by Gene Kemp
Tamworth was trotting up and down under the damson tree.
‘We’ve held our meeting,’ he said. ‘We’ve sent out the posters and animals are showing great interest. We’ve got in touch with farms over all the county. If I can get enough support to be elected President of the Animals’ Parliament I shall approach the Minister of Agriculture and put our case before him.’
‘But how will you get to see him?’ Blossom asked, practical as ever. ‘A pig can’t walk into the Houses of Parliament.’
Mr Rab choked back a giggle as Tamworth frowned on him.
‘No, I don’t especially wish to go to London. I don’t think I should care for the traffic. But we shall ask the Minister to come here. He’s always willing to visit farms.’
‘Won’t you play chess, instead?’ Hedgecock asked. ‘The black knight is going quite green from not being used.’
‘I may play games again in the future, but, at present, I must dedicate myself to the Cause.’
‘You’re really keen, aren’t you, Tamworth?’
‘There’s not much point in doing anything unless you put your heart and soul into it. By the way, Jasper, that particularly black-hearted stallion, is putting his heart and soul into opposing me, aided and abetted by the miserable cur, Rover, the dog. We shall have to do something about them.’
He distributed his great weight down in the most comfortable position.
‘Good-bye. Time for my morning snooze.’
He drifted off to sleep, a red-gold heap under the damson tree.
‘Let’s visit Ethelberta’s nest and see if we can get some eggs to sell,’ Thomas said.
‘You do that while I get my flower stall ready,’ Blossom said. ‘We’d better not choose a place too near home or Mummy will find out.’
The next day was perfect, and, of the cars that streamed along the road, many stopped to buy ‘Pretty Flowers’, and ‘Fresher than Fresh Eggs from the Country’. By evening they’d taken two pounds, according to Hedgecock, who kept the account.
They returned home flushed with pride, and hid the money in a tin at the bottom of Thomas’s wardrobe.
‘They’re up to something,’ Mummy said, late that night.
Daddy put down his paper.
‘What makes you think so?’
‘They’re so quiet. Something’s up.’
‘If they are we’ll soon find out. Thomas will do something he shouldn’t and give the show away.’
The weather remained sunny and the children had another good day. Wild flowers were blooming everywhere, and Ethelberta was still laying eggs at a great rate, so they had plenty of produce to sell. In all, the takings totalled four pounds and they sat in Thomas’s room and discussed what they were going to do with the money. Blossom wrote down the final decision, which went like this.
One pound to Tamworth Pig for the Fund.
One pound to starving children.
‘Better send that to Oxfam,’ Blossom had said.
One pound to Mummy and Daddy as a present.
One pound to spend on …
‘Sweets, chocolates, crisps, ice-cream, lemonade,’ they all cried together. Heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs. ‘It’s Daddy,’ Blossom whispered. ‘Hide the tin.’
A hasty scuffle followed and Blossom shoved the tin under the pillow as the door opened to reveal both Mummy and Daddy.
‘Mrs Baggs has just called. She says you’ve been taking their eggs to sell at the roadside. Gwendolyn Twitchie told her.’
‘She would,’ Thomas muttered.
‘Is this true?’ Daddy asked in a stern voice.
‘They’re Ethelberta’s eggs, not Mrs Baggs’s.’
‘Ethelberta belongs to Mrs Baggs and so do her eggs. Anyway, Mrs Baggs was obviously telling the truth. Stop crying, Blossom, and tell me how much money you got for them.’
They brought out the tin from under the pillow and made a hasty calculation, helped by Hedgecock. Blossom’s tears fell all over the money, damping a very beautiful new pound note.
‘We got two pounds for the eggs and two pounds for the wild flowers.’
‘Oh, so you’ve been selling wild flowers too?’
‘Yes,’ Blossom howled. ‘We didn’t think it was wrong. We only wanted to make some money ’cos we’re so poor. We were going to give some to you.’
Daddy and Mummy looked at one another.
‘We’re not so poor that you have to take other people’s eggs and sell them. Give the money to me,’ Daddy said.
