The Grunts In Trouble Read online

  No wonder the photo on the website had only shown the dressing gown from the front.

  At first, Lord Bigg had been very angry. Then he decided that, because he only ever saw himself from the front, it didn’t really matter. What’s more, Barney “The Bruiser” Brown had been quite a GOOD boxer in his day, before he had retired and got himself a new job with a smart blue uniform.

  Standing at the window, Lord Bigg pulled a small pair of mother-of-pearl-coated binoculars from a dressing-gown pocket and held them up to his eyes. He surveyed the scene. Through the trees he could just make out the entrance to the grounds. What he spied was the Grunts and Larry Smalls. What he thought was: trouble.

  By the time Lord Bigg had tramped all the way out of the house and down the drive to the entrance gates, Mr and Mrs Grunt, Sunny and the donkeys were long gone.

  All His Lordship found was Larry Smalls hanging from the top of one of the gates, and tennis ball-sized rocks dotted all over the ground.

  “What in blazes are you doing up there, man?” demanded Lord Bigg.

  “Squawk!” added Monty the parrot for good measure.

  “Bigg ain’t best!” shouted Larry Smalls, who was very proud of his slogan and couldn’t think what else to say anyway.

  “Oh, it’s you, is it?” said Lord Bigg with a sigh.

  “Of course I’m me,” said Larry Smalls.

  “You’re the man who threw the cauliflowers at me at the village fête, aren’t you?” said Lord Bigg.

  Larry Smalls nodded proudly. “And who tried to drown you at the swimming gala!” he added.

  “And posted me that very realistic rubber tarantula!” spluttered Lord Bigg.

  “And smeared full-fat yoghurt on the saddle of your bike!” said Larry Smalls.

  “And tried to push me into that vat of marmalade on the factory outing!” said His Lordship.

  “And forced your motor car into a ditch that wet Wednesday!” Smalls nodded with glee.

  “And locked me in that cupboard at the art gallery that dry Thursday!” fumed Lord Bigg.

  “And—” began Larry Smalls, only to be interrupted this time.

  “And I think I’ll go and call the police,” said Lord Bigg. He looked down at his feet. There on the ground in front of him was a coal-black, short, crumpled top hat. “Yours, I take it?” he said, looking up at Smalls.

  “Mine!” agreed Smalls.

  Lord Bigg picked the hat up, crumpled it some more, and somehow managed to squodge it into a large outside pocket of his dressing gown.

  “You can’t do that!” Larry Smalls protested.

  Lord Bigg chose to ignore him.

  Monty the parrot, on the other hand, took immediate action. Up until now he’d been perching on Lord Bigg’s left shoulder. He flapped up into the air and sank his beak into Larry Smalls’ nose.

  screeched Mr Smalls, then added a few very rude words, which I’m FAR too polite to repeat here and now. (Maybe later, when no one else is around, if you ask me nicely.)

  “I want you off my land – I mean, off my gate – within the hour,” said Lord Bigg, “or I really will call the police. One hour.”

  “But I’m stuck!” protested Larry Smalls. He clutched his bleeding, swollen nose in both hands.

  “That’s not my problem,” said His Lordship. He turned and walked away. Monty the parrot swooped low and landed back on his shoulder. From the top of the gate, his belt looped over a railing spike, Mr Smalls read the back of Lord Bigg’s dressing gown with a puzzled frown.

  Barney “The Bruiser” Brown?

  Lord Bigg was Barney “The Bruiser” Brown?

  Blimey.

  Smalls hadn’t even known that Lord Bigg was a boxer, let alone a fairly well-known one, recently retired from the ring. That would help explain why Bigg was covered in little crosses of sticky plasters. Boxing injuries!

  Larry Smalls would never admit it, but he was impressed that Lord Bigg was Barney “The Bruiser” Brown. Only a tiny bit impressed, but impressed none the less.

  A mile or so away, meanwhile, Mr Grunt was climbing up on to the roof of the moving caravan for a better view of the road ahead. He often sat up there and often fell off, which was usually Mrs Grunt’s fault, Sunny’s fault or Clip and Clop’s fault, but never HIS fault. (According to Mr Grunt, that is. Funny that.)

