Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car Read online

  Commander Pott took his face out from under the bonnet. He looked at them and they looked back at him, and he just turned to the garage man and said, “I’ll buy her. We all love her and we’ll make her as good as new. How much do you want for her?”

  “Fifty pounds,” said the garage man. “She wouldn’t fetch much as scrap.”

  Commander Pott counted out the money there and then, and said, “Thank you, and will you please have her towed along to my workshop just as soon as you can.”

  And do you know? There were almost tears of happiness in the garage man’s eyes as he shook them all by the hand. As they climbed into their taxi to go off home, he said seriously, “Commander Pott, Mrs. Pott, Master Pott, and Miss Pott, you will never regret buying that car. She’s going to give you the time of your lives. You’ve saved her from the scrap-heap, and I’ll eat my hat — if I had a hat to eat — if she doesn’t repay you for what you’ve done today.” He was still waving happily after them when they drove out of sight.

  As they bowled along in their taxi, Jemima whispered to Jeremy in the front seat next to the driver, “Jeremy, did you notice something very mysterious about the old registration number that was hanging from the back of our car?”

  “There was nothing mysterious about it,” said Jeremy scornfully. “It was GEN ELEVEN.”

  “Yes,” said Jemima excitedly. “GEN II. Don’t you realize what that spells? Genii — like magical people, sort of spirits, like that story about the Bottle Imp by Robert Louis Stevenson that Mimsie read to us once.”

  “Hum!” said Jeremy thoughtfully. “Hum! Hum! Hum!” and they sat silently, thinking this odd coincidence over, until they got home.

  Well, the next day Jeremy and Jemima had to go off to boarding-school, so they never saw the arrival of the new car, or rather of the ruins of it, as it came bumping and crashing down the lane behind the tow truck, but Mimsie wrote and told them of how it disappeared at once into Commander Pott’s workshop and how their father then locked himself inside with it and only emerged to eat and sleep.

  For three months, the whole of the summer term, Commander Pott worked and worked secretly on the wreck of the old Paragon, and Mimsie said that much smoke came out of the chimney and often lights shone all night through the windows, and mysterious packages arrived from engineering factories all over England and disappeared into the workshop through the locked doors. Mimsie wrote that their father went through periods of gloom and impatience and frenzy and triumph and dejection and delight and unhappiness and nightmares and loss of appetite, but that gradually, with the passing weeks, he became calmer and happier until, as the holidays came nearer, he was smiling and rubbing his hands. Then at last came the great day when they fetched Jeremy and Jemima from school and the whole family assembled outside the workshop while Commander Pott solemnly unlocked the doors and they all trooped in to where the twelve-cylinder, eight-litre, supercharged Paragon Panther stood under the bright lights.

  Mimsie and Jeremy and Jemima stood and stared and stared and stared until Jemima broke the silence and said, “But she’s the most beautiful car in the world!” Mimsie and Jeremy just nodded their agreement and looked at the Paragon with round and shining eyes.

  And she was beautiful! Every single little thing had been put right, and every detail gleamed and glinted with new paint and polished chromium, down to the snarling mouth of the big boa-constrictor horn.

  Slowly they walked round her and examined her inch by inch, from the rows and rows of gleaming knobs on the dashboard to the brand-new, dark-red leather upholstery, from the cream-coloured, collapsible roof to the fine new tyres, from the glistening silver of the huge exhaust pipes, snaking away from holes in the bright-green bonnet, to the glittering number-plates that said GEN II.

  And silently they climbed in through the low doors that opened and shut with the most delicious clicks, and Commander Caractacus Pott sat behind the huge driving-wheel with Mimsie beside him in her own bucket-seat with an arm-rest, and Jeremy and Jemima got in the back and sank down amongst the big, soft, red-leather cushions and rested their arms on their own arm-rest between them.

  Then, without saying anything, Commander Pott leant forward and pressed the big black knob of the self-starter.

  At first nothing happened. There was just the soft grinding from the starter motor. Jeremy and Jemima looked at each other with round eyes. Wasn’t she going to work after all?

  But then Commander Pott pulled out the silver knob of the choke, to feed more petrol into the carburettor, and pressed the starter again. And out of the exhaust pipes there came just these four noises — very loud: CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG!

  And there was a distinct pause after each noise, and it was like two big sneezes and two small explosions. And then there was silence.

  Again Jeremy and Jemima looked at each other, now really rather worried. Had something gone wrong?

  But Commander Pott just said, “She’s a bit cold. Now then!” He pressed the starter again. And this time, after the first two CHITTY sneezes and the two soft BANGS, the BANGS ran on and into each other so as to make a delicious purring rumble such as neither Mimsie nor Jeremy nor Jemima had ever heard before from a piece of machinery. Commander Pott put the big car into gear, and slowly they rumbled and roared out of the workshop into the sunshine and up the lane towards the motorway, and the springs were soft as silk and always this delicious rumble came out behind from the huge fish-tail exhausts.

  When they got to the side road that joined the motorway, Commander Pott pressed the big bulb of the boa-constrictor horn and it let out a deep, polite, but rather threatening roar, and then, because he wanted to show everything to the children, Commander Pott pressed the electric-horn button in the middle of the wheel and the klaxon horn fired off a terrific blast of warning: “GA-GOOOO-GA!” Then he steered out on to the motorway and they were off on their first practice run.

  Well, I can only tell you that the huge, long, gleaming, green car almost flew. With a click of the big central gear-lever, Commander Pott got out of first gear into second at forty miles per hour, with another click at seventy miles per hour he was in third, and as they touched one hundred miles an hour, he put the huge car into top gear and there they were passing the other black-beetle cars almost as if they were standing still.

  “GA-GOOOO-GA!” went the klaxon again and again as they swept down the big safe double-lane highway, and the drivers of the little family saloons looked in their rear mirrors and saw the great gleaming monster whistling towards them and drew in to the left-hand side to let her go by, and all the drivers said, “Cooer! See that! What is she? Smashing!” And then the green car was past and away, and they caught the hurricane howl of the big exhausts and made a note of the number, GEN II, and not one of the drivers noticed what the number really spelled, they just thought it was a nice short number to have and easy to remember.

  So CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG came to the end of the motorway and Commander Pott carefully swung the big car into the other lane and roared off back towards home, and Jeremy and Jemima clutched their arm-rest with excitement and looked over at the glittering dashboard and watched the needle of the speedometer creep back up to a hundred and stay there until they came to the turning-off for home. And Commander Pott clamped on the powerful hydraulic brakes until the car was only creeping along, and they turned off the motorway and bumped back down their narrow lane and back in under the bright lights of the workshop. And when Commander Pott switched off the engine, it gave one last “CHITTY-CHITTY,” let out a deep sigh of contentment, and was silent.

  They all climbed out, and Commander Pott turned to them with a gleam of triumph in his eye. “Well? What do you think of her?”

  And Mimsie said, “Terrific!”

  And Jeremy said, “Smashing!”

  And Jemima said, “Adorable!”

  And Commander Caractacus Pott said mysteriously, “Well, that’s good. But I’m warning you. There’s something odd about this car. I’ve
put all I know into her, every invention and improvement I could think of, and quite a lot of the thousand pounds we got from the Skrumshus people, but there’s more to it than that. She’s got some ideas of her own.”

  “How do you mean?” they all chorused.

  “Well,” said Commander Pott carefully, “I can’t exactly say, but sometimes, in the morning when I came back to get to work again, I’d find that certain modifications, certain changes, had, so to speak, taken place all by themselves during the night, when I wasn’t there. Certain — what shall I say? — rather revolutionary and extraordinary adaptations. I can’t say more than that, and I haven’t really got to the bottom of it all, but I suspect that this motor-car has thought out, all by herself, certain improvements, certain very extraordinary mechanical devices, just as if she had a mind of her own, just as if she was grateful to us for saving her life, so to speak, and wanted to repay all the loving care we’ve given her. And there’s another thing. You see all those rows and rows of knobs and buttons and levers and little lights on the dashboard? Well, to tell you the truth, I just haven’t been able to discover what they’re all for. I know the obvious ones, of course, but there are some of those gadgets that seem to be secret gadgets. We’ll find out what they’re for in time, I suppose, but for now I’ll admit there are quite a lot of them that have got me really puzzled. She just won’t let me find out.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Jemima excitedly. “Is it a she?”

  “Well,” said Commander Pott, “that’s how I’ve come to call her. It’s funny, but all bits of machinery that people love are made into females. All ships are ‘she.’ Racing drivers call their cars ‘she.’ Same thing with aeroplanes. Don’t know about rockets or Sputniks — somehow they don’t seem very feminine to me — but I bet the rocketeers and Sputnicators, or whatever they call the Sputnik experts, I bet they call their spaceships and things ‘she.’ Odd, isn’t it? I used to serve in a battleship. Gigantic great ship stuffed with guns and radar and so on. Called the George V. But we called her ‘she.’”

  Jeremy said excitedly, “We’ve got to have a name for her. And I know what we ought to call her. What she called herself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What was that?”

  “When did she?” they all cried together.

  Jeremy said slowly, “She said it when she started — CHITTY-CHITTY, like sneezes, and then BANG-BANG! So we’ll call her that, her own invented name.”

  And the others looked at each other and slowly they all smiled and Commander Caractacus Pott patted the green and silver car on her nose and said in a loud and solemn voice, “Now hear me, twelve-cylinder, eight-litre supercharged Paragon Panther. We hereby christen you . . .” and they all chorused: “CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG!” Then they trooped out of the workshop and went happily about all the things they’d forgotten to do for the whole of that exciting afternoon.

  The next day was a Saturday and the month was August and the sun positively streamed down. It was a roaster of a day, and at breakfast Commander Pott made an announcement. “Today,” he said, “is going to be a roaster, a scorcher. There’s only one thing to do, and that’s for us to take a delicious picnic and climb into CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG and dash off down the Dover road to the sea.”

  Of course everyone was delighted with the idea and while Commander Pott and Jeremy and Jemima went to get CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG ready, fill her up with petrol, check the water in the radiator, verify the oil in the sump, test the tyre pressures, clean yesterday’s squashed flies off the windscreen, dust down the body, and polish up the chromium until it shone like silver, Mimsie filled a hamper with hard-boiled eggs, cold sausages, bread-and-butter sandwiches, jam puffs (with, of course, like all good jam puffs, more jam than puff) and bottles and bottles of the best fizzy lemonade and orange squash.

  Then they all piled into the car, with the hood down of course, and, with CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG’s usual two sneezes and two small explosions, they were off up the lane to the motorway that led towards Dover and to the sea, some twenty miles away.

  But, but, but! And once again but!!

  Twenty-two thousand, six hundred and fifty-four other motor-cars full of families (that was the number announced by the Automobile Association the next day) had also decided to drive down the Dover road to the sea on that beautiful Saturday morning, and there was an endless stream of cars going the same way as the Pott family in CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG.

  Well, Commander Pott drove as cleverly as he could, overtaking when it was safe, weaving like a snake in and out of the traffic, and taking short cuts and side roads to dodge really bad queues of cars, but they made terribly slow progress, in spite of much polite mooing of the boa-constrictor horn and, I’m sorry to say, an occasional furious “GA-GOOOO-GA” on the klaxon when some booby in a black-beetle insisted on hogging it down the middle of the road and not leaving room for CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG to get by. As for doing a hundred miles an hour, there just wasn’t any question of it, and they crawled along at a miserable twenty. All of them, Commander Pott, Mimsie, Jeremy, and Jemima, were getting more and more hot and impatient, and even CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG began steaming angrily out of the top of her radiator, on which (I’d forgotten to tell you this) there was a silver mascot of a small aeroplane whose propeller went round and round in the wind, faster or slower according to their speed.

  And, although they couldn’t see them, CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG’s big headlamp eyes, that had been so gleaming with happiness and enthusiasm ever since the day before, began to get angrier and angrier and more and more impatient, so that the people who had gazed in admiration at her through the back windows of their cars became more and more nervous of this gleaming green monster behind them, beginning to look as if she wanted to eat up, with the silver jaws of her radiator, all the line upon line of black-beetle cars that were getting in her way and keeping her family from their picnic by the sea.

  But all the same, they were making steady though very slow progress until, outside Canterbury, they came upon a solid jam of cars that must have reached for at least a mile. And there they were — stuck at the back of the queue; it really looked as if they couldn’t possibly get down to the sands and the sea in time for their picnic, let alone have a wonderful bathe before it.

  Suddenly Commander Pott happened to glance at the dashboard, over on the left, opposite Mimsie, and he said excitedly, “I say, all of you, look at that!”

  And Mimsie looked and Jeremy and Jemima peered over the back of the seat, and amongst all the knobs and instruments a light on top of a small knob was flashing pale pink! And it was showing a word, and the word was PULL!

  “Good heavens!” said Commander Pott. “I wondered what that knob was for, but it’s one of the ones I haven’t had time to tinker with. What can it be for?”

  “Look!” cried Mimsie. “The light’s turning red!”

  And sure enough it was, and now another word was showing! And do you know what the other word was? It was IDIOT! So now the angry red knob read PULL IDIOT! And Commander Pott laughed out loud and said, “Well, I never! That’s pretty good cheek! Here’s CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG taking control and calling me an idiot into the bargain! Oh, well! Here goes!” And he reached over and pulled down the little silver lever.

  The children, in fact the whole family, sat on the tips of their behinds, if you see what I mean, and waited excitedly to see what would happen.

  And a kind of soft humming noise began. It seemed to come from all over the car — from the front axle and from the back axle and from underneath the bonnet. And then the most extraordinary transmogrifications (which is just a long word for “changes”) began to occur. The big front mudguards swivelled outwards so that they stuck out like wings, sharply swept back, and the smaller back mudguards did the same (it was lucky the road was wide and there was single-lane traffic, or a neighbouring car or a telegraph-pole might have been sliced in half by the sharp green wings!). The wings locked
into position with a click, and at the same time, though the family couldn’t see it from behind, the big radiator grille slid open like a sliding door, and the big propeller of the fan belt, together with the fly-wheel underneath that runs the petrol pump and the electric generator, slowly slid forward until they were sticking right out in front of the bonnet of the car.

  And then, on the dashboard, beside another little lever, a green light started to blink and this light said PULL DOWN, and Commander Pott, rather nervously but this time obediently, reached over and gingerly pulled the lever very, very slowly down.

  And then, in heaven’s name, what do you think happened?

  Yes, you’re right, absolutely right. The wings slowly tilted, and as Commander Pott, at last realizing what CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG was up to, pressed down the accelerator pedal, the big green car, which was now what I might call an aerocar, tilted up her shining green and silver nose and took off! Yes! She took off like an aeroplane and soared up over the car in front, just missing her roof, and roared away over the long line of stationary cars in the queue, while all the people stared out of their car windows in absolute astonishment and Commander Pott called out, “Hang on, everyone. For heaven’s sake, hang on!” Mimsie and Jeremy and Jemima clutched the arm-rests beside them and just sat, stiff with excitement and with their eyes and their mouths wide open, thinking, Heavens above! What is going to happen next?

  Well, what happened next was that there came a shrill whine of machinery and a thump, thump, thump, thump from under the car, and automatically the four wheels retracted up into the bodywork, so as to be out of the way and let the aerocar go faster without the wind resistance of the wheels to slow her down.