Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again

“Well . . . we’d have a lot more categories.”

  “Good heavens . . . what’s that sticking out of the front? Is that a hand crank? A camper van with a hand-cranked engine? A wind-up camper van? You are not a contradiction — you are a mess.”

  “Please stop calling poor Sneezy a mess,” said Dad.

  “Please stop calling the van Sneezy,” said Mum, stepping out to stretch her legs. “I’ve been thinking: it’s a camper van and it’s quite . . . unpredictable. What about Scamper?”

  “That sounds like a puppy,” said Lucy.

  “Yes.”

  “I hate puppies.”

  Jem realized then that both his parents were rubbish at thinking up names. Which presumably was why they had decided to call him Jeremy.

  The field sloped down toward the edge of a big white cliff. Over to the left, Jem could see the port of Dover. Huge ferryboats were going back and forth across the water. They shone red when the rays of the setting sun touched them, and great plumes of smoke rose from their funnels. Looking at them, Jem felt suddenly excited. They really were going to go on a boat. Boats went over the sea to . . . everywhere. Anywhere at all. Paris, Cairo, maybe even to Lost Cities. Just because they were lost didn’t mean they’d vanished completely. They must be somewhere. Maybe he could find them. Somewhere behind him, his dad and the lady with the clipboard were still arguing about where to park the camper van, but Jem’s mind was already floating out across the sea, imagining jungles and deserts and pyramids. So it was a bit of a surprise when the camper van trundled slowly past him toward the edge of the cliff.

  Jem looked back over his shoulder. Dad and the lady were still talking. Mum and Lucy were farther along the cliff. None of them had noticed that the van was rolling away. “Dad! Mum!” shouted Jem, then he took off after the van. It was picking up speed now, but the engine wasn’t running. Dad must have forgotten to put the hand brake on. Jem was sprinting, but the van rolled faster and faster. If he could just catch up, he might be able to stop it.

  He could hear shouting behind him now. Mum and Dad were running after the van, too. The van wobbled. Oh. The field was going uphill for a while. Thank heavens. It was slowing down. Jem was gaining on it. And gaining. He got alongside. He yanked open the door, but he couldn’t reach the hand brake!

  Little Harry was in the way.

  Jem’s baby brother was sitting in the driving seat with a smile on his face and his hands on the steering wheel, saying, “Me driving! Me driving!” as he raced toward his doom.

  “Little Harry! Jump! Jump, Little Harry!” yelled Jem, desperately trying to grab his little brother.

  “Me driving! Me driving!” said Little Harry.

  Jem clutched at the seat belt and tried to use it to clamber inside the cab. But the van was rolling downhill again now. Jem tried to keep up, but he wasn’t running anymore. He was being dragged along.

  Then the van hit a bump.

  Jem bounced into the air and tumbled head over heels. He leaped up, but the van was already rolling away, moving faster and faster. Dad tore past him, then Mum. Jem could still just about hear Little Harry giggling and saying, “Me driving! Me driving!”

  And then the van was gone.

  It was there.

  And then not there.

  The van was gone.

  And so was Little Harry.

  Where the little boy had been, now there was just blue sky.

  Mum and Dad stood on the edge of the cliff looking into the blue.

  Seagulls were screaming all around their heads.

  “Harrrrrryyyyyyyyy!” yelled Dad.

  “Nooooooo!” howled Mum.

  Jem didn’t scream or yell. He just stared. His brother was gone. How could the sun still be shining, the ferries still sailing, the seagulls still flying, and his brother be gone?

  How could the world keep going as though nothing had happened?

  He knew it was too late to do anything, but he ran to the edge of the cliff. He had to look.

  It seemed his mother and father didn’t feel the same way.

  They were running in the opposite direction. Away from the cliff. Toward him.

  “Jem,” they yelled, “get down!”

  “What?”

  Mum and Dad threw themselves flat on their faces and covered their heads with their hands.

  Then Jem looked up and saw why.

  He saw the last thing he was expecting.

  It burst into view from just below the edge of the cliff, roaring like a furious bull before it rushed upward into the sky.

