Part 7 (1/2)

'Why don't you try, then?' said Tobermory patiently. Tomsk thought it over for several minutes and then nodded and went off leaving Tobermory chuckling to himself. Tomsk was a very good tree climber he always won when they played Wombles and Ladders but he wasn't much good at pretending to be a monkey. However, it was wonderful exercise and although he fell down more times than he swung from branch to branch he didn't hurt himself, because he always landed in a soft bed of snow; and his temper improved no end.

Orinoco enjoyed the snow for quite a different reason. It meant that there was very little work to be done, so he carefully built himself a kind of snow sofa with curves and b.u.mps in just the right places to fit his figure. Then he lined it with dried bracken from one of the store cupboards, borrowed a pair of sungla.s.ses from Tobermory's collection and a very wide selection there was from which to choose, as Human Beings are better at losing sungla.s.ses than practically anything else except perhaps gloves and settled himself down for a really long rest with his favourite book from the library. It was called: g*FORTUNE & BASON.

SPLENDID CHRISTMAS CATALOGUE, 1932.

g*And Bungo and Alderney, of course, were having the time of their lives, although neither of them ever mentioned the idea of building another snow Womble. So all the young ones were extremely happy and contented with this wonderful weather. But with the older Wombles it was quite a different story.

'How much is left in the larders?' asked Great Uncle Bulgaria, when Madame Cholet brought him his mid-morning hot drink. Alderney was out building an igloo, so Madame Cholet was on trolley duty.

'Alas,' said Madame Cholet, 'we are getting low on food.'

'How low?' asked Great Uncle Bulgaria, giving her a sharp look. 'I want the truth now, my good Womble.'

Madame Cholet twisted her ap.r.o.n between her paws and said in a low voice, 'There is enough to last for another ten days. That is all.'

Great Uncle Bulgaria grunted and went over to the barometer which Tobermory had hung on the wall during the Great Rains. He tapped the gla.s.s, but the needle stayed firmly at 'Snow'.

'Tsk, tsk, tsk,' said Great Uncle Bulgaria, and pushed aside the plans for the great Midsummer outing on which he had been working. The party seemed a long way off at the moment, and his instinct told him that a danger even worse than the floods lay ahead.

A really long hard winter makes life a difficult business for all wild creatures, and the Wombles were no exception, although they were more efficient than most at surviving because they are by nature so thrifty. While the squirrels only stored nuts, the Wombles packed away everything they possibly could. All through the spring, summer and autumn months Madame Cholet was bottling, drying and stacking everything on which she could lay her paws. Nothing was wasted in her kitchen, not a blade of gra.s.s or a single berry, not a mushroom stalk or half a bar of chocolate.

Many of the Human Beings who picnicked on the Common would have been astonished to know that what they left behind so untidily was carefully taken back to Madame Cholet, cleaned by was.h.i.+ng or boiling, and turned into some delicious dish. Orinoco had been known to track a likely looking picnic party from one side of the Common to the other and no Womble would ever forget the time when he had returned in triumph with a whole bag of perfectly good bananas. Rolled and coated in gra.s.s-seed dough they had been baked very slowly and served with thick, creamy rowan berry sauce. It had been one of Madame Cholet's greatest triumphs.

All this went through Great Uncle Bulgaria's mind now, and it made his mouth water. He pushed the memory to one side and said, 'I'd better come and have a look.'

'Very well,' said Madame Cholet rather crossly, for like all good cooks she didn't care for anybody inspecting her kitchens and larders.

Great Uncle Bulgaria's heart sank as they moved through the storerooms. There were all too few full jars, sacks and packets left.

'There's only one thing for it,' he said. 'We'll have to start rationing food. We did it in the bad winter of '46 to '47 and we'll have to do it again. Please fetch Tobermory and we'll work out a scheme together.'

And so the three Wombles sat down at the scrubbed wooden table made from orange boxes, and with papers and pencils and much 'ho-humming' from Great Uncle Bulgaria and sniffs from Madame Cholet they drew up a list of food and a list of Wombles and divided one with the other.

'Perhaps the younger ones should have a little more,' suggested Madame Cholet, who in that family of kindly creatures probably had the warmest heart of all.

That meant a lot more adding and dividing and subtracting and even so it was plain that there would be only enough food to last three weeks and Great Uncle Bulgaria, who could remember one winter when the snow and frost had stayed on the ground for two months, shook his white head, but kept his thoughts to himself.

'If only there was some better way of keeping food,' said Tobermory, sharpening their pencils with the small knife attached to his screwdriver it was his own invention and a very useful one.

'I'm sure I do my best,' said Madame Cholet, sitting up very straight.

'Yes, yes, of course,' said Tobermory hastily, 'only there are times such as September when we have a glut of blackberries and mushrooms . . .'

'. . . and toadstools,' put in Great Uncle Bulgaria, who had a weakness for this delicacy, which is poisonous to Human Beings but much enjoyed by Wombles, some of whom are convinced that it prevents falling fur.

'Yes,' agreed Madame Cholet reluctantly, 'but I bottle all I can, and mushrooms and toadstools just will not keep. They go wormy.'

'Exactly what I mean,' said Tobermory. 'Just think how splendid it would be if we had some now.'

All three Wombles licked their lips and sighed and then pulled themselves together.

'If wishes were wings then Wombles would fly,' said Great Uncle Bulgaria, quoting an old proverb. 'Rationing must start immediately, Madame Cholet. I shall make an announcement in the Common Room before lunch.'

