Well, the next day Jeremy and Jemima had to go off to boarding-school, so they never saw the arrival of the new car, or rather of the ruins of it, as it came bumping and crashing down the lane behind the tow truck, but Mimsie wrote and told them of how it disappeared at once into Commander Pott’s workshop and how their father then locked himself inside with it and only emerged to eat and sleep.
For three months, the whole of the summer term, Commander Pott worked and worked secretly on the wreck of the old Paragon, and Mimsie said that much smoke came out of the chimney and often lights shone all night through the windows, and mysterious packages arrived from engineering factories all over England and disappeared into the workshop through the locked doors. Mimsie wrote that their father went through periods of gloom and impatience and frenzy and triumph and dejection and delight and unhappiness and nightmares and loss of appetite, but that gradually, with the passing weeks, he became calmer and happier until, as the holidays came nearer, he was smiling and rubbing his hands. Then at last came the great day when they fetched Jeremy and Jemima from school and the whole family assembled outside the workshop while Commander Pott solemnly unlocked the doors and they all trooped in to where the twelve-cylinder, eight-litre, supercharged Paragon Panther stood under the bright lights.
Mimsie and Jeremy and Jemima stood and stared and stared and stared until Jemima broke the silence and said, “But she’s the most beautiful car in the world!” Mimsie and Jeremy just nodded their agreement and looked at the Paragon with round and shining eyes.
And she was beautiful! Every single little thing had been put right, and every detail gleamed and glinted with new paint and polished chromium, down to the snarling mouth of the big boa-constrictor horn.
Slowly they walked round her and examined her inch by inch, from the rows and rows of gleaming knobs on the dashboard to the brand-new, dark-red leather upholstery, from the cream-coloured, collapsible roof to the fine new tyres, from the glistening silver of the huge exhaust pipes, snaking away from holes in the bright-green bonnet, to the glittering number-plates that said GEN II.
And silently they climbed in through the low doors that opened and shut with the most delicious clicks, and Commander Caractacus Pott sat behind the huge driving-wheel with Mimsie beside him in her own bucket-seat with an arm-rest, and Jeremy and Jemima got in the back and sank down amongst the big, soft, red-leather cushions and rested their arms on their own arm-rest between them.
Then, without saying anything, Commander Pott leant forward and pressed the big black knob of the self-starter.
At first nothing happened. There was just the soft grinding from the starter motor. Jeremy and Jemima looked at each other with round eyes. Wasn’t she going to work after all?
But then Commander Pott pulled out the silver knob of the choke, to feed more petrol into the carburettor, and pressed the starter again. And out of the exhaust pipes there came just these four noises — very loud: CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG!
And there was a distinct pause after each noise, and it was like two big sneezes and two small explosions. And then there was silence.
Again Jeremy and Jemima looked at each other, now really rather worried. Had something gone wrong?
But Commander Pott just said, “She’s a bit cold. Now then!” He pressed the starter again. And this time, after the first two CHITTY sneezes and the two soft BANGS, the BANGS ran on and into each other so as to make a delicious purring rumble such as neither Mimsie nor Jeremy nor Jemima had ever heard before from a piece of machinery. Commander Pott put the big car into gear, and slowly they rumbled and roared out of the workshop into the sunshine and up the lane towards the motorway, and the springs were soft as silk and always this delicious rumble came out behind from the huge fish-tail exhausts.
When they got to the side road that joined the motorway, Commander Pott pressed the big bulb of the boa-constrictor horn and it let out a deep, polite, but rather threatening roar, and then, because he wanted to show everything to the children, Commander Pott pressed the electric-horn button in the middle of the wheel and the klaxon horn fired off a terrific blast of warning: “GA-GOOOO-GA!” Then he steered out on to the motorway and they were off on their first practice run.
Well, I can only tell you that the huge, long, gleaming, green car almost flew. With a click of the big central gear-lever, Commander Pott got out of first gear into second at forty miles per hour, with another click at seventy miles per hour he was in third, and as they touched one hundred miles an hour, he put the huge car into top gear and there they were passing the other black-beetle cars almost as if they were standing still.
