“What a lovely idea.” Jemima smiled. “Would you like some sandwiches, too?”
“Good thinking,” said Dad.
“You’ve only been in the 1960s for one day,” yelled Lucy, “and already you’ve turned into a raving sexist!”
“Dad seems to have everything in hand.” Mum took Lucy gently by the elbow. “Let’s leave him and the boys to it and make that tea, shall we? Jemima, where is the kitchen?”
Jemima led them out of the lab and across the farmyard toward the house, but as soon as they were out of sight Mum said, “We need to act fast. Dad will restore Chitty to her former glory, but not in time to save Little Harry and your parents. We need a plane. Do you have a plane?”
“A plane? No, we don’t have a plane. We don’t even have a television.”
“We don’t need a plane,” said Lucy.
“What?”
“The Commander invented antigravity paint, remember. All we need is a car. We can cover it in antigravity paint and rendezvous with them over the Channel. If we can get close enough, they can jump out of Big Ben into the car and then let Big Ben crash into the sea.”
“Daddy would never let Big Ben go to the bottom of the sea! At least not without him. A captain always goes down with his ship. Even if it’s a clock.”
“What about Little Harry?” gasped Mum.
“Oh. He wouldn’t let a baby go to the bottom of the sea either. So . . . I don’t know . . . I’m all confused.”
“We’ll sort out your confusion later,” said Lucy. “Meanwhile, have you got a car? The bigger the better. It’ll make it easier for them not to miss when they jump, if it’s a really big car.”
“Only Chitty. We didn’t even have bicycles until last summer. We had to make them ourselves out of scrap.”
“Scrap! Of course!” shouted Mum.
Bucklewing Corner — that graveyard of fast cars — was just a short scramble away through the trees and down a gravel slope. Before they even got there they could hear the gigantic car crusher chomping away, gobbling up cars and spitting out little metal boxes at the far end of the main avenue. Last time they’d seen Bucklewing Corner — just a few hours earlier — it was packed with great herds of broken cars — piled one on top of the other, leaning against each other, happily rusting in the English summer rain. Now, under the floodlights, they saw a wide, carefully mown lawn studded with daisies.
“Where are all the cars?” wailed Mum.
“Crushed,” said Lucy, “and then tidied away.” She pointed to a wall of metal boxes, six high, running the whole length of the main avenue. A painted sign hung from the trees. It read:
“He’s crushed all the cars,” remarked Mum. “What are we going to do?”
“Duck!” yelled Jemima.
“How will that help . . . oh!”
Wind and noise whirled round Mum’s head. There was a whiff of petrol. She curled up into a little ball and looked up just in time to see some kind of van fly over her and belly flop into the field just a few feet ahead. The driver’s door opened and a skinny man stumbled out. He looked at the van, then at the hedge behind him. He was trying to figure out where the road had gone. Like hundreds of drivers before him he had miscalculated Bucklewing Corner and come hurtling through the hedge.
“Are you all right?” said Mum, rushing to help him.
“Quite all right, thank you,” said the driver. “Thank you. I just need my mummy, that’s all.” Then he walked unsteadily away.
“Is he going to be OK?” asked Jemima.
But neither Mum nor Lucy answered. They were staring at the camper van in front of them.
“How can this have happened?” asked Mum.
“It can’t be . . . is it?”
In front of them was a 1966 VW Samba Bus — the classic split-window model.
“What is it?” asked Jemima.
“It’s a 1966 VW Samba camper van — the classic split-window model,” explained Lucy.
“And we’re in 1966, so this car is brand-new.” It was bright blue. Its paintwork was flawless and glossy, its windows shining, its tyres as black as liquorice. “That car,” said Mum, “is our car.” She took a step toward it and breathed on it as if she weren’t quite sure that it was real. “Fifty years from now Mr. Tooting will lose his job at Very Small Parts for Very Big Machines — they will say his fingers are too fat. I will cheer him up by going out and buying this very car. It will be an old wreck by then — cast aside, forgotten about — but he will fix it. He’ll make it as good as new.”