The news was greeted by the Wombles in shocked silence, and several of the younger ones wished that they had stopped to eat a larger breakfast instead of rus.h.i.+ng off to play in the snow. When they saw their plates their faces fell more than ever, and a kind of gloomy s.h.i.+ver ran through their fur.

'This is simply dreadful,' whispered Orinoco, who had worked up a nice appet.i.te from lying in the pale sunlight.

'I don't understand it,' said Alderney, thinking sadly of her little trolley which Madame Cholet had told her would not be used until after the thaw. She did so enjoy pus.h.i.+ng it along the corridors and ringing the bell.

'It's quite simple,' said Bungo, who had been listening to the older Wombles and who was getting a little more grown-up every day. 'There are two reasons really. First, Human Beings don't come on to the Common at all when the weather's like this, except if they are exercising their dogs and then, of course, they don't bring any food with them. And second, we can't get at anything that's growing not that there is much in the winter because of the snow.'

'Then how do the birds manage?' asked Alderney.

'Quite often they don't,' said Tobermory, who had overheard this question and who felt that the three young Wombles were now old enough to learn some of the harsher facts of existence. 'They die.'

At this a really dreadful gloom settled on the table and Alderney began to sniff, so to cheer her up Bungo suggested a game of Wombles and Ladders. Alderney soon perked up a bit, but Orinoco became steadily more and more upset. He knew he was greedy, he was perfectly aware that he thought too much about food, and ever since he had got stuck in the rabbit hole he had tried to be better. But now, faced with a real shortage, his whole tubby little body longed and yearned and ached for food. He made matters worse for himself by imagining all his favourite menus, from bracken and berry pie to chocolate and orange-skin cake. Every night he had wonderful dreams in which by some miracle Madame Cholet suddenly discovered a forgotten larder and dished up the most enormous high tea.

Poor Orinoco would wake up groaning and with his tongue hanging out, and in spite of all Great Uncle Bulgaria's instructions he would slip along the silent pa.s.sages, past the other slumbering Wombles and down to the small back door near the road to see if it had stopped snowing yet.

But each time all he saw were the soft, s.h.i.+ning flakes filtering slowly on to the Common and the rooftops. It had even hardened on the road so that the traffic moved far more slowly than usual, and at all times of the day and night there were Human Beings throwing shovel-loads of yellow sand on it to make it less slippery. The sand made Orinoco think of lovely fine yellow sugar, and he groaned more than ever.

And every day the Wombles grew a little thinner and their fur became a little less sleek and their eyes more worried.

'Perhaps we could buy some food,' suggested Tobermory.

'We've got very little English money left,' replied Great Uncle Bulgaria, who was becoming a shadow of his former self for, unknown to anyone but Madame Cholet, the old Womble had cut his own rations in half and insisted that the rest should be divided among the younger ones. 'When you get to my age you don't need so much,' he said, pulling his tartan shawl more closely round his shoulders so that she shouldn't notice how straggly his white fur had become.

'We should never have bought all that concrete,' said Tobermory. 'It was my fault, worrying on about foundations and cracks. You reminded me once that Wombles were more important than mere things. You were right.'

'Don't be an idiot,' said Great Uncle Bulgaria, who hated seeing his usually strong-minded friend showing such weakness. 'We couldn't have foreseen this snow siege. If things do get really bad then we'll be forced to buy but it'll only mean about one biscuit each. I'm going to read The Times. Think I'll have a copy of the Jubilee Summer in 1935. I remember that I never did finish that crossword.'

It was on the nineteenth day of rationing that Orinoco was woken up by the sound of his own empty stomach rumbling. He had been dreaming of fungus tarts, and for a moment the reality of there being no such things available was almost more than he could bear. He shook his head and clambered out of bed and tiptoed past Bungo and went off down the long dark pa.s.sage.

Surely, surely, it would have stopped snowing by now? But it hadn't. Little drifts of white flakes flurried into his face and settled on his fur. Orinoco blinked his eyes and made a sound which was almost a sob. He was so upset that for a minute or two he didn't realise that something unusual was happening by the flas.h.i.+ng lights of the black and white crossing. Then it did slowly occur to him that there was a great deal of activity for one o'clock in the morning, so he edged towards the snowy bushes to investigate.

It appeared that not quite enough sand had been put down, or perhaps the deep cold had turned the road to ice, for there, tipped up against a tree, was a large van. Two of its wheels were stuck up in the air, its back doors had swung open and a group of Human Beings were standing round arguing and talking and stamping their feet.

Orinoco moved a little closer, keeping in the shadows, and then, almost unbelievingly, he saw that a large crate had fallen out of the van and was lying on the snow with half its contents spilled about it.

'Cakes,' breathed Orinoco, rubbing his paws in his eyes the better to see this glorious sight. 'Buns, rolls, bread!'

The food was already being covered with a thin layer of snow and it was icy cold, but even so the delicious smell of newly baked food swam round Orinoco's nose. And what was more the food was lying ON THE COMMON, and Orinoco knew that no Human Being would salvage it once it had been spilled on the ground.

Orinoco registered all this in a flash and then with one excited whimper, he burrowed through the bushes, grasped the crate with one paw and shovelled everything back into it with the other. A pick-up van with a flas.h.i.+ng yellow light on the roof was slowly coming down the road, and the Human Beings were far too interested in that to notice one desperate Womble tugging a large box into the bushes.

Although it was as large as he was Orinoco pushed and pulled, pulled and pushed that beautiful heavy crate all the way to the back door of the burrow without stopping for a rest. Then he leant against the wall and with his tongue hanging out and his breath coming in excited gasps he investigated his discovery.