The Wombles by Elisabeth Beresford

Author:Elisabeth Beresford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Chapter 8

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The Snow Womble

Of course it was too much to expect that the young Wombles could go on behaving so well once the excitement of Christmas had worn off, while the Midsummer outing was still six months away, so when Bungo went off to work one morning and found that it was actually snowing something like pandemonium broke out.

‘I can’t control them,’ said Tobermory.

‘Shouldn’t try if I were you,’ said Great Uncle Bulgaria. Although he hadn’t actually seen the snow himself, he could sense it in the atmosphere and it always made him feel uncommonly sleepy.

Tobermory muttered to himself and went back to the Workshop and began to tinker with a secret project that he had started on just before the Awful Rainstorms. He found it very soothing, and after a while he forgot all about the mutinous behaviour of the younger Wombles and settled down quite happily to oiling and greasing and taking apart and investigating whatever-it-was that he was so interested in.

Meanwhile Bungo and Orinoco and Alderney were having a look at this strange new outside world. None of them, not even Orinoco, had seen snow before and they found it the most wonderful stuff imaginable. For a start it looked so lovely as it lay glinting in the sunshine, and secondly it meant that all work was suspended out on the Common as no Human Beings, however forgetful, were going to drop or abandon their belongings on this clean white carpet.

‘Look, look, look,’ shouted Bungo, running down a slope and turning to glance over his shoulder at his own prints.

‘Look, look, look,’ called Alderney, and she put down her head and went head over heels, leaving a funny bumpy track behind her.

‘Look, look, look,’ cried Orinoco, and he lay down and rolled over faster and faster until he reached the bottom.

‘You look like a snow Womble,’ said Alderney, pulling him to his back paws.

‘Let’s build one,’ said Orinoco.

‘Not allowed,’ said Bungo, who was gazing entranced at his own rather flat-footed pawmarks. There is something about leaving a trail of one’s own pawmarks in the snow which is extremely exciting.

‘Why not?’ asked Alderney, sticking out her underlip and looking very sulky.

‘’Cause of them,’ said Bungo, jerking his head towards the road at the side of the Common where the traffic was moving very slowly and the snow had already turned to a dirty yellow mush.

‘You’re a ’fraidy Womble; who’s a ’fraidy Womble?’ said Alderney, dancing round and round.

‘I’m not!’

‘It’s like sugar icing,’ said Orinoco dreaming, picking up handfuls of glittering, gleaming snow. He hadn’t been able to get out recently on his bicycle because of the weather and he was growing stout once more.

‘I’m not afraid,’ said Bungo angrily, ‘but if a Human Being found a snow Womble it could lead to all kinds of difficulties, so there.’

‘Well, I’m not scared even if you are,’ said Alderney, more unfairly still. And she began to pick up great pawfuls of snow and to pat them and mould

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