The Wombles Read Free Page A

shut his eyes.
    For the next hour Bungo trotted backwards and forwards chasing the papers and stuffing them into his shopping basket. But as soon as he had cleared one patch of Common the wind sent another shoal of bits and pieces dancing through the air. In spite of the cold – it was a north wind – Bungo was soon very warm indeed, so he wedged his basket firmly between two tree stumps and went puffing and panting down to Queen’s Mere to have a drink of water.
    There was nobody about apart from the ducks and Bungo stopped to watch them riding on the water, which was quite choppy and full of leaves. He was just thinking about going back to work when he noticed something long and black caught in the rushes, and although the pond was not one of the places which he had to keep tidy, being Bungo he couldn’t resist going to have a closer look, so he slid into the water and swam across.
    ‘It’s a stick with stuff on it,’ said Bungo, circling round the thing. One of the ducks came quacking over and Bungo slapped the water with his paws and the duck sailed away again.
    ‘Silly thing,’ said Bungo, who like most Wombles didn’t think much of ducks, rabbits and squirrels. He got hold of the long black thing between his teeth and pulled it free and began to swim back to the shore rather slowly, for the object was large and awkward. Once on firm ground Bungo put it down and shook himself thoroughly, and then put the thing under his arm, collected his shopping basket and hurried off to Orinoco.
    Orinoco was sound asleep, but he woke up at once when he heard Bungo and sat up and pretended to be very busy looking through the three bus tickets in his tidy-bag.
    ‘Look what I’ve found,’ said Bungo, laying the thing at Orinoco’s paws.
    ‘That’s nothing to get excited about – it’s only an old umbrella,’ said Orinoco.
    Now Bungo was a good-hearted Womble who would never do anyone a bad turn, but it did occur to him at this moment that it was rather unfair that he should work so hard while Orinoco hardly did a paw’s turn. Perhaps it was because Orinoco was being so squashing about the umbrella.
    ‘It’s a very splendid umbrella,’ Bungo said. He had actually never seen one before because he hadn’t yet been all round the Workshop, where, as it happened, Tobermory had a very good selection of umbrellas and even a couple of parasols. ‘Look!’ And he picked it up and twirled it round and round his head in exactly the same way as Great Uncle Bulgaria twirled his stick sometimes.
    ‘That’s not the way to use it,’ said Orinoco, and he got up out of his nest and took the umbrella from Bungo’s paws and opened it up. Now although Orinoco was quite fat (no Womble is what you might call thin , but Orinoco was fatter than most), the wind was exceptionally strong, and the umbrella particularly large, and before Orinoco or Bungo knew quite what was happening Orinoco was being swept over the grass as fast as his short back legs would carry him.
    ‘Hang on, hang on,’ said Bungo, dancing up and down.
    ‘I am hanging on,’ Orinoco shouted back, for a Womble, once it’s attached to something, simply will not let go.
    He was on the top of a high ridge of ground by this time and suddenly the wind lifted him clean off his paws and took him straight up towards the sky.
    ‘Come back,’ shouted Bungo.
    ‘I can’t,’ shouted Orinoco.
    Up and up he went, peering over his shoulder at the ground, which was now spreading out beneath him so that he could see the tops of the tossing trees and the ruffled water of Queen’s Mere. And beyond that there was the Windmill and the Golf Course and beyond that the road to one side of the Common with the early morning rush-hour traffic just starting to build up. He could even see the roofs of the houses and a building site where the workmen were coming on duty. He only needed to go a little bit higher and he might have been able to see the dome of St Paul’s far away to the