The Grunts In Trouble Read online

  For FCRC,

  with thanks for his permission

  to use the name “Ginger Biscuit”

  Mr Grunt woke up with his head down by the footboard and his feet up by the headboard. He didn’t realise that he’d got into bed the wrong way round the night before, so he thought someone had turned the room round in the night. And who did he blame? His wife, Mrs Grunt, of course.

  Mr Grunt was FUMING. He reached over the side of the bed and, feeling something fluffy and stiff, curled his hairy fat fingers around it. It was Ginger Biscuit’s tail. Ginger Biscuit wasn’t a biscuit and, although he was great-big-ginger-cat-shaped, he wasn’t a great big ginger cat either. Ginger Biscuit was a doorstop: a doorstop stuffed with sawdust and very heavy (as doorstops should be). Mrs Grunt loved that old cloth moggy so much that she made Mr Grunt stuff him with fresh sawdust every time he sprung a serious leak. (Whenever Mr Grunt refused, she hid his favourite hat in the back of the fridge until he did.)

  Mr Grunt struggled out of bed and stomped over to the window, accidentally brushing Ginger Biscuit’s tail against Mrs Grunt’s nose. She was snoring like an old boiler about to break down any minute, and had her mouth half open showing a jumble of yellow and green teeth. “Wh— What?” she spluttered, sitting up with a jolt. “What are you playing at, mister?”

  “Teaching you a lesson, wife!” grunted Mr Grunt, opening the window and throwing the stuffed cat straight out of it.

  Mrs Grunt watched it go with a mixture of puzzlement and anger. “Lesson? What lesson?” she demanded. (She had hated lessons at school, except for science when she could make explosions – she loved a good explosion – and certainly didn’t want Mr Grunt teaching her a lesson first thing in the morning.) She swung her legs over the side of the bed and rammed her feet into a moth-eaten pair of old bunny slippers.

  “I can’t remember what lesson!” said Mr Grunt, which was true. He couldn’t. “I want my breakfast.”

  (I don’t usually eat breakfast myself, but there are those people who say that it’s the most important meal of the day. One thing you can be sure of, though, is that people who say that about breakfast have never eaten one of the Grunts’ breakfasts.)

  Mrs Grunt snorted. “Then MAKE some breakfast,” she said.

  “But it’s your turn!” Mr Grunt insisted. “I made us that lovely badger porridge yesterday morning.” (The Grunts usually made meals from things they found squashed in the road. Squashed squirrels were a favourite, but even old car tyres didn’t taste too bad to them, if they added enough salt and pepper.)

  “It was badger STEW, not porridge,” grunted Mrs Grunt, “and you made it for lunch not breakfast, so it’s YOUR TURN.”

  “Huh!” grunted Mr Grunt grudgingly. Mrs Grunt was right. He could now remember the bird-seed-and-sawdust cereal she’d served up the previous morning. Not bad. Not bad at all. He watched her stomping off in those tatty old bunny slippers of hers. She looked beautiful. Well, she looked beautiful to him. “Where are you going?” he demanded.

  “I’ve got a cat to collect,” said Mrs Grunt. She stepped out of the bedroom, tripped over something on the landing and promptly fell down the stairs.

  The something she’d tripped over was Sunny. Sunny wasn’t the Grunts’ flesh-and-blood child. They didn’t have one of their own, but Mrs Grunt had always wanted one and on one of those rare occasions when Mr Grunt was in a good mood and feeling all lovey-dovey towards his wife, he’d got her one. Well, stolen one. (Not that he’d planned it, you understand. Oh no, it wasn’t planned. It kind of just happened.)

  Mr Grunt had been out pounding the pavement in search of something else – I’ve no idea what – when he’d glanced over a garden wall (or maybe a fence, he could never remember which) and caught sight of a washing line. On that washing line had been an assortment of things hanging up to dry, one of which he was pretty sure was a spotted sock and another of which had been a child. The child was held in position by large, old-fashioned clothes pegs clipped to each ear. And before you could say, “Put that child back, it’s not yours … and, anyway, it’s not dry yet!” Mr Grunt had leaned over the wall (or fence) and whipped that child off the line.

