The Grunts In a Jam

by Philip Ardagh

  Mrs Lunge was on her feet now. She fixed her eyes on those of her arch-rival. “Oh, there you are, Edna,” she sighed. “I was wondering when you’d show up and spoil the party.”

  Edna Tuppenny was about to reply when she was interrupted by a few loud bangs followed by an enormous explosion.

  To explain the KABOOM – because that’s what the explosion sounded like – we need to go back just a little bit, to when Dr Alphonso Tubb’s so-called music first started wailing out of the speakers and people looked up to the sky. While all this was going on, Mimi, Ace and Mr Grunt were part of only a handful of visitors to the country fair who’d not stopped doing what they were doing to see what all the fuss was about up-in-the-air.

  Mimi and Ace were still looking for Sunny.

  “He can’t have vanished into thin air,” said Mimi, as Frizzle and Twist flitted above her head. “And he must know that angry man’s not still after him after all this time.”

  “I’m running out of places to look,” said Ace.

  Just then, something came hurtling out of the sky and landed on the tea tent to their left. It skittered down the tarpaulin roof and landed at Mimi’s feet with a crunch. She looked down at it. It was a toffee apple, just like the ones she, Ace and Sunny had been clutching when the red-faced dad was in hot pursuit. Just like the toffee apples being eaten by men, women and children all over the fair…

  …but how come this one had fallen out of the sky? Now Mimi looked up at the biplanes: the red one with a pilot and the blue one with a pilot and a passenger. She could clearly see someone in the front cockpit waving his arms about.

  No! Surely not, she thought. It can’t be … can it?

  But what was Mr Grunt up to? I hear you ask. Well, I don’t actually hear you ask – probably because you’re not asking or, if you are, you’re much too far away – but I’ll tell you anyway. Mr Grunt was busy looking at the GUESS THE NUMBER OF BEES IN THE HIVE display. The local beekeepers’ association had brought along a special hive. The sides were made of the usual overlapping pieces of wood, painted white, but the usual roof – which doubled as a lid – had been replaced with a glass one. This was so that people could look inside and see the busy, buzzy bees at work.

  The prize for the person guessing the closest to the beekeeper’s own estimate of the number of bees would win a very large jar of honey. Mr Grunt wasn’t particularly interested in honey – though he had enjoyed pouring some into a pair of Mrs Grunt’s shoes one time as a little surprise, and it certainly improved the taste of some of the roadkill – but he loved the jar. Though made of glass, as jars often are, this one was shaped like a huge trophy, with a base, a stem, a handle on either side and a lid with a knobble on top. It looked like a see-through football-championship-cup. Once the honey was used up, he could rinse it out and use it to show off the marbles and special glass eyes (shaped like complete eyeballs) he’d collected over the years. It would be perfect!

  “How much a guess?” he asked the woman staffing the stall, dressed in her full beekeeping clothing, including a round hat with a veil to protect her face.

  The woman eyed him nervously through the veil. She’d never actually met Mr Grunt before but she’d heard talk of him, and the plaster-over-the-nose made him seem even more – er – what’s the word? Odd.

  She told him the price.

  Mr Grunt grunted, pulling a small woman’s purse from his trouser pocket. I don’t mean “a small woman’s-purse” in that the purse was small. I mean “a small-woman’s purse” in that the purse belonged to a small woman: Mrs Lunge. Mr Grunt had decided to look after her purse for her without wasting time by asking her first.

  He pulled out a clump of coins and shoved them into the beekeeper’s gloved hands, without checking the amount. “I want six guesses,” he said. Then he leaned over the top of the hive, pressing his nose right up against the glass roof, peering deep inside. “It’s impossible to tell how many there are in there!” he grumbled, his breath misting the glass. “S’not fair.”

  “Everyone has an equal chance of estimating,” said the beekeeper.

  “Well, I wants a proper look,” said Mr Grunt and – before she could say “Don’t be a fool!” – he’d prised off the glass roof with his fingers.

  “Wait––” began the woman, reaching forward to try to get the lid from him.

