The Grunts In Trouble (2 page)

The Grunts were very fond of Sunny in their
own way, but their own way was a
strange
way. Let me give you some examples (and if you don’t like my examples you can always give them back).

For example: Mr and Mrs Grunt knew that boys don’t like washing, so they never made Sunny wash. They knew that boys don’t like tidying their bedrooms, so they didn’t give him a bedroom. They made him sleep on the landing outside
their
room.

The truth be told, there wasn’t room for a second bedroom in the Grunts’ house because they didn’t live in an ordinary house. They lived in a caravan.

Not a lovely, pretty, brightly painted wooden caravan.

No, not one of those. Put such thoughts out of your mind.

Nor a sleek, modern, metal caravan.

No, not one of those either.

They lived in a caravan Mr Grunt and his dad (Old Mr Grunt) had built together out of
stuff
. Stuff that included an old garden shed, the sidecar of a motorbike-and-sidecar, the less interesting half of an ice-cream van and some bobs (from a collection of bits and bobs) including an old dog kennel, some wooden planks and a frothy-coffee-making machine. The end result usually made most sensible people run away if they saw it being towed round the corner by the Grunts’ two donkeys, Clip and Clop.

Ah, Clip and Clop. I was wondering when I’d get a chance to tell you about them, and now here we are.

Clip and Clop were sister and brother and/or brother and sister. They both had ridiculously long, lovable ears and big, lovable noses.
For a long time the Grunts thought that there was only one of them – that they were one and the same donkey – and they called “it” Clip-Clop. It was only when Sunny pointed out they could see them both at once, next to each other, that they realised that there must be TWO donkeys.

(This may not make much sense to you or me, but it’s the Grunts we’re talking about here, remember. They’re not like the rest of us. Well, certainly not like ME. I can’t be sure about you, come to think of it. I’ve no idea how ODD you may be. Which reminds me. I hope you’ve still got that piece of paper tucked safe and sound under your beard.)

The easiest way to tell Clip from Clop at a glance was to imagine that their ears were the hands of a clock. Clip’s ears appeared to be saying eleven o’clock and Clop’s said one
o’clock. If you’ve no idea what I mean – and, amazingly, this does happen sometimes – here’s a picture to explain it.

See? Good.

It was one of Sunny’s many jobs to unhitch Clip and Clop from the caravan every evening so if the donkeys decided to go for a little wander in the night, the Grunts’ house stayed put.

Back in the days before Mr Grunt took Sunny from the washing line and gave him to Mrs Grunt, it was up to them to unhitch the pair. And as you’ve probably realised by now, Mr and Mrs Grunt aren’t the two most reliable people in the world.

More often than not, Mr Grunt would think that Mrs Grunt had unhitched the donkeys and Mrs Grunt would think that Mr Grunt had done it, so the job wouldn’t get done and they’d wake up MILES from where they thought they’d parked their house the night before.

On one memorable occasion they woke up
on a golf course to find Clip sticking her nose down one of the holes, Clop thoughtfully chewing the little flagpole next to it, and a VERY angry, VERY red-faced man running towards them with a double-barrelled shotgun.

Mr Grunt knew that it was a
double-barrelled
shotgun because the man was firing at them WITH BOTH BARRELS! It took Mrs Grunt a week to dig the buckshot – the little round pellets inside the shotgun cartridges – out of Mr Grunt’s bottom with a pair of rusty eyebrow tweezers. (And please don’t ask me how you get rusty eyebrows because that’ll make me almost as angry as
the golf-club groundsman had been with them and the donkeys.) Mrs Grunt had a big grin on her face every time Mr Grunt went “Ouch!” as she dug out another tiny pellet, but that’s not to say she didn’t secretly love him as much as he secretly loved her. (Shocking, I know, but true.) How much Mr and Mrs Grunt loved Clip and Clop was unclear. Lately, Sunny had heard Mr Grunt grumbling about the pair “not being as hard-working as they used to be” and muttering, “What good are donkeys that won’t do the donkey work?”

