Ian Fleming - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

“What trap?” they all called, leaning out to see.

Commander Pott pointed to a very thin trip-wire stretched knee high from wall to wall across the cave.

He scratched his head and walked up and down the wire, looking at the ground in front in case there was a trap door to catch people in, and looking at the walls and the roof to see if there was some big rock or a concealed weapon waiting to drop on their heads as soon as they touched the wire. They saw him kneel down and examine where the wire joined the wall and he finally stood up and said, “Aha! The devils! I’ve got it!” Then he walked back to the car and got out a pair of pliers and some rubber gloves he always carried for dealing with faults in CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG’S electrical system.

“What is it?” they asked rather anxiously, because by now the whole adventure was getting almost too exciting.

Commander Pott said cheerfully, “Oh, nothing much. They’re only trying to electrocute trespassers and explorers who get this far into their cave. Probably not actually kill them. Just give them a powerful shock to frighten them away. But it wouldn’t have been funny if our front bumpers touched the wire. Might easily have short-circuited the whole of CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG’S electrical system as well as giving us all a nasty shock.” He looked puzzled. “Funny the way CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG saw the wire and stopped just in time. There really is something almost magical about this car.”

(Well, of course, Jeremy and Jemima weren’t in the least surprised. They knew CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG was a magical car. Just look at the way she could fly like an airplane and skim across the sea like a speedboat. And anyway, hadn’t they had their suspicions on the very first day, when they had noticed that the license plate number GEN II could be read two ways?)

Commander Pott put on his rubber gloves (electricity can’t go through rubber) and gave one short snip at the wire and, sure enough, as the pliers cut through, there was a bright blue flash and a shower of sparks and the two halves of the wire fell dead.

And now, when Commander Pott got back into the driving seat and pressed the starter, CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG’S engine at once roared into life again. On they went, climbing still up the wide tunnel of the cave with the big headlights searching ahead for more dangers, and I must say that Jeremy and Jemima in the back seat were quite trembly with excitement at where, in heaven’s name, this underground adventure was going to end.

Round the bends they went, on and on into the depths of the chalk cliff, and the speedometer showed that they had now come a whole mile inland from the sea. The air was cold and damp and the breeze, that got stronger and stronger, blew the cobwebs to and fro high up in the roof and made Jeremy and Jemima huddle up together to keep warm.

And then, round a particularly sharp bend, they were suddenly faced with a blank wall of chalk that completely closed the cave. They had come to the end—or at any rate, they seemed to have come to the end—of the long cave!

But Commander Pott got out of the car and walked carefully forward, looking at the ground and the walls and then examining, inch by inch, the chalk wall that blocked the cave. He seemed to find something that excited him very much and he came back to the car and announced, “It’s not a wall. It’s some kind of a door, a sort of secret trap door. We must find the catch that opens it. Come on, everyone. We must just search every inch of the ground and the walls for it. It’ll be something very clever I expect, and well hidden, so tell me if you find even the tiniest clue.”

So, inch by inch, the family, working in the bright glare from CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG’S headlights, began examining what seemed to be a solid wall of chalk blocking the cave—just as if the original cave diggers had decided they couldn’t be bothered to burrow any farther. The only clue, which Commander Pott found very early on, was that there was the tiniest crack that wandered, zigzagging, down the middle of the wall. It might have been natural, just a fault in the chalk surface, but again it might not, because through the crack a sharp draft was blowing from the other side.

Jemima had chosen to grub about in the right-hand corner where the wall met the side-wall of the cave. There were a lot of bits of flint embedded in the chalk. (There had been the whole way along the walls and roof of the cave, just like you find in the chalk of any chalk cliff. Some of them are fossils. It’s often worth digging them out to see.) Jemima found a jagged piece of flint almost as big as a football. Some instinct made her tug at it and go on tugging until it suddenly came away in her hand so that she almost fell over backward. She bent down and peered into the hole the flint had left in the chalk and at once she gave a squawk .of excitement and called, “Daddy, come quickly!” And when Commander Pott knelt down beside her, he saw what she had seen—AN ELECTRIC LIGHT SWITCH!

“By golly, you’re a clever girl, Jemima! I do believe you’ve found the secret.” He called to the other two, “Stand back everyone. I’m going to press down this switch. Heaven only knows what’ll happen. Ready?” And he pressed down the switch.

From somewhere inside the walls of the cave, there came a deep rumbling and grinding of machinery as, very slowly, the jagged zigzag crack in the solid wall widened and widened and widened until the two halves of what was really a secret door slid sideways into deep slots in the side walls of the cave. And what do you think CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG’S lights showed through the opening? A huge, vaulted room, quite as big as the inside of your village church, and all round the sides were cases and boxes and barrels and sacks neatly stacked up against the walls. It was an underground warehouse—a very secret warehouse for secret things. What could these things be? And who owned them? And why did the owners want to keep them secret? And why did they want a very private cave leading down through the cliff to the sea? And where were the owners? And, since it all smelled so strongly of secrecy, and therefore probably of unlawfulness, how nasty could these owners be?

These questions and many others ran through all their minds, and Commander Pott put their thoughts in a nutshell when he put his hands on his hips and declared, “Ho hum! I smell dirty work! Now then everyone, switch on the brains! Full power! What do we do next?”

Mimsie, who was, like all mothers, worried about the children, said at once, “Darling, let’s close the secret door again and reverse quietly back down the way we came. I don’t like the look of this at all.”

But Jeremy and Jemima just wouldn’t agree to this. They were both the tiniest bit trembly about the way the adventure was going, but they had inherited some of their father’s exploring bug and they were terribly eager to discover the secrets of the big underground vault. “Oh, please, Mimsie,” they both pleaded together, “do let’s find out what it’s all about.”

Commander Pott reflected and said, “Well, Mimsie, after all, no one’s going to eat us. And the children don’t seem worried. I vote we see the adventure through. It would be ghastly reversing CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG the whole way back now over a mile of cave to the sea. Besides we’ve been climbing ali the way and we can’t be far from the top of the cliff. The cave obviously goes on out of this vault on the other side and leads on to the top. Come on, we’ll drive the car up on to the level floor of the vault and give her a rest and then have a good explore. After all, this is pretty thrilling and we really must get to the bottom of this secret.”

“All right, darling,” said Mimsie rather reluctantly. “You know I’m just as keen as you are to find out what this is all about. But if you ask me, there’s something pretty fishy about all—this something, well, something criminal. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we hadn’t come upon a nest of crooks and gangsters. I only hope none of them appear while we’re looking into their secret hoard!”