There’s nothing wrong with that.
The next morning, when Mr Twit went out to collect the birds, he found four miserable little boys sitting in the tree, stuck as tight as could be by the seats of their pants to the branches. There were no birds because the presence of the boys had scared them away.
Mr Twit was furious. ‘As there are no birds for my pie tonight,’ he shouted, ‘then it’ll have to be boys instead!’ He started to climb the ladder. ‘Boy Pie might be better than Bird Pie,’ he went on, grinning horribly. ‘More meat and not so many tiny little bones!’
The boys were terrified. ‘He’s going to boil us!’ cried one of them.
‘He’ll stew us alive!’ wailed the second one.
‘He’ll cook us with carrots!’ cried the third.
But the fourth little boy, who had more sense than the others, whispered, ‘Listen, I’ve just had an idea. We are only stuck by the seats of our pants. So quick! Unbutton your pants and slip out of them and fall to the ground.’
Mr Twit had reached the top of the ladder and was just about to make a grab for the nearest boy when they all suddenly tumbled out of the tree and ran for home with their naked bottoms winking at the sun.
The Great Upside Down Monkey Circus
Now for the monkeys.
The four monkeys in the cage in the garden were all one family. They were Muggle-Wump and his wife and their two small children.
But what on earth were Mr and Mrs Twit doing with monkeys in their garden?
Well, in the old days, they had both worked in a circus as monkey trainers. They used to teach monkeys to do tricks and to dress up in human clothes and to smoke pipes and all the rest of that nonsense.
Today, although they were retired, Mr Twit still wanted to train monkeys. It was his dream that one day he would own the first great upside down monkey circus in the world.
That meant that the monkeys had to do everything upside down. They had to dance upside down (on their hands with their feet in the air). They had to play football upside down. They had to balance one on top of the other upside down, with Muggle-Wump at the bottom and the smallest baby monkey at the very top. They even had to eat and drink upside down and that is not an easy thing to do because the food and water has to go up your throat instead of down it. In fact, it is almost impossible, but the monkeys simply had to do it otherwise they got nothing.
All this sounds pretty silly to you and me. It sounded pretty silly to the monkeys, too. They absolutely hated having to do this upside down nonsense day after day. It made them giddy standing on their heads for hours on end. Sometimes the two small monkey children would faint with so much blood going to their heads. But Mr Twit didn’t care about that. He kept them practising for six hours every day and if they didn’t do as they were told, Mrs Twit would soon come running with her beastly stick.
The Roly-Poly Bird to the Rescue
Muggle-Wump and his family longed to escape from the cage in Mr Twit’s garden and go back to the African jungle where they came from.
They hated Mr and Mrs Twit for making their lives so miserable.
They also hated them for what they did to the birds every Tuesday and Wednesday. ‘Fly away, birds!’ they used to shout, jumping about in the cage and waving their arms. ‘Don’t sit on that Big Dead Tree! It’s just been smeared all over with sticky glue! Go and sit somewhere else!’
But these were English birds and they couldn’t understand the weird African language the monkeys spoke. So they took no notice and went on using The Big Dead Tree and getting caught for Mrs Twit’s Bird Pie.
Then one day, a truly magnificent bird flew down out of the sky and landed on the monkey cage.
‘Good heavens!’ cried all the monkeys together. ‘It’s the Roly-Poly Bird! What on earth are you doing over here in England, Roly-Poly Bird?’ Like the monkeys, the Roly-Poly Bird came from Africa and he spoke the same language as they did.