‘You can keep the flower money,’ Mummy said. ‘But the rest must go to Mrs Baggs.’
‘That horrible mean woman,’ Thomas muttered. ‘I bet she won’t give any of it to Tamworth.’
‘What’s that, Thomas?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Don’t mumble, boy. And Blossom, don’t sell too many flowers. Much of the countryside is being ruined by people picking too many flowers. At this rate there’ll be none left.’
Mummy and Daddy went downstairs with the tin. The little band sat in a miserable heap on the bed.
‘Never mind, we’ve still got two pounds left,’ Mr Rab said.
‘Yes, but it doesn’t feel the same,’ Blossom wailed. ‘It doesn’t feel nice any more.’
‘Two pound notes must feel nice, only four pounds felt better,’ Hedgecock growled. ‘More is always better than less.’
‘More school isn’t better than less school,’ Thomas said.
‘I think Mr Rab’s right,’ Blossom said. ‘We’ve still got a pound for Tamworth and a pound for ourselves.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Uncle jeff and aunt cynthia came for a holiday. Blossom loved them, but Thomas detested them. Mummy never seemed very cheery either during their visit, perhaps because she was always in the kitchen, cooking. Uncle Jeff liked lots of food. He was Daddy’s brother and they laughed a lot together.
There were lots of people detested by Thomas, but on his special list of hates, Mrs Baggs came first, Gwendolyn Twitchie second, Christopher Robin Baggs third and Aunt Cynthia fourth.
She was unusually tall and thin with elongated bones sticking out in all directions, and fuzzy, pink hair like candy floss. She was very proud of her hair and was always washing it, after which she would walk round in green plastic rollers looking like a creature from outer space. Her finger-nails were long, polished and pointed like daggers and almost as dangerous. She piled her dressing-table with jars and perfumes and talcum powder and bottles and brushes. When Thomas was very young, about four, he had crept into her room and covered himself with cream and powder and then drawn faces all over the mirror with lipstick and mascara. He thought it looked very pretty, but no one agreed with this idea. Aunt Cynthia had never liked him after that, not that she’d ever been very fond of him, anyway.
‘Nasty, rude, spoilt little boy,’ she squeaked to Uncle Jeff.
Every year Thomas hoped she wouldn’t come, but she always did, and he would watch her waggling walk and try not to listen to her high-pitched, niminy-piminy voice and think how nasty she was, especially when Blossom, who always copied other people’s mannerisms, started to waggle and squeak too.
‘It’s really horrible,’ he said to Hedgecock.
Everyone else had gone shopping and they were playing with the green rollers, which they’d found in a polythene bag on the mantelpiece. They’d made them into forts, pretended they were soldiers, or, by putting them on their spiky sides, turned them into barbed-wire barricades. They arranged them in fives and eights, counting them happily. There were thirty-seven.
‘A peculiar number,’ Hedgecock said. ‘There’s always something over when you put it into twos or threes or fives or anything. There’s others like it: thirteen or nineteen fr’instance. They ought to have a special name. Tamworth will know what it is.’
They arranged them in a pattern on the flat top of the guard that was always bolted round the fire. Aunt Cynthia felt the cold, so there were constant hot fires despite the warm weather.
They went out into the garden. Time passed and then there came an appalling scream from the house. Thomas sat back on his heels, listening with interest. Something was obviously going on.
Aunt Cynthia shot out of the door wailing like a cat with its tail trapped, and she bore down on Thomas.
‘I’m going to slaughter you. I’m going to give you the hiding of a lifetime, you dreadful boy!’
Thomas did not stop to reason why. He leapt to his feet and fled as fast as he could go with Aunt Cynthia hot on his heels. But his legs were much shorter than her long ones, and in desperation he headed for Tamworth Pig, who was sitting in his favourite place under the damson tree.
‘I shall catch you,’ Aunt Cynthia cried. ‘Don’t think you can get away.’
‘Save me,’ Thomas panted as he scrambled on to the golden back.
