Ian Fleming - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Again Jeremy and Jemima looked at each other, now really rather worried. Had something gone wrong?

But Commander Pott just said, “She’s a bit cold. Now then!” He pressed the starter again. And this time, after the first two CHITTY sneezes and the two soft BANGS, the BANGS ran on and into each other so as to make a delicious purring rumble such as neither Mimsie nor Jeremy nor Jemima had ever heard before from a piece of machinery. Commander Pott put the big car into gear and slowly they rumbled and roared out of the workshop into the sunshine and up the lane toward the highway, and the springs were soft as silk and always this delicious rumble came out behind from the huge fishtail exhausts.

When they got to the side road that joined the highway, Commander Pott pressed the big bulb of the boa-constrictor horn and it let out a deep, polite, but rather threatening roar, and then, because he wanted to show everything to the children, Commander Pott pressed the electric horn button in the middle of the wheel and the klaxon horn fired off a terrific blast of warning:

Then he steered out on to the highway and they were off on their first practice run.

Well, I can only tell you that the huge, long, gleaming green car almost flew. With a click of the big central gear lever, Commander Pott got out of first gear into second at forty miles per hour, with another click at seventy miles per hour he was in third, and as they touched ONE HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR, he put the huge car into top gear and there they were, passing the black beetle cars almost as if they were standing still.

GA—GOOOO—GA! went the klaxon again and again as they swept down the big, safe, double-lane highway, and the drivers of the little family sedans looked in their rear mirrors and saw the great, gleaming monster whistling toward them and drew to the side to let her go by, and all the drivers said, “COOER! See that! What is she? Smashing!!” And then the green car was past and away and they caught the hurricane howl of the big exhausts and made a note of the number, GEN II, and not one of the drivers noticed what the number really spelled. They just thought it was a nice short number to have and easy to remember.

So CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG came to the end of the highway and Commander Pott carefully swung the big car into the other lane and roared off back toward home, and Jeremy and Jemima clutched their armrest with excitement and looked over at the glittering dashboard and watched the needle of the speedometer creep back up to a hundred and stay there until they came to the turning off for home. And Commander Pott clamped on the powerful hydraulic brakes until the car was only creeping along and they turned off the highway and bumped back down their narrow lane and back in under the bright lights of the workshop. And, when Commander Pott switched off the engine, it gave one last CHITTY-CHITTY, let out a deep sigh of contentment, and was silent.

They all climbed out and Commander Pott turned to them with a gleam of triumph in his eye. “Well? What do you think of her?”

And Mimsie said, “Terrific!”

And Jeremy said, “Smashing!”

And Jemima said, “Adorable!”

And Commander Caractacus Pott said mysteriously, “Well, that’s good. But I’m warning you. There’s something odd about this car. I’ve put all I know into her, every invention and improvement I could think of, and quite a lot of the thousand pounds we got from the SKRUMSHUS people, but there’s more to it than that. She’s got some ideas of her own”

“What do you mean?” they all chorused.

“Well,” said Commander Pott carefully, “I can’t exactly say, but sometimes, in the morning when I came back to get to work again, I’d find that certain modifications, certain changes, had, so to speak, taken place all by themselves during the night, when I wasn’t there. Certain—what shall I say?—rather revolutionary and extraordinary adaptations. I can’t say more than that, and I haven’t really got to the bottom of it all, but I suspect that this motorcar has thought out, all by herself, certain improvements, certain very extraordinary mechanical devices, just as if she had a mind of her own, just as if she were grateful to us for saving her life, so to speak, and wanted to repay all the loving care we’d given her. And there’s another thing. You see all those rows and rows of knobs and buttons and levers and little lights on the dashboard? Well, to tell you the truth, I just haven’t been able to discover what they’re all for. I know the obvious ones, of course, but there are some of those gadgets that seem to be secret gadgets. We’ll find out what they’re for in time I suppose, but, for now, I’ll admit there are quite a lot of them that have got me really puzzled. She just won’t let me find out.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jemima excitedly. “Is it a she?”

“Well,” said Commander Pott, “that’s how I’ve come to call her. It’s funny, but all bits of machinery that people love are made into females. All ships are ‘she.’ Racing drivers call their cars ‘she.’ Same thing with airplanes. Don’t know about rockets or sputniks—somehow they don’t seem very feminine to me—but I bet the rocketeers and sputnicators, or whatever they call the sputnik experts, I bet they call their spaceships and things ‘she.’ Odd isn’t it? I used to serve in a battleship. Gigantic great ship stuffed with guns and radar and so on. Called the George V. But we called her ‘she.’ ”

Jeremy said excitedly, “We’ve got to have a name for her. And I know what we ought to call her. What she called herself.”

“What do you mean?”

“What was that?”

“When did she?” they all cried together.

Jeremy said slowly, “She said it when she started CHITTY-CHITTY, like sneezes, and then BANG-BANG! So we’ll call her that, her own invented name.”

And the others looked at each other and slowly they all smiled and Commander Caractacus Pott patted the green-and-silver car on her nose and said in a loud and solemn voice, “Now hear me twelve-cylinder, eight-liter, supercharged Paragon Panther . We hereby christen you . . .” and they all chorused, “CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG!” Then they trooped out of the workshop and went happily about all the things they’d forgotten to do for the whole of that exciting afternoon.

The next day was a Saturday and the month was August and the sun positively streamed down. It was a roaster of a day, and at breakfast Commander Pott made an announcement. “Today,” he said, “is going to be a roaster, a scorcher. There’s only one thing to do, and that’s for us to take a delicious picnic and climb into CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG and dash off down the Dover Road to the sea.”

Of course everyone was delighted with the idea and while Commander Pott and Jeremy and Jemima went to get CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG ready, fill her up with gas, check the water in the radiator, check the oil, test the tire pressures, clean yesterday’s squashed flies off the windshield, dust down the body, and polish up the chrome until it shone like silver, Mimsie filled a basket with hardboiled eggs, cold sausages, bread-and-butter sandwiches, jam puffs (with, of course, like all good jam puffs, more jam than puff), and bottles and bottles of the best fizzy lemonade and orange soda.

Then they all piled into the car, with the top down, of course, and, with CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG’S usual two sneezes and two small explosions, they were off up the lane to the highway that led toward Dover and to the sea some twenty miles away.

But, but, but! And once again, but!!

Twenty-two thousand, six hundred and fifty-four other motorcars full of families (that was the number announced by the Automobile Association the next day) had also decided to drive down the Dover Road to the sea on that beautiful Saturday morning, and there was an endless stream of cars going the same way as the Pott family in CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG.