The Grunts In a Jam Read online

  “Or, failing that, we can cheat,” muttered Mrs Grunt. Edna Tuppenny was her mother’s arch-rival in the all-important annual Preserves, Jams and Jellies Competition at the fair. She was the thorn in her mother’s side.

  “As long as you don’t expect me to sleep in that thing overnight,” sighed Mrs Lunge, eying the caravan suspiciously. “It might fall apart and kill me in my sleep.”

  “Course not, Ma,” said Mrs Grunt. “You sleep in your own bed tonight. We don’t want you waking up dead, now, do we?”

  There was another loud guffaw from inside the caravan.

  Bright and early the next morning, Jenny Prendergast read the latest poem from Alphonso Tubb for a third time:

  She sighed. No one wrote poetry like her beloved Tubby. If only she were clever like him: doing all that doctory stuff that doctors do AND being such a brilliant poet.

  She picked up the photograph of him in the heart-shaped frame and kissed it on the already lipstick-covered glass. She’d decorated the frame herself with seashells and pieces of broken glass from one of Alphonso’s empty medicine bottles. Some of the bits of glass still had a reddish tint from where she’d cut her fingers gluing them down. Broken glass can be like that sometimes. Then she picked up the photograph right next to it. This was in a plain silver frame and was of a smartly dressed young man with a smile that showed off his two rows of perfect white teeth.

  “Oh, Norris,” she sighed. “I love you too.” And she kissed the glass of that photo as well. But then she thought once more of Alphonso’s poetry. Oh, the poetry!

  Her thoughts were interrupted by none other than the very Norris Bootle I just mentioned popping his head around the door.

  “Knock knock!” he said, instead of knocking. “Hello, Jenny, old girl!” he said. (She was three days older than him.)

  “Norris!” said Jenny with a sickening squeal of delight. Then she remembered that she was supposed to be annoyed with him about something – she usually was – so she frowned. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “I thought you said you wanted me to drive you to the country fair with all your silly old jars for the Preserves, Jams and Jellies Competition?”

  She looked at Norris. He always seemed to be wearing the same checked suit nowadays. Once upon a time it had been rather snazzy, but that once upon a time had been long, long ago.

  “What’s that?” asked Norris, looking beyond Jenny to the piece of paper lying on the table.

  “Nothing!” said Jenny, quickly snatching up the poem but Norris simply snatched it off her in turn. “That’s private!” she squealed. “Don’t you dare read it!”

  But childhood sweetheart Norris Bootle did dare read it, much in the same way that, back in their school days, he’d snatch privately-passed-around-notes off her.

  “This is piffle!” he said with a snort.

  “What-le?”

  “Piffle,” said Norris.

  Jenny Prendergast had no idea what piffle was but she could tell by the way that Norris said it that it was NOT a good thing.

  “You’re beastly!” she said, throwing herself on a sofa so covered in cushions that it looked more cushion than sofa. She pummelled a few with tight fists, for good measure. “Beastly, beastly, beastly.”

  “Come on, old thing,” said Norris, suddenly looking sheepish. He thrust the poem back into her hand. “I was only joking. It’s not the worst poem I’ve ever read.”

  “It isn’t?” said Jenny between sniffs, not that she’d been crying.

  “No,” said Norris. “Not by a long way.” He was thinking of some of Alphonso Tubb’s poems he’d read on the postcards pinned up in his Jenny’s bedroom when he’d gone looking for a pair of scissors one time. He was particularly fond of the dreadful opening lines:

  He’d been wandering around eating a dainty cake when he’d first read it. (Norris was a man who liked to eat on the move.) He’d done such a big snort of laughter that a couple of almond flakes – which were decorating the top of the cake – had shot right up his nose. (But it wasn’t a piggy snort, unlike the kind Ace made.)

  Jenny got up from the sofa and rearranged her dress, smoothing it down at the front. She then studied her face in a small, round wall-mirror,patting her hair into position. She smiled, liking what she saw. Jenny was, in fact, what many people thought of as pretty. It was only when she said or did anything that most people wanted to run away, feeling a little sick.

  “Now, where are your preserves, jams and jellies? We do need to get them in the car,” said Norris.

  Jenny Prendergast didn’t like Norris’s car, which was, in fact, a small van. It came with his job. Because that job was selling underwear for The Hearty Underwear Company, it had the words THE HEARTY UNDERWEAR COMPANY written on both sides. Because The Hearty Underwear Company sold underwear for men AND women, it had a picture of a pair of frilly, spotted women’s knickers below the writing on one side, and a pair of equally spotted but not-at-all frilly men’s pants on the other.

  Jenny had been very glad when Norris had got a job but was embarrassed by what that job was. She could never imagine herself being married to a man in underwear (if you see what I mean). She’d looked forward to the day he got a different, better job. But he hadn’t. It seemed that he liked the idea of being a Hearty Underwear man for life. But even more embarrassing than the job was being driven around in a vehicle with big pictures of pants on it, something which didn’t seem to bother Norris in the slightest.

  Soon they were both in the van, he behind the wheel and she with the carefully jarred and neatly labelled preserves, jams and jellies – her competition entries – on a wooden tray on her lap.

  Breakfast at Mrs Lunge’s that morning was really a variety of different breakfasts. Clip and Clop each had a nosebag of oats. Fingers had some currant buns. Mimi had some fruit (a bit bruised), while Mr and Mrs Grunt and Sunny had some home-made muesli – which, along with some of the donkeys’ oats, included wood-shavings and sheep’s dandruff – with fox’s milk. In her own little kitchen, Ma Lunge had bacon and eggs on Blue Plate and a slice of very ordinary, very nice toast on Red Plate.

  When she’d washed up, she went out of No 3, Railway Cottages, up the steps of her daughter’s caravan and knocked at the door, Squat yapping at her feet.

  Sunny opened the door. “Morning, Grandma!” he said. “All set for the country fair?”

  “I’ll get my things,” she sighed. She stomped back down the steps, across the pavement, through the garden gate and up the short path. “Come on!” she called. “Follow me!”

  A few minutes later, Sunny emerged from the house carrying a large cardboard box. Although the words “BONZO’S DOG TREATS For the Discerning Dog” were printed on the side, this is not what was in the box. The cardboard box was full of the jars of Mrs Lunge’s home-made preserves, jams and jellies that she would be entering into the competition at the fair.

  The top of each jar was covered in a piece of red-and-white checked cloth, held in place with an elastic band. Each jar was also clearly labelled in Mrs Lunge’s surprisingly neat handwriting.

  Squat, who’d just been having a quick staring contest with Clip and Clop, bounded excitedly over to Sunny and began jumping up at him, yapping. Sunny found it difficult to carry a box full of jars while a dog seemed to be doing her very best to trip him up.

  Ma Lunge swooped down – it wasn’t that far – and picked up Squat in her arms. Yap! Yap! Yap! went the dog, and then licked her mistress’s face with her long, pink tongue. “Well, what are we waiting for?” said Ma Lunge.

  Sunny was suddenly blinded – briefly – by a flash of light.

  “Argh!” he said, shielding his eyes. “What was that?”

  “Are you OK?” asked Mimi. “The flash came from over there.” She pointed to a fenced-off area of scrubby trees and bushes running along the side of the railway track, on the opposite side of the street. “It must have been sunlight reflecting off glass or something – look!”
r />   Someone tall, thin and pointy was trying to slink off unnoticed between the shrubs. Despite the sunny weather, they were wearing a long coat and a baseball cap.

  Mimi and Sunny could clearly see a pair of binoculars in their hand. The sun’s rays must have reflected off the lenses into Sunny’s face. Is this person the one who was peering through Dr Tubb’s window? Sunny wondered. And, if so, did this mean that it was he, Sunny, who they were interested in?

  Sunny would have liked to have known the answer to that.

  Traditionally, the judge of the Preserves, Jams and Jellies Competition at the country fair was Lord Bigg of Bigg Manor but, unfortunately for him, he was currently in prison. The new judge was none other than Lord Bigg’s wife, Lady “La-La” Bigg.

