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Authors: Philip Ardagh
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Lippy will come looking for us when he finds out he’s been tricked?” Sunny interrupted.
“He may not even notice. And if he does, we’ll be long gone from here by then,” said Mr Grunt.
“But circuses travel around too, and surely we won’t be that hard to find,” said Sunny.
“Why not?” said Mr Grunt.
“Because we’ll have a hulking great elephant with us,” said Sunny.
Mr Grunt was about to say something, but stopped. He looked flummoxed. He didn’t have an answer to that.
The following morning – after a night in which both Mr and Mrs Grunt slept beautifully in their bed, and Sunny lay awake for much of it outside their door with a mixture of worry and excitement – the Grunts actually set off for a particular destination for the second time in two days.
Sunny was used to hitching up Clip and Clop and simply going where the donkeys and the Grunts’ moods might lead them. Today, however, they were following Mr Lippy’s map to collect an elephant .
Mr Grunt had given Sunny the task of reading the map and making sure that they were going the right way. He didn’t trust Mrs Grunt to be able to do it, and had “important things” to do himself, apparently.
Sunny certainly heard much hammering, crashing and bashing, along with the occasional cry of pain when Mr Grunt musthave hit himself by mistake.
The clown’s map wasn’t particularly detailed but what details he had drawn were very useful. He’d shown landmarks to look out for (linked together by dotted lines and arrows), with instructions for what to do – turn left, straight on, turn right, etc. – once they were reached. (So it wasn’t really a proper map. It was not to scale, with places in the right place or anything.)
The starting point was the old barn and the next landmark Sunny had to look out for as he led Clip and Clop westward was a crossroads by a windmill, where they’d have to turn right. They stopped briefly at the mill to give Mr and Mrs Grunt time to laugh and point at the miller in his flour-covered smock, and for Mr Grunt to kick one of the sacks of grain stacked at the roadside. (Mrs Grunt usually liked tosave her kicking-of-things for extra-special occasions.) They then hopped back inside the caravan, ready for Sunny to negotiate the bend.
It was quite a tight turn for the Grunts’ extraordinarily higgledy-piggledy house on wheels. The roads were narrow, and the one he was supposed to be taking them down had high hedges on both sides. Sunny had to manoeuvre the caravan backwards and forwards quite a few times (which wasn’t theeasiest thing in the world when working with donkeys, especially ones that weren’t quite as young as they used to be). Sunny talked to Clip and Clop, gently coaxing and praising them, and promising them juicy carrots in the not too distant future. He also gave them hearty pats on the haunches, stroked their muzzles and, when he really needed the pair to go beyond the call of donkey duty, scratched them between the ears. The Grunts’ home was a big haul for Clip and Clop, even though there were actually two of them.
After the windmill crossroads, Sunny had to look out for a left-hand turn just after crossing a three-arched bridge, and a right-hand fork in the road next to a waterfall. He found these, along with the entrance to a shortcut by a fallen tree and a turning by a statue of a white stag – a deer with antlers – into a forest. Thestatue had recently been given a fresh coat of white gloss paint, so looked very shiny and unrealistic.
Sunny enjoyed following the map instructions: seeing places first as black- and-white drawings on paper, and later as the real thing. He liked being on the move with a purpose – and such an exciting purpose …
He found himself thinking of Mimi, imagining her not as he’d last seen her (in Sack the gardener’s borrowed overalls) but as he’d first caught sight of her before the bee attack, at her very pinkest, when she was still smelling
“He may not even notice. And if he does, we’ll be long gone from here by then,” said Mr Grunt.
“But circuses travel around too, and surely we won’t be that hard to find,” said Sunny.
“Why not?” said Mr Grunt.
“Because we’ll have a hulking great elephant with us,” said Sunny.
Mr Grunt was about to say something, but stopped. He looked flummoxed. He didn’t have an answer to that.
The following morning – after a night in which both Mr and Mrs Grunt slept beautifully in their bed, and Sunny lay awake for much of it outside their door with a mixture of worry and excitement – the Grunts actually set off for a particular destination for the second time in two days.
Sunny was used to hitching up Clip and Clop and simply going where the donkeys and the Grunts’ moods might lead them. Today, however, they were following Mr Lippy’s map to collect an elephant .
Mr Grunt had given Sunny the task of reading the map and making sure that they were going the right way. He didn’t trust Mrs Grunt to be able to do it, and had “important things” to do himself, apparently.
Sunny certainly heard much hammering, crashing and bashing, along with the occasional cry of pain when Mr Grunt musthave hit himself by mistake.
The clown’s map wasn’t particularly detailed but what details he had drawn were very useful. He’d shown landmarks to look out for (linked together by dotted lines and arrows), with instructions for what to do – turn left, straight on, turn right, etc. – once they were reached. (So it wasn’t really a proper map. It was not to scale, with places in the right place or anything.)
The starting point was the old barn and the next landmark Sunny had to look out for as he led Clip and Clop westward was a crossroads by a windmill, where they’d have to turn right. They stopped briefly at the mill to give Mr and Mrs Grunt time to laugh and point at the miller in his flour-covered smock, and for Mr Grunt to kick one of the sacks of grain stacked at the roadside. (Mrs Grunt usually liked tosave her kicking-of-things for extra-special occasions.) They then hopped back inside the caravan, ready for Sunny to negotiate the bend.
It was quite a tight turn for the Grunts’ extraordinarily higgledy-piggledy house on wheels. The roads were narrow, and the one he was supposed to be taking them down had high hedges on both sides. Sunny had to manoeuvre the caravan backwards and forwards quite a few times (which wasn’t theeasiest thing in the world when working with donkeys, especially ones that weren’t quite as young as they used to be). Sunny talked to Clip and Clop, gently coaxing and praising them, and promising them juicy carrots in the not too distant future. He also gave them hearty pats on the haunches, stroked their muzzles and, when he really needed the pair to go beyond the call of donkey duty, scratched them between the ears. The Grunts’ home was a big haul for Clip and Clop, even though there were actually two of them.
After the windmill crossroads, Sunny had to look out for a left-hand turn just after crossing a three-arched bridge, and a right-hand fork in the road next to a waterfall. He found these, along with the entrance to a shortcut by a fallen tree and a turning by a statue of a white stag – a deer with antlers – into a forest. Thestatue had recently been given a fresh coat of white gloss paint, so looked very shiny and unrealistic.
Sunny enjoyed following the map instructions: seeing places first as black- and-white drawings on paper, and later as the real thing. He liked being on the move with a purpose – and such an exciting purpose …
He found himself thinking of Mimi, imagining her not as he’d last seen her (in Sack the gardener’s borrowed overalls) but as he’d first caught sight of her before the bee attack, at her very pinkest, when she was still smelling
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