“GA-GOOOO-GA!” went the klaxon again and again as they swept down the big safe double-lane highway, and the drivers of the little family saloons looked in their rear mirrors and saw the great gleaming monster whistling towards them and drew in to the left-hand side to let her go by, and all the drivers said, “Cooer! See that! What is she? Smashing!” And then the green car was past and away, and they caught the hurricane howl of the big exhausts and made a note of the number, GEN II, and not one of the drivers noticed what the number really spelled, they just thought it was a nice short number to have and easy to remember.
So CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG came to the end of the motorway and Commander Pott carefully swung the big car into the other lane and roared off back towards home, and Jeremy and Jemima clutched their arm-rest with excitement and looked over at the glittering dashboard and watched the needle of the speedometer creep back up to a hundred and stay there until they came to the turning-off for home. And Commander Pott clamped on the powerful hydraulic brakes until the car was only creeping along, and they turned off the motorway and bumped back down their narrow lane and back in under the bright lights of the workshop. And when Commander Pott switched off the engine, it gave one last “CHITTY-CHITTY,” let out a deep sigh of contentment, and was silent.
They all climbed out, and Commander Pott turned to them with a gleam of triumph in his eye. “Well? What do you think of her?”
And Mimsie said, “Terrific!”
And Jeremy said, “Smashing!”
And Jemima said, “Adorable!”
And Commander Caractacus Pott said mysteriously, “Well, that’s good. But I’m warning you. There’s something odd about this car. I’ve put all I know into her, every invention and improvement I could think of, and quite a lot of the thousand pounds we got from the Skrumshus people, but there’s more to it than that. She’s got some ideas of her own.”
“How do you mean?” they all chorused.
“Well,” said Commander Pott carefully, “I can’t exactly say, but sometimes, in the morning when I came back to get to work again, I’d find that certain modifications, certain changes, had, so to speak, taken place all by themselves during the night, when I wasn’t there. Certain — what shall I say? — rather revolutionary and extraordinary adaptations. I can’t say more than that, and I haven’t really got to the bottom of it all, but I suspect that this motor-car has thought out, all by herself, certain improvements, certain very extraordinary mechanical devices, just as if she had a mind of her own, just as if she was grateful to us for saving her life, so to speak, and wanted to repay all the loving care we’ve given her. And there’s another thing. You see all those rows and rows of knobs and buttons and levers and little lights on the dashboard? Well, to tell you the truth, I just haven’t been able to discover what they’re all for. I know the obvious ones, of course, but there are some of those gadgets that seem to be secret gadgets. We’ll find out what they’re for in time, I suppose, but for now I’ll admit there are quite a lot of them that have got me really puzzled. She just won’t let me find out.”
“What do you mean?” asked Jemima excitedly. “Is it a she?”
“Well,” said Commander Pott, “that’s how I’ve come to call her. It’s funny, but all bits of machinery that people love are made into females. All ships are ‘she.’ Racing drivers call their cars ‘she.’ Same thing with aeroplanes. Don’t know about rockets or Sputniks — somehow they don’t seem very feminine to me — but I bet the rocketeers and Sputnicators, or whatever they call the Sputnik experts, I bet they call their spaceships and things ‘she.’ Odd, isn’t it? I used to serve in a battleship. Gigantic great ship stuffed with guns and radar and so on. Called the George V. But we called her ‘she.’”
Jeremy said excitedly, “We’ve got to have a name for her. And I know what we ought to call her. What she called herself.”
“What do you mean?”
“What was that?”
“When did she?” they all cried together.
Jeremy said slowly, “She said it when she started — CHITTY-CHITTY, like sneezes, and then BANG-BANG! So we’ll call her that, her own invented name.”
And the others looked at each other and slowly they all smiled and Commander Caractacus Pott patted the green and silver car on her nose and said in a loud and solemn voice, “Now hear me, twelve-cylinder, eight-litre supercharged Paragon Panther. We hereby christen you . . .” and they all chorused: “CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG!” Then they trooped out of the workshop and went happily about all the things they’d forgotten to do for the whole of that exciting afternoon.
HTML style by Stephen Thomas, University of Adelaide.
Modified by Skip for ESL Bits English Language Learning.
Well, the next day Jeremy and Jemima had to go off to boarding-school, so they never saw the arrival of the new car, or rather of the ruins of it, as it came bumping and crashing down the lane behind the tow truck, but Mimsie wrote and told them of how it disappeared at once into Commander Pott’s workshop and how their father then locked himself inside with it and only emerged to eat and sleep.
For three months, the whole of the summer term, Commander Pott worked and worked secretly on the wreck of the old Paragon, and Mimsie said that much smoke came out of the chimney and often lights shone all night through the windows, and mysterious packages arrived from engineering factories all over England and disappeared into the workshop through the locked doors. Mimsie wrote that their father went through periods of gloom and impatience and frenzy and triumph and dejection and delight and unhappiness and nightmares and loss of appetite, but that gradually, with the passing weeks, he became calmer and happier until, as the holidays came nearer, he was smiling and rubbing his hands. Then at last came the great day when they fetched Jeremy and Jemima from school and the whole family assembled outside the workshop while Commander Pott solemnly unlocked the doors and they all trooped in to where the twelve-cylinder, eight-litre, supercharged Paragon Panther stood under the bright lights.
Mimsie and Jeremy and Jemima stood and stared and stared and stared until Jemima broke the silence and said, “But she’s the most beautiful car in the world!” Mimsie and Jeremy just nodded their agreement and looked at the Paragon with round and shining eyes.
And she was beautiful! Every single little thing had been put right, and every detail gleamed and glinted with new paint and polished chromium, down to the snarling mouth of the big boa-constrictor horn.
Slowly they walked round her and examined her inch by inch, from the rows and rows of gleaming knobs on the dashboard to the brand-new, dark-red leather upholstery, from the cream-coloured, collapsible roof to the fine new tyres, from the glistening silver of the huge exhaust pipes, snaking away from holes in the bright-green bonnet, to the glittering number-plates that said GEN II.
And silently they climbed in through the low doors that opened and shut with the most delicious clicks, and Commander Caractacus Pott sat behind the huge driving-wheel with Mimsie beside him in her own bucket-seat with an arm-rest, and Jeremy and Jemima got in the back and sank down amongst the big, soft, red-leather cushions and rested their arms on their own arm-rest between them.
Then, without saying anything, Commander Pott leant forward and pressed the big black knob of the self-starter.
At first nothing happened. There was just the soft grinding from the starter motor. Jeremy and Jemima looked at each other with round eyes. Wasn’t she going to work after all?
But then Commander Pott pulled out the silver knob of the choke, to feed more petrol into the carburettor, and pressed the starter again. And out of the exhaust pipes there came just these four noises — very loud: CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG!
And there was a distinct pause after each noise, and it was like two big sneezes and two small explosions. And then there was silence.
Again Jeremy and Jemima looked at each other, now really rather worried. Had something gone wrong?
But Commander Pott just said, “She’s a bit cold. Now then!” He pressed the starter again. And this time, after the first two CHITTY sneezes and the two soft BANGS, the BANGS ran on and into each other so as to make a delicious purring rumble such as neither Mimsie nor Jeremy nor Jemima had ever heard before from a piece of machinery. Commander Pott put the big car into gear, and slowly they rumbled and roared out of the workshop into the sunshine and up the lane towards the motorway, and the springs were soft as silk and always this delicious rumble came out behind from the huge fish-tail exhausts.
When they got to the side road that joined the motorway, Commander Pott pressed the big bulb of the boa-constrictor horn and it let out a deep, polite, but rather threatening roar, and then, because he wanted to show everything to the children, Commander Pott pressed the electric-horn button in the middle of the wheel and the klaxon horn fired off a terrific blast of warning: “GA-GOOOO-GA!” Then he steered out on to the motorway and they were off on their first practice run.
Well, I can only tell you that the huge, long, gleaming, green car almost flew. With a click of the big central gear-lever, Commander Pott got out of first gear into second at forty miles per hour, with another click at seventy miles per hour he was in third, and as they touched one hundred miles an hour, he put the huge car into top gear and there they were passing the other black-beetle cars almost as if they were standing still.
