The next day was a Saturday and the month was August and the sun positively streamed down. It was a roaster of a day, and at breakfast Commander Pott made an announcement. “Today,” he said, “is going to be a roaster, a scorcher. There’s only one thing to do, and that’s for us to take a delicious picnic and climb into CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG and dash off down the Dover road to the sea.”
Of course everyone was delighted with the idea and while Commander Pott and Jeremy and Jemima went to get CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG ready, fill her up with petrol, check the water in the radiator, verify the oil in the sump, test the tyre pressures, clean yesterday’s squashed flies off the windscreen, dust down the body, and polish up the chromium until it shone like silver, Mimsie filled a hamper with hard-boiled eggs, cold sausages, bread-and-butter sandwiches, jam puffs (with, of course, like all good jam puffs, more jam than puff) and bottles and bottles of the best fizzy lemonade and orange squash.
Then they all piled into the car, with the hood down of course, and, with CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG’s usual two sneezes and two small explosions, they were off up the lane to the motorway that led towards Dover and to the sea, some twenty miles away.
But, but, but! And once again but!!
Twenty-two thousand, six hundred and fifty-four other motor-cars full of families (that was the number announced by the Automobile Association the next day) had also decided to drive down the Dover road to the sea on that beautiful Saturday morning, and there was an endless stream of cars going the same way as the Pott family in CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG.
Well, Commander Pott drove as cleverly as he could, overtaking when it was safe, weaving like a snake in and out of the traffic, and taking short cuts and side roads to dodge really bad queues of cars, but they made terribly slow progress, in spite of much polite mooing of the boa-constrictor horn and, I’m sorry to say, an occasional furious “GA-GOOOO-GA” on the klaxon when some booby in a black-beetle insisted on hogging it down the middle of the road and not leaving room for CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG to get by. As for doing a hundred miles an hour, there just wasn’t any question of it, and they crawled along at a miserable twenty. All of them, Commander Pott, Mimsie, Jeremy, and Jemima, were getting more and more hot and impatient, and even CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG began steaming angrily out of the top of her radiator, on which (I’d forgotten to tell you this) there was a silver mascot of a small aeroplane whose propeller went round and round in the wind, faster or slower according to their speed.
And, although they couldn’t see them, CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG’s big headlamp eyes, that had been so gleaming with happiness and enthusiasm ever since the day before, began to get angrier and angrier and more and more impatient, so that the people who had gazed in admiration at her through the back windows of their cars became more and more nervous of this gleaming green monster behind them, beginning to look as if she wanted to eat up, with the silver jaws of her radiator, all the line upon line of black-beetle cars that were getting in her way and keeping her family from their picnic by the sea.
But all the same, they were making steady though very slow progress until, outside Canterbury, they came upon a solid jam of cars that must have reached for at least a mile. And there they were — stuck at the back of the queue; it really looked as if they couldn’t possibly get down to the sands and the sea in time for their picnic, let alone have a wonderful bathe before it.
Suddenly Commander Pott happened to glance at the dashboard, over on the left, opposite Mimsie, and he said excitedly, “I say, all of you, look at that!”
And Mimsie looked and Jeremy and Jemima peered over the back of the seat, and amongst all the knobs and instruments a light on top of a small knob was flashing pale pink! And it was showing a word, and the word was PULL!
“Good heavens!” said Commander Pott. “I wondered what that knob was for, but it’s one of the ones I haven’t had time to tinker with. What can it be for?”
“Look!” cried Mimsie. “The light’s turning red!”
And sure enough it was, and now another word was showing! And do you know what the other word was? It was IDIOT! So now the angry red knob read PULL IDIOT! And Commander Pott laughed out loud and said, “Well, I never! That’s pretty good cheek! Here’s CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG taking control and calling me an idiot into the bargain! Oh, well! Here goes!” And he reached over and pulled down the little silver lever.
The children, in fact the whole family, sat on the tips of their behinds, if you see what I mean, and waited excitedly to see what would happen.
And a kind of soft humming noise began. It seemed to come from all over the car — from the front axle and from the back axle and from underneath the bonnet. And then the most extraordinary transmogrifications (which is just a long word for “changes”) began to occur. The big front mudguards swivelled outwards so that they stuck out like wings, sharply swept back, and the smaller back mudguards did the same (it was lucky the road was wide and there was single-lane traffic, or a neighbouring car or a telegraph-pole might have been sliced in half by the sharp green wings!). The wings locked into position with a click, and at the same time, though the family couldn’t see it from behind, the big radiator grille slid open like a sliding door, and the big propeller of the fan belt, together with the fly-wheel underneath that runs the petrol pump and the electric generator, slowly slid forward until they were sticking right out in front of the bonnet of the car.
And then, on the dashboard, beside another little lever, a green light started to blink and this light said PULL DOWN, and Commander Pott, rather nervously but this time obediently, reached over and gingerly pulled the lever very, very slowly down.
And then, in heaven’s name, what do you think happened?
Yes, you’re right, absolutely right. The wings slowly tilted, and as Commander Pott, at last realizing what CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG was up to, pressed down the accelerator pedal, the big green car, which was now what I might call an aerocar, tilted up her shining green and silver nose and took off! Yes! She took off like an aeroplane and soared up over the car in front, just missing her roof, and roared away over the long line of stationary cars in the queue, while all the people stared out of their car windows in absolute astonishment and Commander Pott called out, “Hang on, everyone. For heaven’s sake, hang on!” Mimsie and Jeremy and Jemima clutched the arm-rests beside them and just sat, stiff with excitement and with their eyes and their mouths wide open, thinking, Heavens above! What is going to happen next?
Well, what happened next was that there came a shrill whine of machineryand a thump, thump, thump, thump from under the car, and automatically the four wheels retracted up into the bodywork, so as to be out of the way and let the aerocar go faster without the wind resistance of the wheels to slow her down.
Commander Pott sat gripping the wheel and chuckling with excitement and delight. “I told you so!” he shouted against the roar of the wind. “She’s got ideas of her own. She’s a magical car. Don’t worry! She’ll look after us!”
He carefully turned the wheel to see what would happen. And sure enough, the bonnet of the car followed what he did, and after curving about a bit to get the feel of the steering, Commander Pott made straight for the tall tower of Canterbury Cathedral in the distance, soaring over the long line of cars in which the poor people were roasting in the sunshine and sniffing up the disgusting petrol fumes of the cars in front.
Gradually, as they got confidence, Mimsie and Jeremy and Jemima sat back more comfortably in their seats, and Jemima’s golden hair streamed out in the wind like a golden flag behind the car and Jeremy’s black mop blew about like a bird’s nest in a hurricane.
Over the solid line of cars they flew — altitude five hundred feet, air speed one hundred miles per hour, engine temperature one hundred and twenty degrees, outside temperature seventy degrees, revolutions of propeller three thousand per minute, visibility five miles — over the river that runs through Canterbury down to the coast, over the houses and over the fields where the cows and the horses and the sheep stampeded about at the roaring noise of this big green dragon they had never seen before, and the shadow of CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG chased after them over the ground.
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