  It was the Tooting family camper van.

  It looked exactly the same as it had when it plunged from the cliff. Except for one important detail: it had sprouted an enormous pair of racing-green and chrome wings. And now it was soaring high above the field. It banked. It turned. Its split windscreen eyes flashed in the sunlight, and the van began to drop toward the field, its wheels spinning, its big gleaming wings rocking from side to side as it tried to steady itself, the hand crank spinning like a propeller. It was coming in to land. It was heading straight for Jem.

  Jem hurled himself to the ground just in time. The smell of petrol and burning rubber whirled around his head. He could even hear the faint voice of Little Harry still happily shouting, “Me driving! Me driving!”

  There was a shower of tiny stones as the van crunched onto the gravel path. Sods of grass and bits of soil flew up into the air as it bounced to a stop. Mum and Dad ran up, pulled open the door, grabbed Little Harry, and almost suffocated him with hugs and kisses and happiness.

  “Oh no, no, no, no, no. Not there. You definitely can’t park there.” It was the lady with the clipboard again. “You’ve got wings. Wings! It’s one thing adding fancy wheels or extra headlights. But wings? Wings!”

  “Yes,” said Dad. “When we fitted the engine, we did wonder why that metal frame was so heavy. The wings must have been folded up inside. They seem to be some kind of added emergency feature.”

  “Wings is going much too far. Your vehicle is no longer a camper van at all. This is an aeroplane.”

  “Me flying!” yelled Little Harry.

  “Aeroplanes are not allowed in the Camper Van Club. The Camper Van Club is camper vans only.”

  By now the owners of all the other camper vans had gathered round. They clapped. They cheered. They took photographs.

  “Please stop applauding!” shouted the woman with the clipboard. “This vehicle is a disgrace to the camper-van community. The poor thing doesn’t know if it’s a van or a plane.”

  But they all carried on applauding, and Dad saluted and bowed and waved and climbed into the driver’s seat. Then jumped out of it again. Mum was already sitting there.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “On the way here,” said Mum, “you jumped lights, swerved all over the road, failed to engage the hand brake. Do you really think for one moment that I am going to let you drive ever again? Plus you thought the van was a him. You kept calling it ‘he.’”

  “It is not a him or a her. It’s a van.”

  “It’s a girl. Of course it’s a girl. Look how colour-coordinated the wings are. And the way she fell off the cliff and then came back again — so stylish, like Audrey Hepburn. She’s definitely a girl. Quite a girl. Children! Climb in and fasten your seat belts. Mummy’s the driver now.”

  Mum started the engine and tried to drive back up the gravel pathway while the members of the Camper Van Club cheered them off. She didn’t mean to take off and fly again. She just completely forgot that the wings were still extended. The faster she drove, the more they filled with air. At first this seemed to slow the van down, but suddenly there was a bump, and it bounced and never landed back on the ground. One moment people were waving at them through the window, then they had all dropped out of sight, as though the ground had shrunk. Soon their faces were just little dots looking up as the Tooting family climbed higher and higher.

  “Me drive!” shouted Little Harry, struggl
ing as Dad fastened him into his car seat.

  “No, your mother drive now,” said Dad in his sulky voice. “Mummy’s the driver.”

  “She’s not the driver,” said Lucy. “She’s the pilot.”

  Dad looked out of the window and saw for the first time where they were. The cliffs of Dover were just a frilly white collar at the edge of the sea. The soft green fields were far behind them.

  “Julie? Julie!” yelled Dad. “We’re in the air. We’re flying in the air! We’re not on the ground. We’re not even over the ground. Julie! You’ve taken a wrong turn. A very, very, very wrong turn.”

  “Oh, Tom,” said Mum calmly, “do calm down.”

  “I am calm. Completely calm. I am completely and utterly calm. I am completely . . . How are we going to get down? Have you thought about that? We’re up in the air! How are we going to get down? We don’t have parachutes. We don’t have emergency exits. We have to get down. How are we going to get down? Please get us down now.”

  “Tom, look out the window —”

  “I don’t want to look out the window. We’re too high. We’re much too high.”

  “If we come down now, Tom, where will we be?”

  “The sea. The sea. It’s just sea all around now. We’re completely out over the sea.”

  “If I come down, we’ll sink and drown, won’t we? You just sit back and enjoy the view until we get to Paris.”

  “Paris! We can’t stay up here all the way to Paris. You don’t even know the way to Paris.”

  “Paris is in France. Everyone knows that. Those beaches and fields up ahead of us are France. We’re almost in France already.”

  Lucy and Jem leaned forward over the front seat, trying to get a better view of the beaches and fields of France. As soon as they did so, the front of the van dipped downward so that there was nothing to see but sea, and they were plunging toward it.

  “Sit back! Get back!” yelled Dad. “You’re going make us crash.”

  The children jumped back into their seats and felt their stomachs lurch into their throats as the van bounced up out of its dive and started to climb again.

  “That was fun!” yelled Mum.

  “That was not fun,” said Dad. “Julie, please . . . that was a near-death experience.”

  “Look! We’re over the beach. We’re in France. For the first time in its entire history, the Tooting family is abroad! All we’ve got to do now is find Paris.”

  “Just please, very slowly, come back down,” said Dad. “Come back down and we will buy a map, and we will drive carefully and safely to wherever you want to go.”

  “We want to go to Paris,” said Mum. “It’ll be far quicker to fly there. Why do we need a map? We’re in the right country. Paris is large. We’ve seen pictures. We know what it looks like. I’m sure if we just keep going, we’ll spot it. Look, we can see everything from up here. Oh.”

  The “Oh” was because all at once she couldn’t see anything at all.

  Everything had gone grey. As though an unseen giant had wrapped the van in damp toilet roll.

  The noise of the engine changed from a thrilling roar to a dull grumble.

  “Where did the world go?” said Jem.

  “I believe,” said Dad, “we are inside a cloud. We need to duck down under it.”

  “How do we do that?”

  Then a terrible truth dawned on both parents. They were flying in some kind of plane, but they only had the controls of a van. They could accelerate or brake. They could go left or right. They could indicate. Reverse. But there was no control for going higher or lower.

  “Children,” said Dad, “lean forward again. That worked last time.”

  “No!” said Mum. “We’re over land. What if there are trees? Or power lines? Or the side of a hill? We need to go higher. We need to get above the clouds, not below them.”

  “To the back of the van and lean backward,” said Dad.

  So Jem and Lucy jumped onto the backseat and leaned back as far as they could. Slowly the front of the van turned upward. They could see the wisps of clouds falling past them like ghostly curtains.

  When the last curtain was pulled back, everyone said, “Oh!” and then, “Oooh!” and Little Harry clapped. The sun had finally gone down, and above the clouds was an endless, velvety night. Below them, the clouds were still flushed with the last red of sunset. But over their heads were endless clusters of hard, bright stars. They looked like cat’s-eyes marking out a million tangled roads. The planet Mars was like a faraway stop sign. Every now and then shooting stars appeared and disappeared, quick as racing cars. The children lay back in the seats, hypnotized by the wonder that was hidden away just above a cloudy night.

  “No!” said Dad. “Back to the middle. Lean forward. Lean forward. We’re going too high . . . much too high.”

  He was right. Already a fierce cold had got inside the van. It was biting into the children’s hands and feet, and numbing their noses. They leaned forward until the van was just grazing the tops of the clouds — not sunset red anymore but moonlight silver now. Dad jumped into the back and pulled extra sweaters and socks out of the cupboards to keep them warm.

  “You know, Julie, it’s dark,” he said. “Don’t you think you should turn on the headlights?”

  “There isn’t any other traffic up here, Tom.”

  “How do you know that? We’re up here and we didn’t expect to be. How do you know there isn’t some equally surprised French family heading the other way?”

  “I never thought of that.” So she turned on the headlights, and their soft orange glow rolled out in front of them like a wide inviting road.

