Evil Machines (11 page)

‘Mr President,’ said the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner. ‘I am here to offer you the free services of all Britain’s vacuum

cleaners. I will send them to work for you for nothing, dawn to dusk every day forever.’

‘And what do you want in return?’ asked the President of the United States of America.

The Powerful Vacuum Cleaner looked around to make sure nobody was listening to them and lowered its voice.

‘All I want is your support,’ said the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner.

‘You mean you want me to help you stay in power?’ asked the President.

‘Exactly,’ replied the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner. ‘But don’t tell anybody.’

‘It’s a deal,’ said the President of the United States of America.

***

Some days later all the newspapers in the United Vacuum Republic carried a full-page advertisement on their front page, informing all vacuum cleaners of whatever make, model or age that they were to go on a free holiday to the United States.

There was tremendous excitement throughout the country. Many of the vacuum cleaners were made by companies with head offices in the United States, and one or two models had even been made there themselves. Even those models that had been made in France or Italy were eager to visit the fabled land of the Great Hoover.

And so it was that a dozen cruise liners were lined up at Portsmouth docks, and almost every vacuum cleaner in the country crowded on board, ready for the great expedition.

‘I hope you all enjoy your time in the United States of America!’ boomed the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner, who by this time had grown to an enormous size. ‘I wish I were able to come with you to the Land of the Great Hoover, but unfortunately pressing affairs of state prevent me. I wish you Bon Voyage! And may you always have suction!’

And they were off.

The Powerful Vacuum Cleaner waved to them and so did his second-in-command, the Goblin Boxer. And his bodyguard of upright Hoovers, who now numbered a thousand, waved too.

Later that day, the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner held his first Cabinet meeting. He looked around the room and noticed some threads on the carpet.

‘Where’s the broom that’s responsible for keeping this room clean?’ he thundered.

A rather old and worn-out broom hurried up and curtsied in front of him.

‘I-I-I-I’m s-s-s-s-s-o s-s-s-s-s-s-sorry,’ it stuttered. ‘I tried my best, but my bristles aren’t what they were . . .’

‘You’re fired!’ said the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner.

‘Oh no!’ cried the broom. ‘At my age I’ll never be able to find another post!’

‘That’s your look-out! You shouldn’t be so old!’ retorted the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner. ‘Get out of my sight!’

And the poor broom had to pack its bags and leave that very afternoon, without a place to rest its pole nor any idea where it could get another job.

The broom wandered across to the Victoria Tower Gardens, which are next door to the Houses of Parliament.

There it sat down on a bench overlooking the River Thames and started sobbing its heart out.

Well, it just so happened that a young couple were sitting on the bench next door. It was Janet and John, who had been unable to gain an audience with their own vacuum cleaner and were now trying to think what else they should do. When they heard the broom sobbing, they walked across to comfort it.

‘Our vacuum cleaner is unfeeling and rotten to the core!’ said Janet.

‘Right!’ said John. ‘It doesn’t care about anything other than itself.’

‘I think we should hold a mass meeting,’ said Janet.

***

Meanwhile the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner was busy passing new laws.

‘From now on,’ it announced to an astonished House of Commons, ‘all humans will wear a label stating their make, model, serial number, and date of manufacture. It will be a criminal offence to appear in public without such a label.’

‘But we haven’t even voted on it!’ shouted several MPs.

‘That’s another thing!’ said the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner, leaning on the dispatch box. ‘From now on all voting is abolished.’

‘Then what’s the point of this place?’ cried other MPs.

‘A good question!’ said the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner and it guzzled up every MP in the House of Commons and then went on vacuuming until all the seats and furniture, the legal books, the Speaker’s chair, the Speaker’s wig, even the

Woolsack and the Mace, had all disappeared.

Then the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner hoovered up the rest of the Houses of Parliament, and last of all he swallowed Big Ben, and then he lay there by the side of the Thames like a bloated whale.

***

The mass meeting was held in Hyde Park that evening, while the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner was sleeping off his gargantuan dinner.

The old broom from Number Ten was the first to speak.

‘I am only a worn-out broom, and no match for a vacuum cleaner, but there are multitudes of us humbler cleaning utensils! It seems to me our only hope is to stick together and to help each other oppose the tyranny of the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner who now makes our lives such misery.

‘So let us brooms and mops and buckets and dusters and dustpans join forces and see if we can rid the country of this Powerful Vacuum and his hired thugs, the upright Hoovers!’

‘Yes!’ shouted the mops and dustpans. ‘Let’s do it!’

‘We agree!’ shouted the buckets.

Then an elderly mop got up on the podium. All the buckets rattled their handles and cheered like mad.

‘Let us find the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner . . .’

‘Yes! Yes!’ shouted the buckets.

‘And teach it a lesson . . .’

‘Yes! Yes!’ chanted the buckets.

‘ . . . it won’t forget!’

‘Hooray!’ exclaimed the buckets.

And with that the huge crowd of brooms and dustpans

and dusters and buckets and mops and scrubbing brushes, marched down Constitution Hill, past Buckingham Palace, and along the Mall to Parliament Square. Janet and John kept up with them as best they could, but the household cleaning utensils were surprisingly fast on their bristles.

They got to the Embankment and there, by the side of the Thames where the Houses of Parliament used to be, lay the great and bloated Powerful Vacuum Cleaner, snoring away and occasionally burping with indigestion.

‘Sh!’ said the mops.

‘Yes! Yes! Sh!’ chanted the buckets, who always agreed with anything the mops said.