Now, where were we?

Oh, yes.

When Mrs Grunt tripped over Sunny outside the bedroom door and went tumbling down the stairs, she ended up tumbling out of the doors of the caravan and on to the ground. She narrowly avoided a patch of extremely
stingy stinging nettles but did land head-first in a mole hill.

“If you’re going to fall downstairs, then do it
quietly
, wife!” Mr Grunt shouted from the bed. “Some of us have more sleeping to do.” He pulled the duvet over his head, rolled over and fell on to the floor.

He landed on Sharpie, Mrs Grunt’s stuffed hedgehog. A real one.

“OUCH!” yelled Mr Grunt.

His cry of pain could be heard as far away as Bigg Manor (if you were an exotic bird with very good hearing). That’s BIGG MANOR, with two Gs. But more about
that
later.

Lots more.

Chapter Two

Throwing Things

B
y the time Mr Grunt had got back into bed and Mrs Grunt had clambered back inside the caravan, her beloved Ginger Biscuit tucked under her arm, Sunny had given Clip and Clop their breakfast and hitched them up to the front of the van. It was time to head off again. He walked alongside the donkeys as they slowly moved forward, pulling the huge weight of the caravan behind them.

The sun was shining and birds sang in the trees. Well,
some
birds, at least. Others were
busy trying to pull reluctant juicy breakfast worms out of the ground, and yet more of them were flying away in horror at the sight of the Grunts’ home-made caravan trundling along the asphalt road. Their little beaks were all a-quiver. 

Mr and Mrs Grunt never really seemed to care much where they went, as long as they were going
somewhere
, though sometimes Mr Grunt would leave them for a few days – often on a rusty old bike made up from the parts of three separate rusty old bikes – then miraculously find them, wherever they’d ended up.

The Grunts didn’t like staying in one spot for too long because whenever they did, they usually ended up getting into trouble. They didn’t MEAN to, but they didn’t go out of their way to avoid it either – like the time they
walked through the middle of a re-enactment of a famous battle involving three thousand people dressed as soldiers, and there was something about the way they joined in that seemed to upset people.

And not just people.

Sometimes animals too.

Once Mr Grunt upset a glow worm so much that it deliberately kept him awake all night by hovering above his bed, flashing on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off.

(And I suspect you’re beginning to get an idea of
just
how irritating that can be. I went to make myself a cup of coffee part way through.)

Soon the Grunt residence was trundling up a hill, which was quite hard work for Clip and Clop but they didn’t seem too bothered. Sunny had made sure that they’d had a good feed before they went to sleep and a good feed when they woke up – and the sleep in between had been peaceful – so they were in a good mood. Sunny was wandering along beside them, but before starting the uphill climb had double-checked that the bottom part of the stable-like door to the caravan (at the back) was bolted shut.

Why?

I’ll tell you why. (That’s what I’m here for, as well as to add a bit of bearded glamour.) He checked that it was bolted because if it hadn’t been, once the caravan started going uphill the door might have swung open and lots of stuff would have rolled out of the doorway
and into the road … which is what used to happen a lot before Sunny became part of the family.

Unfortunately, Mr Grunt had decided to have a bath. He was sitting in the tin tub just before the whole caravan had tilted backwards and begun the climb. The tub was fixed to the floor, so there was no problem with it sliding about, and it had a detachable lid with a hole for his head to stick out of so the water didn’t slop everywhere, but he had left a big cake of soap resting on the floor.

Now the soap slid across the floor and right into the path of Mrs Grunt. Mrs Grunt wasn’t one for looking where she was going even at the best of times. At that particular moment, however, she was carrying some rolls of turf she’d borrowed from a village green – which was now more of a village
brown
, because
without its lovely layer of grass it looked plain muddy – so she couldn’t have been watching her step even if she’d wanted to. She stood on the cake of soap, which skidded away in front of her, taking one foot forward and leaving the rest of her behind, like an
ice-skater
doing the splits.

She landed on top of the lid of the tin bath with a resounding CLANK (or THUNG!). The noise was like the sound you might get from a very fat knight in a roomy suit of armour being hit on the breastplate with a big, spiky truncheon-like thingy.

Next, the rolls of turf that had been in her arms went flying up in the air and came flopping down on her and on Mr Grunt and
the surrounding area.

“Idiot woman!” said Mr Grunt.

“Rude man!” said Mrs Grunt. She had just spied the cake of soap on the floor and realised what must have happened. “This is your fault.”

“Yours.”

“Yours!”

“Yours!”

“Yours!” Mrs Grunt repeated, just as Sunny appeared through the doorway. He had heard the terrible CLANG (or THUNG!), stopped Clip and Clop as soon as he reached a
not-quite
-so-steep part on their uphill journey, and had come to investigate.

“Your father tried to trip me up,” she protested.

“But he’s in the bath,” Sunny pointed out, “so how could he?”

“Through trickery!” cried Mrs Grunt. “That’s what it was! Trickery!”

Sunny looked from the roll of turf on top of Mrs Grunt’s head to the roll of turf on top of Mr Grunt’s head and then back again. “Why are you both wearing grass wigs?” he asked. Mr Grunt gave out a big grunt and flung his piece of turf across the room. It landed on the doorstop cat, knocking him sideways.

“Ginger Biscuit!” cried Mrs Grunt, struggling off the bath lid and hurrying over to her beloved sawdust-filled moggy.

Sunny sighed and, safe in the knowledge that everything was pretty much normal (as far as the Grunt family was concerned, that is), went back outside – carefully bolting the bottom half of the stable-style door behind him – and returned to Clip and Clop.

Ten minutes or so later, Sunny found himself
leading the donkeys down the country road that led past the entrance to Bigg Manor. (Remember the name?

^{Yes, that one.)}

Up ahead a tallish, thinnish man was standing in the middle of the road with a neat pyramid-shaped pile of rocks. His name was Larry Smalls and he was wearing a badly crumpled, coal-black top hat on his head (of all places) and an old white T-shirt. On the T-shirt were the words:

in faded red letters.

“Hello, kid,” said Larry Smalls as the
caravan approached. (The truth be told, he couldn’t tell whether the child with the wonky face, sticking-up hair and blue dress was a girl or a boy.) “Want to throw a rock?”

“Where?” asked Sunny.

“Here,” said Larry Smalls, pointing to the pile. “One of these.”

“I meant where should I throw it?” asked Sunny.

Larry Smalls sighed. “At the gates to the Bigg house, of course,” he said, looking as sad as a box of ignored kittens.

Sunny looked over at the impressive entrance to the long and winding driveway leading up to the manor house: two big brown stone pillars either side, topped with white stone lions, and two gates of black metal railings with impressive gold-coloured spikes on top.

He looked back at Larry Smalls in his BIGG AIN’T BEST T-shirt. “Excuse me,” he said a little hesitantly, “but WHY, exactly?”

“Why?” said Larry Smalls with a gasp. He was wondering a “Why?” of his own. He was wondering why this odd boy – he’d worked out Sunny was a boy – was wearing a strange blue dress. (Or
any
kind of dress, come to that.)

“Why would anyone want to throw rocks at the gates?” asked Sunny.

If you must know, Sunny was very tempted to throw a rock or two. He knew that throwing rocks at things was usually wrong, but there wasn’t any rock-throwing in his life, and the neat pyramid-shaped pile of them did look very
throwable
.

Each rock was roughly the size and shape of a tennis ball; just the sort of size you’d want a
chuckable rock to be. (Not that I EVER throw rocks, even when one seems to be saying,
“Throw me! Throw me!”
in a tiny voice inside my head which only I can hear.)

“Why should you throw them at the gates?” said Larry Smalls. “You ask me WHY?” He looked a mixture of puzzled and outraged and a bit like one of those birds that stands on one leg just because it can. “Because that is the gateway to the home of the Bigg family.
That’s
why.”