The Wombles to the Rescue (6 page)

And Orinoco ducked his head a couple of times and then went hurrying off. Madame Cholet watched him go and then picked up an edge of her frilly apron and wiped the corners of her eyes.

‘He starts to grow up, little fat Orinoco,' she said to herself. ‘For once he worries about other Wombles as well as himself.
Alors
, I hope he – or one of us –
will
think of something. Well, now that I am here, I had better just check on the shredded toadstools and tree fungi. There's nothing like work for making you forget your worries after all . . .'

And Madame Cholet blew her nose on a small lace handkerchief which had C
HOLET
embroidered on one corner, and got out a notebook and pencil from her pocket and began to count up the bottles, pots and packets that she had left in all her larders.

Orinoco went off in a very thoughtful mood, his paws clasped behind his back and his chin sunk on his chest. He was so intent on the awful problem of Not Enough Food that he walked straight past Alderney who was going off with a very patched tidy-bag over her arm.

‘Hallo,' said Alderney.

‘Mmmf,' said Orinoco.

‘Oh, very well, if that's how you feel,' said Alderney in a most superior voice. ‘I
was
going to ask you if you'd come and look for lichens we could make into savoury spreads, but if that's the way you feel I shan't bother.'

‘Don't pick too much or there may not be enough left,' said Orinoco, sounding so stern it could have been Great Uncle Bulgaria speaking. Away he went, leaving Alderney staring after him till she saw Shansi coming down the passage carrying a bulging tidy-bag with what looked like several sticks poking out of the top.

‘Hey, hallo,' said Alderney, thinking as she spoke how friendly she was being to a new working Womble, ‘you can come on a lichen hunt with me if you like.'

Shansi stopped dead, not looking at all delighted at this gracious invitation. In fact she appeared to be almost dismayed. However, being the most polite Womble probably in the whole world, she then put her front paws together, ducked her head twice and said in a soft voice, ‘Most kind. Most gracious. Regret cannot accept as have other employment. Please excuse.'

And Shansi, with yet another polite nod of her head, hurried past Alderney and out of the burrow before that young Womble could get her breath back. When she did, she said to nobody in particular, for there was nobody else about apart from Miss Adelaide who was just coming out of the Womblegarten with a worried frown on her grey furry forehead, ‘Well, really! Not that I care! I don't care
AT ALL
!'

And most regrettably Alderney then stamped out of the burrow and actually kicked the doorpost as she passed it. A shower of fine dust fell softly from the wood and Miss Adelaide said, ‘
Tsk, tsk, tsk
. What is happening to this burrow! Nothing runs smoothly or pleasantly any more. Even my Womblegarten are not the happy young Wombles they used to be and it's no wonder when the working Wombles set them such a bad example. The sooner Bulgaria returns the better it will be for all of us!'

Miss Adelaide, her back very straight indeed, went off to have a word with her old friend Madame Cholet, passing as she did so the Workshop where Tobermory, for once in his very long life, was facing a problem with which even he couldn't cope.

There just wasn't enough wood, seasoned or otherwise, with which to make all the new doors and fittings that the burrow needed.

‘Short of going and sawing some trees down on the Common,' muttered Tobermory, ‘I don't know what's to be done and that's a fact. I knew there'd be trouble ahead, but I never imagined anything like this. The sooner Bulgaria gets back the better. Now then, where was that piece of planking I had put by? Dratted Human Beings, I'd let 'em stew in their own silliness if I had my way. Now there's a strange thing, some of the old cups have vanished from the back storeroom. Who'd want
them
, I wonder!'

So there they all were, muttering and grumbling to themselves about this and that. It was as if everything in the Wimbledon burrow was boiling up and up and up and then at any minute there would be a tremendous rumble and roar and the Trouble would start.

The strange thing was that it was the quietest Womble of them all who would start matters really humming . . .

.

* See
The Wombles.

.

Chapter 6

Cousin Botany's Secret

Wellington read up everything he could in the library about building oil rigs but, as this was very little indeed, he wasn't much the wiser by the end of the next few days. All he was certain about was the way the rigs actually looked, but what they did underneath the North Sea, or anywhere else for that matter, remained a mystery.

‘Never mind,' Wellington said to Tomsk, who hadn't thought of minding anyway as he wasn't at all sure what they were supposed to be doing. ‘I expect that once we've built the rig-thing we'll know how it works.
OK
?'

‘Mm. It won't upset the swimming, will it? Or the skating? I mean, if it's a nice cold winter we might get some good skating. I like skating,' said Tomsk who was good at absolutely every game and sport and who had once gone round the Wimbledon golf course in Par. (Great Uncle Bulgaria had told Tomsk that this was what he had done and that it was something of which to be proud. Tomsk hadn't quite worked out yet just what
exactly
these mysterious words meant.)

‘No, of course not,' said Wellington. ‘Well, that is, Terry and John did say something about oil companies spoiling the environment. But they meant
ever
so big oil rigs with lots and lots of Human Beings working on them, and this rig is just going to have you and me. Now look at this picture.'

‘It's a sort of tower,' said Tomsk after a long pause. ‘Isn't it?'

‘Yes, and we're going to make one like it.'

‘What with?'

‘Well, I think it's supposed to be steel, but we don't get much of that dumped on the Common, so I thought perhaps we'd do ours with what we could find and pick up. Come
ON
.'

Wellington was getting quite bossy now that Bungo was in America and so couldn't push everybody about. Added to which there's nothing like an even younger and more shy Womble such as Shansi being grateful, to make a Womble such as Wellington get rather grand ideas about himself. So for the next few days (when they weren't doing some tidying-up work or sleeping or playing games or helping Tobermory, Madame Cholet or Miss Adelaide or adding their two lines to the long letters which were being sent regularly to America), Tomsk and Wellington picked up bits of this and that and collected bits of that and this until they had enough pieces with which to build a rig.

It was a most difficult thing to do, and as neither Wellington nor Tomsk were particularly handy with their paws, they kept hitting themselves with hammers and losing screws and even, when matters got somewhat out of hand, hitting each other. But Wellington was absolutely determined to make a rig and Tomsk felt that Wellington probably really did know deep down what this strange business was all about and should be helped.

‘A shortage of oil means a lot more toil,' muttered Tomsk as he sucked his grazed knuckles and tried to ease the ache in his back.

‘It doesn't look bad, does it?' said Wellington, gazing proudly at their handiwork. ‘I mean, considering what it's made of!'

It was indeed a most remarkable construction of bits of fencing, pieces of plastic, some iron railings, string, wire, rope, a plastic hosepipe, the central shaft of an umbrella and a bicycle pump. It certainly resembled a miniature oil rig and its two inventor-builders thought it was beautiful. To anybody else it might have appeared a very strange thing indeed.

‘It's not half bad,' agreed Tomsk, quite forgetting his hurt knuckles. ‘What do we do now?'

Wellington had been slightly dreading this point, because it is one thing to copy something you've seen in a photograph and quite another to get the something actually working. He had a hazy idea of the principle of drilling for oil; that is, that first they would have to make a deep hole and then they would pump up whatever was at the bottom of the hole. Only, there can be a very big gap between the idea of what should be done and actually doing it. Wellington saw that gap opening up before him at this moment and swallowed nervously. Tomsk, who believed that Wellington was even more clever than Great Uncle Bulgaria and could therefore do
anything
, watched his friend with round unblinking eyes and waited to be told what to do next.

‘We get it going,' said Wellington in a high squeaky voice. ‘It's a lovely day for it.' It was a lovely day from the Wombles' point of view, as it was raining steadily and there was a nice cold east wind. These weather conditions meant that no Human Beings would be out on the Common so that Wellington and Tomsk would be able to launch the rig undisturbed. ‘Come on.'

Very gently they loaded the rig on to a wheelbarrow and then, as quietly as possible, they pushed it through the burrow from the far end of the Workshop where they had built it. The front door creaked and groaned and almost stuck as it was opened and a shower of sawdust drifted out of the hinges, but Wellington and Tomsk were in too much of an excited dither to notice this.

Once clear of the burrow they made for Queen's Mere as fast as they could. The weight of the rig made them stagger and slip but at last they reached the water where the ducks, who didn't mind the weather, were placidly diving for food.

‘Now we . . .' said Wellington and stopped because he suddenly remembered a bit in the newspaper he had read about ‘floating oil rigs out to their destination'. The destination of this particular rig was only a question of yards away, but no matter how hard and fast he and Tomsk swam, carrying the rig between them, it would sink (because of the iron bars) within feet of the shore.

‘Drat!' said Wellington and made the furious face which meant he was really thinking furiously. Tomsk watched him respectfully. ‘Hold on a tick,' said Wellington and scuttled off the bank in the direction of the burrow.

Tomsk, who really had been working extremely hard and was therefore quite tired, decided that he might have a bit of a rest in among the dripping bushes and ferns. He settled himself in comfortably, folded his paws across his stomach and sighed contentedly.

That Wellington might be rather a small sort of Womble and was not good at games at all – look at that time when they'd tried a round of golf some while ago – but he was awfully good at Thinking. And Thinking was something which Tomsk found quite difficult to get to grips with. He didn't have to think when he hit a tennis ball, or did a perfect running three-quarter turn and flip dive, or learnt to ski almost up to championship standards in a couple of hours. He did all those sort of things without . . .

Tomsk's pleasant thoughts were interrupted as his sharp ears caught the sound of a twig snapping and then a faint thud of feet followed by the ghost of a worried sigh. Inch by inch Tomsk raised himself out of the bracken and saw a small, tubby, grey-white figure wearing an apron and a battered straw hat trotting down the slope towards the Mere. It was Cousin Botany. That mysterious, lonely sort of Womble who seemed to live in a world of his own.