  This annoyed Mr Grunt so much that he kicked the hive.

  Now, to accompany the sound of the skywriting and Hearty Underwear planes up in the air, there was a loud buzzing of bees down on the ground: a swarm of bees that were even MORE angry and annoyed than Mr Grunt was … and they were chasing him.

  Mr Grunt ran around stalls like a metal ball in a pinball machine, the bees in stingingly hot pursuit. He zoooooooooooomed past Mr Lippy, who was now juggling for an audience of one – a boy of about five or six – because the rest of the crowd had drifted off to look up at Alphonso Tubb in his plane.

  The boy had stayed watching, mesmerised, because Mr Lippy was now juggling flaming clubs.

  It was one of these clubs that Mr Grunt snatched from the stunned clown as he ran past, the bees close behind. Mr Grunt had once been told that bees didn’t like smoke, so waving around a flaming club seemed like an excellent idea.

  He waved it this way. He waved it that. He waved it in a figure of eight. He even tried a figure of nine. Basically, he waved that flaming club all over the place, without ever slowing down from an all-out run. The bees were just seconds behind him.

  Waving the club certainly wouldn’t have been a bad idea, if he hadn’t dashed through a gap in a fence leading to a separate field, where the end-of-day fireworks display had been set up (the opposite side of the fair to the field which the planes used as a grassy runway).

  Tripping over one of the ropes fencing off an area in the centre of the display, the torch flew from his hands into a cluster of firework rockets.

  As the bees finally reached Mr Grunt, the flames of Mr Lippy’s torch lit the blue touchpaper – the fuses – and the rockets burst into life…

  Unfortunately, among the fireworks was a prototype for a brand-spanking-new firework rocket that wasn’t yet officially on the market. It was called the OOMPH 5.

  Most fireworks go up in the air so far and then no further. The prototype OOMPH 5 rocket went up 200 metres without pausing for breath, and then climbed higher and higher still…

  And the end result? KABOOM!

  (Yes, that KABOOM! The one on page 147.)

  Funnily enough, Sunny was not unfamiliar with planes unexpectedly hurtling downwards. I was going to say “hurtling to the ground”, but the last hurtling plane he’d seen – well, if truth be told, the only one he’d seen – had hurtled into the sea not to the ground. And, anyway, the big difference between that occasion and this was that, in this instance, he was inside the plane.

  At least he was now strapped in. When he’d almost fallen out earlier – when Dr Tubb was banking the plane to write one of the letters, and his toffee apple had gone spiralling into the sky below – he’d grabbed the belt and managed to lash himself to his seat. He had his eyes tight shut, partly out of fear and partly to try to keep the gushing wind out of them. Alphonso Tubb and WingCo Fish weren’t wearing their fancy flying goggles just to look good.

  And why was the blue biplane hurtling downwards?

  Alphonso had just finished skywriting the line and had been in the process of framing the whole message in a heart. Meanwhile, WingCo Fish had been losing altitude – aeroplane talk for losing height – in the Hearty Underwear plane as he prepared to land.

  This meant that, when most of the firework rockets shot up into the air and exploded with a shower of colours, they were a long way from either plane. But, when the massive OOMPH 5 firework kept on going, it was WingCo Fish’s Hearty Underwear plane that it hit.

  The OOMPH 5 was big, packed with gunpowder and, by pure fluke and/or misfortune, it hit the plane’s propeller. The damage was done. Not only that, some of the
sparks from the rocket even sprayed into the open cockpit, setting fire to the pilot’s trousers.

  WingCo Fish said some extremely rude words and started trying to beat out the burning embers on his trousers with one hand, while trying to control the plane spiralling out of control with the other. This wasn’t his best day in the air.

  High above, Dr Tubb spotted the red plane in trouble far below. His natural instinct as a doctor and an amateur pilot was to help and – without pausing and without warning – he put the old biplane into a nosedive, to try to reach the stricken red plane. Sunny could do nothing but hold on tight and hope for the best. And – oh yes – go, “Aaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhh!!!”