  Today was no exception; as the caravan went over a small bump, Mr Grunt found himself sliding off the roof with a “Woooooaaaaah!”, which was swiftly followed by an “Ahhh! Ahh! Argh! Ouch!” as he landed in a roadside gorse bush.

  A gorse bush is a very prickly bush. It has a few pretty yellow flowers, but apart from that it’s just about all thorns. If he’d been a sack full of jelly, Mr Grunt would have sprung some serious leaks.

  Sunny sighed and told Clip and Clop to stop. They were happy to, which surprised Sunny a little until he saw what they’d seen: an especially fine patch of roadside thistles. So while he did his best to help free Mr Grunt without getting too prickled himself, the two donkeys enjoyed a mid-morning snack.

  Once freed, Mr Grunt felt a need to kick something solid. Sunny remembered the time Mr Grunt had kicked a statue in the middle of a town square. It wasn’t in the middle of a town square any more. It was now in pieces in the town’s rubbish dump. Not that Mr Grunt’s foot hadn’t suffered too. For the following three days, Mrs Grunt’d had to give him a piggyback up and down stairs, and the rest of the time he’d shuffled around on his bottom like a toddler who couldn’t quite toddle (so wasn’t really a toddler yet, I suppose).

  Today, however, Mr Grunt decided to kick an electricity pylon because, apart from a couple of spindly-looking trees, it was the nearest solid thing. Electricity pylons – metal towers supporting electric cables high above ground – can be dangerous things, as Mr Grunt was about to find out. He gave the pylon a mighty kick, and guess what happened …

  Oh, go on. Guess.

  Just for me.

  Mr Grunt gave the pylon such a big kick that it vibrated, making the ground vibrate, causing a swarm of bees to leave their hive in a nearby tree to find out what was going on.

  Did you guess right? Of course you didn’t. (And if you did think “bees” you’re either one of those people who can see into the future, or you’ve read this before. And that’s not proper guessing, so it doesn’t count.)

  So the bees swarmed out of their hive to find out what was going on and, because Mr Grunt was what was going on, they decided to take a closer look. They landed on his face, creating what looked like A GIANT BEARD OF LIVING BEES.

  What Mr Grunt wanted to do was to SCREAM, but even Mr Grunt wasn’t stupid enough to do that because screaming would have meant having to open his mouth. And one of the last things he wanted was a mouthful of stingy bees. It was annoying enough that a few of the bees were thinking about exploring his nostrils. So he imagined himself screaming and simply went beetroot red instead.

  In fact, his face went so red that it was enough to make Clip and Clop stop chewing their thistles and stare at him with a gleam of casual interest in their donkey eyes. Or perhaps it was the enormous buzzy beard he’d suddenly grown that attracted their attention.

  Mrs Grunt, meanwhile, burst out laughing. You may have heard the phrase “to laugh like a drain”, which has always confused me because drains don’t laugh. I can’t really describe what Mrs Grunt’s laugh sounded like but I can say that with her mouth that wide open it smelled like a drain.

  “Shave that thing off, mister!” she said between the guffaws. “It makes you look stupid!”

  Saying that Mr Grunt looked stupid is like saying that France is “a bit French”. For Mrs Grunt to have said that Mr Grunt looked stupid, then, must have meant that he looked really, REALLY stupid.

  Sunny, meanwhile, was taking matters more seriously. He imagined that if a lot of the bees decided to sting Mr Grunt, this would be very bad – as well as very painful – for him. So how could he help?

  Sunny ran back inside the caravan and grabbe
d a big jar of honey off the breakfast table. The Grunts had discovered long ago that a smear of honey could make even the toughest squashed magpie even tastier, so they’d bought the biggest jar they could find. And bees like honey, don’t they? (Or is that bears?)

  “Here, bee, bee, bees!” said Sunny, waving the open honey pot in front of Mr Grunt’s buzzing face, trying to attract the stripy insects’ attention. “Here, bees! Lovely honey, honey, honey!”

  And this was the scene that met a certain young lady as she rounded the bend in the road: the strangest, most worrying-looking caravan she’d ever clapped eyes on; a cackling yellow-and-green-toothed woman; a bright-red man with an enormous beard of BUZZING BEES; and an extraordinary-looking boy, wearing an extraordinary blue dress, leaping about with a big pot of honey.

  In the girl’s hair was the biggest pink bow Sunny had ever seen. Yes, you guessed it: she was Lord Bigg’s boot boy, Mimi. She was skipping down the lane with two tiny hummingbirds buzzing around her head like the excited bees. On seeing this most amazing sight, she stopped in her tracks and her eyes widened behind the pink-tinted lenses of her pink-framed glasses.

  Waves of her cloying home-made rose-petal perfume wafted through the air. Mrs Grunt hated the smell. Mr Grunt couldn’t smell anything except BEE. And Sunny thought it was rather nice.

  But the bees?

  The bees?

  They LOVED IT!

  Before anyone quite knew what was happening, they’d wiped themselves off Mr Grunt’s face – as if he’d had an instant, magical shave – and were heading for Mimi faster than Sunny could shout, “Run for your life!”

  Sack the gardener was hiding in the potting shed and he didn’t want to come out. After being hit by a tennis ball-sized rock that some IDIOT had thrown over the wall, he’d gone to the shed to get ready for work, but ended up trying to get back to sleep. Lying among the terracotta pots, staring up at the cobwebby roof, he found himself inventing stuff. He just couldn’t stop it.

  In the space of half an hour, he’d invented the collapsible ironing board, toast, fingerless gloves and lightbulbs. Eventually, he decided that he’d better do some gardening. Unfortunately for Sack, although he really hated it, he was very good at gardening. If he threw away an apple core it would eventually grow into a tree. If he spat out a grape pip, in next to no time a vine would start curling out of the ground where it landed. He had what his gran called “green fingers”.

  Sack’s gran (Granny Sack) was not very good at telling greens from browns, or recognising people’s faces unless they were pushed up very close to her own, but she was right about the green fingers part. It’s a phrase that describes someone who seems to have a natural ability to get plants to grow beautifully, without necessarily even trying that hard. (I meant the green-fingered folk don’t have to try hard. The plants have to, of course. They always do. All that turning-sunlight-into-food and stuff.)

  So when Sack had to garden – when there was no way out of it – he did it very well. He had just picked up his least favourite garden tools and put them in his least favourite wheelbarrow and was wheeling it across the loathsome front lawn to one of his least favourite flowerbeds when he heard Mimi.

  She was sprinting down the road the other side of the wall, wailing as she went. Or was it a word? What was she saying? Was it “Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesss!”?

  The walls around the Bigg Manor estate were high: brick-built with no obvious footholds or hand-holds. Those gates with their fancy gold-topped spikes were there for a reason and not just for show. When they were closed, entrance was pretty much by invitation – or by ladder – only.

  Or would have been, if there hadn’t been a hole in the wall, hidden on both sides by evergreen bushes. The hole was so well hidden that Lord Bigg himself didn’t know about it. But the servants, Peach, Agnes, Handyman Jack, Sack and Mimi, knew about it. And it was through this hole in the wall that Mimi suddenly appeared – well, charged – still crying, “Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesss!”

  Sack watched in amazement as the bright-pink, rose-petal-smelling, big-bowed Mimi was pursued across the lawn by a swarm of eager bees. Hummingbirds Frizzle and Twist hovered around her ears, snapping at the buzzing insects with their tiny beaks. Moments later, a boy in a blue dress appeared through the hole, clutching the biggest jar of honey Sack had ever seen, and waving a spoon in the air.

  Sunny had a dozen or so bees buzzing around him, but they obviously found Mimi far more interesting. Then he spotted the fish pond. There was a big lake in the grounds of Bigg Manor, but that was round the back of the house. Here at the front there was a large, formal, circular stone fish pond. It had a fountain shaped like a dolphin in the middle, which had long since stopped squirting water.

  “The pond!” Sunny shouted.

  “Jump into the pond!”

  He wasn’t sure whether Mimi had heard him. She certainly didn’t veer off in that direction. So he shouted it a few more times: “Jump into the pond! Jump into the pond!”

  Finally, Mimi seemed to get the message. Flapping her arms as she ran, she zigzagged across the grass, then with one last cry of “Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesss!” she threw herself into the water with an almighty SPLASH! A startled goldfish or two found themselves momentarily in mid-air, and some lily pads flew around like plates in a Greek restaurant, then all was still.

  At first, Mimi kept her head above water, but the bees still swarmed around her. It was only when she ducked it below the surface that the bees lost interest and looked around for somewhere else to go. It was then that Sunny lobbed the huge jar of honey high in the air in a graceful arc. It landed on the gravel drive a fair distance away, breaking the glass and revealing a wonderful, golden, gloopy mass of honey. Now he had the bees’ attention. They forgot all about Mimi and buzzed over to the honey.

  Sunny and Sack reached the pond at about the same time. Frizzle and Twist hovered above the water where Mimi’s head had disappeared moments before, their wings flapping at such a speed they seemed a blur.

  As Sunny and Lord Bigg’s gardener leaned over the stone surround, Mimi broke through the surface of the water, gasping for air. Sack took one hand and Sunny the other and together they heaved her out on to the grass. She couldn’t have looked more soaked. Her clothes clung to her like a flabby second skin, her hair dripped straight and long, and her once-proud bow looked more like a squashed, pink, soggy something. And gone was the smell of her rose-petal scent, to be replaced by the faintest whiff of pond water.

  The first thing Mimi did was look around nervously for the bees through the pink-tinted lenses of her pink-framed spectacles.

  “Don’t worry about them,” said Sunny, pointing towards the broken honey jar on the driveway. “That should keep them busy for a while.”

  Mimi’s whole body suddenly seemed to sag and she lowered herself on to the stone rim of the pond, sitting down with a bump.

  “Thanks,” she said, looking up at Sunny, who was panting from the chase. “Thanks for rescuing me.”

  “Rescuing?”

  “For suggesting I jump in the pond. I would never have thought of it,” said Mimi. She seemed to be taking in the boy’s appearance for the first time: the sticky-up hair, the sticky-out ears and the blue dress. “I’m Mimi.”

  “I’m Sunny,” said Sunny. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “And I’m Sack,” said the gardener. “We’d better get away from here before His Lordship starts wondering what’s going on.’

  Sack headed off in the direction of his potting shed, with Sunny and Mimi following close behind. Every step she made was accompanied by a squelch from the water in her shoes.

  “Do you know the man with the beard?” Mimi asked Sunny.

  “What man?” asked Sunny.

  “The man with the beard of bees that decided to chase me?”

  “Oh,” said Sunny, looking a little crestfallen. “He’s my dad. He doesn’t usually go around with a beard of bees. I’m pretty sure this was his first time. He kicked an e
lectricity pylon that annoyed them, and they took a liking to his face—”

  “Until I came along,” said Mimi as she squelched.

  “Well, you do have a much nicer face,” said Sunny, then turned an interesting shade of pink when he realised what he’d just said.

  “You think so?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He blushed some more. “And obviously the bees thought so too. And you smell – well, you smelled – fantastic.”

  “You liked that? It’s my very own home-made rose-petal scent.”

  “It smelled delicious,” said Sunny.

  “You’re not supposed to drink it!” Mimi laughed.

  “You know what I mean,” said Sunny.

  “Yes.” Mimi nodded. “I know what you mean.”

  “Do you work here?” Sunny asked.

  “She’s the boot boy,” said Sack, who’d come to a halt and was fumbling for a key in his pocket.

  “But she’s a girl!” said Sunny.

  Mimi beamed. “My point exactly!” she said, and proceeded to give Sunny a big hug, the end result being that the front half of his dress looked a far darker blue than the back half because of the wetness (and now he too had the slightest whiff of pond water about him).

  Sack and Sunny waited outside the potting shed, while Mimi slipped inside, reappearing at the door a few minutes later dressed in one of Sack’s overalls. “I’ll put the kettle on,” she said.

  Soon all three were sitting around a little camping stove, three chipped enamel mugs in front of them and the kettle well on its way to boiling.