Always ready to answer a cry for help, Tamworth heaved himself on to his trotters and Thomas held on for dear life. He pawed the ground, then charged full tilt with all his weight behind him at the rapidly approaching aunt. Her screams of rage changed into a different key as the Pig of Pigs hurtled towards her with Thomas clutching the furry ears. She spun around and, if anything, ran even faster back to home and safety.
‘Horrible children and mad animals,’ she cried down on to Mummy’s shoulder, which wasn’t easy as she was much taller than Mummy, who finally got her off to bed with an aspirin.
Having settled the sorrowing aunt, she went to fetch Thomas, who was now hiding between Tamworth and the damson tree, pretending not to be there.
‘Tamworth,’ she remarked politely, handing him a pear, as he was an old friend of hers, ‘justice has to be done. Thomas must come home.’
‘Yes, I know, yet I am strangely reluctant to part with my young friend. Come out, Thomas.’
Thomas lifted an unhappy face from behind the broad and sheltering back.
‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done.’
‘Just come in and I’ll show you.’
Thomas crept out slowly, slipped his hand into Mummy’s and they went off together.
‘Think of the Cause,’ Tamworth called after them. ‘Be brave, Thomas.’
Thomas felt anything but brave. Mummy led him to the fireguard, where lots of green blobs had spread, while others hung in dangling ringlets.
‘Oh, the curlers melted.’
‘Yes,’ Daddy said, appearing from nowhere as he so often did. ‘When I’ve spanked you, you can go and apologize to Aunt Cynthia. Then, tomorrow, you can buy her some more with your pocket money.’
Funnily enough, it wasn’t a severe spanking, not one of Daddy’s mightier efforts. He even seemed to be laughing a little. Perhaps he didn’t like curlers either. Saying sorry was hard as it always is, especially to Aunt Cynthia. But it must have worked for she decided to stay a bit longer after all. She’d been packing her case when Mummy pushed him into the bedroom to make his speech.
‘Just think,’ he said in bed that night. ‘If I’d refused to say sorry, she might have gone by now.’
‘Let’s forget her,’ Hedgecock replied. ‘I was talking to Tamworth after you’d gone and he said those peculiar numbers like thirty-seven are called Prime numbers. Like Prime Pork, I said. Then he went all sulky and wouldn’t talk to me.’
‘He hates you to mention pork or bacon or sausages,’ Mr Rab said. ‘It makes him very sad. You are stupid, Hedgecock.’
Hedgecock bashed Mr Rab several times for that remark, but finally they all settled down to sleep.
CHAPTER SIX
Uncle jeff was quite a different shape from his wife, being tubby and bald, with a huge ginger moustache. He laughed a lot. He tickled Blossom under the chin and told her she was a smasher.
‘That’s right,’ Hedgecock muttered. ‘She’s always breaking things.’
Uncle Jeff sang as he helped with the washing up, and he sang as he came back from the ‘Duck and Drake’ with Daddy late at night. Daddy also sang, reported Mr Rab, who never slept very soundly, unlike Hedgecock, who snored the dark away.
Blossom loved Uncle Jeff. She sat on his knee, wriggling and giggling as he asked:
‘What key won’t open a door?’
Blossom didn’t know.
‘A donkey, of course,’ he roared and they both fell on the floor with laughter. Cherry Blossom he called her.
He was very jolly with Thomas for three or four days, laughed and sang and told jokes, while his nephew remained unsmiling and expressionless, just staring at him. Actually he didn’t think much of the jokes or the singing, but the ginger moustache he found fascinating.
‘There’s something peculiar about that boy of yours,’ Uncle Jeff said to Mummy, who was ironing. ‘I can’t get on with him at all. He just sits and stares. Are you sure there’s nothing wrong with him?’
‘He isn’t good with people,’ Mummy said, ironing fiercely and scorching something. ‘Oh bother.’ She sounded cross.
‘I’m not people. After all, we come here every year and he never even says hello to me.’
‘Hello,’ Thomas said.
‘Well, at least he understands what I say. I was beginning to wonder if he was quite right in the head.’
Mummy banged down the iron.
‘Thomas is quite clever and he understands everything you say.’
‘I wonder if they’ll have a row,’ Mr Rab whispered to Hedgecock.
