Grimble at Christmas Page 2

  Brown toast.No toast.Toast after Christmas . . . Grimble said, "Thank you, I shall let you know, at present the service is confined to white, thin, sliced which is the popular demand," and went next door.

  This time it was a woman who answered the door. Grimble preferred men. "Hello," said the woman, "you've come about the toast." Grimble admitted this. "How old are you?" asked the woman. (This was really why Grimble preferred men.) "About ten," he said. "Oh," said the woman, "how nice, I have a little nephew who is coming for Christmas. He is nine and three quarters, you must come and meet him." There was a short silence. "Excuse me," said Grimble, "how old are you?" The woman looked slightly put out and said, "What an extraordinary thing for a small boy to ask." Then she gave an embarrassed giggle and said, "I-am-in-my-middle-thirties," all in one gasp. "How nice," said Grimble, "I have a mother at home who is in her middle thirties. I do hope you will be able to come round sometime and play with her. We live two houses up the hill.Now about the toast." "Ah yes," said the woman, "Toast. Actually we make our own toast."

  "I realize this," said Grimble. "But the point of the service is that we take the hard work out of toast for you at a very modest charge, 21/2p for three slices." The woman looked at Grimble and thought some more and finally said, "May I sleep on it?" "I would not advise it," said Grimble. "Sleeping on toast may well keep it warm but it would do nothing to keep it crisp and fresh."

  "I mean I would like to think about it tonight . . ." said the woman, and Grimble remembering his good manners said, "Naturally, Madam; our aim is to please," and left the house.

  When he got home his mother was up making toast with his bread. This was very unusual . . . I mean for his mother to be up was very unusual – and Grimble took four of the slices of toast his mother had made and, very quickly, because it was getting quite near his school time, he raced round the four remaining houses that he had warned of the toast service. He slipped the toast through the letterboxes, shouted, "Will try to come back this evening," and ran home.

  "Where have you been?" asked Mrs Grimble, her head inside the refrigerator. "Out," said Grimble, and realizing that this was not a very complete reply added, "actually feeding under-privileged people." His father had told him once that when people began a sentence with "actually", it was nearly always a lie. His mother, who had not been listening, said, "Here is your breakfast. Come home straight from school, because we are going shopping."

  "Shopping," said Grimble; "Christmas shopping and there are still six shopping days to go . . ." "Well," said his mother, "actually mostly going to the launderette and things."

  Grimble drank his glass of iced milk which his mother had finally taken out of the refrigerator and went to school. She said "actually", said Grimble to himself. That means she was telling a lie. It is Christmas shopping.

  Walking to school he thought about the eight slices of bread given away and the rest probably eaten by the old Grimbles. I don't know how anyone can make a living in this country. It's the fault of the Government. When I grow up I am going to be a Government. Then anyone with a good idea will be able to make a lot of money . . .

  That afternoon, when he returned from school, his father said, "Some people called and left you some toast . . . hold on I'll find it. I looked at it carefully and there was no messages in it. Just toast wrapped in a napkin with some initials on it . . . I wonder what it can mean." "Actually," said Grimble "it's a new club" . . . and blushed. It was the second lie he had told that day. His father went out and brought back three slices of toast still wrapped with the G.H.T.D.S. slip on them and just then his mother called, "Come on, Grimble," and they went shopping. Grimble's idea of shopping was to go into a shop, find something he wanted, and say, "I'll buy it." Mrs Grimble did not work like that. She went into a shop, found something she liked and then spent the next half hour looking at a lot of things similar to it, that she didn't mind, to make sure she liked the first thing she had seen as much as she thought she had liked it when she first saw it. This wasted a lot of time and was very weary for their feet.

  After his mother had bought a few womanish things made out of buckles and elastic they went into a food shop. Grimble headed straight for the turkey counter and looked with interest at the turkeys. His mother bought lemons. So Grimble, watching his mother out of the corner of his eye, stood in front of the Christmas puddings and as Mrs Grimble moved off to the tomato-ketchup shelf he said, "Oh look . . . Christmas puddings for small families. What a good idea. I thought you could only buy enormous ones."

  "Heavy things Christmas puddings," said his mother. "Make you feel tired – like eating hedgehogs. You go and wait for me at the launderette.'

  Grimble left his mother in the food store and went to the launderette and watched the clothes go round. It was a bit like colour television only even less plot.

  He was just getting interested in a green shirt which was twisting itself affectionately around a pair of white underpants, when his mother came in with a large parcel and said, "Come on, Grimble, let's go home."

  Grimble took one corner of the parcel and his mother took the other and they carried it home and on the way back he said to his mother, very casually, "Tell me . . . what would be a good thing to do with three slices of stale toast?" His mother was a very surprising woman. Most mothers would have said, "throw them away", or else pretend not to have heard; not Mrs Grimble. She put down the parcel, sat on the pavement, and said, "Three pieces of stale toast. I know exactly what you can do. You can make welsh rarebit with some cheese and an egg and some mustard, if you like mustard, and I shall pay you 2p for every welsh rarebit you make."

  Grimble looked at Mrs Grimble and thought, she really is quite a splendid woman. Three times 2p are exactly 6p, which is what I lost on my thin sliced loaf . . . and at home there is a very good book on cooking. It will tell me all about welsh rabbits.

  3. Four Shopping Days

  to Christmas

  Now there were only four more proper shopping days to Christmas. Father Grimble was in the study looking at some very small islands on the globe through his microscope . . . which is a machine that makes small things look bigger. Mother Grimble was in bed with her feet and Grimble was on holiday. That morning he had had his first proper holiday feeling; first he did not get up and then he quite especially did not go to school and at nine o'clock there was no roll call, and he didn't answer his name. He purposely did not have milk at eleven, although he would have quite liked a glass, and then they had lunch.

  Grimble cooked. A bag of potato crisps, peanut-butter sandwiches with chutney, a tin of baked beans, a 21/2p piece of fudge and a bottle of fizzy lemonade with two straws. Grimble did not understand how anyone drank out of a lemonade bottle with less than two straws and as straws are very cheap – eighty-three straws cost the same as a bottle of lemonade – it was just meanness when people gave you a single one.

  The best thing about Grimble's lunch was the washing up. There was hardly any, and he left it for his mother to do when she felt better.

  A very odd thing happened after lunch. You know how you can go weeks and weeks without getting a letter and then suddenly get two? Well, after lunch the postman came and there were three letters, all for Grimble. Three letters – although one was in a brown envelope.

  He took them up to his bedroom and opened them carefully. The first was from his Aunt Percy. He knew because she had funny handwriting with words underlined.

  As he opened it he thought he noticed a onepound note lurking just inside the flap, but he read the letter first . . .

  Dear Grimble, here is one pound for Christmas. I shall take cat away to the sea for a few days. We shall probably go by bus.

  Your loving

  Aunt Persimmon

  He took out his notebook, in which there was a page at the end headed cash, and crossed out 19p and wrote 119p; then he thought, I have not been very clever and he rubbed out the 119 and put in a 1 in front of the 19. There. One should be able to get a jolly dec
ent Christmas tree for 119p and have a bit left over for some washingup powder, which was going to be his Christmas present for his mother.

  The second letter was from David Sebastian Waghorn.

  DEAR GRIM,

  WILL YOU COME AND SPEND THE DAY WITH US ON THURSDAY? IF WE DO NOT HEAR FROM YOU, I SHALL EXPECT YOU AFTER BREAKFAST. IF YOU CANNOT COME, COME AFTER BREAKFAST AND EXPLAIN WHY. DSW.

  David Sebastian Waghorn was a very funny boy.

  So Grimble, feeling quite particularly cheerful, opened the last letter; the one that was in the brown envelope. It had not even been stuck down, and said: "Dear Sir or Madam," which Grimble thought not a very polite way to start a letter.

