The Grunts In Trouble Read Free

the air and came flopping down on her and on Mr Grunt andthe surrounding area.
    “Idiot woman!” said Mr Grunt.
    “Rude man!” said Mrs Grunt. She had just spied the cake of soap on the floor and realised what must have happened. “This is your fault.”
    “Yours.”
    “Yours!”
    “Yours!”
    “Yours!” Mrs Grunt repeated, just as Sunny appeared through the doorway. He had heard the terrible CLANG (or THUNG!), stopped Clip and Clop as soon as he reached a not-quite -so-steep part on their uphill journey, and had come to investigate.
    “Your father tried to trip me up,” she protested.
    “But he’s in the bath,” Sunny pointed out, “so how could he?”
    “Through trickery!” cried Mrs Grunt. “That’s what it was! Trickery!”
    Sunny looked from the roll of turf on top of Mrs Grunt’s head to the roll of turf on top of Mr Grunt’s head and then back again. “Why are you both wearing grass wigs?” he asked. Mr Grunt gave out a big grunt and flung his piece of turf across the room. It landed on the doorstop cat, knocking him sideways.
    “Ginger Biscuit!” cried Mrs Grunt, struggling off the bath lid and hurrying over to her beloved sawdust-filled moggy.
    Sunny sighed and, safe in the knowledge that everything was pretty much normal (as far as the Grunt family was concerned, that is), went back outside – carefully bolting the bottom half of the stable-style door behind him – and returned to Clip and Clop.
    Ten minutes or so later, Sunny found himselfleading the donkeys down the country road that led past the entrance to Bigg Manor. (Remember the name?
    Yes, that one.)
    Up ahead a tallish, thinnish man was standing in the middle of the road with a neat pyramid-shaped pile of rocks. His name was Larry Smalls and he was wearing a badly crumpled, coal-black top hat on his head (of all places) and an old white T-shirt. On the T-shirt were the words:
    in faded red letters.
    “Hello, kid,” said Larry Smalls as thecaravan approached. (The truth be told, he couldn’t tell whether the child with the wonky face, sticking-up hair and blue dress was a girl or a boy.) “Want to throw a rock?”
    “Where?” asked Sunny.
    “Here,” said Larry Smalls, pointing to the pile. “One of these.”
    “I meant where should I throw it?” asked Sunny.
    Larry Smalls sighed. “At the gates to the Bigg house, of course,” he said, looking as sad as a box of ignored kittens.
    Sunny looked over at the impressive entrance to the long and winding driveway leading up to the manor house: two big brown stone pillars either side, topped with white stone lions, and two gates of black metal railings with impressive gold-coloured spikes on top.
    He looked back at Larry Smalls in his BIGG AIN’T BEST T-shirt. “Excuse me,” he said a little hesitantly, “but WHY, exactly?”
    “Why?” said Larry Smalls with a gasp. He was wondering a “Why?” of his own. He was wondering why this odd boy – he’d worked out Sunny was a boy – was wearing a strange blue dress. (Or any kind of dress, come to that.)
    “Why would anyone want to throw rocks at the gates?” asked Sunny.
    If you must know, Sunny was very tempted to throw a rock or two. He knew that throwing rocks at things was usually wrong, but there wasn’t any rock-throwing in his life, and the neat pyramid-shaped pile of them did look very throwable .
    Each rock was roughly the size and shape of a tennis ball; just the sort of size you’d want achuckable rock to be. (Not that I EVER throw rocks, even when one seems to be saying, “Throw me! Throw me!” in a tiny voice inside my head which only I can hear.)
    “Why should you throw them at the gates?” said Larry Smalls. “You ask me WHY?” He looked a mixture of puzzled and outraged and a bit like one of those birds that stands on one leg just because it can. “Because that is the gateway to the home of the Bigg family. That’s why.”
    “Which big family?” asked Sunny, which was yet another perfectly