The Grunts In Trouble

by Philip Ardagh

  “S’what he just said!” said Mrs Grunt.

  “Kind of,” said Mr Grunt.

  “Why only ‘kind of’, Dad?” asked Sunny. He had an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  “Because although my map is real, what it leads to isn’t exactly what I’d promised it would be,” said Mr Grunt.

  Now Sunny was feeling really uneasy. “What did you promise to give him in exchange for the elephant?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t matter, because what he’s actually getting is close enough. Just not precisely what we agreed!” Mr Grunt laughed.

  “Exactly!” said Mrs Grunt, who spent much of the time not really knowing what was going on but doing her best to pretend she did.

  “But that’s cheating!” said Sunny. “That’s wrong.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s wrong, Sunny,” said Mr Grunt. “Stealing an elephant from a circus is what’s wrong. Do you really think the elephant was Mr Lippy’s to swap in the first place?”

  “Not necessarily—”

  “So you could argue that we’re –” Mr Grunt tried to think of the right words. “We’re teaching him a lesson.”

  “A lesson that you should never trust people!” said Mrs Grunt proudly.

  “Quiet, wife,” said Mr Grunt. “You’re making a fool of yourself.”

  “No more than you are!” Mrs Grunt retorted.

  “Numbskull!” said Mr Grunt.

  “Toolbag!” said Mrs Grunt.

  “Armpit!” said Mr Grunt.

  “Trench coat!” said Mrs Grunt.

  “Don’t you think Mr Lippy will come looking for us when he finds out he’s been tricked?” Sunny interrupted.

  “He may not even notice. And if he does, we’ll be long gone from here by then,” said Mr Grunt.

  “But circuses travel around too, and surely we won’t be that hard to find,” said Sunny.

  “Why not?” said Mr Grunt.

  “Because we’ll have a hulking great elephant with us,” said Sunny.

  Mr Grunt was about to say something, but stopped. He looked flummoxed. He didn’t have an answer to that.

  The following morning – after a night in which both Mr and Mrs Grunt slept beautifully in their bed, and Sunny lay awake for much of it outside their door with a mixture of worry and excitement – the Grunts actually set off for a particular destination for the second time in two days.

  Sunny was used to hitching up Clip and Clop and simply going where the donkeys and the Grunts’ moods might lead them. Today, however, they were following Mr Lippy’s map to collect an elephant.

  Mr Grunt had given Sunny the task of reading the map and making sure that they were going the right way. He didn’t trust Mrs Grunt to be able to do it, and had “important things” to do himself, apparently.

  Sunny certainly heard much hammering, crashing and bashing, along with the occasional cry of pain when Mr Grunt must have hit himself by mistake.

  The clown’s map wasn’t particularly detailed but what details he had drawn were very useful. He’d shown landmarks to look out for (linked together by dotted lines and arrows), with instructions for what to do – turn left, straight on, turn right, etc. – once they were reached. (So it wasn’t really a proper map. It was not to scale, with places in the right place or anything.)

  The starting point was the old barn and the next landmark Sunny had to look out for as he led Clip and Clop westward was a crossroads by a windmill, where they’d have to turn right. They stopped briefly at the mill to give Mr and Mrs Grunt time to laugh and point at the miller in his flour-covered smock, and for Mr Grunt to kick one of the sacks of grain stacked at the roadside. (Mrs Grunt usually liked to save her kicking-of-things for extra-special occasions.) They then hopped back inside the caravan, ready for Sunny to negotiate the bend.

  It was quite a tight turn for the Grunts’ extraordinarily higgledy-piggledy house on wheels. The roads were narrow, and the one he was supposed to be taking them down had high hedges on both sides. Sunny had to manoeuvre the caravan backwards and forwards quite a few times (which wasn’t the easiest thing in the world when working with donkeys, especially ones that weren’t quite as young as they used to be). Sunny talked to Clip and Clop, gently coaxing and praising them, and promising them juicy carrots in the not too distant future. He also gave them hearty pats on the haunches, stroked their muzzles and, when he really needed the pair to go beyond the call of donkey duty, scratched them between the ears. The Grunts’ home was a big haul for Clip and Clop, even though there were actually two of them.