  Soon the children began to feel tired. Lucy was the first to crawl off to her newly painted matte-black sleeping corner. Then Little Harry and finally Jem, who discovered that he still had in his pocket the tiny model plane that he had found at Bucklewing Corner. He thought how strange it was — a tiny plane flying inside another little plane — and that little plane flying inside the big ball of Earth’s atmosphere, and everyone bobbing about inside the atmosphere just like the plane was bobbing about inside the van and . . . thoughts like that sent him to sleep.

  “Shall I drive now?” asked Dad. “You must be feeling weary.”

  “I’m not weary,” said Mum. “But I know you’d love this. Take a turn.”

  So they shuffled past each other, and Dad took the wheel. Mum lay her head on his shoulder, and he talked as they drifted through the stars.

  “A few weeks ago, this van was just another rusty Bargain of the Week in the corner of Unbeatable Motoring Bargains, and the engine was a piece of junk stuck up in a tree. And now, look, it’s floating among the stars with its whole family on board.”

  But though Mum had said she wasn’t weary, she had already drifted off to sleep. Guiding the van through the night, with everyone sleeping peacefully around him, Dad felt like a super-guardian angel, carrying everyone safely into morning.

  So he was pretty surprised when — what seemed like minutes later — he woke up in bright summer daylight, looking out across a city.

  “Oh!” said Mum, rubbing her eyes. “We’ve stopped. You found it! Clever old you!” Dad wasn’t sure what she was talking about but took the praise, anyway. “Look, children. Daddy found Paris.”

  “Paris?” said Lucy. “Really?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve dreamed about this day for years and years. Look, that river with all the different bridges, that’s the Seine — oh, can we take a trip along it in one of those boats? — and that great cathedral with the two towers, on the island, that’s Notre Dame — where Quasimodo lived. Oh, nice work, Tom.”

  “The reason I ask,” said Lucy, “is that if this is Paris, where’s the Eiffel Tower?”

  “The Eiffel Tower! Oh, I’ve always wanted to go up the Eiffel Tower. It’s along the river somewhere. Let me see. . . .” Mum twisted around in her seat.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to just step out and look around and get our first
lungful of Parisian air?” said Dad, opening the door, stepping out, and completely and instantly vanishing.

  “Where did Dad go?” said Jem.

  “Daddy’s hands!” shouted Little Harry, pointing excitedly to the floor by the driver’s door. “Daddy’s hands! Daddy’s hands!”

  There indeed were Daddy’s hands, or rather his fingers, clinging on desperately, the knuckles turning white. Dad was dangling by his fingertips on the edge of a thousand-foot drop, his eyes closed, his legs bicycling pointlessly in panic.

  “Oh, Tom, what are you doing?” said Mum, grabbing one of his wrists. “Look, children, your father is clinging by his fingertips on the edge of a thousand-foot drop. Honestly, he’s such a show-off!”

  Together they hauled Dad back inside. As soon as he could breathe, he gasped, “I’ve found the Eiffel Tower.”

  “Well done, you.” Mum smiled, kissing him on the forehead. “Where is it?”

  “We are parked right on top of it.”

  Indeed, the camper van was parked neatly and precisely on the edge of the roof of the uppermost observation deck, so when Dad stepped out, he had fallen clean off the top of the Eiffel Tower. “When you get out, children,” he said, “please use the passenger-side doors.”

  “The wings have gone,” said Jem.

  “They pop back in when they’re not in use,” said Dad. “Sneezy is a convertible.”

  “Scamper,” corrected Mum, but no one heard her because her voice was drowned out by a whirring, clanging sound like a cyclone full of tin trays. A helicopter was hovering right in front of them, so close that they could see the expressions of the men inside, and their uniforms. They were policemen. One of them picked up a microphone and said something. His amplified voice boomed and barked around them, but they mostly couldn’t understand a word, because they mostly didn’t speak French.

  “I get the feeling they’re angry,” shouted Jem.

  “I’m sure they’re just trying to be helpful,” said Mum. “What makes you think they’re angry?”

  “The ones behind us are pointing guns.”

  “Bang!” yelled Little Harry.