  You are probably going to get very fat at Christmas. All those rich foods washed down with important wine followed by heavy puddings covered in cream and brandy butter and old cheese and biscuits and things like that. Well, we at Thumpyew Farm are ready for you. We give you orange juice and hot water flavoured with just a teeny bit of lemon and on Sundays you get two peeled grapes, and in hardly any time at all you will regain your youth and your health and your figure. Just think about it as you stuff roast turkey into yourself next week.We at Thumpyew are ready and willing to help you get THIN . . .

  And it gave an address to which one could reply.

  Now I wonder why they chose me, thought Grimble. He opened the door of a cupboard that had a mirror attached to it and stood in front of it, sideways with his shirt tucked under his chin. Well, his back was certainly thinner than his tummy. I mean, his back sort of caved in while his tummy stuck out, but surely not as far as that. Anyway how did Thumpyew know he was going to stuff himself with turkey and things? Unless he did something about it, the chances were that on Christmas Day he was going to get fish fingers.

  He put the pound note into his wallet slipped the three letters under his pillow and went out. In the shopping street there was a greengrocer called Flewett who sold Christmas trees. A Christmas tree, Grimble decided, was absolutely completely essential to Christmas, and he stood in front of the shop looking at a notice which said 20p a foot. He was just wondering what people could do with an extra foot (win a 3-legged race by oneself?) when he realized that it did not mean a foot with five toes at the end and a shoe on the outside, but a foot with twelve inches to it.

  So for 80p he could buy a four-foot tree, and as he had 119p he would still have 39p left to buy something for 40p with 1p off for his mother. He peered through the shop window and saw someone peering out at him and he waved; and the person who was looking out waved, so he smiled and the person smiled back. It was a boy with glasses and freckles and suddenly he recognized him. It was a boy from his class. He looked closely at him and said, "Grimble" (for it was he) "you are definitely getting a little fat." Thumpyew was right. "Now that you are on holiday you are not taking enough exercise", and he started hopping around outside the shop, watching himself in the shop window and wondering whether he was suddenly going to get thinner or whether it took a long time.

  As he was hopping around the greengrocer came out and said, "Excuse me, are you all right?" Grimble said, "Yes. I'm just taking a little exercise." Mr Flewett looked at him and said, "If it's exercise you want you can do some delivering for me; Christmas trees; I pay according to the length of tree. You look a good strong boy. You can take this three-foot tree to stationmaster Wheeler at the station for 5p."

  "Oh thank you," said Grimble. "I know Mr Wheeler," and he took the tree and went off to the station.

  He found that the best way of carrying the tree was folding his hands in front of his tummy, getting Mr Flewett to put the trunk into them, and resting the top of the tree against his head. It was quite easy to carry that way, although people in the street thought he was a Christmas tree on legs and some of them ran to the other side of the road.

  Mr Wheeler was very pleased to see Grimble with his tree and gave him a free platform ticket and they went on to the platform and there was a weighing machine. "I wonder," Grimble asked, "whether I might weigh myself on your machine?" Mr Wheeler said, "Yes of course you can, and you need not put in a penny. I have the key," and he opened up the machine at the back and pressed a lever. There was a click and Grimble stood on the machine and he weighed just under five stone. As he got off the machine a card popped out of a slot and it had your fortune written on it. His fortune was a small card with printing:

  BEWARE OF STRANGERS WITH BLACK HAIR. YOU ARE GOING ON A JOURNEY. THIS IS A GOOD TIME FOR LOVE. MONEY WILL BE DIFFICULT TO FIND.

  "I don't know any strangers with black hair," said Grimble, "What very peculiar advice." Mr Wheeler said the machine was very old and it only had two fortunes. The other said:

  A HAPPY EVENT WILL TAKE PLACE SOON. SOMEONE YOU LOVE IS GOING ON A JOURNEY. BE VERY CAREFUL NOT TO GET TOO CLOSE TO WATER.

  "That means if I weighed myself twice I would get both fortunes."

  "That's right," said the stationmaster. "We like people to do that because of the 'journey' part. That way more people go on the railway."

  Grimble went back to the shop and realized that he now had enough money to buy a six-foot tree . . . if he didn't get any soap powder for his mother. A six-foot tree would be marvellous. Six foot was much bigger than he was. When he got back to the greengrocer, he decided to ask whether he might buy a tree for himself with a bit off the price for delivering it to himself, but as soon as Mr Flewett saw him he said, "Here you are. Take this four footer to Number 26, The Terrace; they've got a children's party with dancing-round-the-tree, and the tree isn't there yet." So Grimble took the tree and ran.

  It was very heavy, but as he waddled along he said to himself, "Now we'll be able to get the biggest Christmas tree anywhere, especially if I get a special price for delivering my own tree."

  When he got back there was only one tree left outside the shop. It was the biggest one of all and the greengrocer was waiting for Grimble and said, "That's my last tree; we'll have to take it between us because it's too big for one person to carry." Grimble said, "All right . . . but will there be no more trees?"

  "Not now," said Mr Flewett. "Trees are all finished now.We start selling tangerines after this."

  Grimble was very sad. He liked tangerines but you can't put presents under a tangerine. You can't even put a lot of candles into a tangerine and light them. And there was not another Christmas-tree shop in the district. "Come on then," said the greengrocer, and he took the thick end and led the way. Grimble got hold of the trunk near the top and followed him down the street. It must have looked funny. The big greengrocer at the front end – and all you could see at the back was a pair of shoes under a lot of branches. "I can't see where I'm going," shouted Grimble towards the trunk.

  "You just hold your end up," shouted the greengrocer over his shoulder. "I'll pull you in the right direction."

  They walked a very long way and then he heard the man say, "Here we are, hold on," and he heard the trunk drop and a bell ring and a woman's voice saying, "Oh there it is, you'd better hide it in the shed in the garden because I don't want someone to see it just yet."

  Grimble thought it was rather a nice voice, a bit like his mother's, and then the voice said, "Will you put it on my account please," and Mr Flewett said, "Certainly, Madam, goodbye," and the lady went back into the house and Grimble came out from the tree and looked up and it was his house. He had delivered the Christmas tree to his own house.

  He helped Mr Flewett hide the tree in the shed and then he walked about for a few minutes – thinking. First he thought he must have managed to lose a little weight after all that exercise and that delivering Christmas trees was better than living on nothing but orange juice and peeled grapes.

  And then he thought about his mother. She had said she didn't want "someone" to see the Christmas tree and the only someone he could think of was himself. He decided he would pretend not to know about the tree so she wouldn't be upset. Really he was very pleased – it was one less thing for him to organize.
<
br />   Then he went inside. "There you are," said his mother. "Did you have a nice day?" "Yes thank you," said Grimble. "Are your feet better?" His mother said they were a bit better but she was going to bed and if it was not too much trouble could she have some fudge.

  As Grimble had never made fudge, he said that might take a little time, but his mother said that didn't matter. "I have plenty of time now because there is nothing else to do, is there?"

  "I hope not," said Grimble and went off to find a book called How to Make Fudge and Other Good Tricks.

  4. David Sebastian

  Waghorn

  It was now Thursday and Grimble had arranged to spend the day with his friend David Sebastian Waghorn. The Waghorns lived in a large house, which was built a very short time ago but tried to look old.

  Mr Waghorn was a loud man who shouted a lot. The odd thing was that he did not only shout when he was angry, the way most people do; he shouted all the time.

  "HELLO, GRIMBLE," he shouted. "HERE'S, GRIMBLE," and then he raised his voice and shouted, "GRIMBLE IS HERE."

  So Grimble said, "Good morning, Mr Waghorn. I am here."

  "RECOGNIZED YOU," shouted Mr Waghorn, "KNEW WHO YOU WERE. MUST GO TO WORK. GOODBYE," and then in case everyone had not heard him he shouted it again: "GOODBYE."