  Mrs Grunt had been very pleased. Sunny was the best present Mr Grunt had ever given her (with the possible exception of a pair of very expensive gold-coloured sandals and some old taped-together barbecue tongs, which she used to pull out her nose hairs). Mrs Grunt didn’t know much about children but she could tell this one was a boy.

  Mrs Grunt knew that boys should always be dressed in blue so she took a bottle of blue ink out of Mr Grunt’s desk and tipped the contents into a great big saucepan full of boiling water. Next, she found some of her old dresses back from when she was a little girl and added them to the mix. She’d kept the dresses to use as cleaning rags, but now they were dyed they didn’t look bad. Then, because she didn’t like to waste things, she went on to serve up the boiling blue water to Mr Grunt, who’d liked it so much he had seconds. But he wasn’t so happy when he had a blue tongue and blue lips for eight weeks.

  Sunny was already an odd-looking boy, what with his left ear being higher than his right ear and that kind of sticky-up hair which NEVER goes flat, even if you pour glue into it and then try taping it into position with rolls of sticky tape, but in a badly made, badly dyed blue dress he looked really, REALLY odd.

  Here, let me spell that for you:

  (Perhaps you could jot it down on a piece of paper and keep it under your beard until I ask you for it later. If you don’t have a beard then perhaps you could ask for one for your birthday.)

  Sunny had been very young when Mr Grunt had snatched him from that washing line, so he didn’t remember much about his real parents. He couldn’t remember his father at all (though he did have a memory of a pair of amazingly shiny polished black shoes). As for his mother, what he seemed to remember most about her was a nice warm snuggly feeling and the smell of talcum powder. Once in a while, snatches of a song would drift into his mind on little wisps of memory. The song was something to do with fluffy little lambs shaking their lovely little lambs’ tails, and – in his mind – it was his mother singing it. She had the voice of an angel who’d had singing lessons from a really good teacher.

  The Grunts were very fond of Sunny in their own way, but their own way was a strange way. Let me give you some examples (and if you don’t like my examples you can always give them back).

  For example: Mr and Mrs Grunt knew that boys don’t like washing, so they never made Sunny wash. They knew that boys don’t like tidying their bedrooms, so they didn’t give him a bedroom. They made him sleep on the landing outside their room.

  The truth be told, there wasn’t room for a second bedroom in the Grunts’ house because they didn’t live in an ordinary house. They lived in a caravan.

  Not a lovely, pretty, brightly painted wooden caravan.

  No, not one of those. Put such thoughts out of your mind.

  Nor a sleek, modern, metal caravan.

  No, not one of those either.

  They lived in a caravan Mr Grunt and his dad (Old Mr Grunt) had built together out of stuff. Stuff that included an old garden shed, the sidecar of a motorbike-and-sidecar, the less interesting half of an ice-cream van and some bobs (from a collection of bits and bobs) including an old dog kennel, some wooden planks and a frothy-coffee-making machine. The end result usually made most sensible people run away if they saw it being towed round the corner by the Grunts’ two donkeys, Clip and Clop.

  Ah, Clip and Clop. I was wondering when I’d get a chance to tell you about them, and now here we are.

  Clip and Clop were sister and brother and/or brother and sister. They both had ridiculously long, lovable ears and big, lov
able noses. For a long time the Grunts thought that there was only one of them – that they were one and the same donkey – and they called “it” Clip-Clop. It was only when Sunny pointed out they could see them both at once, next to each other, that they realised that there must be TWO donkeys.

  (This may not make much sense to you or me, but it’s the Grunts we’re talking about here, remember. They’re not like the rest of us. Well, certainly not like ME. I can’t be sure about you, come to think of it. I’ve no idea how ODD you may be. Which reminds me. I hope you’ve still got that piece of paper tucked safe and sound under your beard.)

  The easiest way to tell Clip from Clop at a glance was to imagine that their ears were the hands of a clock. Clip’s ears appeared to be saying eleven o’clock and Clop’s said one o’clock. If you’ve no idea what I mean – and, amazingly, this does happen sometimes – here’s a picture to explain it.

  See? Good.

  It was one of Sunny’s many jobs to unhitch Clip and Clop from the caravan every evening so if the donkeys decided to go for a little wander in the night, the Grunts’ house stayed put.

  Back in the days before Mr Grunt took Sunny from the washing line and gave him to Mrs Grunt, it was up to them to unhitch the pair. And as you’ve probably realised by now, Mr and Mrs Grunt aren’t the two most reliable people in the world.

  More often than not, Mr Grunt would think that Mrs Grunt had unhitched the donkeys and Mrs Grunt would think that Mr Grunt had done it, so the job wouldn’t get done and they’d wake up MILES from where they thought they’d parked their house the night before.

  On one memorable occasion they woke up on a golf course to find Clip sticking her nose down one of the holes, Clop thoughtfully chewing the little flagpole next to it, and a VERY angry, VERY red-faced man running towards them with a double-barrelled shotgun.

  Mr Grunt knew that it was a double-barrelled shotgun because the man was firing at them WITH BOTH BARRELS! It took Mrs Grunt a week to dig the buckshot – the little round pellets inside the shotgun cartridges – out of Mr Grunt’s bottom with a pair of rusty eyebrow tweezers. (And please don’t ask me how you get rusty eyebrows because that’ll make me almost as angry as the golf-club groundsman had been with them and the donkeys.) Mrs Grunt had a big grin on her face every time Mr Grunt went “Ouch!” as she dug out another tiny pellet, but that’s not to say she didn’t secretly love him as much as he secretly loved her. (Shocking, I know, but true.) How much Mr and Mrs Grunt loved Clip and Clop was unclear. Lately, Sunny had heard Mr Grunt grumbling about the pair “not being as hard-working as they used to be” and muttering, “What good are donkeys that won’t do the donkey work?”

  Now, where were we?

  Oh, yes.

  When Mrs Grunt tripped over Sunny outside the bedroom door and went tumbling down the stairs, she ended up tumbling out of the doors of the caravan and on to the ground. She narrowly avoided a patch of extremely stingy stinging nettles but did land head-first in a mole hill.

  “If you’re going to fall downstairs, then do it quietly, wife!” Mr Grunt shouted from the bed. “Some of us have more sleeping to do.” He pulled the duvet over his head, rolled over and fell on to the floor.

  He landed on Sharpie, Mrs Grunt’s stuffed hedgehog. A real one.

  “OUCH!” yelled Mr Grunt.

  His cry of pain could be heard as far away as Bigg Manor (if you were an exotic bird with very good hearing). That’s BIGG MANOR, with two Gs. But more about that later.

  Lots more.

  By the time Mr Grunt had got back into bed and Mrs Grunt had clambered back inside the caravan, her beloved Ginger Biscuit tucked under her arm, Sunny had given Clip and Clop their breakfast and hitched them up to the front of the van. It was time to head off again. He walked alongside the donkeys as they slowly moved forward, pulling the huge weight of the caravan behind them.

  The sun was shining and birds sang in the trees. Well, some birds, at least. Others were busy trying to pull reluctant juicy breakfast worms out of the ground, and yet more of them were flying away in horror at the sight of the Grunts’ home-made caravan trundling along the asphalt road. Their little beaks were all a-quiver.

  Mr and Mrs Grunt never really seemed to care much where they went, as long as they were going somewhere, though sometimes Mr Grunt would leave them for a few days – often on a rusty old bike made up from the parts of three separate rusty old bikes – then miraculously find them, wherever they’d ended up.

  The Grunts didn’t like staying in one spot for too long because whenever they did, they usually ended up getting into trouble. They didn’t MEAN to, but they didn’t go out of their way to avoid it either – like the time they walked through the middle of a re-enactment of a famous battle involving three thousand people dressed as soldiers, and there was something about the way they joined in that seemed to upset people.

  And not just people.

  Sometimes animals too.

  Once Mr Grunt upset a glow worm so much that it deliberately kept him awake all night by hovering above his bed, flashing on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off.

  (And I suspect you’re beginning to get an idea of just how irritating that can be. I went to make myself a cup of coffee part way through.)

  Soon the Grunt residence was trundling up a hill, which was quite hard work for Clip and Clop but they didn’t seem too bothered. Sunny had made sure that they’d had a good feed before they went to sleep and a good feed when they woke up – and the sleep in between had been peaceful – so they were in a good mood. Sunny was wandering along beside them, but before starting the uphill climb had double-checked that the bottom part of the stable-like door to the caravan (at the back) was bolted shut.

  Why?

  I’ll tell you why. (That’s what I’m here for, as well as to add a bit of bearded glamour.) He checked that it was bolted because if it hadn’t been, once the caravan started going uphill the door might have swung open and lots of stuff would have rolled out of the doorway and into the road … which is what used to happen a lot before Sunny became part of the family.

  Unfortunately, Mr Grunt had decided to have a bath. He was sitting in the tin tub just before the whole caravan had tilted backwards and begun the climb. The tub was fixed to the floor, so there was no problem with it sliding about, and it had a detachable lid with a hole for his head to stick out of so the water didn’t slop everywhere, but he had left a big cake of soap resting on the floor.

  Now the soap slid across the floor and right into the path of Mrs Grunt. Mrs Grunt wasn’t one for looking where she was going even at the best of times. At that particular moment, however, she was carrying some rolls of turf she’d borrowed from a village green – which was now more of a village brown, because without its lovely layer of grass it looked plain muddy – so she couldn’t have been watching her step even if she’d wanted to. She stood on the cake of soap, which skidded away in front of her, taking one foot forward and leaving the rest of her behind, like an ice-skater doing the splits.

  She landed on top of the lid of the tin bath with a resounding CLANK (or THUNG!). The noise was like the sound you might get from a very fat knight in a roomy suit of armour being hit on the breastplate with a big, spiky truncheon-like thingy.

  Next, the rolls of turf that had been in her arms went flying up in the air and came flopping down on her and on Mr Grunt and the surrounding area.

  “Idiot woman!” said Mr Grunt.

  “Rude man!” said Mrs Grunt. She had just spied the cake of soap on the floor and realised what must have happened. “This is your fault.”

  “Yours.”

  “Yours!”

  “Yours!”

  “Yours!” Mrs Grunt repeated, just as Sunny appeared through the doorway. He had heard the terrible CLANG (or THUNG!), stopped Clip and
Clop as soon as he reached a not-quite-so-steep part on their uphill journey, and had come to investigate.

  “Your father tried to trip me up,” she protested.

  “But he’s in the bath,” Sunny pointed out, “so how could he?”

  “Through trickery!” cried Mrs Grunt. “That’s what it was! Trickery!”

  Sunny looked from the roll of turf on top of Mrs Grunt’s head to the roll of turf on top of Mr Grunt’s head and then back again. “Why are you both wearing grass wigs?” he asked. Mr Grunt gave out a big grunt and flung his piece of turf across the room. It landed on the doorstop cat, knocking him sideways.

  “Ginger Biscuit!” cried Mrs Grunt, struggling off the bath lid and hurrying over to her beloved sawdust-filled moggy.

  Sunny sighed and, safe in the knowledge that everything was pretty much normal (as far as the Grunt family was concerned, that is), went back outside – carefully bolting the bottom half of the stable-style door behind him – and returned to Clip and Clop.

  Ten minutes or so later, Sunny found himself leading the donkeys down the country road that led past the entrance to Bigg Manor. (Remember the name?

  Yes, that one.)

  Up ahead a tallish, thinnish man was standing in the middle of the road with a neat pyramid-shaped pile of rocks. His name was Larry Smalls and he was wearing a badly crumpled, coal-black top hat on his head (of all places) and an old white T-shirt. On the T-shirt were the words:

  in faded red letters.

  “Hello, kid,” said Larry Smalls as the caravan approached. (The truth be told, he couldn’t tell whether the child with the wonky face, sticking-up hair and blue dress was a girl or a boy.) “Want to throw a rock?”