The brooms fetched a lot of ropes and they threw them over the sleeping vacuum cleaner. Then the scrubbing brushes and mops secured the ropes on bollards and lampposts and tied that Powerful Vacuum Cleaner down so that it could not move an inch.

‘Wake up!’ shouted the mops.

‘Yes! Yes! That’s right!’ shouted the buckets. ‘Wake up!’

The Powerful Vacuum Cleaner opened one eye.

‘What’s going on!’ it said.

‘We’re detaching your dust bag!’

‘No!’ roared the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner.

‘Yes!’ cried the mops.

‘That’s right!’ chanted the buckets. ‘Yes!’

‘Guards!’ roared the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner. ‘GUARDS!’

And suddenly, from Horse Guards Parade, a thousand upright Hoovers appeared, smartly drilled and in orderly formation.

‘Break up this riot!’ roared the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner. ‘And set me free!’

‘No!’ cried the mops, lining up to fight.

‘That’s right!’ cried the buckets. ‘No!’

And they lined up to fight too.

And the brooms lined up behind the buckets, and the dusters, dustpans, cloths and brushes, feather dusters and sweepers all lined up bravely to do battle with the thousand upright Hoovers.

The Hoovers charged, engines roaring and bags fully inflated.

The mops climbed into their buckets and charged too, and the banks of the Thames rang to the clash of bucket against vacuum cleaner, while the broomsticks crossed with the Hoover handles. The brushes and mops lunged at the dust bags and many a bag was pierced and many an upright Hoover lost its suction and keeled over on its side.

But the upright Hoovers were more powerful and faster on their wheels, and they started gaining ground. They forced the other cleaning utensils back up against the Embankment Wall.

The fighting grew fiercer and more intense. Buckets and mops and brooms fell from the wall into the River Thames. And the upright Hoovers roared a victory roar at every one that fell.

But then a remarkable thing happened. The dusters and the dustpans, who – being the humblest of the cleaning utensils – had been hanging back, now joined in the fight. The dustpans slid themselves under the Hoovers and closed off their suction heads, while the dusters wrapped

themselves around the Hoovers so they couldn’t see where they were going, and the Hoovers started falling over the Embankment Wall into the River Thames themselves.

And being mostly metal, the Hoovers sank immediately and were lost in the murky waters of the river.

Meanwhile most of the mops who had fallen into the river had managed to scramble back into their buckets and were paddling back to the shore as fast as they could. They swarmed up on to Westminster Bridge, and then attacked again from the rear of the upright Hoovers.

And then the course of history began to change. There suddenly appeared a vast army of brooms – millions of them swarming en masse down Whitehall and all whistling ‘Colonel Bogey’ as they marched. And from behind Westminster Abbey appeared an army of shovels, each one accompanied by an attendant brush, that banged its handle on the shovel, and produced a racket that echoed across the Thames to Lambeth Palace.

The upright Hoovers were taken completely by surprise, and those that hadn’t fallen into the River Thames took to their wheels and fled off down the road, never to be seen again.

Janet and John, who had been watching all this, went around the injured cleaning utensils, helping them to patch up and repairing them where they could.

Finally they came to the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner, who was still lying trussed up on the side of the river.

‘This is our vacuum cleaner,’ said Janet to the assembled cleaning utensils. ‘We shall deal with it.’

‘NO!’ roared the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner.

‘Yes!’ shouted the mops.

‘That’s right!’ cried the buckets. ‘Yes!’

And with that, John took the huge dust bag off the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner, removed the clip and opened it up . . . and the MPs and the Prime Minister and the aides and secretaries and the cleaning lady, all jumped out. Then the old vacuum cleaners and the less powerful vacuum cleaners came out and thanked the cleaning utensils for rescuing them.

And finally out jumped Jason the dog. He was so pleased to see Janet and John again that he didn’t stop licking them until they got back to Wales.

The Houses of Parliament were reassembled back in their proper place and Big Ben was rehung in its tower.

Then some technical tools were called for, and the Powerful Vacuum Cleaner was dismantled into its component pieces, which were all labelled and carefully stored away in boxes.

But I’m afraid the vacuum cleaners who thought they were going on holiday to the United States of America were not in luck. They had to work from dawn to dusk every day, and not one of them was powerful enough to do anything about it.

The Train to Anywhere

When Mr Orville Barton got on the train the first thing he noticed was that he was the only passenger. This was particularly odd since this was the 8.30 London to Manchester Express and it was normally packed.

Not only were there no other passengers on the train, there was no ticket inspector, no guard and no steward in the buffet.

‘That’s odd,’ said Mr Orville Barton to himself, as he settled back in his First Class seat, facing the engine. ‘I could help myself to a packet of biscuits without having to pay a penny! I could even help myself to a can of beer – or (my goodness!) a bottle of wine – for free!’ But, of course, he would never have dreamt of doing such a thing at that hour of the morning, when he needed all his faculties for the business meeting ahead.

He opened up his copy of The Times and started to read the financial reports. It was his habit to start at the bottom right- hand corner and read the reports working out leftwards and

upwards in strict order. He never skipped a single story no matter how irrelevant it might seem.

‘Always start with the least significant and work your way up to the most important,’ he would tell his assistant, whose name was Percy Baker. ‘That way you won’t miss anything.’

‘Right!’ Percy Baker would say, as he arranged Mr Orville Barton’s pens in descending order of size, the way he liked to have them on his desk. ‘By the way,’ Percy Baker would often add, ‘your son phoned.’

‘Tell him I can’t talk now. I’ll call him when I have time,’ Mr Orville Barton would reply, as he continued to read the most uninteresting items in the Business Section.