“GA-GOOOO-GA!” went the klaxon again and again as they swept down the big safe double-lane highway, and the drivers of the little family saloons looked in their rear mirrors and saw the great gleaming monster whistling towards them and drew in to the left-hand side to let her go by, and all the drivers said, “Cooer! See that! What is she? Smashing!” And then the green car was past and away, and they caught the hurricane howl of the big exhausts and made a note of the number, GEN II, and not one of the drivers noticed what the number really spelled, they just thought it was a nice short number to have and easy to remember.
So CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG came to the end of the motorway and Commander Pott carefully swung the big car into the other lane and roared off back towards home, and Jeremy and Jemima clutched their arm-rest with excitement and looked over at the glittering dashboard and watched the needle of the speedometer creep back up to a hundred and stay there until they came to the turning-off for home. And Commander Pott clamped on the powerful hydraulic brakes until the car was only creeping along, and they turned off the motorway and bumped back down their narrow lane and back in under the bright lights of the workshop. And when Commander Pott switched off the engine, it gave one last “CHITTY-CHITTY,” let out a deep sigh of contentment, and was silent.
They all climbed out, and Commander Pott turned to them with a gleam of triumph in his eye. “Well? What do you think of her?”
And Mimsie said, “Terrific!”
And Jeremy said, “Smashing!”
And Jemima said, “Adorable!”
And Commander Caractacus Pott said mysteriously, “Well, that’s good. But I’m warning you. There’s something odd about this car. I’ve put all I know into her, every invention and improvement I could think of, and quite a lot of the thousand pounds we got from the Skrumshus people, but there’s more to it than that. She’s got some ideas of her own.”
“How do you mean?” they all chorused.
“Well,” said Commander Pott carefully, “I can’t exactly say, but sometimes, in the morning when I came back to get to work again, I’d find that certain modifications, certain changes, had, so to speak, taken place all by themselves during the night, when I wasn’t there. Certain — what shall I say? — rather revolutionary and extraordinary adaptations. I can’t say more than that, and I haven’t really got to the bottom of it all, but I suspect that this motor-car has thought out, all by herself, certain improvements, certain very extraordinary mechanical devices, just as if she had a mind of her own, just as if she was grateful to us for saving her life, so to speak, and wanted to repay all the loving care we’ve given her. And there’s another thing. You see all those rows and rows of knobs and buttons and levers and little lights on the dashboard? Well, to tell you the truth, I just haven’t been able to discover what they’re all for. I know the obvious ones, of course, but there are some of those gadgets that seem to be secret gadgets. We’ll find out what they’re for in time, I suppose, but for now I’ll admit there are quite a lot of them that have got me really puzzled. She just won’t let me find out.”
“What do you mean?” asked Jemima excitedly. “Is it a she?”
“Well,” said Commander Pott, “that’s how I’ve come to call her. It’s funny, but all bits of machinery that people love are made into females. All ships are ‘she.’ Racing drivers call their cars ‘she.’ Same thing with aeroplanes. Don’t know about rockets or Sputniks — somehow they don’t seem very feminine to me — but I bet the rocketeers and Sputnicators, or whatever they call the Sputnik experts, I bet they call their spaceships and things ‘she.’ Odd, isn’t it? I used to serve in a battleship. Gigantic great ship stuffed with guns and radar and so on. Called the George V. But we called her ‘she.’”
Jeremy said excitedly, “We’ve got to have a name for her. And I know what we ought to call her. What she called herself.”
“What do you mean?”
“What was that?”
“When did she?” they all cried together.
Jeremy said slowly, “She said it when she started — CHITTY-CHITTY, like sneezes, and then BANG-BANG! So we’ll call her that, her own invented name.”
And the others looked at each other and slowly they all smiled and Commander Caractacus Pott patted the green and silver car on her nose and said in a loud and solemn voice, “Now hear me, twelve-cylinder, eight-litre supercharged Paragon Panther. We hereby christen you . . .” and they all chorused: “CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG!” Then they trooped out of the workshop and went happily about all the things they’d forgotten to do for the whole of that exciting afternoon.
HTML style by Stephen Thomas, University of Adelaide. Modified by Skip for ESL Bits English Language Learning.