“Though sadly he will call it Sneezy,” put in Lucy.
“And that will be the beginning of our adventures. We will fly this car over the Atlas Mountains and across the Sahara Desert. And now we’re going to use it to save Little Harry.”
“And Mummy and Daddy.”
Back in the Commander’s Secret Laboratory, Jeremy fished a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and wedged it between two folds of Chitty’s crumpled chassis.
“Aren’t you going to help?” he said to Jem.
“I don’t have a knife,” said Jem.
“You don’t have a knife?” gasped Jeremy, who had never before met a boy who didn’t have his own knife.
“You don’t have a knife?” said Dad.
“No,” said Jem. “You wouldn’t ever let me have one.” But Dad was already handing him a screwdriver and saying, “Jeremy, show Jem how to do it.”
“It’s OK, thanks,” muttered Jem. “I can do it.”
The two boys worked on in silence, peeling strips of twisted metal back until a sprig of metal petals bloomed from the side of the block. Jem peered down into the gap.
“Dad,” he called. “Bring a flashlight.”
“I’ve got a flashlight,” said Jeremy, taking one out of his pocket. “Don’t you have a flashlight?”
“No, I don’t. That’s why I asked for one. Shine it down there. Into the hole. What do you see?”
“Something shining. And sharp. And pointy.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“Yes. It’s a shiny sharp pointy thing.”
“That is the Zborowski Lightning. Chitty’s mascot. The plane with the propeller that goes round. That must be its wingtip. Somehow when everything else got crushed, the Lightning isn’t even scratched. It’s just buried inside.”
“I don’t see why that’s exciting,” said Jeremy. “It’s just a mascot.”
Jem explained that the Lightning was made of an unknown element called Zborowskium, which is only found inside a meteorite that crash-landed on the Zborowski Estate in 1922. “It’s the Lightning that makes it possible for Chitty to travel through time.”
“I can’t help thinking that wheels would be more useful,” said Jeremy sniffily.
“But don’t you see? If we can get the Lightning out,” said Jem, “we could . . .”
He never had the chance to finish his sentence. The door of the secret laboratory burst open.
“Ah,” said Jeremy. “Tea at last.”
“Oh, how embarrassing. We forgot the tea!” said Jemima. “But we’ve got something else. Come and see . . .”
The split windscreen of the 1966 Samba van glinted like a pair of laughing eyes. “Sneezy!” cried Dad. “Is it really Sneezy?!”
“It’s really our old camper van,” said Lucy. “Just don’t call her Sneezy.”
“She’s going to help us rescue your parents,” said Mum to Jeremy.
“A foreign car!” said Jeremy.
“Father will never agree to being rescued by a foreign car.”
“Commander Pott invented antigravity paint,” explained Lucy. “We know that this car is air-worthy because we have already flown it over the Atlas Mountains. So why don’t we just spray her with antigravity paint, float her into the path of Big Ben, and rendezvous somewhere near Dover?”
“Perfect,” said Dad. “This way we don’t need Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at all.”
It might have been a coincidence, but wh
en he said this, there was a deafening clang as a big lump of metal fell off the Cube of Metal That Had Once Been Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Dad was already sitting behind the wheel. “Open those laboratory doors wide,” he called. “I’ll back her in and we’ll get to work with the antigravity spray.”
“Seems a shame to spoil her paintwork,” said Mum.
“You only need to apply the antigravity paint to the parts closest to the ground,” said Jemima. “The tyres.”
Jem wasn’t listening to any of them. Like an empty petrol tank filling up with petrol, his heart filled up with memories of the days that he and Dad had spent piecing together this very vehicle from a jigsaw of broken parts, how they had fixed her so well that she had flown through mountain passes and over desert oases. He remembered the deafening roar of her engine the first time they took her out on the road. How people had stared at them. How proud Jem had been, sitting in the front passenger seat with the road map open on his knee and Dad letting him navigate.
“Look out!”
Something went crunch.
Dad slammed on the brakes.
“You’ve crashed it!” howled Jeremy.
“Oh, no!” wailed Jemima. “Now you’ve ruined everything. How are we going to rescue our parents now?”
Dad pulled on the hand brake and rushed to the back of the van. He had crashed into the Cube of Metal That Had Once Been Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The sharp metal petals must have cut into the camper van’s electrics. Lightning sparks flashed. Thunderous clouds of smoke whirled. The air crackled.
“It’s going to explode!”
Dad jumped back behind the wheel. If the van catches fire, it might explode and kill us all, he thought. If I can drive it into the lake, maybe the fire will go out. He sped out of the doors.
“Dad, don’t!”
But the van did not catch fire.
It did not explode.
Dad had only driven it forward a few feet before he realized that the sparks were not coming from the van. They were coming out of the Cube of Metal That Had Once Been Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And sparks were not all that was coming out of the cube. The pieces of metal that had been crunched and folded into each other unfolded.
They stretched out, relaxed, and spread, like a flower emerging from a bud.
First a lovely chrome bumper rose up like a stem, next a pair of doors opened out of the sides like leaves, and the great brass Klaxon uncurled like a tendril.
“It’s obvious, really,” said Dad. “Putting the van into reverse, while it’s in contact with the Lightning, has made it reverse time. So it’s now reversing the crushing.”
Tyres plumped up like great pumpkins. The radiator grew as straight and tall as a row of peas. The gleaming split windscreen blossomed.
A pair of fabulous headlights popped out and lit up. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was awake.
“Excellent.” Jeremy smiled, yanking open her boot. “The retro-rockets are here and shipshape. All we need now is the antigravity paint and a paint gun.”
“Big Ben is losing height,” explained Jeremy. “She’s in grave danger of crashing. When we rendezvous with her we’ll spray her with the antigravity paint. That’ll push her back up into the sky and give Father a bit more time to fix the retro-rockets.”
“Good thinking,” gasped Jemima, who had already struggled over with three big pots of paint. “Would you like me to make you a sandwich after this?”
“No, thank you,” said Jeremy. “Mr. Tooting, I’m sorry for what I said about your fat fingers. You fixed Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, even if you did it by accident.”
“Thank you, Jeremy,” said Dad. “Now, let’s go and save Little Harry. And your parents and Big Ben.”
He climbed into Chitty’s driving seat. Jem went to sit next to him, the way he always used to, but Jeremy had climbed in already. Jem stood back, waiting for Dad to say, “No, you go in the back, stranger. I need my navigator.” But he didn’t say that. Instead he ruffled Jeremy’s hair, handed him the road atlas, and said, “Welcome aboard, navigator.”
Jem stood with his hands in his pockets while the others squeezed into Chitty.
“Come on, Jem,” called Jemima, patting the seat beside her. “Jump in the back with us girls.”
“There’s no room.” Jem sulked.
“Of course there is,” said Jemima, practically climbing onto Lucy’s knee to make a space.
“Yes, hurry up, Jem,” shouted Dad. “We’ve got an iconic London landmark to save.”
“Not to mention Little Harry,” added Mum.
“Hello! Hello!” The voice of Commander Pott came crackling over the radio in the lab. “Big Ben calling Kent . . . Big Ben calling Kent . . .”
This time, though, there was no answer.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was already airborne, soaring over the hills and downs, speeding up into the clouds.
The first time the Pott family ever flew in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was the summer of 1964. They’d been heading for the seaside when they got stuck in an August Bank Holiday traffic jam near Canterbury. Chitty had lifted herself into the air and over the miles of overheating cars. She had cruised over the fields of Kent — altitude 500 feet, speed 100 mph — like a steaming green dragon. For fun she had flown once around the spire of Canterbury Cathedral, frightening the crows and jackdaws, before setting down gently on a sunbaked sandbar in the middle of the English Channel. It had been the most thrilling day ever.
