The Grunts In Trouble

by Philip Ardagh

  “Where?” asked Sunny.

  “Here,” said Larry Smalls, pointing to the pile. “One of these.”

  “I meant where should I throw it?” asked Sunny.

  Larry Smalls sighed. “At the gates to the Bigg house, of course,” he said, looking as sad as a box of ignored kittens.

  Sunny looked over at the impressive entrance to the long and winding driveway leading up to the manor house: two big brown stone pillars either side, topped with white stone lions, and two gates of black metal railings with impressive gold-coloured spikes on top.

  He looked back at Larry Smalls in his BIGG AIN’T BEST T-shirt. “Excuse me,” he said a little hesitantly, “but WHY, exactly?”

  “Why?” said Larry Smalls with a gasp. He was wondering a “Why?” of his own. He was wondering why this odd boy – he’d worked out Sunny was a boy – was wearing a strange blue dress. (Or any kind of dress, come to that.)

  “Why would anyone want to throw rocks at the gates?” asked Sunny.

  If you must know, Sunny was very tempted to throw a rock or two. He knew that throwing rocks at things was usually wrong, but there wasn’t any rock-throwing in his life, and the neat pyramid-shaped pile of them did look very throwable.

  Each rock was roughly the size and shape of a tennis ball; just the sort of size you’d want a chuckable rock to be. (Not that I EVER throw rocks, even when one seems to be saying, “Throw me! Throw me!” in a tiny voice inside my head which only I can hear.)

  “Why should you throw them at the gates?” said Larry Smalls. “You ask me WHY?” He looked a mixture of puzzled and outraged and a bit like one of those birds that stands on one leg just because it can. “Because that is the gateway to the home of the Bigg family. That’s why.”

  “Which big family?” asked Sunny, which was yet another perfectly reasonable question.

  “Not a big family,” said Larry Smalls, who had picked the topmost rock off his pyramid-shaped pile of rocks with his long, thin fingers and was now tossing it from one hand to the other. “THE Bigg family. The family called Bigg.”

  “Oh,” said Sunny, though his “oh” made it obvious that he wasn’t any clearer as to why this meant that he should throw rocks.

  Except, perhaps, for the fun of it.

  Looking at the man’s expression, though, Sunny didn’t think that FUN had anything to do with it. He eyed Larry Smalls’ T-shirt. “So the ‘BIGG’ on your T-shirt means the Bigg family then?” He’d assumed it had just been a case of bad spelling.

  “Humph,” said Larry Smalls. The smell of his breath somehow reminded Sunny of the smell of a circus, which was rather strange. “Don’t you know your history, boy?” he asked.

  Not having been to school, Sunny didn’t know much about anything except what Mr Grunt, Mrs Grunt and Mr Grunt’s dad (Old Mr Grunt) had told him, along with the things he’d learned for himself over the years, of course.

  And one of the most important things that he’d learned for himself was to believe half of what Mr Grunt, Mrs Grunt and Mr Grunt’s dad (Old Mr Grunt) told him.

  Sunny was just about to get an answer as to why it might be a good idea to throw rocks at the gates to Bigg Manor, when Mrs Grunt went and spoiled it all.

  She appeared in the doorway of the caravan. For some strange reason – if there was a reason – she had a mouldy old carrot stuck in her unkempt hair. “You’re blocking the road, big nose!” she shouted.

  Larry Smalls – whose nose was no bigger than Mrs Grunt’s – looked rather startled. He was about to protest when Mr Grunt stuck his head out of a window in the roof. “Why have we stopped, wife?” he shouted. “What have you done NOW?”

  “I haven’t done nothing but breathe,” said Mrs Grunt, “and everyone has to breathe.”

  “Except for dead people,” snapped Mr Grunt, leaning dangerously far out of the window.

  “Except for dead people,” his wife agreed.

  “And except for rocks and fridges and stuff,” Mr Grunt added. Because he doesn’t know much about anything, this felt like a very clever conversation he was suddenly having with Mrs Grunt. Quite intellectual, in fact.

  Clip and Clop brought him back to earth with a bump.

  Quite a big bump.

  They had decided that it was high time to walk forward a few donkey paces, causing Mr Grunt to lose his balance, fall out of the window and bounce off the caravan roof on to the road.

  He stood up, adjusted his belt (which his father had made for him out of two smaller belts sewn together) and stood next to his wife.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING BLOCKING OUR WAY?” Mr Grunt shouted at Larry Smalls.

  Before Larry Smalls had a chance to say anything about Bigg not being best, Mr Grunt marched over to him in six purposeful strides and tripped over the pyramid of rocks almost as though he’d done it on purpose.

  Mr Grunt hit the ground like a sack of mummified cats, with a terrific THUD! and an accompanying GRUNT! The rocks went everywhere: some flying through the air, some rolling across the ground and just about ALL of them heading for Larry Smalls.

  Yelping like a cartoon dog who’s had his tail nipped by a crab, Smalls ran for safety. He took a giant leap and scrabbled to the top of his intended target: one of the gates to Bigg Manor.

  “Lunatics!” he shouted, shaking one fist as he held on to a gold-painted spike at the top of the gate with the other. “You’re all lunatics!”

  Somehow the wiry man’s belt had got tangled up in the spikes, looping around one of them. He was stuck, and in trying to wriggle free, lost his grip and found himself hanging from the top of the gates like a dog’s chew toy on a display hook in a pet shop. The “BIGG AIN’T BEST” on his T-shirt was now facing downwards.

  Mrs Grunt twisted her head round to try to read the letters the wrong way up. “Bigg ain’t best at what?” she demanded. She didn’t like it when other people knew something she didn’t, which was most of the time.

  “Bigg ain’t best because I is!” shouted Mr Grunt, and laughed as though he’d just said the funniest thing in the world.

  Mrs Grunt certainly found it funny and laughed so much that her yellow teeth – and even some of her green ones – rattled inside her head.

  Now Larry Smalls’ already crumpled top hat fell from his upturned head to the ground, revealing a bald patch. It landed upright. Moments later, Mr Grunt was wildly throwing Smalls’ carefully selected rocks at it.

  “You shouldn’t throw rocks!” said Mrs Grunt scornfully. “That’s dangerous.” She grabbed the one from Mr Grunt’s hand and threw it as hard as she could at the hat, snatching another off the ground. Fortunately for Larry Smalls, despite the Grunts being such terrible shots, none of the rocks accidentally hit him.

  In fact, the only person to get hit by one of the rocks was Sack, Lord Bigg’s gardener. He had got up early in the morning to hide behind a really big patch of leaves and one of the rocks had gone sailing over the wall and landed on his head. He thought Lord Bigg must have thrown it, so he reluctantly headed off to find his wheelbarrow.

  How Sack hated gardening.

  Bigg Manor was very big and, as you know by now, named after the Bigg family, who had lived in the manor for hundreds and hundreds of years. (Not all at the same time, of course. For one thing, it would have got ridiculously crowded. No, as the old Biggs died, younger ones took their place and then when they grew old and died, the next lot took over, and so on.) Now the only Bigg left in Bigg Manor was Lord Bigg. His wife, Lady Bigg (who referred to herself as “La-La”), had got fed up with him a long time ago and had moved out to live in the pigsty in the garden.

  Poppet the pig already lived there, but she didn’t seem to mind sharing (though she did think Lady Bigg’s table manners were pretty appalling).

  Don’t get the wrong idea. The pigsty at Bigg Manor wasn’t your average pigsty. It wasn’t a small shack with a corrugated iron roof. It was a very fine pigsty built by a very famous English architect called Albert Docks, who designed the gia
nt rabbits that were originally going to go at the bottom of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square in London, until it was decided to have lions instead. But it was still a pigsty.

  Lord Bigg didn’t miss Lady Bigg much any more, and Lady Bigg found Poppet the pig charming company compared to her husband, so all in all everyone in Bigg Manor (and the gardens) was pretty happy.

  Except for the servants.

  So, if you think about it, that meant that only two people (and one pig) were happy, and the rest of them were pretty miserable. And, oh yes, there were the birds in Lord Bigg’s bird collection. They seemed happy enough but, then again, His Lordship did treat them much, much better than he did the servants.

