The Grunts In a Jam Read online

  Praise for The Grunts

  “Fans of Andy Stanton’s Mr Gum and Roald Dahl’s The Twits will delight in this disgusting but amiable family.” The Guardian

  “… as always with Ardagh, there is the clever word-play, irony and plain silliness that make his books such fun … To add to the enjoyment [they’re] full of wonderfully incisive and daft illustrations by Axel Scheffler … LOL.” The Telegraph

  “Axel Scheffler’s illustrations impart a quirky comic charm to Ardagh’s daft and comic story about the Grunts.” The Sunday Times

  Look out for:

  THE GRUNTS

  IN TROUBLE

  THE GRUNTS

  ALL AT SEA

  THE GRUNTS ON

  THE RUN

  Mr Grunt was staring at a squirrel and the squirrel was staring back at Mr Grunt, with his big squirrelly eyes. (The squirrel had the squirrelly eyes. Not Mr Grunt.) The squirrel was a rather mangy-looking thing. His tail looked less like fur and more like a large feather that had been used as a quill pen and played with by small, sticky-fingered children. The animal was up a tree in a hedgerow lining a narrow lane. He stood on a swaying branch that seemed far too thin to take his weight.

  Mr Grunt was leaning out of the upstairs bedroom window of the Grunts’ truly dreadful caravan, his head framed either side by a curtain made from an old dressing gown. He was about the same height off the ground as the squirrel and – because the caravan almost took up the width of the lane – very close to the animal indeed.

  It was obvious neither of them was going to blink and risk losing the staring match, so Mr Grunt decided to shout instead.

  “Tree rat!” he yelled.

  “Chrrrrrgggg!” chattered the squirrel.

  “Clear off!” said Mr Grunt.

  The squirrel quivered his tail in a don’t-mess-with-me manner and ch-ch-chattered some more.

  The problem, in Mr Grunt’s eyes at least, was that he was convinced that this squirrel – this self-same squirrel, this very one – had been following them for days and was a THIEF. Whenever they stopped for a break, the squirrel would sneak among them and take some of Fingers’ peanuts.

  Fingers was the elephant who pulled the Grunts’ caravan. This job used to belong to the two donkeys – Clip and her twin brother Clop – but they’d retired. They now had a trailer all of their very own, hooked to the back of the caravan, and Fingers pulled them all along with a wave of the trunk and the greatest of ease.

  Fingers’ favourite, favourite, favourite food was stale currant buns. I suspect an elephantologist at the University of Elephantology will tell you that it’s far healthier for elephants to eat certain types of plant, but what Fingers liked best was BUNS. He was also partial to peanuts in their shells – they made good snacks and rewards – so Mr Grunt took a regular supply from the local grocery store.

  I say “local” because, unlike the old days where home was wherever they decided to park their caravan, the Grunts now had a base. They lived in the grounds of Bigg Manor, a stately home that looked very impressive from the outside but which was little more than an empty shell.

  I say “took” because he – er – stole them.

  The nearby grocery store was called Hall’s Groceries and was owned and run by a woman called Miss Winterbottom. (The last Hall to work at Hall’s Groceries was Mr Jon Hall, who died in 1887.)

  Mr and Mrs Grunt used to laugh about Miss Winterbottom’s name behind her back. Actually, they also used to laugh about her name to her left, to her right and directly in front of her. And they always pointed.

  One day, after about a year, Mrs Grunt came up with an extraordinarily clever and original nickname for Miss Winterbottom. She called her “Miss Cold Bum”, laughed out loud at her own genius wordplay and then promptly almost choked on the dog biscuit she’d just popped in her mouth.

  Having been called “Cold Bum” by other children since she was about three years old, Miss Winterbottom was neither impressed by Mrs Grunt’s wit nor bothered by her name-calling. What she was bothered by was her shoplifting a dog biscuit, which is why she thwacked Mrs Grunt with one of those wide, flat-brushed brooms.

  Mrs Grunt was a large woman, often mistaken for a block of wood or an angry rock, so you could imagine her thwacking people with brooms, but Miss Winterbottom was a very different matter. She’d won the southern heat of the Miss Dainty Lady Shopkeeper Contest on a number of occasions. She was very petite, had golden hair and was generally thought to be very pretty indeed. Stick a broom in her hand, though, and it became a lethal weapon.