  After the windmill crossroads, Sunny had to look out for a left-hand turn just after crossing a three-arched bridge, and a right-hand fork in the road next to a waterfall. He found these, along with the entrance to a shortcut by a fallen tree and a turning by a statue of a white stag – a deer with antlers – into a forest. The statue had recently been given a fresh coat of white gloss paint, so looked very shiny and unrealistic.

  Sunny enjoyed following the map instructions: seeing places first as black-and-white drawings on paper, and later as the real thing. He liked being on the move with a purpose – and such an exciting purpose …

  He found himself thinking of Mimi, imagining her not as he’d last seen her (in Sack the gardener’s borrowed overalls) but as he’d first caught sight of her before the bee attack, at her very pinkest, when she was still smelling of roses, with the pink ribbon proudly tied in her hair. She’d said that she liked animals and she’d like to travel. And what was he doing right there and then? Travelling with two donkeys on his way to collect an elephant! It would have been great if she could have come too.

  Thinking about Mimi made him think of Bigg Manor and of Larry Smalls hanging from the gate. And then – bam! – he remembered where he’d heard mention of the Chinn Twins before he’d read their name on the remains of a poster on the barn wall. Larry Smalls had said that if only the Chinn Twins had been there, they’d have been able to get him down from the gate easily (or something like that).

  Maybe they were acrobats? On the poster they’d been referred to as being “remarkable”. Sunny imagined one identical twin leaping up on to the back of the other and unhooking Larry Smalls from the top of the gates to Bigg Manor in one swift, graceful movement. What a sight that would have been!

  After ten minutes or so of clip-clopping down the forest track, Clip and Clop decided that it was lunchtime, and they stopped. Sunny knew that there’d be no point in trying to make them go any further until they’d rested and eaten. And anyway, he was hungry too.

  Mrs Grunt threw open an upstairs window. “Why have we stopped?” she demanded.

  “Lunchtime,” said Sunny.

  Now Mr Grunt threw open a downstairs window. “Why have we stopped?” he demanded.

  “Lunchtime,” said Mrs Grunt.

  “Good!” said Mr Grunt. “Make me an omelette, wife!” He pulled in his head and slammed the window shut.

  “Make it yourself, mister!” shouted Mrs Grunt, slamming her window too.

  In the end, Mr Grunt gathered some old fir cones from the forest floor while Sunny fed Clip and Clop. Mr Grunt then tossed the cones into a blender, ready to make some woody soup or other. Unfortunately, he forgot to put the lid on, and bits of fir cone shot around the kitchen like pieces of shrapnel. Mrs Grunt screamed and dived under the kitchen table, letting out an even BIGGER scream when she landed on Sharpie, the stuffed hedgehog.

  “What’s Sharpie doing under here?!” she yelped the moment Mr Grunt had fumbled with the off switch of the blender, and all was quiet.

  “Not a lot, I expect,” said Mr Grunt. “He’s dead.”

  “I mean, who put him here?” said Mrs Grunt, rubbing her arm where the spines had gone in.

  “Then say what you mean, wife!” Mr Grunt grunted.

  “I just did,” said Mrs Grunt.

  “Oh, well done!” said Mr Grunt. “Do you want a medal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I can’t mak
e you one because I’m too busy making lunch because my wife is too lazy to do it,” said Mr Grunt with enough menace in his voice to frighten the weevils in the cheese. (To be fair, though, cheese weevils are easily frightened, or so I’ve heard.)

  “Too busy shooting chunks of fir cone about the place, more like!” said Mrs Grunt. “And I still want to know why you put Sharpie under the table.”

  “What makes you think it was me, wife?”

  “Well, I didn’t do it, and Sharpie’s dead, so he can’t have walked there by himself … so that leaves you, mister!” said Mrs Grunt.

  “What about Sunny?”

  Mrs Grunt gave a puzzled frown. “He’s not dead,” she snapped.

  “I mean, who’s to say that Sunny didn’t move him?” said Mr Grunt.

  “Because Sunny isn’t an idiot,” said Mrs Grunt.

  Mr Grunt slammed the lid on the top of the blender, trapping what remained of the fir cones. “Are you saying that I am?” he demanded.

  “That you are what?”

  “An idiot!”

  “Are you call me an idiot?” Mrs Grunt bristled.

  “I was calling me an idiot!” said Mr Grunt. “No, I mean, I was asking to know whether you were calling me an idiot.”

  “Work it out for yourself,” said Mrs Grunt, adding the words “you idiot” under her breath. They were drowned out by the noise of the blender when Mr Grunt hit the on switch again.

  It was with only a slight tummy ache that Sunny set Clip and Clop off again along the track after lunch. It was late afternoon when they left the forest, the trees as close together at the fringes as in its very heart.

  Because of the nature of the map – it only showing landmarks to guide them by, leaving out everything else in between – it was impossible to gauge time and distances. On the map, for example, the distance between a blue house they’d had to turn right at and a tunnel they’d had to pass through was the same (on paper) as the distance between the windmill and the three-arched bridge. But on the ground, it took hours longer to get from house to tunnel.

  Once out of the forest and following the road to the right (which was east), Sunny was on the lookout for what looked on the map like a large column with a statue on top. That should be easy enough to spot, he thought. And easy enough as it was – for reasons that will soon become clear – it looked rather different from the picture. There was something like a lay-by – a parking place and resting spot – at the side of the road, where the side of the hill behind had been carved out into a semicircle, with a low stone wall running along the base. In the middle of this area was the impressive column, which was about twenty metres tall.

  Sunny led the donkeys into the lay-by, and stood and looked up at the statue on top of the column. It was of a man with side-whiskers and a big top hat. He appeared to be holding a giant bunch of wilted flowers in his right hand. Unlike the column, statue and surrounding wall – which were all obviously made of stone – the wilting flower-like-thingummies were made of some kind of metal. Only they weren’t supposed to be flowers, of course. This was a statue of one of the early Lord Biggs, proudly clutching a handful of his railings, and they had wilted ten years and a week after they’d been made.

  Sunny wasn’t familiar with how the Bigg family had made their fortune, so might not have known this was a statue of one of the Biggs if it weren’t for three things.

  Firstly, the statue of this particular Lord Bigg looked extraordinarily like the Lord Bigg he’d come face-to-face with in Sack’s potting shed back at Bigg Manor (though it didn’t have little stone sticking-plaster crosses all over its stone face).

  Secondly, there was a big plaque screwed into the base of the column, which read: “LORD BIGG: He Made Our Cliff Tops Safe”. (Well, what it actually said was: “LORD BIGG: He Mad Our li ps Safe”, because some of the letters had worn away.)

  And thirdly, dotted all around the semicircle of the lay-by were handwritten placards that read: “BIGG AIN’T BEST”. One placard was even tied round the statue’s neck with old blue nylon rope. The statue’s stone hat was also partially covered by an orange-and-white traffic cone, which had been plonked on top of it at a jaunty angle.

  “Mr Smalls,” said Sunny to himself, a slight smile appearing on his lips. He couldn’t help having a sneaking admiration for the man (in much the same way that Larry Smalls had had a sneaking admiration for Lord Bigg when he mistakenly thought that he was the ex-boxer Barney “The Bruiser” Brown).

  “What?” said Mr Grunt, tumbling out of the caravan. When he picked himself up, he found himself looking up at the statue with the traffic cone headgear. “Who’s the wizard?” he asked.

  “Lord Bigg,” said Sunny. “Not the latest Lord Bigg. Not the one I met, but another one.”

  Mr Grunt looked at him blankly. He had no idea what the boy was on about. “We’ll stop here for the night,” he announced. “Tomorrow we collect Fingers.”

  “Fingers?” asked Sunny.

  “Fingers.” Mr Grunt nodded.

  “Fingers?” asked Sunny. Again.

  “The elephant,” said Mr Grunt.

  “That’s a funny name for an elephant,” said Sunny.

  “Know many elephants, do you?” asked Mr Grunt, pleased with himself for his quick thinking and clever comment.

  “Aren’t they usually called Jumbo, or, er …?” Sunny couldn’t think of any elephant names other than Jumbo, so he stopped there.

  Very little traffic passed that way that night, and even Sunny slept soundly until he was awoken by the pop-pop-pop of a passing motorcycle at around three o’clock in the morning. Luckily, he managed to get back to sleep.

  First up, Sunny went outside to see what Clip and Clop were up to (which turned out to be chewing things), only to come face-to-face with a middle-aged man with snow-white hair, a yellow checked waistcoat and an arm in plaster.

  “Mornin’,” said the man. “You’ve gotta be Sunny!”

  “How do you mean?” asked Sunny.

  “The way Mimi described your mobile home and your – er – blue dress an’ that,” said the man, finding it difficult to take his eyes off Sunny’s head, with his sticky-up hair and wonky ears (which were probably something else Mimi had mentioned).

  “You know Mimi?” asked Sunny. The world somehow felt that bit sunnier to Sunny, simply at the mention of her name.

  “Know her?” said the man. “I taught her everything she needed to know to become an excellent boot boy.” He put out a bandaged hand. (The one on the end of the arm that wasn’t in a plaster cast.) “I’m Jack the handyman,” he said, grasping Sunny’s hand, “also known as Handyman Jack.”

  “You work at Bigg Manor?” Sunny asked.

  “Yes. I used to be boot boy until Mimi took over,” he explained.

  “So what brings you this far?” asked Sunny.

  “Far?” said Jack, raising a snow-white eyebrow. “If you carry on down this road another half-mile and take a right, you’ll find yourself on the edge of the Bigg estate.”

  “Oh,” said Sunny. The map had given no suggestion of that. They must have been going around in circles.

  “I’ve been instructed to clear up this mess,” said Jack, looking around at the “BIGG AIN’T BEST”s dotted all over the place.

  “I see you brought a ladder,” said Sunny, looking at Jack the handyman’s vehicle. It was an adult-sized black-framed tricycle with a matching black metal trailer attached to the back, with a large number of ladders either side and a heap of tools in the middle.

  “I certainly came prepared,” said Jack.

  “Would you like a hand?” asked Sunny, looking at the bandage and the plaster cast. “I don’t think they’ll be awake for a while.” He jerked his head in the direction of the caravan.

  Jack tilted his whole body back to look to the very top of the column. “I could do with someone holding the ladder when I go up there,” he said.

  “I’d be happy to,” said Sunny.

  Handyman Jack had
to fit all the ladders together to make one long one to reach all the way up to the statue. He slipped them into position quickly and efficiently (despite the plastered arm and bandaged hand), but Sunny still felt a little doubtful.

  “Will that be safe?” he asked.

  “You sound like my wife,” said the handyman, referring to Agnes, the cook and maid back at Bigg Manor. “It’ll be a lot safer than if you weren’t holding it for me, that’s for sure!”

  Sunny gripped the sides of the ladder and gave it a shake. The top, some twenty or so metres above them, wibbled and wobbled (though I’m not absolutely sure “wibbled” is a real word).

  “Here I go!” said Jack. “That Larry Smalls has a lot to answer for! If I break my neck, there’s only him to blame!” He sounded very cheerful about it. When Jack’s feet were on the fifth or sixth rung – level with Sunny’s eyes – the boy found himself staring at the shiniest pair of black lace-up shoes he’d ever seen.

  Shiny black shoes.

  He also noticed that Jack was wearing one spotted sock and one plain. He found his thoughts returning to his one memory of his father.

  “Jack?” he called up, almost afraid of the answer before he’d even asked the question.

  “Yes, Sunny?” Jack called back down.

  “Do you have any children?”

  “No,” said Jack.

  No? thought Sunny. Oh, thought Sunny. Then another thought occurred to him. “Did you ever lose any?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I mean, I know you just said you don’t have any children but I was wondering if you meant that you don’t have any children now. That you might have had one once and – er – lost it,” said Sunny.

  “Oh, like His Lordship, you mean?” asked Jack. “No.”

  Like His Lordship?

  “What’s that about Lord Bigg?” asked Sunny, tightening his grip on the ladder, making his knuckles whiten.

  Jack kept on climbing as he talked. “He and Lady Bigg had a son but they mislaid him years ago. They can’t remember where they put him,” said Jack.