  Alphonso Tubb didn’t actually own the blue biplane. He was a doctor to the stars and one such patient was the film star Dirk Norwich. Dirk had put the doctor in touch with stuntman Zac “Buckwheat” Harris, who had his own skywriting plane, and had spent the previous few weekends teaching Dr Tubb how to fly it.

  As the doctor took the biplane down almost vertically – and Sunny felt as though his stomach had somehow ended up in his not-so-level ears – two things happened: the engine made a strange coughing sound, and a rather important lever came off in Dr Tubb’s hand, followed by a stream of cogs and nuts and bolts trailing up in the air behind it.

  “That’s never happened to me before!” he wailed, not that Sunny could hear him up ahead, which was also directly below, remember. They were heading DOWN.

  Sunny had one thought on his mind at that moment: We’re going to die! We’re going to die! We’re going to die! and I suspect that if anyone were to ask him, “Can you imagine things getting worse?” he would – between screams – have shouted, “No!” or shook his head.

  But they did get worse.

  Their plane had now caught up with WingCo Fish’s plane, and the propeller became entangled in the HEARTY UNDERWEAR banner.

  This was not good news.

  Back on the ground, Mimi was acting fast. Following the falling toffee apple and familiar arm-waving, she was convinced that Sunny was in that plane. She’d hurried to the caravan with Ace and, hearing the “KABOOM!”, dashed over to Fingers the elephant.

  “Quick, Fingers!” she said. “Up!”

  The elephant eyed Mimi for a moment with his intelligent elephant’s eyes then carefully wrapped his trunk around her waist, lifted her up and gently plonked her down on his back.

  “You coming?!” she called down to Ace.

  “Where?” asked Ace.

  “To reach the planes when they land,” said Sunny.

  “Crash, more like,” said Ace. “You bet!” Fingers lifted him up and placed him behind Mimi, with Frizzle and Twist just above her head.

  “Come on, Fingers!” said Mimi. “I think Sunny is up there. Follow those planes!” She gave Fingers a handful of the peanuts she’d grabbed from his nearby sack. The elephant took them in his trunk and popped them in his mouth as he lumbered off through the car park.

  With WingCo Fish’s biplane struck by the OOMPH 5 and propeller-less, and Dr Tubb’s and Sunny’s plane hurtling downwards, Mimi and Ace wanted to get there FAST. Which is why, when they reached the first hedge, Mimi didn’t spend too much time looking for a gap or a gate but simply said, “Straight through, Fingers!” and urged the elephant on.

  Fingers didn’t need telling twice. He trampled through the hedge and was in the next field, gathering speed.

  “Hold on tight!” shouted Mimi, talking to Ace this time.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” shouted Ace. This was turning out to be a very exciting day indeed.

  Dr Alphonso Tubb had never been so frightened in all his life, and he’d been through some pretty frightening moments over the years. There was the time Bing Bong, the famous magician, turned up at his surgery and sawed him in half, and an instance when he ended up hanging from the window ledge up on the forty-fourth storey of a hotel when he mistook the window for a door. But nothing compared to now, being strapped in a crippled biplane swooping down at crazy speeds.

  The doctor came to the conclusion that the best way to fight the fear was to make the most of the situation, so he threw back his head and let out a “Yahoooooooh!” It was the sort of “Yahoooooooh!” a cowboy might make before facing a horde of attacking American Indians all on his lonesome.

  It would have been loud enough for Sunny to hear up front if he hadn’t been howling in panic too. Meanwhile, down below, Mimi and Ace charged through the fields on Fingers’ back, trying to keep sight of the two stricken biplanes in the sky just up ahead of them, and Norris Bootle had reached his Hearty Underwear van.

  “Come on, old girl!” Norris called out to Jenny Prendergast, who was hurrying down the lane behind him. There was an unspoken truce between the two of them. First, they’d have to find her beloved Tubby and see if he was all right, THEN she could blame him for the TOTAL EMBARRASSMENT of the banner.

  By the time Jenny reached the passenger door, Norris was inside the van and firing up the engine. She jumped in and barely had time to close the door behind her before he had pulled out into the lane. There was a screech of tyres on tarmac as he sped in the general direction of the planes.

