by McSweeney's
He put some water on to the stove and when it was boiling he put in the piece of potato, timed it on the second hand of his watch, and after a minute and a quarter he took out the potato and it wasn’t at all properly cooked.
He decided to give the woman another chance, turned to the middle of the cookery book, and read a recipe for potato pancakes.
First of all, dear Grimble, he read, I am terribly sorry about your boiled potatoes … Oh, silly me. I do hope we shall be luckier this time. You need a potato, some milk, some flour, a little fat, and an egg …
It was a jolly good potato pancake even with the 1967 milk, and he sat down at the buff-colored table and ate it up using a fork that had four prongs at one end and a pencil at the other. He thought this was a very good idea, so when he had finished eating he turned the fork round and did his homework.
He had been told to write a poem on women, so he wrote:
As he was still full of writing and his poems were never longer than about four lines, he wrote a note to his Aunt Percy.
DEAR AUNT, I MADE MYSELF A POTATO PANCAKE; THANK YOU FOR DOING THE WASHING-UP. I HOPE YOU GET SOME GOOD FISH. LOVE, GRIMBLE.
Then he went home to bed and dreamt about hot roast peanuts.
THURSDAY
Grimble never slept very well; before he learned to read, he used to lie in bed and twist a piece of soft material round his fingers and make shapes with it. When he started to read, he used to wait until it got light, and when he was given a torch for Christmas and woke up in the night, he lit his torch and read under the bedclothes. He liked thick books about battles and wars best.
Grimble was going to write a book himself when he grew up, and it would be all about how children spent too much time in bed, and that it was a great waste to go to sleep when you could read about how Hannibal and Caesar fought, or that tanks don’t have a steering wheel but have brakes on each side so that if you want to go to the left you pull at the left brake and the right side of the tank overtakes the left and you turn round.
When the clock pointed to eight o’clock on Thursday morning, Grimble had hardly slept at all and was feeling disgruntled … Which means something between all right and angry.
When his parents were home, he had once come into their bedroom and said, “I am not very well,” and his father had said, “You are definitely disgruntled and must stay at home.” He had sent a note to his school saying: GRIMBLE POORLY. SIGNED FATHER GRIMBLE.
As his father was away and it was really up to Grimble to make his own decisions, he decided that he was not well enough to go to school, and wrote a note. It was quite a short note, neatly written, and said: IT IS MY OPINION THAT GRIMBLE IS NOT WELL ENOUGH TO GO TO SCHOOL.
He wrote a name under it, like grown-ups do, so that you could not read it. He put the note into an envelope, addressed it to the headmaster, and went off to deliver it. When he arrived at the gates of the school, the master was just calling out the names and had got to Glum and Gray …
“Grimble,” he called out.
“Absent, sir,” said Grimble waving the letter at the man. But the master took no notice, went on reading the names, closed his book, and went into the school. So Grimble put the envelope into his pocket and stayed at school. He thought it was most unfair. After a while he was quite glad that he had stayed at school because Miss Fishnet, the religious teacher, was ill and they went into the playground and had a game of football, and he scored three goals, two of them with his left foot, and the other sort-of-with-his-knee. Football in the playground was a very good game because when you played you could see all the other boys sitting in their classrooms doing lessons.
In the afternoon they did French. Monsieur Boudin was the French master and he pronounced all the boys’ names in French. Grimble was Grimbell with a nasty rolling “r.”
“Alors, Grimbell,” said Monsieur Boudin, “Speak French.”
“Oui, Monsieur,” said Grimble because he had only started to learn this term and had not got much further than Oui, Monsieur and Non, Monsieur, which mean “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” and clearly Oui, Monsieur was the better of his two sentences.
“What is French for ‘a dog’?” asked Monsieur Boudin.
Grimble absolutely hated saying “I don’t know,” so he said, “Un whoof.” Monsieur Boudin was a bit deaf so he said, “Again,” and Grimble, thinking he had almost got it right, said, “Un whoof whoof.”
“Chien,” said the French master. “Write down chien, and while you are writing it down also write down chat, which is ‘cat.’ Write it down very often, then I can have a little sleep.”
Grimble decided that when he grew up he might become a schoolmaster and sleep in the daytime—then he could read all night.
When he got home from school that evening there was a telegram lying on the doormat. This time the message was absolutely clear. It said: RETURNING HOME FRIDAY NIGHT. INFORM MILKMAN REMEMBER TEETH. He sat down and worked out that this meant one more supper tonight; breakfast, fishfingers, supper tomorrow, and then his parents would be home.
He went into the garden, shot forty-three left-footed penalties, and decided to make his bed. Making beds was a very unnecessary habit. To Grimble, in fact to almost any reasonable person, a bed looks as well with a few sheets twisted around and a pillow or two on the floor as it does if it is all tucked in and done properly. Also it is much easier to get into a bed when it was last used for getting out of, but as grownups make a great deal of fuss about tidiness he made his bed about once a week. This was quite a good idea because he often found things in the bed that he had lost and really given up hope for—like his pyjama trousers, and once a peanut butter sandwich under his pillow that he had completely forgotten about, though he had thought the bed had smelled a bit funny.
When the bed was made, he twisted the plasticine he had found in it to look like a sausage dog and went to see what was the next name on the list of people who would give him supper: STATIONMASTER WHEELER AT THE STATION.
I don’t think I have said before that Grimble’s house was very near the railway and trains went past it, making a lot of noise. The point is that when you live like that you get so used to the noise that you don’t notice it, and one day, when there had been an accident on the railway line and no trains were running, Grimble had woken up with a start and said, “What was that?”
His father had come in and said, “It’s nothing. Just no noise.” The station was at the end of the street and Mr. Wheeler was in charge of it. There were two little shops on the station, one of them selling newspapers and the other selling things to eat—like old sausage rolls and sandwiches that were wrapped in bits of paper as if no one expected anyone to unwrap them. There was also a machine with a sign on it saying Platform tickets 2d. and the 2d. had been crossed out and 3d. put in its place.
Grimble wondered why it was now more expensive to stand on a platform, which is all you are allowed to do with a platform ticket, and Mr. Wheeler had explained that it was probably because you now had to wait longer for trains.
The station had a notice outside it, which said: THIS IS THE STATION. YOUR FRIENDLY STATIONMASTER IS CALLED MR. WHEELER.
Unfortunately the friendly stationmaster was out. Grimble went to the machine, bought a platform ticket, and looked everywhere. The waiting room was empty. There was no one behind the window marked Tickets, and the paper shop and the old wrapped-up-sandwich shops were empty. There was a timetable pinned up against the wall and on this there was a note: GRIMBLE. HAVE GONE TO SEE A MAN ABOUT AN ENGINE. GO TO THE SIGNAL BOX. PS WELCOME.
The signal box was at the end of the platform and was full of levers, so the signal man could pull a lever and the train turned left or right or went straight on depending on where it was meant to go. In a corner of the signal box was a metal box full of food and a gas-ring and a saucepan. The box marked Food had a padlock and in the keyhole of the padlock there was a message saying: KEY IS UNDER BOX.
Grimble felt it was silly to hi
de the key in so obvious a place and then leave a note so that absolutely anybody could find it, but then the station was a very small station. Mr. Wheeler was probably not a very clever man or he would have got a really big station like Birmingham.
When he opened the box, there was a tin of corned beef and a tin of biscuits and a tin of chocolate and a tin of sugar. There was also a tin of sardines and a bag of flour and a bottle of some very strong-smelling brown drink, which was almost empty and had only to be used in emergency written on the label.
As it was a very large bottle and there was very little drink left in it, Grimble realized that there must have been a lot of emergencies. Also in the box was a book called The Signalman’s Manual. Grimble sat down and started to read it. It was very boring and he decided that he would definitely not become a signalman when he grew up.
This brought him to supper. When he had got all the tins out and laid them in a line, he realized there was something missing. Chocolate, sugar, corned beef, sardines, biscuits, flour. What was missing was something wet. Like sauce. When you eat corned beef you have tomato sauce. When you eat sardines … tomato sauce. Biscuits … well, tomato sauce … or any sort of sauce.
Grimble took out a piece of paper and worked out that what he could have for supper (and a man must have sauce with what he eats) could be either corned beef with sardine sauce or sardines with corned beef sauce, or, and this seemed a very much better idea … with chocolate sauce.
He opened The Signalman’s Manual and looked under C, and it had a chapter on couplings, and one on coal for engines, and a long one on clockwork, and right at the bottom of the page there was a little heading “Chocolate Sauce.” He was really very lucky.
Chocolate sauce, said the book, is delicious whichever way you make it, but chocolate and sugar and flour and water are a help. Now, by a very strange piece of good fortune, chocolate and sugar and flour and water were exactly what he had.
He put a whoosh of chocolate into the pan, tasted it, and said, “Yes, it quite definitely needs water to get it wet for sauce,” and as the water was very thin he decided flour would be good to get it thick, and as he liked things sweet he added sugar.
He put the saucepan on the fire and decided to do his homework. It was to write a letter to an uncle thanking him for sending ten shillings and telling him what he was going to do with the money.
DEAR UNCLE, he wrote, IT WAS GOOD OF YOU TO SEND ME TEN SHILLINGS, FOR WHICH I AM GRATEFUL. I THOUGHT THE TEN SHILLING NOTE WAS VERY NICE. BROWN IS MY FAVOURITE COLOR. I AM GOING TO CHANGE IT AND PUT 2S. 6D. INTO MY BANK, SPEND ABOUT A SHILLING ON THINGS FOR ME LIKE SWEETS, AND DECIDE ABOUT THE REST OF THE MONEY LATER. I LIKE MONEY AND ALREADY HAVE QUITE A LOT. I HOPE YOUR NASTY COUGH IS BETTER THANK YOU AGAIN. GRIMBLE.
By the time he had written that, something very odd had happened to the chocolate sauce. It was making spitting noises, and bubbles of sauce would burst and splash bits of lumps on to The Signalman’s Manual. Grimble thought that this served it right because if it had said stir the sauce it would never have happened. What was happening to the chocolate sauce was that the bottom part was burnt and the top was not even very hot, because if you cook things and don’t stir them this sort of thing goes on.
Actually, Grimble thought burnt chocolate sauce was quite nice. He tried a little with his sardines, and then some with the corned beef. Thinking about it, he thought that it tasted best with the biscuits. As there was a lot of washing-up and wiping-up to do, he remembered that he had promised his parents always to be in bed in good time, and as this was a good time he went home. Only one more day, and possibly tomorrow, and when he came home from school his parents would already be there waiting for him. It might even be his birthday.
FRIDAY
On Friday Grimble woke very early and went out to give the pigeons the last of the sandwiches from the oven; these were now very stale and tasted evil but pigeons not only have poor table manners, but they are unfussy about what they eat. He gave the fattest pigeon a five-day-old apricot jam butty and stood behind a tree with his jacket ready to catch it. The pigeon waddled along, looked down at the curled-up piece of bread, pecked at it, and at that moment Grimble dived. The pigeon took a quick step to one side and Grimble landed on the sandwich. He wiped the jam carefully from the inside of his jacket and decided to have breakfast out.
Yesterday’s chocolate sauce had been very interesting but he felt like something special before the Friday fishfingers—he thought a bacon sandwich would be nice.
The shop on the corner that sold newspapers was so steadily empty that one could always get anything else one wanted done there. Grimble said, “Good morning, could I have a button sewn on to my jacket, and a clean handkerchief, and a bacon sandwich while I read your newspaper?” The woman said, “Of course, that’s what I am here for,” and Grimble read School holidays begin soon in one paper and School holidays have just begun in another. Newspapers don’t lie, his father had told him; they invent the truth.
As his school holidays began that afternoon, after school, he made a small note on his cuff about which newspaper told the truth and which one didn’t, and read about football. His best club had lost the evening before and were bottom of the table. The woman in the paper shop came back with his jacket and the sandwich wrapped in a handkerchief. She was rather a silly woman; he blew his nose, ate the sandwich, gave the woman a shilling, folded up the newspaper, saw that it now had a lot of very good bacon fingerprints on it, put it at the bottom of the pack, and went off to school.
The last day of term was a specially good day. Nothing that happens on the last day counts because the teachers have done the reports, and if you have to stay in after school, you can’t because school is finished. There were no real lessons, just teachers chatting and doing puzzles and telling the boys to clean out their desks and hand in their school books. Next term, they were all going up into another class, except for Dashwood, Piercey, and Trugg who were staying in the class for another term because Trugg couldn’t count, Dashwood did not know the difference between reading and writing, and Piercey had had measles and had only been to school on the first day of term—and then again on the last day.
Grimble felt very, very well all that morning, thinking about his parents flying back from Peru; when he got his milk at eleven, he thought they would just about be passing Birmingham now. At lunch, he thought they must be past New York, and when the bell went for end of school, he decided that with the world going round one way and his parents coming another, they might have got back yesterday, only have been held up at the airport waiting for their luggage.
After school he ran straight home and shouted, “I am here.” No one answered.
He went up to his parents’ bedroom because when they went away they sometimes went straight to bed; but the bed was empty and the note from the first day was still there: TEA IN THE FRIDGE, SANDWICHES IN THE OVEN. HAVE A GOOD TIME. “Have a good time” was a typical grownup remark that did not mean anything. He went to the fridge and took out the bottles of tea and poured them into the sink. His mother said tea was very good for children as it made the insides of their tummies golden-red-color. Grimble did not mind what color the inside of his tummy was; he did not like tea and as he drank quite a lot of coffee and ate white chocolate he thought his tummy was probably about the right color anyway.
What would be especially nice, he thought, would be to get some sort of coming-home present for his parents. He went to the cake tin and it was still about one-third full of sixpences, so he took a handful and went to the shop on the corner. “Good evening,” he said to the dotty lady. “Could you give me a present for two people returning from Peru?”
The woman gave him a street map of Manchester and two pencils, and said, “Would you like me to wrap them up?” Grimble said, “Naturally. Whoever heard of a present that was unwrapped up?” So she wrapped the map and the pencils, and found a card that said You are five today. It was not terribly suitable but it was the only on
e in the shop, so he bought it and wrote WELCOME HOME on it and ran back to the house.
“I am home,” he shouted.
There was no reply.
He crept up the stairs and looked in the bedroom. Nothing. Just the have a good time note, so he went downstairs and looked at the list of names. The last name was Madame Beryl’s cake shop.
Madame Beryl was a friend of his mother who sometimes called and talked to her about self-raising flour and currant loaves. She was a very fat lady who smelled of vanilla essence. Grimble had once gone into the bathroom and found Madame Beryl standing on the scales and the pointer on the scales pointing to Jones and Co., which is just after 16 stones, all the way round from 1 stone.
Madame Beryl’s shop was past the station; there was a row of shops selling fish and children’s clothes and electric light bulbs, and then the cake shop. On the shop window he saw a note which said BACK SOON, and under it she had written GRIMBLE, KEY TO THE DOOR IS IN THE FISH SHOP.
So he went into the fish shop and said, “Please could I have Madame Beryl’s key?” and the fish man said, “Do you want chips with it?”
“Yes, please,” said Grimble, “and a little wine vinegar on the chips. I don’t care for malt vinegar very much. But I do like salt.”
He got a very large bag of hot chips and the key to the cake shop, and let himself into Madame Beryl’s and ate chips. They were particularly well cooked chips, and when he had finished he wiped his fingers on the handkerchief and threw the chip paper into a wastepaper basket in a corner of the shop (he missed the basket the first five times), and then went round exploring. The kitchen was at the back of the shop and when Grimble came into it he realized straight away why the cake shop woman was so fat. It was absolutely full of cakes and buns and rolls and fruit loaves and meringues and macaroons and fairycakes and mince pies and fruit tarts. On the shelves there were packets of jelly and tins of fruit and bags of different kinds of sugars and jars of jams and treacles and syrups—and a mouse trap. There was also a note that said GRIMBLE, PLEASE HELP YOURSELF. FRIDAYS ARE GOOD NIGHTS FOR TRIFLES. LOOK IN THE BOOK FOR INSTRUCTIONS.