They were sitting under the table waiting for Thomas to start a game but he was too busy gazing at the ginger moustache.
‘I hope so.’
Hedgecock loved rows, but, at that moment, Blossom burst in, her brown eyes shining, and flung herself at Uncle Jeff.
‘Tell me a story,’ she cried.
‘Did I tell you about the time I had to come down by parachute over enemy territory?’
‘Hundreds of times,’ Daddy said, coming in for the paper and retreating with it hastily.
‘No, he hasn’t. Please tell me, Uncle Jeff. I want to hear.’
‘Well, I was in the Army, and one day a small group of us had to be transported to another unit by aeroplane. The weather was bad and we went off course, and, suddenly, this fighter appeared out of nowhere – guns firing – rat-tat-tat-tat …’
Thomas came even nearer to watch the moustache.
‘Were you frightened?’ breathed Blossom.
‘Scared stiff. They hit us and we were told to jump …’
‘From up in the air?’
‘Yes. I was terrified the parachute wouldn’t open.’
‘But it did,’ Thomas spoke up. ‘Or you’d have been all smashed up dead. Splattered all over the ground.’
‘Don’t go on,’ Uncle Jeff said, looking pained.
‘Where did you land?’
‘In enemy territory. But a farmer hid me on his farm, smuggled me to the coast and I got a boat for England.’
‘Oh, you were brave.’
Blossom’s eyes were starry.
‘Parachutes are nice things, like big balloons or umbrellas. Like big balloons or umbrellas,’ Thomas went on muttering to himself.
Next day he found a ladder and put it up to an outhouse roof. He was quiet and careful, as he didn’t wish to be caught. Mr Rab didn’t like this new game at all for he was afraid of heights. After climbing up and down once or twice, Thomas fetched Blossom. She went up cheerfully, and they sat on the roof. Then Thomas crawled up to the chimney and produced two umbrellas from behind it, one a beautiful red and yellow one shaped like a pagoda, the other old and shabby.
Blossom looked horrified.
‘What are you doing with those? That’s Mummy’s new one.’
‘Shan’t hurt them. They’re going to be our parachutes. We open them and jump off the roof. You can have the pretty one.’
‘Oh no, not me.’
‘It’s quite safe. Look, Num’s lying on the periwinkle bed to catch us.’
Blossom looked down on the grey form of Num spread out apparently hundreds of f
eet below.
‘No, I won’t. I won’t!’
She stood up, nearly fell off, and sat down again, hastily.
Thomas pushed his face close to hers, his eyes a hard blue stare.
‘You took money from Mummy’s purse. If you don’t jump, I shall tell her.’
‘I gave some to you. Then I was sorry. I put it all back later and I never did it again.’
Blossom cried in anguish, her face red, rocking noisily to and fro in her grief. Mr Rab shut his eyes. He couldn’t bear to look.
‘She’ll still be angry and sad, so jump.’
‘Jump,’ echoed Hedgecock.
‘Don’t,’ wept Mr Rab.
‘We’ll hold umbrellas in one hand and each other’s hands with the other,’ Thomas said.
Sad and tearstained, Blossom opened the glorious new umbrella. Thomas opened Daddy’s greenish-black one. They stood up together and Blossom closed her eyes tight.
‘I’m frightened,’ Mr Rab wailed.
‘Don’t be silly. It’s only a little jump,’ Hedgecock growled.
At that moment Mummy came round the corner just in time to see two figures leaping off the roof, one howling miserably. She saw her best umbrella blow inside out, and Blossom miss the soft comfort of Num and the periwinkle bed to fall heavily, her head striking a stone. She lay still, her face as white as it had been red earlier.
‘Oh, oh,’ Mr Rab shrieked.
‘Trouble, trouble, trouble,’ Hedgecock groaned.
Blossom was not badly hurt, though she had to stay in bed for a few days. This time, Thomas wasn’t spanked, but Mummy and Daddy talked long and seriously to him, and found out just why she had jumped when she was so afraid. Thomas promised to be a better boy. He really meant it, this time. In bed, at last, he held Num tightly and said:
