Complete Works of Ian Fleming, page 276
Two weeks after the case, Fleming suffered a serious, second heart attack that necessitated convalescence, which he undertook at the Dudley Hotel in Hove. While there, his friend Duff Dunbar gave him a copy of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin to read and suggested that he took the time to write up the bedtime story that Fleming used to tell his son each evening. Fleming took on the project with keen interest. As he wrote the novel, he used aspects of his life to flesh out the details, much as he did with many of his Bond stories. The child Jemima is named after the daughter of his previous employer, Hugo Pitman; the advice Pott gives to his children also echoes Fleming’s own advice to his son: “Never say ‘no’ to adventures. Always say ‘yes’, otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life.”
The plot introduces Commander Caractacus Pott, an inventor that buys and renovates an old car after gaining money from selling whistle-like sweets to Lord Skrumshus, the wealthy owner of a local confectionery factory. The car, a “Paragon Panther”, was the sole production of the Paragon motor-car company before it went bankrupt. It is a four-seat touring car with an enormous bonnet. After the restoration is complete, the car is named for the noises made by its starter motor and the characteristic two loud backfires it makes when it starts. At first Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang is only a large, powerful car, but as the book progresses it surprises the family by beginning to exhibit independent actions. This first happens while the family is caught in a traffic jam on their way to the beach for a picnic. The car suddenly instructs Commander Pott to pull a switch, causing the car to sprout wings and take flight over the stopped cars on the road. Commander Pott flies them to Goodwin Sands in the English Channel, where the family picnics, swims and sleeps.
Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang the car was based on a composite of two cars: Fleming’s own Standard Tourer, which he had driven in Switzerland in the late 1920’s, and Chitty Bang Bang, a chain-driven customised Mercedes with a 23-litre 6-cylinder Maybach aero-engine. Fleming had seen the car’s owner, Count Louis Zborowski race at the Brooklands race track. The origin of the name “Chitty Bang Bang” is disputed, but may also have been inspired by early aeronautical engineer Letitia Chitty. Like Zborowski, Fleming names his car because of the noise it made — and the noise a car made was evidently important to Fleming.
Sadly, Fleming did not live to see Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang published, as he suffered a further heart attack on 11 August 1964 and died in the early morning of the following day — on Caspar’s twelfth birthday — in Canterbury, Kent. The novel was published two months after his death in three 10 shillings 6d volumes. The novel was generally well-received. A film loosely based on the novel was made in 1968, with a screenplay written by Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes. It was produced by Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, who had made five James Bond films previously. It starred Dick Van Dyke as Caractacus Potts and Sally Ann Howes as Truly Scrumptious, an additional character not found in Fleming’s novel. Two actors from the Bond franchise were also involved in the film: Desmond Llewelyn and Gert Fröbe, who played the parts of scrap-dealer Coggins and Baron Bomberst, respectively.
The first edition
Count Zborowski with Chitty Bang Bang 1 at Brooklands
CONTENTS
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
The 1968 British musical film loosely based on Fleming’s children’s novel. The film’s songs were written by the Sherman Brothers and the famous song “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” was nominated for an Academy Award.
Dedication
These stories are affectionately dedicated to the memory of the original CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG, built in 1920 by Count Zborowski on his estate near Canterbury.
She had a pre-1914 War, chain-drive, 75 horse-power Mercedes chassis, in which was installed a six-cylinder Zeppelin-Maybach aeroplane engine — the military type used by the Germans in their Gotha bombers.
Four vertical overhead valves per cylinder were operated by exposed push-rods and rockers from a cam-shaft on each side of the crank-case, and two Zenith carburettors were attached, one at each end of a long induction-pipe.
She had a grey, torpedo-shaped four-seater body built by Blythe Brothers of Canterbury.
In 1921 she won the Hundred M.P.H. Short Handicap at Brooklands at 101 miles per hour, and in 1922, again at Brooklands, the Lightning Short Handicap. But in that year she was involved in an accident and never raced again.
I.F.
Chapter One
Most motor-cars are conglomerations (this is a long word for bundles) of steel and wire and rubber and plastic, and electricity and oil and petrol and water, and the toffee papers you pushed down the crack in the back seat last Sunday. Smoke comes out of the back of them and horn-squawks out of the front, and they have white lights like big eyes in front, and red lights behind. And that is about that — just motor-cars, tin boxes on wheels for running about in.
But some motor-cars — mine, for instance, and perhaps yours — are different. If you get to like them and understand them, if you are kind to them and don’t scratch their paint or bang their doors, if you fill them up and top them up and pump them up when they need it, if you keep them clean and polished and out of the rain and snow as much as possible, you will find, you may find, that they become almost like persons — more than just ordinary persons: MAGICAL PERSONS!
You don’t believe me? All right then! You just read about this car I’m going to tell you about! I believe you can guess its name already — her name, I should say. And then see if you don’t agree with me. All motor-cars aren’t just conglomerations of machinery and fuel. Some are.
Once upon a time there was a family called Pott. There was the father, who had been in the Royal Navy, Commander Caractacus Pott. (You may think that Caractacus sounds quite a funny name, but in fact the original Caractacus was the British chieftain who was a sort of Robin Hood in A.D. 48 and led an English army against the Roman invaders. I expect since then there have been plenty of other Caractacuses, but I don’t know anything about them.) Then there was the mother, Mimsie Pott, and a pair of eight-year-old twins — Jeremy, who was a black-haired boy, and Jemima, who was a golden-haired girl — and they lived in a wood beside a big lake with an island in the middle. On the other side of the lake, M. 20, the big motorway on the Dover road, swept away towards the sea. So they had the best of both worlds — lovely woods for catching beetles and finding birds’ eggs, with a lake for newts and tadpoles, and a fine big motor road close by so that they could go off and see the world if they wanted to.
Well, almost, that is. But the truth of the matter was that they hadn’t got enough money between them to buy a car. All the money they had went on necessities — food and heat and light and clothes and all those boring things that one doesn’t really notice but families have to have. There was only a little left over for birthday and Easter and Christmas presents and occasional surprise outings — the things that really matter.
But the Potts were a happy family who all enjoyed their lives and since they weren’t in the least sorry for themselves, or sorry that they hadn’t got a motor-car to go whirling about in, we needn’t be sorry for them either.
Now Commander Caractacus Pott was an explorer and an inventor, and that may have been the reason why the Pott family was not very rich. Exploring places and inventing things can be very exciting indeed, but it is only very seldom that, in your explorations, you discover a really rare butterfly or animal or insect or mineral or plant that people will pay money to see, and practically never that you discover real treasure, like in books — gold bars and diamonds and jewels in an old oak chest.
As for inventions, much the same troubles apply. People all over the world, in America, Russia, China, Japan, let alone England and Scotland and Wales and Ireland, are inventing or trying to invent things all the time — every kind of thing from rockets that fly to the moon to ways of making indiarubber balls bounce higher. Everything, everything, everything is being invented or improved all the time by somebody somewhere — whether by teams of scientists in huge factories and laboratories, or by lonely men sitting and just thinking in tiny workshops without many tools.
Just such a solitary inventor was Commander Caractacus Pott, and I am ashamed to say that because he was always dreaming of impossible inventions and adventures and explorations in the remotest parts of the earth, he was generally known in the neighbourhood as Commander Crackpott! You may think that’s cheek, and so it is, but Commander Pott was a humorous man and he knew his own shortcomings very well, so when he heard that that was his nickname in the neighbourhood he was not at all cross. He just roared with laughter and said, “I’ll show ’em!” and disappeared into his workshop and didn’t come out for a whole day and a night.
During that time smoke came out of the workshop chimney and there were a lot of delicious smells, and when the children put their ears to the locked door they could hear mysterious bubblings and cooking-poppings, if you know what I mean; but nothing else at all.