  Thanks to Fingers, with his wide elephant strides, and their travelling directly across the fields, Mimi and Ace were the first to reach WingCo Fish’s plane. They arrived just as it skimmed the top of a clump of trees, the stubby remains of the banner fluttering from the tail fin like a fish out of water in the throes of life. (All that was left was:

  The part had been ripped off, spun around and caught up in the other plane’s propeller, right in front of Sunny’s terrified eyes.)

  With amazing skill, WingCo Fish skimmed his plane across the top of the trees and actually managed to land it on its wheels. The little red biplane bounced off the ground then down again, then up down, up down, up down, before finally nose-diving into the ground.

  But there was no mighty bang.

  No burst of flame.

  Back on the ground, the wing commander had freed himself and had run from the cockpit as fast as he could, towards Mimi and the others.

  Moments later, the bottom of Alphonso and Sunny’s biplane clipped the top of the self-same set of trees, ripping the two front wheels from the aircraft. They were left stuck in the branches, like two cherries on stalks, while the plane hurtled on.

  Struggling with what was left of the controls, the doctor attempted to land the old biplane – front-wheel-less – in the far corner of the field where the red plane now rested. The field was full of sheep. The bleating animals scattered in all directions and then, because sheep generally like to follow OTHER sheep, darted in yet more directions in the hope of finding other sheep to follow…

  Thanks to Dr Alphonso Tubb’s surprisingly impressive piloting skills, the plane actually hit the ground straight enough for it skid along the grass on its undercarriage, Sunny holding on like he’d never held on in his life. Then, like the other plane before it, it tipped forward, ploughing the nose – with its already broken propeller – into the field.

  Earth churned up everywhere.

  Sheep bleated.

  Mimi and Ace gasped.

  Then, to their amazement, the whole plane flipped over on to its back, the tail end wedging itself in the “Y” of a tree.

  What seemed so strange was how s-l-o-w-l-y it happened. The movement was almost like a graceful somersault…

  …leaving Alphonso Tubb and Sunny hanging upside-down from their cockpits.

  “Woweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh!” cried Dr Tubb, face breaking into a grin. “Are you all right, Sunny?”

  Sunny didn’t reply. He laughed. It wasn’t exactly a happy laugh, but they’d made it safely to the ground.

  Without waiting for any orders, instructions or even words of encouragement, Fingers strode purposefully up to the plane and, with extraordinary gentleness, wrapped his trunk around upside-down Sunny.

  Sunny gave another laugh. A happy one this time. “Finge
rs, am I glad to see you!” he said, unclipping his seatbelt. Now freed, the elephant carefully turned him the right way up and placed his feet on the ground. Sunny stumbled, but was still held in Fingers’ trunk so managed to steady himself. “Thanks,” he said.

  A look passed between the elephant and boy. One of love and understanding. Fingers unwound his trunk and turned his attention to Alphonso Tubb, who’d wisely stayed put. If, say, Tubb had simply managed to unclip his seatbelt – which was easier said than done with his whole body weight straining on it anyway – he would’ve fallen to the ground head first and possibly broken his neck. As it was, he was more than happy for the elephant to turn him carefully upright and sit him on the grass.

  “Thank you,” said Dr Tubb, now that he was the right way up and back on good old solid ground. He had, of course, recognised Mimi and Ace the instant he’d laid eyes on them. They were busy with Sunny, who was trying to reassure them that he was OK.

  “I’m fine now that I’ve got my feet back on the ground,” he said.

  “What were you doing in the plane?” asked Dr Tubb.

  “Hiding,” said Sunny.

  Dr Tubb was about to ask who from, when WingCo Fish strode over to greet them.

  “Jeepers!” said Fish. “That was some landing.” He looked at Tubb’s wrecked plane. “For both of us.”

  “I was a bit worried when the wheels came off!” Mimi confessed. She pointed to the tree that had ripped them from the plane. They were still hanging from the branches. Everyone stared.