Mr Twit Gets a Horrid Shock
Mr Twit, who thought he had seen his ugly wife for the last time, was sitting in the garden celebrating with a mug of beer.
Silently, Mrs Twit came floating down. When she was about the height of the house above Mr Twit, she suddenly called out at the top of her voice, ‘Here I come, you grizzly old grunion! You rotten old turnip! You filthy old frumpet!’
Mr Twit jumped as though he’d been stung by a giant wasp. He dropped his beer. He looked up. He gaped. He gasped. He gurgled. A few choking sounds came out of his mouth. ‘Ughhhhhhhh!’ he said. ‘Arghhhhhhhh! Ouchhhhhhhh!’
‘I’ll get you for this!’ shouted Mrs Twit. She was floating down right on top of him. She was purple with rage and slashing the air with her long walking-stick which she had somehow managed to hang on to all the time. ‘I’ll swish you to a swazzle!’ she shouted. ‘I’ll swash you to a swizzle! I’ll gnash you to a gnozzle! I’ll gnosh you to a gnazzle!’ And before Mr Twit had time to run away, this bundle of balloons and petticoats and fiery fury landed right on top of him, lashing out with the stick and cracking him all over his body.
The House, the Tree and the Monkey Cage
But that’s enough of that. We can’t go on for ever watching these two disgusting people doing disgusting things to each other. We must get ahead with the story.
Here is a picture of Mr and Mrs Twit’s house and garden. Some house! It looks like a prison. And not a window anywhere.
‘Who wants windows?’ Mr Twit had said when they were building it. ‘Who wants every Tom, Dick and Harry peeping in to see what you’re doing?’ It didn’t occur to Mr Twit that windows were meant mainly for looking out of, not for looking into.
And what do you think of that ghastly garden? Mrs Twit was the gardener. She was very good at growing thistles and stinging-nettles. ‘I always grow plenty of spiky thistles and plenty of stinging-nettles,’ she used to say. ‘They keep out nasty nosey little children.’
Near the house you can see Mr Twit’s workshed.
To one side there is The Big Dead Tree. It never has any leaves on it because it’s dead.
And not far from the tree, you can see the monkey cage. There are four monkeys in it. They belong to Mr Twit. You will hear about them later.
Hugtight Sticky Glue
Once a week, on Wednesdays, the Twits had Bird Pie for supper. Mr Twit caught the birds and Mrs Twit cooked them.
Mr Twit was good at catching birds. On the day before Bird Pie day, he would put the ladder up against The Big Dead Tree and climb into the branches with a bucket of glue and a paint-brush. The glue he used was something called hugtight and it was stickier than any other glue in the world. He would paint it along the tops of all the branches and then go away.
As the sun went down, birds would fly in from all around to roost for the night in The Big Dead Tree. They didn’t know, poor things, that the branches were all smeared with horrible hugtight. The moment they landed on a branch, their feet stuck and that was that.
The next morning, which was Bird Pie day, Mr Twit would climb up the ladder again and grab all the wretched birds that were stuck to the tree. It didn’t matter what kind they were – song thrushes, blackbirds, sparrows, crows, little jenny wrens, robins, anything – they all went into the pot for Wednesday’s Bird Pie supper.
Four Sticky Little Boys
On one Tuesday evening after Mr Twit had been up the ladder and smeared the tree with hugtight, four little boys crept into the garden to look at the monkeys. They didn’t care about the thistles and stinging-nettles, not when there were monkeys to look at. After a while, they got tired of looking at the monkeys, so they explored further into the garden and found the ladder leaning against The Big Dead Tree. They decided to climb up it just for fun.