  THWACK!

  “Argh!” shouted Mrs Grunt, spitting masticated dog biscuit everywhere. “Stop it!” (“Masticated” is a grown-up word for “chewed”, used by clever authors of children’s books.)

  But Miss Winterbottom didn’t stop. “Stop…” she said. THWACK! “…hitting you…” THWACK! “…with this broom…?” THWACK! “Only…” THWACK! “…when you’ve paid…” THWACK! “…for that biscuit!” THWACK! She spoke with a beautiful sing-song voice, just loud enough to be heard above the THWACKS from the broom.

  Sadly, what Miss Winterbottom didn’t know was that Mrs Grunt was just a decoy (if now a rather battered and bruised one). Her job was to keep Miss Winterbottom distracted while the real thievery was happening at the back of her store. This was the first time Mr Grunt was making off with a large hessian sack marked “BEST PEANUTS”.

  What their almost-son Sunny told neither Mr nor Mrs Grunt was that, once he’d found out what they were playing at, he’d snuck back to the store after closing time and posted exactly the right amount of money to pay for the peanuts through the letterbox. He’d saved up the money from coins he’d found on the roads over the months, and earned from doing odd jobs for less odd people.

  (NOTE TO ANY READERS WHO MAY NOT KNOW OR MAY HAVE FORGOTTEN: As a baby, Sunny had been either stolen or rescued by Mr Grunt, who’d found him hanging by his ears on a washing line. Cute or what?)

  So the Grunts now regularly took – and Sunny regularly later paid for – sacks of peanuts from Hall’s Groceries.

  On more than one occasion, Sunny had wondered whether the Grunts secretly knew that he paid for the peanuts afterwards. On more than one occasion he’d found a surprising number of coins scattered along a single stretch of road. It was as though Mr Grunt might have gone ahead on that rusty old bike of his and tossed them there for him to find. But what would be the point of the Grunts nicking the nuts if they knew Sunny would pay for them straight afterwards? The excitement, perhaps? The thrill? The naughtiness of it all?

  Whether the Grunts did or didn’t know what Sunny was up to, it was some of these “BEST PEANUTS” from Hall’s Groceries that Mr Grunt was convinced this staring-chattering-squirrel-up-a-tree was taking.

  Mr Grunt leaned even further out of the bedroom window of the caravan. “THIEF!” he shouted (which was a bit rich, considering how he’d come by the nuts in the first place).

  The squirrel studied Mr Grunt’s nose. Because Mr Grunt was angry, his nose was even redder than usual. It looked terribly bite-able. That was the word: bite-able. More than anything else in the world, that squirrel now wanted to bite Mr Grunt’s nose.

  He needed to.

  He had to.

  Nothing else would do.

  Bite the nose! Bite the nose! Bite the nose!

  With the rear-haunch wiggle of a lioness about to pounce on a passing gazelle, the squirrel launched himself at Mr Grunt, grabbed on to Mr Grunt’s face with all four paws and sunk his teeth into the target…

  …the nose.

  UNG!

  Mr Grunt screamed, grabbed hold of the squirrel and toppled forward out of the window, falling sideways from the caravan with a

  Wit
h casual interest, Clip and Clop peered around the side of the caravan from their trailer hitched on to the back. They were both chewing slowly, and neither seemed surprised nor interested to see Mr Grunt – with a squirrel attached to his face – falling from the sky. They pulled their heads back in and got back to the important matter of eating, and of thinking donkey thoughts.

  Fingers, hitched to the front of the van but stationary, turned his mighty head around, trunk high in the air, to see what all the fuss was about. He too didn’t seem fazed by Mr Grunt rolling around in the narrow strip of lane between caravan and hedgerow, with a furry grey thing clamped to his face.

  Mrs Grunt threw open a window at the side of the caravan and stuck her head out. “Keep the noise down, mister!” she yelled. “Some of us are trying to watch the goldfish.”

  The Grunts had an old television but it didn’t have a screen. They’d replaced it with a fish tank, which they liked to sit and watch. They found it soothing. Sunny liked them watching it too because it was one of the rare times of day when the pair weren’t arguing with each other or with someone or something else (such as a squirrel).

  It was Sunny who came to Mr Grunt’s rescue. He’d been up front talking to Fingers, so had to push past the elephant’s tree-trunk-like legs to reach him. He thrust his hand inside the pocket of his blue dress – he always wore Mrs Grunt’s childhood dresses, dyed blue – pulled out a fistful of peanuts and threw them at his father and the squirrel.

  Now, although the squirrel was enjoying biting Mr Grunt’s nose, the truth was that it didn’t match the thought – the delicious anticipation – of biting the nose. The lining-up of the nose in his sights had proved to be more exciting than the reality of the actual biting…

  …and now he could smell peanuts. Lovely peanuts.

  He let go of the raging Mr Grunt, snatched a peanut in his jaw and half-hopped, half-bounced (in the way that only squirrels can, however mangy) down the length of Mr Grunt before dashing up a different tree.

  “Idiot!” said Mrs Grunt, possibly to Sunny or the squirrel but most likely to Mr Grunt, before slamming the window shut and padding back over to the sofa in her tatty bunny slippers, sitting herself down next to her cat-shaped doorstop and watching the goldfish again.

  Sunny helped Mr Grunt to his feet. “Are you OK, Dad?” he asked.

  “OK?” said Mr Grunt. “OK? Do I look OK?”

  “Your face is a mess,” Sunny admitted. “Does it hurt?” He pulled a clean hanky out of his dress pocket, causing the last few remaining peanuts to fall on the tarmac. Fingers’ trunk came into view, sniffing, and delicately picked up a few of the nearest stray nuts. Sunny handed the hanky to Mr Grunt, who pressed it against his nose..

  “The little vermin!” he said. “The… The…” He winced. Some of the squirrel bites seemed quite deep.

  “I think we need to find a doctor, Dad,” said Sunny. “You might need stitches.”

  “The nearest doctor could be miles away,” said Mr Grunt, his voice muffled by the hanky – which was turning an impressive shade of red – in front of his face.

  “There’s one just here,” said Mimi, appearing at Sunny’s side. Mimi used to be Lord Bigg’s boot boy at Bigg Manor (although she was a girl) but all that matters here is that she was Sunny’s best friend and was with them on their journey.

  “A doctor just where?” demanded Mr Grunt, through the hanky.

  “Just up ahead,” said Mimi, the two humming birds flitting around her head. Didn’t I mention the humming birds? Sorry. They were called Frizzle and Twist (not that I could tell you which was which).

  It was true. There was indeed a doctor’s just up ahead. When Sunny had jumped down to see why Fingers had stopped in the lane – giving Mr Grunt the opportunity to have his altercation with the squirrel (who was now nibbling through the shell of his peanut) – Mimi had climbed out of the caravan and spotted a sign on a gatepost.

  It read:

  Mimi told Mr Grunt about it.

  “He sounds expensive,” said Mr Grunt.

  “But not as expensive as losing your nose or bleeding to death or getting some horrible infection,” said Sunny.

  “Infection?” said Mr Grunt. “Your mother would love it if I got one of those. She’d laugh herself even more stupid!”

  By “mother”, Mr Grunt meant Mrs Grunt, not Sunny’s birth mother. There was a time when Sunny had thought that he was the son of Agnes the cook and chambermaid, and Jack the Handyman (also known as Handyman Jack) from Bigg Manor, but that had proved not to be the case. He now knew there was the possibility that he was Horace, the missing son of the pig-loving Lady “La-La” Bigg and the bird-keeping Lord Bigg – whom they’d mislaid about the time Mr Grunt had found Sunny on the washing line – but he wasn’t convinced.

  And, despite the fact that Mr and Mrs Grunt spent most of their time calling each other names when they were together, it was obvious that Mr Grunt was far from happy at the thought of some infection keeping them apart.

  So the decision was made. They would pay a visit to Dr Alphonso Tubb.

  Dr Tubb was sitting at his writing desk in the bay window of his home, Green Lawns Villa, when – across the wide expanse of green lawns – he saw a caravan approaching: a hideous contraption made from everything from an old garden shed, parts of a motorbike-and-sidecar, an ice-cream van, some bobs from bits and bobs and just about anything else that Mr Grunt and his dad, Old Mr Grunt, could lay their hands on at the time. And, if that wasn’t weird enough, it was being pulled by an elephant … an elephant being led by what appeared to be a boy with the most sticking up of sticky-up hair, wearing a blue dress.

  Back then, Dr Tubb would write postcards to Jenny Prendergast, a throat-specialist’s daughter in the nearby town of Osprey, three times a day. Each postcard contained a new poem dedicated to Miss Prendergast that he made up as he went along (rather than getting it right on a piece of paper first before copying it out on to a postcard).

  He had a photograph of his beloved Jenny, in a silver frame, on his desk in front of him, and would often glance up at it when writing. It was a slightly odd photo because it had originally been of Jenny with someone standing next to her, but Dr Tubb had cut out the other person, so there was a sort-of-person-shaped-space where the person had been. The doctor had cut out the other person for two reasons: firstly, because he wanted the picture just to be of Jenny; secondly, because the other person was none other than Norris Bootle. And Dr Tubb really didn’t like Norris Bootle because he’d been Jenny Prendergast’s childhood sweetheart. He was Alphonso Tubb’s rival in love. (Boo! Hiss!)

  When the Grunts rolled down his brick driveway, the lovesick Dr Tubb was on his second postcard of the day. Jenny Prendergast’s address and the postage stamp went on the right-hand side of the card, so he had to cram his verse – written in his flowing hand – on to the left. He’d got as far as:

  when he was interrupted. He screwed the top back on to the end of his old-fashioned fountain pen with a sigh. It – the pen not the sigh – rolled off the desk and on to the thick-pile carpet with a silent, cushioned thud. (And yes, you CAN have silent thuds because I say so.) As he bent to pick it up, he reread the words he’d written so far. This was one of his best poems EVER, so he was more than a little annoyed to be interrupted part way through.

  Moments later, the front door bell jangled. Dr Tubb reluctantly got to his feet and walked out of the carpeted drawing room and across the black-and-white marbled-tiled hallway. He opened the front door to be faced by the boy in a blue dress, a girl with pink-framed, pink-lensed glasses, pink bows in her hair and two humming birds flying above her head, and a lump of a man with a hanky over his face.

  “Hello. Are you Alphonso Tubb, MD?” asked Sunny.

  Dr Tubb nodded.

  “Doctor to the stars?” asked Mimi.

  Dr Tubb nodded. Again.

  “My father has been bitten on the nose by a squirrel,” Sunny explained.

  Dr Tubb was already loo
king at Mr Grunt, who, quite apart from having a blood-soaked hanky covering most of his features, looked very odd. The doctor noticed, for example, that the man appeared to be holding his trousers up with a belt made from at least two smaller belts. His shoe laces obviously weren’t really shoe laces. And then there was the smell.

  “You’d better come in,” he said, stepping aside. “Go straight through the door on your right.” The last thing he wanted them to do was to go through the doorway on the left and have the man drip blood on his lovely, deep-pile, light-coloured carpet.

  Sunny, Mimi and Mr Grunt went through the right-hand doorway to find themselves in a well-equipped doctor’s surgery, with an examination couch, a screen to change behind, lots of gleaming gadgets and gizmos, an impressive desk and a wooden swivel chair with brass-studded green leather padding. The air smelled antiseptic.

  Pulling the hanky away from his swollen and bloody nose, Mr Grunt looked around the room. “This room smells funny,” he announced (which was a bit much coming from him).

  Often when Mr Grunt was grumpy or upset, or just felt like kicking something, he’d – er – kick something. The something his foot came into contact with this time was a metal wastepaper bin. The bin clattered across the floor like a milk pail kicked across the milking parlour by a cow. It bounced and skittered, ending at Dr Tubb’s feet. He bent down, picked it up and carried it over to Mr Grunt.

  “Hold this,” he said.

  “Why should I?” demanded Mr Grunt.

  “To catch the drips of blood,” the doctor explained. “Now let’s see what damage this squirrel has done.”