“The logbook,” explained the professor. “It contains the entire history of this automobile. I found it on a shelf. I must have had it since the bodywork first washed up here, years ago. Everything is back the way it was.”
“She’s the most beautiful car in the world,” said Jem.
“She’s not a car,” said Mr. Fury. “She’s a parade.”
It was true.
Jem leaned forward and pressed the shiny black self-starter button.
At first nothing happened. There was just the soft grinding from the starter motor. Jem and Lucy looked at each other. Wasn’t she going to work after all?
Jem pulled out the silver choke to feed more petrol into the carburettor and pressed the starter again. Out of the exhaust pipes, there came just these four noises — very loud — CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG!
There was a distinct pause after each noise, and it was like two big sneezes and two small coughs. There was silence.
Jem pressed the starter again. This time, after the first two CHITTY sneezes and the two soft BANGs, the BANGs ran on and into each other so as to make a delicious purring rumble, such as no one there had ever heard before from a machine.
Everyone sighed and then everyone applauded. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as if to show how much she enjoyed the applause, went, “Chitty. Chitty. Bang! Bang!” once again.
Jem slipped Chitty into gear, and as he drove carefully up the narrow road that wound through the cliffs and hills behind the village, children and young people followed, waving and cheering.
“Wait, wait, wait . . .” called the Furys’ son (now known as the Camper Van Pancake Boy). He ran after them and passed Jem the tiny silver aeroplane that had been hanging from the rearview mirror.
“You nearly forgot this,” he said.
“Oh. Thanks,” said Jem.
“Good-bye,” shouted Flora, “sayonara, au revoir, hasta luego, arrivederci . . .” Her voice faded away as they climbed to the crossroads at the top of the cliff.
“I don’t know which way to go,” said Jem.
“The last time we saw Mum and Dad,” said Lucy, “was in Egypt. So I suggest we fly Chitty to Africa and then drive up through Mozambique.”
The newly restored dashboard had special buttons and handles for all Chitty’s functions — the wings, the oxygen tanks, the electromagnetic front and rear bumpers. There were one or two that Jem didn’t understand (what was the Chronojuster, for instance?), but it was good to know that you didn’t have to drive off a cliff to get her to fly anymore. They drove up high into the foothills of Maromokotro, where they found a nice wide meadow.
Jem engaged the wings and drove forward until they snagged on the air, caught, and then wafted Chitty upward and over the sea toward Africa.
Wherever they stopped for fuel and food as they drove toward Egypt, they asked, “Have you seen a couple — a man and wife — in a beautiful silver sports car with a bulletproof screen, headlights that pop up, and an exhaust that can spray a smoke screen?”
“If we’d seen something like that, we would have remembered,” they said.
Then one day they drove through a village and out the other side, and there were no more villages, just the desert. They flew north over a baking dust plain, floating from one thermal of hot air to the next.
They’d been travelling for days and nights, over swamps and forest and desert, when Little Harry drummed his heels on the back of the seat. “Mummy!” he shouted.
“We’ll find her,” said Jem, “don’t you worry. One day we’ll find her.”
“Actually the chances of that are fairly remote,” said Lucy. “Just speaking realistically. We are very probably tragic orphans by now.”
“Mummy!” shouted Little Harry.
“What’s that?” said Jem.
A strange dark shape was rocketing into the sky ahead of them. It was too fast and its flight was too vertical for a bird.
“Someone’s shooting at us!” said Lucy. “We’re going to be dead tragic orphans. Or tragic dead orphans. Whichever sounds better.”
The shape seemed to stop in midair. Something like a huge flower blossomed from it. A parachute. They were closer to it now. It was a chair with a parachute attached to it. Someone was sitting in the chair.
“Mummy!” yelled Little Harry.
“Hello!” called the woman in the chair. “If you could just . . . to the left . . . Jem . . . that’s right.”
It was their mother!
Jem flew Chitty in a circle, and Mum carefully steered her parachute and landed behind the front seats. The parachute descended gently onto their heads. It covered the whole car. Suddenly blinded, Jem lost control and Chitty went into a terrifying dive.
“We’re all going to die!” came Lucy’s muffled voice from under the swathes of parachute silk. “Reunited and then dashed to our doom!”
Luckily the slipstream caught the parachute and blew it away. It flapped and flopped across the desert like a crazy ghost. When it was gone, they could see Mum sitting there with Little Harry in her arms.
“We’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she said. “Every village we went to, the people had seen you, so we followed your trail out here into the desert, and then Dad looked up and spotted you in the sky. At first we thought you were an unusually large vulture, but then as we got closer, we saw you were a car. We only know one flying car, so Dad suggested I get into the ejector seat, and here I am. Chitty’s changed a bit. I see she’s had a makeover.”
“Where is Dad?”
“If you look over to your left, you’ll see some armoured cars and soldiers and so on. That’s the Aston Martin in the middle. It’s completely surrounded.”
“Errm, why are the soldiers pointing their guns at Dad?”
“You tell me. Our car seems to have an awful lot of enemies because, honestly, everywhere we’ve been, people have shot at us, chased us on motorbikes, set traps for us. We’ve got surprisingly good at car chases actually. This looks more serious, though. I keep trying to persuade your father to trade in the car for a less conspicuous model. But he just loves that Aston. We’d better go and rescue him, I suppose.”
This wasn’t as hard as it sounds, even though by the time they got to Dad, a tank was rumbling up the dune toward him. Jem landed Chitty right in its path. The moment he did so, the soldiers lowered their guns. Some of them started clapping. They all wanted to have their photograph taken with Chitty. They apologized to Dad for nearly shooting him, and he said that was quite all right and told them they could keep the Aston. Though he did have his photograph taken with it before the soldiers drove it away.
“You do look after us, Chitty,” said Mum.
“Yes,” said Dad. “Where is Chitty?”
“This is Chitty,” said Mum, patting the car’s bonnet appreciatively.
“How can this be Chitty? Chitty is a twenty-three-window camper van beautifully restored by me and my son. This car is . . . I don’t know what it is.”
“Dad! Shush!” warned Lucy. “Chitty does have feelings, you know.”
“Yes, but that’s not Chitty. Chitty is a camper van.”
“The thing is, Dad,” said Jem, “I don’t think Chitty is a camper van. I think Chitty is . . . Chitty. She’s got a mind of her own. All the time we thought we were driving her, she was really driving us. She’s been searching the world for all her missing components. She took us to the Eiffel Tower for her lights. Cairo for her wheels. And the bodywork — she found it in Madagascar. She’s been putting herself back together.”
Dad crouched down and peered under the radiator. “Well, if she’s putting herself back together, she’s not doing a very good job. Who fitted this bodywork onto the chassis?”
“Professor Tuk-Tuk,” said Jem. “The miraculous car restorer.”
“It’s miraculous that it’s all stayed together. Look at this. It’s not lined up properly. And the tracking is all over the place. We’d better get home as soon as we can so you and I can finish th
e job properly.”
“Seemed like she was running quite nicely to me,” said Lucy. “We did fly over the Arabian S — Ow!”
Mum had stepped on Lucy’s toe. “Quite right, Dad,” she said. “Chitty definitely needs your help to get her back into shape.”
“My help and Jem’s,” said Dad, climbing into the driver’s seat. “The word today is teamwork.”
“Jem,” said Lucy quietly as Jem sat down next to her, “did you ever wonder how the headlights of a car that crashed in Dover ended up on top of the Eiffel Tower?”
“Or how the bodywork of a car that lost its wheels in Egypt ended up in Madagascar?” replied Jem.
“Or why anyone should take such a beautiful car and break it into pieces?”
“Or why, when they had, they’d go to so much trouble to spread the pieces all over the world?”
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang wasn’t just a car. She was a mechanical mystery.
So the Tootings headed for home — across the Mediterranean and over the Pyrenees, north through France, doing a lap of the Eiffel Tower for old times’ sake, sharing stories of their adventures.
Jem sat in the back with Lucy and Little Harry. He didn’t want to drive Chitty anymore. It was fun to drive, but to be in the back of your car while your parents were chatting and laughing up front, that was really special. Especially if the car happened to be floating through a starry night sky high above Paris.
“The car was built by Count Zborowski,” he said, leafing through the logbook. “And then a family owned it after that. The Pott family. They made a whole list of alterations. They’re all in here. They must be the ones who put in the wings and the oxygen tanks and so on. It doesn’t say where they went, but there are lots of tickets and postcards. Argentina, Brazil, the North Pole . . .” As Jem read the names, Chitty’s engine purred as if she was enjoying these reminders of travels long past. “And here are all the technical specifications — horsepower, tyre pressure, and . . . oh.”
“What?”
“It says here the engine came from a Sopwith Lightning. What’s that?”
“It sounds like an old-fashioned plane. That would make sense. It’s an aircraft engine.”
“When you say an old-fashioned plane, do you mean one with two sets of wings and a big propeller? A plane like this . . . ?”
He took the little silver plane out of his pocket and held it up so that his dad could see it in the rearview mirror.
“Yes. Something like that.”
“So this is it,” said Jem. “I’ve had it all along — the Zborowski Lightning.”
“How lovely,” said Mum. “Chitty’s missing mascot.”
“It must be more than a mascot,” Jem replied. “Nanny was prepared to feed us to the fish for it.”
As dawn was breaking, they landed near the campsite on top of the white cliffs of Dover. They had decided to drive home, along roads, like normal people. It would feel more like a proper homecoming that way.
They stopped at a service station and all had a full English breakfast. Dad leaned back in his chair and looked at his family, and he said, “You know, I could live like this.”
As they were getting back into the car, Jem took out the silver aeroplane again and slotted it into the little hole in the top of the radiator cap. It fitted perfectly.
“The word today,” said Dad, “is finishing touch, cherry on the cake, grande finale.”
“That’s actually eight words,” said Lucy.
“It does look fine,” said Mum.
It looked even finer when they started to move, because the tiny propellers went round and round in the breeze. And Chitty’s engine hummed as softly and smoothly as a distant aeroplane. You could tell she was glad to have her ornament back. “Who would have thought,” said Dad, “that a car would be so impressed by a toy aeroplane.”
“BANG BANG,” went Chitty’s exhaust. She clearly took a dim view of people calling her silver plane a toy. But before the argument could go any further, the car stopped. And so did all the cars around it. And behind it. And in front of it. Motorists raged and banged on their horns.
“Ah.” Dad sighed contentedly. “Congestion on the eastbound carriageway of the M25. Now I feel like I’m really home.”
Out of the blue came a voice. “ANSWER THE PHONE!” Everyone jumped. “ANSWER THE PHONE! WHY IS EVERYONE IGNORING ME?” It was the voice of Tiny Jack. Everyone looked around.
“It’s all right,” said Jem. “It’s just the phone. That’s his ringtone. Look. . . .” The lemon jelly-baby phone was glowing prettily in its special little eau-de-cologne-bottle slot in Chitty’s door.
“I’ll answer it,” said Dad. “I owe him an apology really. We got bullet holes in his Aston Martin. And then we gave it away.”
“No!” yelled Lucy and Jem. “Don’t touch it!”
“The children are right. You mustn’t use the phone while you’re driving. I’ll get it.”
“ANSWER ME!”
“NO!” said Lucy. “Please don’t.”
As Mum reached for the phone, Chitty lurched into reverse. Mum was thrown back into her seat. The phone tumbled to the floor. Suddenly the big shiny handle of Chitty’s Chronojuster clunked to the bottom of its slot. Before they knew it, the car was speeding backward down the middle lane.
“Dad! You can’t do this!” yelled Jem. “You’re driving backward down the motorway. . . .”
Lucy couldn’t bear to look. Little Harry put his fingers in his ears. Jem stared in horrified fascination at the cars behind them rushing toward them. Except they weren’t rushing toward them. They seemed to be going backward, too. It wasn’t a motorway anymore, just an ordinary road.
“We seem to have taken the exit without noticing . . .” said Dad as they reversed into a quiet road with thatched cottages on either side. They went backward past a field of horses, a pond full of ducks, a hedgerow decked with May blossoms. “Basildon town centre,” said Dad, “is a lot greener than I remember.”
They backed down a narrow country lane, twisting and turning through clumps of huge mossy trees. “I must say,” observed Dad, “the council have really let the roads go these last few weeks.”
“Yes,” replied Mum. “I’m sure this corner was where World of Leather was.”
“And the SuperBowl Ten Pin Bowling Centre was just there,” said Jem. “Now it’s just trees.”
“That’s good,” said Dad. “Trees are good.”
But he couldn’t help but notice that the lane no longer had tarmac and road signs. It was just a track, a white dusty track cut into the chalk. The trees, too, were surprisingly tall. They were thicker. The air was damp and hot. The undergrowth was thick and steamy. So thick and steamy that Chitty had to stop to catch her breath (the engine was air-cooled).
“Dinosaurs!” shouted Little Harry.
“Yes, yes, when we get home, we’ll find your dinosaur,” said Mum. “Now shush while I check the map. We seem to be lost.”
But Jem knew that you should never tell Little Harry to be quiet. Never ignore what he was saying. If Little Harry said dinosaurs, then that strange, heavy thumping that seemed to be coming nearer and nearer through the trees . . . that splintering of wood and crunching of rocks . . . that hideous, mucusy roar that almost deafened you . . .
“I know this sounds strange,” said Mum, pointing nervously off to the left, “but isn’t that . . . ?”
“Dinosaurs!” yelled Little Harry.
“Tyrannosaurus rex, to be precise,” said Lucy, “from the Latin for ‘king of the terrible lizards.’”
“The word today,” said Dad, “would seem to be Jurassic.”
“Not to be picky,” observed Lucy as the giant beast came crashing toward them through the trees, “but I think you’ll find that the word today is actually Cretaceous.”
“Dinosaurs!”
“I think Chitty just engaged her Chronojuster,” said Jem, leafing quickly through the logbook and manual. “It says here, ‘Do not engage the
Chronojuster unless’”— he looked up —“‘time travel is required. . . .’”
The very first proper film I ever saw in the cinema was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I remember a lot of things about that day — for instance, the big helping of cherry lips I got from Woolworth’s Pick’n’Mix beforehand. But the thing I remember most is the moment when Chitty drives off the edge of the cliff with the family on board. The whole cinema howled with fear and frustration because the picture froze and the word “Intermission” blazed across the screen. I sat through the next ten minutes not even looking at the sweets I’d so carefully picked and mixed, just waiting for the movie to start up again. That was the day I discovered that a story could be even better than cherry lips!
Even now, whenever I come across a really heart-stopping moment in a script or a story, I think of it as a “Chitty falls off the cliff” moment.
Because I didn’t want the film to be over, I followed the car’s smoky trail to the library and found Ian Fleming’s book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car, which he’d written for his son, Caspar, in 1964. I thought that if I read it, I would see the whole movie again inside my head. I was surprised to find that the book was very, very different from the film. The mum isn’t dead. There’s a different villain. There’s a recipe for fudge! This must have been the moment I learned that films and books — even when they’re telling the same story — each have a different kind of enchantment. And that there might be more than one story — or more than a hundred — ways to tell the same story. As the old Tuscan proverb says: “The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added.”
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again Page 13