Botany was certainly being most mysterious at the moment, as he was actually wading into the water until it reached his knees and then, from out of his apron pocket, he produced a sort of tube, one end of which he put up to his eye and the other he directed to the surface of the water.

An inquisitive duck came swimming up to see what was happening and the ripples that it made sloshed against the end of the tube and made Botany glance up.

‘Stupid bird,' he said crossly and, wiping the end of the tube on the bib of his apron, he returned to the path looking more thoughtful than ever, and if anything, sadder and more worried than he had done before. It was a very funny sort of way to behave and Tomsk lay back quietly for he felt that probably Cousin Botany didn't want to talk to anybody at the moment. Not that he often appeared to want to talk to anyone. It was all very strange and Tomsk was still thinking about it in a muzzy sort of way when Wellington came crashing back with two enormous pieces of white polystyrene under his arms and a great grin on his face.

‘Floats,' he said breathlessly. ‘And I'll tell you what else we need, only I couldn't carry it as well. A bucket.'

‘A bucket! What for? I say, Wellington, I saw . . .'

‘A bucket for the oil, of course. I say, Tomsk, this is jolly exciting, isn't it? I mean finding oil in the bottom of Queen's Mere. Great Uncle Bulgaria and Tobermory and everybody'll be ever so pleased. Get a move on and get a bucket, there's a good Womble. My specs have misted over . . .'

‘OK, but look here, Wellington, I saw . . .'

But Wellington, who was getting quite carried away by his own marvellous ideas, only waved an impatient paw, so Tomsk gave up trying to explain about Cousin Botany and went running as fast as he could (which was very fast indeed with his elbows into his side and his chin up) back to the burrow. In record-breaking time he was back with a bucket, just as Wellington had managed to get the rig balanced on the two pieces of polystyrene.

‘Great,' said Wellington. ‘The oil will be pumped, by the bicycle pump, into the bucket which I'll tie on here. It'll travel up this tube here, shoot up – I think it's called a gusher or something – and then we watch it as it all comes down again. OK?'

‘Ah,' said Tomsk, who had got lost about the third word.

It was really quite difficult floating the rig out to the middle of the Mere because the ducks would keep coming to investigate what was happening and the more they swam round and made ripples, the more the rig rocked about and very nearly came off its floats.

‘When . . . when I say one, two, three, go,' said Wellington breathlessly, ‘we both pull our floats out from under the rig at the same time. We've got to do it carefully though, otherwise the rig might tip over.'

‘What's it supposed to do?' asked Tomsk.

‘Sink,' snapped Wellington, who could hardly see anything by this time, as his spectacles had not only steamed over with excitement, but were also covered in water, so that he felt as if he was trying to look through paper.

‘But how can it work if it sinks?' asked Tomsk, who was getting more and more muddled by the whole project.

‘I
T
'
S
SUPPOSED
TO
SINK
. Are you ready? One, two, three –
puuuuuuull
.'

The rig sank all right. The moment the floats were pulled from under it, down it went with a gurgling sound until with a
clunk-clonk
it hit the mud on the bottom, leaving about half of itself sticking out of the water. A great many large, flat bubbles rose slowly to the surface and swilled about for a moment or two and then burst. There was a distinctly rich, unusual smell.

‘Oil,' said Wellington, ‘that's oil! We've hit oil!'

‘Are you sure?' asked Tomsk, who was treading water and holding his nose, because if this was what oil smelt like he wasn't at all sure that he wanted to know more about it.

‘'Course I am. And it can't be much below the bottom of the lake either. Now we'd better start the drilling bit. I want you to dive down, because you're much better at diving than me, to spin the umbrella shaft. That will go down and down into the oil bed and then you start working the bicycle pump so that oil comes up to gush. It's very good fun, isn't it, Tomsk?'

‘Yeees,' said Tomsk a shade doubtfully, ‘but, Wellington . . .'

‘Go on, go
on. Please
.' Wellington waved both his front paws at once, his blue and black cap right over one eye and his face smiling from ear to ear.

‘Oh, very well,' said Tomsk and took a tremendous deep breath before he dived, which is how he missed everything that happened next.

Wellington was still clutching on to the oil rig to keep it steady as, despite the iron railings, it did tend to tilt a bit, when suddenly there was the most extraordinary and fur-lifting sound from the bank. It was a roar, a bellow and a cry of anguish and it was far, far worse than the wolf noise which Wellington had made some days before.

Wellington's fur stood up in prickles and he just managed to keep his grip on the oil rig as he looked over his shoulder and saw a small, round, grey-white Womble, wearing a straw hat and an apron, come tearing down the slope with a fishing net in one hand and a home-made telescope in the other.