  Lady “La-La” Bigg hadn’t actually lived with Lord Bigg for a long time before he went to prison. While he stayed in the big, empty house with Monty his parrot, she’d lived in a rather nice pigsty in the grounds. A VERY nice pigsty, in fact. And she shared it with her very best friend in the whole-wide-world who went by the name of Poppet the pig.

  Lady Bigg was one of the few people who actually seemed to like the Grunts. Maybe like is a bit of an exaggeration. She certainly liked Sunny, but she was also perfectly happy to have Mr and Mrs Grunt live on her property. So when, later that morning, the Grunts’ caravan came rolling into the country fair ground, Lady Bigg was one of the few people not to scatter. While others snatched up their children, cried, “It’s them!” or, in one case, dived for cover inside a large sawdust-filled barrel used as a lucky dip, her ladyship simply waved at them with a cheerful “CooooEEEE!”

  As for Poppet the pig, she’d fallen in love with Fingers the very first time she’d laid her little piggy eyes on him, the very last day Lord Bigg spent at Bigg Manor. Poppet had somehow got it into her piggy heart and mind that the elephant was a very large pig – and an extremely handsome one at that.

  Mr Grunt stopped the caravan in a taped-off area of grass, knocking over a traffic cone marked “NO PARKING” in the process. Usually he’d have Sunny up at the front riding Fingers, but he’d wanted to get away from Mrs Grunt’s mother, who’d been complaining from the moment they’d set off.

  “This caravan is full of melons,” she’d moaned.

  “Melons are good for you.”

  “Your television is stuck on one channel.”

  “It’s a goldfish tank.”

  “It’s very cold in here.”

  “You’re leaning out of the window.”

  “That cat keeps staring at me.”

  “It’s not a cat. It’s a doorstop.”

  The cat-shaped doorstop in question used to be called Ginger Biscuit because it looked like a ginger cat … until, one day, Mr Grunt had absent-mindedly used it as a paintbrush when he was repainting Clip and Clop’s trailer.

  When he’d realised his mistake, he’d been genuinely upset – because he knew just how much the cat-shaped doorstop meant to Mrs Grunt and she (secretly) meant a great deal to him – so he’d done his best to wash the paint out. The end result was that Ginger Biscuit still looked like a cat but not a ginger one. Mr Grunt had been dreading what Mrs Grunt would say when she saw it, or what she might do. To him.

  What had actually happened, though, was that she’d walked in, picked up the now muddy-brown cat-shaped doorstop, said, “Hello, Chocolate Biscuit!” and wandered off with it as though he’d always looked like that and had always had that name.

  “It smells of old lawns in here,” Mrs Grunt’s mother had said, glaring at the few remaining pieces of turf cut from Dr Tubb’s garden.

  That’d been the last straw. Mr Grunt had gone up front and taken charge of Fingers, and Sunny had gone inside to talk to Mimi. Not surprisingly, their main topic of conversation was the person at the surgery window and the one over the road outside Mrs Lunge’s house.

  “Do you think they were the same person?” asked Mimi.

  “Couldn’t say,” admitted Sunny. “I’m as certain as I can be that the person outside Dr Tubb’s window was a man, but I don’t know if the one with the binoculars was a man or a woman.”

  “It’s weird enough one person spying on you, but two!” said Mimi. “What on earth’s going on?”

  They’d now reached the car park and Mr Grunt had knocked over a cone or two. A man clutching a book of raffle tickets was jumping up and down and shouting furiously, “You can’t park your contraption here! Didn’t you read the signs?!”

  “No,” said Mr Grunt. “I didn’t.” One of the Grunts’ favourite pastimes was not bothering to read signs.

  The furious man stomped right up to the Grunts’ caravan. He was about to get VERY bossy with Mr Grunt, which would no doubt have made Mr Grunt VERY angry when – fortunately for everyone else at the country fair – Poppet put in an unexpected appearance.

  Lots of kicking was avoided.

  The pig came barrelling towards the caravan, more like a very excited, very overweight dog than a piggy. She was making the happiest of squealing noises. She’d spotted Fingers and was DELIGHTED. Here was her biggest and best piggy friend in the whole wide world (except, of course, for the fact that he was actually an elephant).