When Commander Pott came out, he was so hungry that first of all he ate four fried eggs and bacon and drank a huge pot of coffee, and then he asked Mimsie to call Jeremy and Jemima, who were getting in an awful mess digging out a water-rat’s hole on the bank of the lake. (They never caught the water-rat. He dug down faster than they did.)
The twins came and stood side by side looking at their father, wondering what his invention had been this time. (Commander Pott’s inventions were sometimes dull things like collapsible coat-hangers, sometimes useless things like edible gramophone records, and sometimes clever things that just, only just, wouldn’t work, like cubical potatoes — easy to slice and pack and peel but expensive to grow each in its little iron box — and so on.) Commander Pott, looking very mysterious, dug in his pockets and produced a handful of what looked like round, coloured, sugar sweets, each a bit bigger than a marble, wrapped in paper. And, still looking mysterious, he chose a red one for Jeremy and a green one for Jemima and handed them over.
Well, sweets are always sweets, thought the children, even though they don’t look very exciting, so they unwrapped them and were just about to pop them in their mouths when Commander Pott cried, “Wait! Look at them first — very, very carefully!”
The children looked at the sweets and Commander Pott said, “What do you see? What’s different about them?”
And Jeremy and Jemima said with one voice, or almost, “They’ve got two small holes drilled through the middle of them.”
Commander Pott nodded solemnly. “Now suck them.”
So Jeremy and Jemima popped the sweets into their mouths and sucked busily away, looking at each other with raised eyebrows, as much as to say, “What do you notice? And what do you taste? Mine tastes of strawberry. Mine tastes of peppermint.” And both pairs of eyes seemed to say, “They’re just sweets, round boiled sweets, and our tongues can feel the holes in them. Otherwise they’re just like any other sweets.”
But Commander Pott, who could easily see what they were thinking, suddenly held up his hand. “Now stop sucking, both of you. Twiddle the sweets round with your tongues until they’re held between your teeth, with the twin holes pointing outwards, open your lips and BLOW!”
Well, of course, the children laughed so much watching each other’s faces that they nearly swallowed the sweets, but finally, by turning their backs on each other, they managed to compose themselves and fix the sweets between their teeth.
And then they BLEW!
And do you know what? A wonderful shrill whistle came out, almost like a toy steam-engine. The children were so excited that they went on whistling until Commander Pott sternly told them to stop. He held up his hand. “Now go on sucking until I tell you to whistle again,” and he took out his watch and carefully observed the minute hand.
“Now!”
This time Jeremy and Jemima didn’t laugh so much, but managed to get their sweets, which of course were much smaller than before, between their teeth, and they BLEW like billy-ho.
This time, because their sucking had hollowed out the holes still more, the whistle was a deep one, like one of the new diesel trains going into a tunnel, and they found that they could play all sorts of tricks, like changing the tone by blocking up one hole with their tongues and half closing their lips so as to make a buzzing whistle, and lots of other variations.
But then, what with their sucking and their blowing, the bit between the two holes collapsed and the sweets made one last deep hoot and then crunched, as all sweets do in the end, into little bits.
Jeremy and Jemima both jumped up and down with excitement at Commander Pott’s invention and begged for more. Then Commander Pott gave them each a little bag full of the sweets and told them to go out into the garden and practise every whistling tune they could think up, as after lunch he was going to take them to Skrumshus Limited, the big sweet people at their local town, to give a demonstration to Lord Skrumshus, who owned the factory. And as they ran out into the garden Commander Pott called after them, “They’re called ‘Crackpots — Crackpot Whistling Sweets’. And you know what, my chickabiddies? They’re going to buy us a motor-car!”
But the children were already dancing away into the woods making every kind of whistle you can think of, at the same time sucking like mad at their delicious sweets. There really seemed to be something special about Commander Pott’s invention — just a little touch of genius.
Well, anyway, I can tell you this, Lord Skrumshus thought so. After he had heard Jeremy and Jemima whistling in his office, he sent them out into the factory and they danced around among the workers, sucking and whistling and handing out sweets from their packets, so that very soon they had all the workers in the factory sucking and whistling, and everyone laughed so much that all the Skrumshus sweet-machines came to a stop. Lord Skrumshus had to call Jeremy and Jemima away before they brought the whole production of Skrumshus sweets and chocolates to a grinding halt.
So Jeremy and Jemima went back into Lord Skrumshus’s grand office, and there was their father being paid One Thousand Pounds by the Skrumshus Company Treasurer, and signing a paper which said he would get an additional One Shilling on every thousand Crackpot Whistling Sweets sold by Skrumshus Limited. Jeremy and Jemima didn’t think that sounded very much, but when I let you into a secret and tell you that Skrumshus Limited sell Five Million every year of just one of their sweets called Chock-a-Hoop, you can work out for yourself that perhaps, just PERHAPS, Commander Caractacus Pott wasn’t making such a bad bargain after all.
So then everyone shook hands and Lord Skrumshus gave Jeremy and Jemima each a big free box of samples of all the sweets he made. The three of them hurried off back to Mimsie to tell her the good news, and straight away the whole family hired a taxi and went to the bank to deposit the cheque for a thousand pounds and then — and then they all went off together to buy a car!
Now I don’t know if you’ve got it into your heads yet, but the Pott family wasn’t a very conventional family — that is, they were all rather out of the ordinary. Even Mimsie must have been rather an adventurous sort of mother, or she wouldn’t have married an explorer and inventor like Commander Caractacus Pott, R.N. (Retired), who had, as they say, no visible means of support — meaning he was someone who doesn’t do regular work that brings in regular money, but depends on occasional windfalls from lucky explorations or inventions.
So when it came to buying a car, they were all determined that it shouldn’t be just any car, but something a bit different from everyone else’s — not one of those black-beetle saloon cars that look much the same back and front so that, in the distance, you don’t know if they’re coming or going, but something rather special, something rather adventurous.
Well, they hunted all that afternoon and all the next day. They looked at brand-new cars and they visited the second-hand showrooms, where smart salesmen offered Commander and Mrs Pott cigarettes and Jeremy and Jemima sweets just to try and tempt them to buy. But Commander Pott knew pretty well all there is to know about cars, having been an engineer officer in the Navy and being an inventor as well, and one look under the bonnet and one trial, listening carefully to the sound of the engine, was generally enough for him — even if he didn’t notice that the speedometer had been disconnected or that the chassis was bent because of some crash whose scratches and dents the salesman had carefully painted over. (You have to be very cautious buying anything second-hand. You never know how careful the last owner has been. And anyway, whatever the thing is, if it is in good order, why does the person want to get rid of it?)
And then at the end of the second day, they came to a broken-down little garage run by a once famous racing-driver. It was really only a big tin shed with a couple of grimy petrol pumps outside, and inside, the concrete floor was slippery with oil and everywhere there were bits and pieces of old cars that the garage man had been tinkering with, really, as far as one could see, just for the fun of it.
But he was the sort of enthusiast Commander Pott always had a warm corner in his heart for. The two of them went on talking for a long time while Mimsie and Jeremy and Jemima, who were pretty tired by then, grew more and more impatient.
Suddenly they were surprised to see Commander Pott follow the garage man round to the back of his shed, where there was a long, low object hidden under a tarpaulin. The garage man looked Commander Pott and the family, each one, carefully up and down, and then he went to one end of the tarpaulin and slowly rolled it back.
Well, I can’t tell you how disappointed Mimsie and the children were. From the way the garage man had behaved, they thought there must be some splendid treasure of a car under the tarpaulin. But what did they see? A wreck — that’s all. Just the remains, rusty and broken and bent, of a very long, low, four-seater, open motor-car without a hood and with the green paint peeling off in strips.
