Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Dedication

These stories are affectionately dedicated to the memory of the original CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG, built in 1920 by Count Zborowski on his estate near Canterbury, England.

She had a pre-1914 war, chain drive, 75 horsepower Mercedes chassis in which was installed a six-cylinder Maybach aero engine —the military type used by the Germans in their Zeppelins.

Four vertical overhead valves per cylinder were operated by exposed push rods and rockers from a camshaft on each side of the crankcase, and two Zenith carburetors were attached, one at each end of a long induction pipe.

She had a gray steel body with an immense polished hood eight feet in length, and weighed over five tons.

In 1921, she won the Hundred M.P.H. Short Handicap at Brooklands at 101 miles per hour, and, in 1922, again at Brooklands, the Lightning Short Handicap. But in that year she was involved in an accident and the Count never raced her again.

A Note

for the Reader

This story takes place in England and, as in England they use English money—peculiarly enough—the American reader will need to know a little—though not a lot—about English currency. So, a pound is worth approximately $2.80 and a shilling is worth 14 cents. And, if your arithmetic is good enough, you should be able to figure out exactly how much things cost in this story.

MOST MOTORCARS are conglomerations (this is a long word for "bundles") of steel and wire and rubber and plastic, and electricity and oil and gasoline and water, and the toffee papers you pushed down the crack in the back seat last Sunday. Smoke comes out of the back of them and hornsquawks out of the front, and they have white lights like big eyes in front, and red lights behind. And that is about that—just motorcars, tin boxes on wheels for running about in.

But some motorcars— mine, for instance, and perhaps yours—are different. If you get to like them and understand them, if you are kind to them and don't scratch their paint or bang their doors, if you fill them up and pump them up when they need it, if you keep them clean and polished and out of the rain and snow as much as possible, you will find, you MAY find, that they become almost like persons—MORE than just ordinary persons—MAGICAL PERSONS! ! !

You don't believe me? All right then! You just read about this car I'm going to tell you about! I believe you can guess its name already her name, I should say. And then see if you don't agree with me. All motorcars aren't just conglomerations of machinery and fuel. SOME ARE ....

Once upon a time there was a family called POTT. There was the father, who had been in the Royal Navy, COMMANDER CARACTACUS POTT. (You may think that Caractacus sounds quite a funny name, but in fact the original Caractacus was the British chieftain who was a sort of Robin Hood in A.D. 48 and led an English army against the Roman invaders. I expect since then there have been plenty of other Caractacuses, but I don't know anything about them.) Then there was the mother, MIMSIE POTT and a pair of eight-year-old twins—JEREMY, who was a black-haired boy, and JEMIMA, who was a golden-haired girl—and they lived in a wood beside a big lake with an island in the middle. On the other side of the lake, M.20, the big turnpike along the Dover Road, swept away toward the sea. So they had the best of both worlds—lovely woods for catching beetles and finding birds' eggs, with a lake for newts and tadpoles, and a fine big road close by so that they could go off and see the world if they wanted to.

Well, almost, that is. But the truth of the matter was that they hadn't got enough money between them to buy a car. All the money they had went to necessities—food and heat and light and clothes and all those boring things that one doesn't really notice but families have to have. There was only a little left over for birthday and Easter and Christmas presents and occasional surprise outings—the things that REALLY matter.

But the Potts were a happy family who all enjoyed their lives and since they were not in the least sorry for themselves, or sorry that they had no motorcar to go whirling about in, we need not be sorry for them either.

Now Commander Caractacus Pott was an explorer and an inventor and that may have been the reason why the Pott family was not very rich. Exploring places and inventing things can be very exciting indeed, but it is only very seldom that, in your explorations, you discover a really rare butterfly or animal or insect or mineral or plant that people will pay money to see, and practically never that you discover real treasure, like in books—gold bars and diamonds and jewels in an old oak chest.

As for inventions, much the same troubles apply. People all over the world, in America, Russia, China, Japan—let alone England and Scotland and Wales and Ireland—are inventing or trying to invent things all the time—every kind of thing from rockets that fly to the moon to ways of making India rubber balls bounce higher. Everything, everything, everything is being invented or improved all the time by somebody somewhere—whether by teams of scientists in huge factories and laboratories, or by lonely men sitting and just thinking in tiny workshops without many tools.

Just such a solitary inventor was Commander Caractacus Pott, and I am ashamed to say that, because he was always dreaming of impossible inventions and adventures and explorations in the remotest parts of the earth, he was generally known in the neighborhood as Commander CRACKPOTT! ! You may think it's rude, and so it is, but Commander Pott was a humorous man and he knew his own shortcomings very well, so when he heard that that was his nickname in the neighborhood, he was not at all cross. He just roared with laughter and said, "I'll show 'em!" and disappeared into his workshop and didn't come out for a whole day and a night.

During that time, smoke came out of the workshop chimney and there were a lot of delicious smells. And when the children put their ears to the locked door, they could hear mysterious bubblings and cooking-poppings, if you know what I mean, but nothing else at all. When Commander Pott came out, he was so hungry that first of all he ate four fried eggs and bacon and drank a huge pot of coffee, and then he asked Mimsie to call Jeremy and Jemima, who were getting in an awful mess digging out a water rat's hole on the bank of the lake. (They never caught the water rat. He dug down faster than they did.)

The twins came and stood side by side looking at their father, wondering what his invention had been this time. (Commander Pott's inventions were sometimes dull things like collapsible coat hangers; sometimes useless things like edible phonograph records; and sometimes clever things that just, only just, wouldn't work, like cubical potatoes [easy to slice and pack and peel but expensive to grow each in its little iron box] and so on.) Commander Pott, looking very mysterious, dug in his pockets and produced a handful of what looked like round colored sugar candies, each a bit bigger than a marble, wrapped in paper. And, still looking mysterious, he chose a red one for Jeremy and a green for Jemima and handed them over.

Well, candies are always candies, thought the children, even though they didn't look very exciting, so they unwrapped them and were just about to pop them in their mouths when Commander Pott cried, "Wait! Look at them first—very, very carefully !"

The children looked at the sweets and Commander Pott said, "What do you see? What's different about them?"

And Jeremy and Jemima said with one voice, or almost, "They've got two small holes drilled through the middle of them."

Commander Pott nodded solemnly. "Now suck them."

So Jeremy and Jemima popped the candies into their mouths and sucked busily away, looking at each other with raised eyebrows as much as to say, "What do you notice? And what do you taste? Mine tastes of strawberry. Mine tastes of peppermint." And both pairs of eyes seemed to say, "They're just candy, round hard candy, and our tongues can feel the holes in them. Otherwise they're just like any other candy."

But Commander Pott, who could easily see what they were thinking, suddenly held up his hand. "Now stop sucking, both of you. Twiddle the candies round with your tongues until they're held between your teeth, with the twin holes pointing outward, open your lips, and BLOW!"

Well, of course the children laughed so much watching each other's faces that they nearly swallowed the candies, but finally, by turning their backs on each other, they managed to compose themselves and fix the candies between their teeth.

And they BLEW!

And do you know what? A wonderful shrill whistle came out, almost like a toy steam engine. The children were so excited that they went on whistling until Commander Pott sternly told them to stop. He held up his hand. "Now go on sucking until I tell you to whistle again." And he took out his watch and carefully observed the minute hand.

"Now!"

This time Jeremy and Jemima didn't laugh so much, but managed to get their candies, which of course were much smaller than before, between their teeth, and they blew like crazy.

This time, because their sucking had hollowed out the holes still more, the whistle was a deep one, like one of the new diesel trains going into a tunnel, and they found that they could play all sorts of tricks, like changing the tone by blocking up one hole with their tongues and half closing their lips so as to make a buzzing whistle, and lots of other variations.

But then, what with their sucking and their blowing, the bit between the two holes collapsed and the candies made one last deep hoot and then crunched, as all candy does in the end, into little bits.

Jeremy and Jemima both jumped up and down with excitement at Commander Pott's invention and begged for more. Then Commander Pott gave them each a little bag full of the candies and told them to go out into the garden and practice every whistling tune they could think up, as after lunch he was going to take them to SKRUMSHUS LIMITED, the big candy people at their local town, to give a demonstration to Lord Skrumshus who owned the factory.

And as they ran out into the garden, Commander Pott called after them, "They're called 'CRACKPOTS—CRACKPOT WHISTLING SWEETS.' And you know what, my chickabiddies? They're going to buy us a motorcar! !"

But the children were already dancing away into the woods making every kind of whistle you can think of, at the same time sucking like mad at their delicious candies. There really seemed to be something special about Commander Pott's invention—just a little touch of genius.

Well, anyway, I can tell you this, Lord Skrumshus thought so. After he had heard Jeremy and Jemima whistling in his office, he sent them out into the factory and they danced around among the workers, sucking and whistling and handing out candies from their pockets, so that very soon they had all the workers in the factory sucking and whistling, and everyone laughed so much that all the SKRUMSHUS candy machines came to a stop. Lord Skrumshus had to call Jeremy and Jemima away before they brought the whole production of SKRUMSHUS candies and chocolates to a grinding halt.

So Jeremy and Jemima went back into Lord Skrumshus's grand office and there was their father being paid ONE THOUSAND POUNDS by the SKRUMSHUS Company Treassurer, and signing a paper which said he would get an additional ONE SHILLING on every thousand CRACKPOT WHISTLING SWEETS sold by SKRUMSHUS LIMITED. Jeremy and Jemima didn't think that sounded very much, but when I let you into a secret and tell you that SKRUMSHUS LIMITED sells FIVE MILLION every year of just one of their candies called CHOCK-A-HOOP, you can work out for yourself that perhaps, just
perhaps
, COMMANDER CARACTACUS POTT wasn't making such a bad bargain after all.