.

  Mrs Grunt didn’t want to add something to Edna Tuppenny’s jars that would make Lady Bigg unwell when judging. She just needed to add some nasties.

  Mrs Grunt rummaged in her Rummage Bag. It was FULL of those.

  At first, she considered adding a dash of Blow’s Extra Strong Chilli Sauce, say, or some dried, crushed wild garlic, but she decided that this might be a bit of a giveaway. So what to choose? Whatever she chose, she didn’t have much time. She set to work.

  It was all going fine until the second biplane – the red one, flown by WingCo Fish, pulling the Hearty Underwear banner – flew on to the scene and Jenny Prendergast ran sobbing into the nearest tent…

  Unfortunately for Mrs Grunt, the nearest tent was the very Competition Marquee where she was, and the tear-soaked Miss Prendergast burst in just as she was adding a dead fly to a jar of Edna’s jelly.

  Their eyes met.

  Jenny Prendergast screamed just as Norris Bootle appeared behind her.

  “No one but the judges is currently permitted in––” said a voice, which turned out to belong to the lady with the blue glasses, clutching a clipboard, who was spilling in after them. She too saw Mrs Grunt. “Madam,” she said. “Explain yourself!”

  “She was tampering with the jars!” said Norr
is. “I saw her! She was tampering!” (If truth be told, he was grateful for something – anything – to distract Jenny from the unfortunate Hearty-Underwear-banner-mix-up-based interruption to Dr Alphonso Tubb’s skywriting. If only his banner had carried the “Be Mine Forever” message he’d planned, how different things might have been.)

  “You’re … you’re CHEATING!” wailed Jenny Prendergast, with the kind of horror the rest of us would reserve for discovering someone eating an endangered species in a sandwich.

  “Am not!” said Mrs Grunt.

  “Are!” rasped a voice that sounded as if it belonged to a lizard that ate gravel for a living.

  Everyone turned to look at who’d spoken: a newcomer to the tent, a tall, angular woman with sharp features and very flat hair. She was sweating. It was Edna Tuppenny. “I’ve had my eye on your mother and you!”

  “I am not cheating,” said Mrs Grunt, which was technically true. She had been cheating but had stopped when they’d all piled into the marquee.

  “Then what precisely are you doing?” demanded the lady with the clipboard.

  “She was trying to help me find my contact lens,” said a voice that made everyone jump. Moments later, Ma Lunge appeared from under the table. “I was looking on the ground here while she was checking my jars to see if it had fallen in one of them,” she said, brushing a few blades of grass off her knees. “But the lens is bound to be lost or trodden on,” she sighed. “Or both.”

  “Right,” said Mrs Grunt. “So true.” She might have been more convincing if she hadn’t so obviously been as startled as the rest of them.

  “Contact lens?” said the clipboard lady. “A likely story. I’m going to have to ask you to come with me!”