  Back in the old days, when men wore top hats – not short, crumpled ones like Smalls’ – and had big beards, and the women wore layers and layers of frilly things, there were over one hundred servants working at the manor.

  Now there were just five. Count them.

  There was:

  Peach, the red-headed butler (1)

  Agnes, the cook and maid (Two jobs, one person) (2)

  Jack, the handyman (also known as Handyman Jack), who used to be the boot boy (3)

  Sack, the gardener (4) and Mimi, the (newish) boot boy. Mimi was in fact a girl but there’s no such title as a “boot girl”, so a boot boy she was (5).

  And that certainly adds up to five (unless you count at least one of them more than once, or leave one or more out.)

  The Bigg family used to be very rich. They made their money from metal railings. You have to sell a lot of metal railings to make a lot of money, and that’s exactly what they did.

  The government had put the very first Lord Bigg in charge of coming up with a way of stopping people falling off cliffs, and he had a brainwave.

  The first thing he did was get the law-makers to pass a law saying that all cliffs had to have safety railings built along the top of them.

  Then he begged, stole and borrowed money to set up a factory making safety railings.

  Next, he awarded this factory – his factory – the job of making ALL the railings to run along the tops of all the cliffs in the country. But the first Lord Bigg’s brainwave didn’t end there. The final part of his brainwave was almost genius: Lord Bigg made sure that Bigg Railings were good, but not that good. For the first ten years after they’d been put up, they were just the sort of railings you’d want to use to stop people falling off cliffs: big and strong and railing-like. After ten years and one week, though, they’d go all floppy, like the stems of wilting flowers, and then droop to the ground, completely useless. This meant that every ten years the railings had to be replaced with a lot of new Bigg Railings! See what I mean? Clever or what?

  Because different stretches of cliff top were fenced at different times – they couldn’t all be done at once – there was never a time when the government wasn’t paying Lord Bigg’s safety-railings factory for more Bigg Railings!

  And so it went on for years and years and years. All the next Lord Bigg had to do – and the one after that, and the one after that, and so on – was to make sure that someone was running his factory and making railings so that the money kept on rolling in. All he and the Bigg family had to do was to spend, spend, spend, which was the fun part.

  One day, however, the government decided to stop wasting money on fencing off cliff tops. They decided to spend the money on guns and cannons and smart new uniforms for their soldiers instead … and the Bigg Railings factory was left full of railings (which went floppy just over ten years after they were made) with no one to buy them.

  Because the Bigg family had no idea HOW to work, having never had to give it a go, they decided the best way to make money was by selling off some of the stuff they already had.

  The latest Lord Bigg’s grandfather sold off the family tropical island, the fifty-bedroom town house and a fleet of vintage motor cars. Next, Bigg’s father sold off all his wife’s jewellery, his silver foil collection and some of the grounds. (He’d tried to sell his wife only to find that she’d been trying to sell him at exactly the same time. And no one had wanted to buy either of them.) This left next to nothing for the current Lord Bigg to sell, except the railings factory itself and the occasional painting or piece of furniture.

  Because he paid for the servants’ food and drink and let them live in Bigg Manor with him, Lord Bigg really didn’t like having to pay them wages as well. He thought that they should be paying him. But Peach, Agnes, Jack, Sack and Mimi didn’t see it that way. They said they would leave if they didn’t get wages, so Lord Bigg paid them just enough to make them stay. He also made them each sign a very complicated, official-looking contract – with plenty of rubber stamps, and a big red seal at the bottom – which stated that if they thought of leaving without permission, they’d owe him far too much money to dare try.

  So they added the contract to their usual list of grumblings, stayed at Bigg Manor, and felt even more cross and miserable.

  Peach the butler was usually moaning about his corns and bunions (which were lumpy things on his feet).

  Agnes the cook and maid was always going on about her different allergies, which made her eyes and nose run and brought her out in all kinds of interesting spots and exciting blotches in the shapes of different counties.

  Jack was forever breaking different parts of himself – arms, legs and, once, an ear – while climbing ladders when trying to mend everything from holes in the roof to a dripping tap. (This didn’t put him in the best of moods.)

  Sack the gardener hated plants and flowers. Actually, he hated most things. This was because he was a really good inventor. His inventions included the hat and the motor car. The only trouble was, someone had already invented hats and cars before him, and when he found this out he got terribly upset and blamed everyone and everything around him (including the daisies, marrows, peas and carrots).

  And Mimi, the boot boy, found polishing everyone else’s boots VERY BORING INDEED. She was also fed up with everyone calling her a boy, which is why she wore an ENORMOUS pink bow in her hair and pink-framed glasses with tinted pink lenses. She had also got Sack the gardener to give her all the old rose petals, which she boiled up in a big saucepan to create her very own home-made girly-smelling perfume. It smelled so sickly sweet that a quick dab behind each ear was enough to attract all the hummingbirds in the district. (All two of them. They were called Frizzle and Twist and they were part of His Lordship’s bird collection.)

  On top of all these gripes and groans, the servants at Bigg Manor lived in the part of the house that didn’t have any glass in the windows and had very few planks on the floor. (Lord Bigg used the planks from that part of the house for firewood. I’ve no idea what happened to the glass.) They also had very little furniture. With the exception of the furniture in his own rooms, Lord Bigg had sold off all the valuable stuff and burned a lot of the cheaper stuff for fuel too (when he ran out of planks).

  The servants’ beds were made of old sacks stuffed with straw and old beard hairs.

  His Lordship’s rooms were nice enough, though, and he did have a best friend in Monty the parrot.

  Monty the parrot was actually as grumpy as the servants but Lord Bigg didn’t seem to notice. Monty bit him hard and often and it didn’t seem to bother His Lordship in the slightest. He simply stuck another sticking plaster on the cut (which was why Lord Bigg was usually covered in the things). If a servant had bitten him so much as ONCE, he’d have exploded in a terrible rage.

  That day, Lord Bigg was woken up by a squawk from Monty, who had in turn been disturbed by the distant, but still loud, “OUCH!”. You know the one: it was the “OUCH!” from Mr Grunt when he’d rolled out of bed and landed on Sharpie the stuffed hedgehog. The house was at the end of a long driveway, some distance from the road, but as well as having beady, birdie eyes Monty had excellent birdie hearing.

  Lord Bigg slept in a huge bed that looked more like a giant wooden sledge. He sat up, let out a great bi
g yawn, leaned against his pile of plump pillows, and yanked a bell-rope.

  Down in the dark, dank kitchens, a little bell tinkled. It was the signal for Agnes to cook and take up his breakfast. She was asleep at the kitchen table (an old packing crate), her head slumped over a copy of Dull magazine. Dull magazine was a weekly magazine full of such boring articles that it was supposed to make you feel better about your own life. Agnes had been reading a piece about a woman who spent thirty-five years inside a hollow tree counting ants. Suddenly, working for the horrible Lord Bigg inside nasty Bigg Manor hadn’t seemed quite so bad.

  The annoying tinkling of the bell woke her up. She had been having a lovely dream about having a pet frog that burped up gold coins. When she realised that it had been just that – a lovely dream – she felt very upset, and came out in a whole new set of blotches. She dragged herself out of her chair and banged a frying pan down on to the top of the great big iron range stove to cook His Lordship his morning eggies.

  Lord Bigg had finished his eggies and was sharing a piece of toast with Monty the parrot when there was yet more noise. This time it was the distant sound of the “thunk-phwut-thwacks” made by the Grunts’ rock-throwing, and it got the parrot into another flap. He squawked and ruffled his feathers, then flew over to the window, where he tapped the glass with his beak.

  “What is it, Monty?” asked Lord Bigg. He lifted the tray off his lap, threw back his bedclothes and stepped out on to a threadbare rug. “What’s all the fuss about?” He slipped a blue silk dressing gown over his red-and-white striped pyjamas, and strode across to the window. Monty flapped up on to his shoulder.

  With money in such short supply, Lord Bigg had bought the dressing gown second-hand from an Internet auction site. (A rather dodgy Internet site, where not everything on it was being sold by people who actually had the right to sell them, if you see what I mean. As in: they probably-weren’t-theirs-to-sell.) What hadn’t been stated in the ad was that the dressing gown must have been worn by a boxer into the boxing ring. So when it arrived and Lord Biggs unwrapped it, he was surprised to find that it had writing on the back. The big black letters said: