It Wasn’t Me!

by Michael Bond

  ‘It’s a good job it didn’t happen to Harry,’ said my Big Sister. ‘They wouldn’t have kept him more than five minutes. Catching sight of him on the way in would have been more than enough.’

  ‘Now, now,’ said Mum. ‘Think of your poor father.’

  She was right there. One way and another it hadn’t been Dad’s weekend.

  Anyway, he came out of hospital later that day, so all was well. In fact, he discharged himself. Apparently a team of doctors came to see him and he thought he heard one of them use the word ‘amputer’.

  The man was looking at his leg at the time. Perhaps Miss Jones was right and they had their eye on him for spare parts.

  ‘Not a day too soon,’ said Dad when we met him in reception. ‘I can’t grumble about the food, but it’s been costing me a small fortune.’

  ‘You should have got an E111 card before we left,’ I said. ‘Max Masters says it entitles you to free healthcare under a reciprocal arrangement. I was reading about it last night.’

  ‘Him again!’ said Dad. ‘There are some things I would rather not know.’

  Anyway, I was glad we did go on an outing to Paris – otherwise I wouldn’t have got the idea for my school essay. I bet the bit about Dad falling down the hole will have the whole class in fits, especially as we have a photograph of him being put in the ambulance. I might even get a star.

  I bought my Big Sister a sticker of the Eiffel Tower and she bought me a bronze replica of it, which took me by surprise. I think I came off best. Why anyone would want to go around with a sticker of the Eiffel Tower on their chest I don’t know. I’d pictured it on her bedroom wall. But she seemed very pleased.

  On the train going home we all agreed that it was the best weekend ever.

  Well, I say we all agreed. Dad was a bit iffy because of the time he had spent in hospital. There’s another good thing about it, though. Since we went to France he has never once complained about my not looking up when I am out with him. It’s quite the reverse now. He’s the one who keeps looking down. If he isn’t careful he’ll end up walking into a lamp-post, and I bet I know who will get the blame, so I’d better not say ‘I told you so!’

  In the meantime, Mortimer and I have a problem. I knew there was something wrong with him the moment we got back and I tried placing him in his drawer as usual. His little legs, which normally went nineteen to the dozen until he settled down, were as stiff as ramrods. The sun had been shining all the time we were in Paris and that may have had something to do with it. Perhaps he needs oiling, but if you ask me I think he needs winding up and I can’t find the key.

  My Big Sister may laugh, but she doesn’t understand. It isn’t her fault she was born with no imagination – I feel sorry for her. Even though he needs to be wound up regularly, Mortimer is flesh and blood to me, as real as real can be, and the best friend I’ve ever had.

  Life wouldn’t be the same without him. He’s what you might call irreplaceable and he will just have to stay indoors until I find it. I’m sure he will forgive me – he’s that sort of a pig – but I would never forgive myself if I had lost it for ever.

  I’m sure Max Masters will come to my rescue. He’s never let me down yet, and that sort of problem is just up his street. Like when he came across a tribe of abandoned robots in the Kalahari desert and got them all working again.

  9

  Trouble with the Oven

  ONE DAY I had a really good chance to score what my dad calls Brownie Points, and would you believe it? I messed the whole thing up. It only goes to show that he’s right about one thing. Just because something is on television doesn’t mean to say it’s true. It happened the night my Big Sister had her parents’ evening and I was left to my own devices for a change.

  My Big Sister’s parents’ evenings never last very long because none of the teachers can find much to say about her, except for things like Excellent and Well Done! Then, as ever, Miss Spooner says she is A Credit to the School. It makes you want to throw up.

  Not like my parents’ evenings, I can tell you. Mine go on for ever as the report is always left to the very end. Dad says it’s because the teachers don’t want to embarrass him and Mum in front of all the other parents. The teachers go on and on about my work.

  Once I’d had to write an essay about a day in the life of a tortoise. Now, it isn’t as easy as it might sound. I mean, if you’re a tortoise, one day must be very like another. They never go to the cinema or read the newspapers or anything like that. If they kept a diary, they would have to put ditto marks on blank pages all the way through.

  I wondered about writing a very short story about a tortoise that stayed in its shell all day because it was raining. Then I had what I thought was a GREAT IDEA.

  Since tortoises probably can’t write, except in a sort of spidery scrawl – or even spell very well for lack of practice, come to that – I thought that’s how I should write it. It might get mistaken for the real thing – although it wasn’t. As things turned out, I didn’t even get any marks for neatness, which is what I usually rely on.

  In fact, Miss Jones was quite worried. She thought I’d suddenly gone what she called dickslecsick, and for a time even the school doctor was concerned about me. I tried looking the word up in Dad’s dictionary, but I don’t think the man who wrote it knew what it was either. It was yet another example of trying to look up a word you can’t spell. This time it took me four days! I think the man who wrote the first dictionary is to blame. Fancy knowing all those words and then not being able to list them properly.

  You’ll never guess how it’s spelled . . . DYSLEXIC. Fancy having a word like that to describe people who have trouble reading! They would never find out what’s wrong with them.

  Anyway, I never go to parents’ evenings – I only hear about them afterwards. They came home from the next one and Dad said: ‘What’s all this about our having to be rescued by helicopter from the top of the Eiffel Tower?’

  We’d had to write an essay on our family holiday and it so happened that soon after we talked about going to Paris there was a James Bond film on television.

  The other day I read that grown-up writers have something they call DRAMATIC LICENCE. That means they can change things around as much as they like. The trouble is, it’s like getting a driving licence: no one under the age of seventeen is allowed one. If you use a dramatic licence before then, they say you are telling lies. That’s something else which isn’t fair.

  I bet my dad would have been even more upset if I’d written a boring story about what he did last year instead of going on a proper holiday – he painted the front door! It took him a whole fortnight because people kept touching it to see if it was dry.

  Mind you, schoolteachers are funny people. They can’t know very much, otherwise they wouldn’t keep asking you questions.

  Anyway, after I’d listened to all the warnings about not opening the front door to strangers (last time I did I bought fifty dusters and the man told all his friends) and ‘If you get hungry there are some cold sausages in the refrigerator, but make sure you leave some for the rest of us,’ etc., etc., off they went to my sister’s parents’ evening.

  It was as the front door was closing and I was opening the fridge door that I got this idea. I rushed upstairs to tell Mortimer. ‘Why don’t I have a nice surprise ready for them when they get back?’ I said.

  He seemed to think it was a good idea, so I rushed back downstairs again.

  Well, I gave everyone a surprise all right, but it wasn’t quite what they were expecting; nor me, for that matter. My idea was to have a meal ready for them. Mum’s got this new cooker, you see, and I’ve been dying to have a go.

  It’s what’s known as a ‘State of the Art Catering Centre’, whatever that means. It doesn’t look much different to me, apart from the fact that it has TWO OVENS and a remote control module which sometimes switches on what sounds like a burglar alarm if you press the wrong button. I think Dad’s right when he says he doesn�
��t think it will ever fly. That made me laugh when I first heard it – the thought of an oven flying – but he says it to anyone who comes to the door now, including the man selling dusters. (At least it stopped him coming for a while.)

  Anyway, just lately I’ve become very interested in cookery programmes. It seems to me that if you learn to cook you don’t need to know about geography and history and mathematics and all those other boring things. All you need to do is open a restaurant and you can make lots of money. In fact – and here’s another funny thing – you don’t even need to cook. Some chefs are just rude to everyone – like asking them if they enjoyed their meal and then throwing them out if they say ‘No’. They get famous that way. In fact, the more they do it, the more people go there to eat. I suppose they’re hoping they may get thrown out too, then they won’t have to pay.

  I don’t think I’d like to be that sort of chef, but I wouldn’t mind having my own television programme. If you have your own television programme, you don’t have to stay on afterwards and do the washing-up. I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed, but television chefs always have gleaming new pots and pans to work with. I’ve never yet seen a dirty one.

  My mum had to get new ones after I’d finished cooking the meal, but that’s another story. (Dad says she ought to be able to sue the makers under the Trade Descriptions Act for calling them ‘non-stick’!)

  I like Italian chefs best because they’re always cheerful and make everything look easy peasy, which I suppose it is in a way: they have everything already chopped up for them before they start, so they don’t waste any time. Though a lot of chefs chop things so quickly it’s a wonder they don’t cut their fingers off. I often wonder what would happen if they did – especially with colour television. If they chopped all their fingers off, I bet it would make the audience figures go up. But they wouldn’t be able to do it twice, so it would be the end of the series.

  Whenever Italian chefs cook something, they always start by pouring lots of olive oil into a pan, and then they throw all the ingredients into it. After that they empty a bottle of wine over the lot, give it a good stir and leave it to simmer while they go off to Italy to make a film. Or else, if they’re short of time, they show the viewers round their herb garden.

  Well, I could do that with my eyes shut.

  Unfortunately I couldn’t find any of the right ingredients to do something Italian, and I didn’t fancy cold sausages cooked in olive oil, but I did find a tin of meat in the fridge, so I decided to make a stew instead.

  That was mistake numero uno (Italian for number one!).

  Mistake number two was that because I didn’t have as much time as I’d thought, instead of letting it simmer I turned the heat up to Mark 5. You wouldn’t think water could disappear quite so quickly. I expect that’s how George Stephenson got to be famous. He probably put some potatoes on to boil, then when the water dried up he thought: Look at that! I’ve wasted all that steam. I bet I could have used it in an invention! I bet if I put some wheels on a kettle of boiling water it would pull people along. It might even go so fast I could call it the Rocket.

  Dad says some train companies are still using the Rocket to this day. Especially the one he uses to get to the office.

  Anyway, I’d hardly finished peeling my first potato when there was this funny smell of burning from what used to be the non-stick saucepan. Whoever designed it had never tried making a stew. Mine got so stuck to the bottom it wouldn’t come away, not even with one of Dad’s wood chisels.

  Which was the very moment my parents chose to arrive home!

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, trying to divert their attention by dropping a dishcloth on Dad’s toes. Then, doing my best chef impression, I went to the second oven, just like they do on television, and opened the door.

  ‘Ta-daaa!’ I cried. ‘Here’s one I made earlier!’

  And do you know what? There was nothing there! So much for State of the Art Cooking Centres – and so much for television programmes! You don’t know who to trust these days.

  If you ask me, anyone who’s a television chef needs to be a bit of a magician as well, but they never tell you that in their recipe books!

  ‘It could have been worse,’ said Mum when she discovered the open tin. ‘We might have eaten it. You opened the cat’s meat by mistake!’

  Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not very keen on stories with unhappy endings, and there’s nothing happy about an open tin of cat’s meat – especially when you haven’t had a cat for several years.

  For me, the nicest ending of all would be finding something small that you thought you might have lost for ever.

  Guess who found the key . . . My Big Sister! She’s a funny girl. She didn’t even tell me she was looking for it. Apparently it was buried in the carpet right by the chest of drawers. I must have been standing on it, and I know what she’s going to say when I thank her: ‘That’s what comes of having such an untidy room.’

  The thing is, I know she’s right, but I can’t help it. Besides, what matters most to me is poor old Mortimer. Imagine what he must have been going through: one moment lying on his back in the drawer with his feet in the air, unable to move; the next, still on his back, but with his little legs going nineteen to the dozen out of sheer joy.

  I don’t know about you, but I shall sleep better tonight!

  Harry

  About the Author

  MICHAEL BOND is the much-celebrated author of Paddington Bear.

  His twenty-six Paddington books have sold more than 35 million copies worldwide and have been translated into forty languages. He was born in Berkshire in 1926 and he served in the Royal Air Force and the British Army before working as a cameraman for BBC TV. In 2015 he was awarded the CBE for his services to children’s literature. He lives in London, not far from Paddington Station.

  Classic series from Michael Bond

  Paddington Bear

  Olga da Polga

  Monsieur Pamplemousse

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  This edition published 2016

  Text copyright © Michael Bond, 2016

  Illustrations copyright © Joel Stewart, 2016

  The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978–1–448–19526–8

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