The first time the Tooting family had ever flown in her was when she had terrified them all by falling off the white cliffs of Dover before spreading her wings and taking them all to Paris.
Today’s flight did not feel thrilling or terrifying. It felt beautifully familiar and normal. As she slipped into the air, Chitty celebrated with two bangs of her exhaust. She saluted the Kentish Downs below with a dip of her wings. Jemima’s hair flapped in the wind like a golden pennant. Jeremy’s black mop was blown about like a bird’s nest in a hurricane.
Jem leaned over the side and looked down at the mashed-potato mountains of fluffy white cloud. He could just make out Chitty’s shadow — a black thumbprint wobbling across the bottom of a cloud valley. It grew to the size of a flag, wrapped in a rainbow halo, waving victory as they skimmed the peak of a cloud mountain. Chitty’s shadow seemed to be playing some sort of chase game with them. Running away from the shark-shaped shadow that was closing in on her from behind. Wait a minute . . . what shark-shaped shadow? Why was a swiftly moving shark-shaped shadow coming up behind them? Jem looked back. He was the first to see it.
It was huge, spiky, shining with gold and glass.
The tower of Big Ben was speeding silently toward them.
“Dad! Dive!” he screamed.
“What is it now, Jem?” huffed Dad. “We’re in a hurry.”
“Go left! Or right! Or something!”
“Jem, you’re not making any sense.”
Then Jeremy looked in the rearview mirror. He saw it, too. “Mr. Tooting!” he called. “Behind you!”
Dad looked in the mirror. There was nothing to see there but a mass of bricks. Bricks getting bigger by the second. He pulled on the wheel.
Too late.
There was a crash.
They shuddered.
They shook.
Supersonic Big Ben had run smack into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s rear.
The second it hit, the clock tower seemed to scatter into a thousand different components. Windows, bricks, doorways all veered off in different directions. Exactly like a flock of starlings that seems like a dense black ball one minute, then explodes into a thousand separate fluttering birds. For a moment Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was hanging in the air, in the middle of a vast exploded diagram of the tower of Big Ben.
They finally heard Big Ben itself — the deep, sonorous dong of the greatest bell on Earth, rolling around the clouds, flooding in from all directions. They had not heard the bell before because, of course, being supersonic, Big Be
n was travelling faster than its own sound. The ringing had had to catch up with the bell.
Then everything happened at once. The bricks and windows flew back together again. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang fell like a stone. A strange, tingling breeze blew right through Jem, as though his cells were jumping away from each other, just as the bricks of the tower had done.
“Daddy! Mummy!” called Jemima. But the breeze blew all her words in different directions.
It blew the clouds, too — so hard and so fast that it seemed as if they were passing through the bodywork of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and through the heads of her passengers.
The sky went dark.
The sky went bright again.
It was cold.
It was hot.
It felt as if days and nights, winters and summers were flickering by.
“What’s happening?” said Dad.
“I think we just saw a time splash,” said Lucy.
“A what?”
“Surely you’ve felt it. When you travel in time you get a kind of breeze blowing between your cells. That’s because the river of time flows through your body just like blood does. Obviously it’s different if you’re a two-hundred-foot tower rather than a human being. Each individual brick in the tower is a moment in its life. When the tower made contact with the Chronojuster, all the moments splashed out of the tower’s time river. Then when the Chronojuster had gone, they all flowed back together again.”
“That’s really interesting, Lucy,” said Dad. “So you’re saying we just drove right through the middle of the tower of Big Ben without so much as a scratch.”
“Yes.”
“Scratch-free crashing — my favourite kind of driving! But hang on. Why are we rapidly losing height?” Dad had been so interested in Lucy’s explanations that he hadn’t noticed the strange feeling in his stomach or the wind howling round his ears.
“It’s because we’re plummeting to our doom,” yelled Mum.
They dropped from . . .
Very High to . . .
Really High to . . .
High-ish to . . .