  In an effort to avoid the hurtling pig, the raffle-ticket man leaped backwards directly into the path of a small flock of passing sheep. They were being led from the back of a large, wooden-slatted trailer to the country fair’s holding pens, which were off to one side of the car park, and he very quickly found himself having to do some very serious apologising to an annoyed-looking farmer.

  Poppet, meanwhile, was swooning at the sight of handsome Fingers, who was patting her on the back with his trunk, as he had Squat the dog. Mr Grunt jumped down on to the grass, which was still damp with morning dew, and Mrs Grunt and her mother spilled out of the back of the caravan. Mrs Lunge was clutching an enormous misshapen handbag.

  “This is going to be the worst country fair ever,” she announced before she’d even reached the bottom step. She looked up at the clear blue sky. “I don’t much like the look of the weather either.”

  “There isn’t a cloud in sight, Ma,” sighed Mrs Grunt.

  “Precisely,” said her mother. “There could be a drought! We could all die of thirst.”

  “Not in a day, surely, Grandma?” said Sunny, appearing in the doorway behind her. He was carrying the big cardboard box marked “BONZO’S DOG TREATS For the Discerning Dog”, full of the jars of Mrs Lunge’s home-made preserves, jams and jellies. “We’d better enter these into the competition.”

  “Insects!” said Mrs Lunge.

  “Insects?” said Mrs Grunt.

  “Insects?” said Mimi, who’d come out behind Sunny. She looked around for any gnats or flies or wasps or – Heaven forbid! – bees. “I don’t see any insects.”

  “Exactly,” said Mrs Lunge. “Not enough water, and the insects die of thirst. Not enough insects to feed on, and the birds die of hunger. Not enough birds, and—” She paused to brush a fly off her nose.

  “See, Ma?” snorted Mrs Grunt, glaring at her tiny mother. “More than enough insects to go round.”

  Mrs Lunge looked disappointed. “Have you seen the dry, parched earth?” she demanded, tucking her huge handbag under one arm and pointing.

  Sunny looked down at the lovely, lush, dewy green grass of the field being used as the country fair car park. “No, Grandma,” he said.

  “Exactly!” said Mrs Lunge. “They’ve obviously been wasting precious water keeping it this way! Babies in their cots and prams, with cracked lips and dry tongues, gasping for water and—”

  “Are you still complaining?” muttered Mr Grunt, stomping by.

  “WHAT did you just say?” demanded Mrs Grunt’s mother. “Did you say something about raining? We’re in the middle of a DROUGHT here and you’re making jokes about rain?!”

  “There isn’t a drought, Grandma,” said Sunny soothingly. “We were just discussing the weather, remember?”

  Mrs Grunt,
meanwhile, was staring at Mr Grunt. There was something different about him.

  A new hole in his old sweater?

  No.

  Fresh plasters on his squirrel wounds?

  No, not that either.

  He’d cleaned his shoes?

  Definitely not.

  He was wearing a traffic cone on his head?

  Ah, yes. That was it…

  “Why’ve you got that cone on your head, mister?” she shouted.

  “It was the nearest cone I could find,” said Mr Grunt.

  “I meant, why are you wearing it on your head?”

  “Then say what you mean.”

  “Then answer the question.”

  “I’ve forgotten the question.”

  “Why … are … you … wearing … a … traffic … cone … on … your … head, you leg-warmer?”

  “Because it won’t fit on me knees, you shaving brush!” snapped Mr Grunt.

  “Cushion cover!”

  “Hash browns!”

  “Horse hair!”

  “Privet hedge!”

  “Privet hedge?” gasped Mrs Grunt.

  “Privet hedge,” nodded Mr Grunt.

  “You… You…” spluttered Mrs Grunt. “You bone marrow!”

  Sunny plonked the cardboard box on the grass, causing the jars inside to chink. The others stopped and looked.

  “Careful with those, Sunny,” said Mrs Grunt.

  “Sometimes I don’t know why I bother entering,” muttered Mrs Lunge. “The whole competition is fixed, rigged, a con…”

  “But you won once, Ma,” Mrs Grunt reminded her.

  Her mother didn’t seem to know what to say to that, so changed the subject. “Where’s Squat?” she asked.