because Chank was coming near his car.
‘What’s that idiot doing running around on fire?’ he roared. ‘Sit on his head!’
The Bottersnikes blinked at this because Chank’s head was obviously too hot to sit on, but the King was angry and not to be put off.
‘But King, we can’t —’ they said.
‘Yes you can,’ he bawled. ‘If he’s got a head it can be sat on, so sit on it, hard, and don’t argue.’
‘We’ll get burned!’
‘I don’t care,’ the King screamed. ‘If somebody doesn’t sit on his head in less than no time I won’t have a birthday when it stops raining, and there’ll be no King’s Party.’
This would never do. The Bottersnikes hurried to their jam tins and let the Gumbles go with orders to put the fire out quick smart so that Chank could have his head sat on. The Gumbles were glad to be out of the tins at last and made a great show as firefighters.
First they tripped Chank up by thrusting a stick between his legs. The straw hat had nearly burned away by now but somehow — no one quite knew how — the fire spread alarmingly.
A patch of dry bladey grass exploded into flames. Billows of vile smoke went up from an old bag that caught alight. Gumbles, rushing about with hoses, tackled the job manfully, but seemed to be making the fire worse. The hoses would keep getting wound round the Bottersnikes’ legs. Many a tail was scorched, accidentally. And the noise! There was a wailing from the roofless Chank and yelping from the owners of scorched tails, while the fire was roaring and the King was roaring and smoke made everyone cough. Altogether there was far more smoke, sparks, shouting and confusion than when the Gumbles were safely in their jam tins.
At last the King made his voice heard above the uproar: ‘Them Gumbles ain’t doing any good! Put ’em in their jam tins and squash ’em down hard!’ So the Bottersnikes grabbed the Gumblefiremen and groped through the smoke for the tins. They popped them in and squashed them down most savagely but instead of flattening out like lumps of dough as they were supposed to, the Gumbles came shooting out of their tins as if on springs. This was not so surprising. They were on springs. Willigumble and Kookaburra had put a mattress spring in each tin while everyone was busy with the fire.
The Gumbles held on to the springs with their toes and went zoinng! zoinng! over the heads of the startled Bottersnikes like rubber kangaroos. The Bottersnikes were too amazed to do anything except rub their smoke-filled eyes and watch the Gumbles zoinnging down the hill into the bush.
Willigumble was bouncing along on a spring of his own.
‘Sorry we can’t —’ zoinng! — ‘stay for the King’s Party —’ zoinng! — he shouted, ‘But we have to —’ zoinng! — ‘go now. Spring’s in the air, you know!’ and he bounced after the others as fast as he could zoinng.
Bottersnikes eat pictures of food in papers and magazines. There are plenty of these in rubbish heaps — that’s partly why they are so fat. Also they eat the stuffing out of mattresses. This they like fried. For sweets they are fond of rusty nails, though their favourites are milk-bottle tops, which they chew like chewing gum. They will eat earwigs and cardboard too, but only if they are hungry.
So the Gumbles had to go through all the rubbishy papers carefully cutting out the food pictures. They had to search the junk heaps from end to end for bottle tops and rusty nails and, worst of all, they had to carry in the stuffing from four mattresses and pile it ready for frying. The Bottersnikes yelled at them all day long.
By evening everything was nearly ready. The Gumbles had built a large table from sheets of iron propped on bricks, and a stone fireplace too, to do the cooking on.
From the roof of his palace the King bawled: ‘Light the fire and fry the stuffing!’
Firelighting was the one job the Bottersnikes did themselves. As no one happened to be angry at the time, they grabbed a snoozing ’snike, thrust his head into the fireplace and kicked him and twisted his tail until he was thoroughly enraged. The kindling quickly caught from his red-hot ears and the fire blazed in no time.
In great excitement, Smiggles woke from a little nap he happened to be taking. ‘Look what I done!’ he shouted. ‘Look what I gone and dreamed!’
‘You wasn’t ordered to dream anything, Smiggles,’ the King roared. ‘Sit on his head!’
‘But it’s tomato soup!’ Smiggles protested. It was too, a large tureen of it, rich, red and steaming, fresh from the depths of Smig’s sleep. ‘I dreamed it special,’ he added craftily, ‘as a birthday present.’
The King could not be angry. Everyone loves tomato soup. Yet care had to be taken lest the present vanished before it could be used; so Smiggles was hung up by his tail to stop him going to sleep. From time to time he was given a kick to make certain of his wakefulness, then a pat on the head to show there were no hard feelings.
Quite pleased with the gift of soup, the King announced, loudly: ‘I will receive the rest of my birthday presents.’
The Bottersnikes blinked.
‘Now,’ the King said. And sat there waiting.
Once more the tired Gumbles had to comb the rubbish heaps, with the Bottersnikes waddling behind, this time for suitable presents for the King. His Majesty received a whistle, a water pistol, a mousetrap and a quantity of fruit, mostly rotten — the best that could be found at short notice.
Presently the King stood atop his car and blew a shrill blast on his new whistle. In the grand manner, the King said: ‘Bottersnikes! I declare my Birthday Party open!’ He took a flying leap from the roof of his palace and landed on the table, which tipped under his weight. Most of the Party food slid his way and he grabbed all he could and sat on it. The others rushed in from the sidelines and yelled and fought for what was left — the idea being to grab all that could be grabbed and sit on it, then to try to steal from someone else’s grabbing without getting caught.
With nothing left to grab, they pounded the iron table with their spoons, scratched their backs with their forks and shouted at each other in a ’snike-like way.
‘My pile’s bigger’n Glob’s!’ crowed Chank.
‘But I got more stuffin’!’ shouted Glob, and to prove it he hurled his table knife. His aim was bad and the knife stuck quivering in the Weathersnike’s tummy. The weather expert folded his umbrella (he had brought it with him because, he said, you can’t take chances at a Party) and coshed Chank on the head, whereupon Chank groped under the table for a dead fish he’d hidden there and slapped Snorg in the face with it twice. So the Party got going.
All
