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Overview
You're a Bad Man, Mr. Gum was selected as a Tom Fletcher Book Club 2017 title.
Shabba me whiskers! It’s that bestselling and award-winning first ever Mr Gum book by Andy Stanton. The Mr Gum books are only the craziest, funniest most best books for children in the whole wide world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781405249393 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2011 |
| Series: | Mr Gum , #1 |
| Sold by: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
| Age Range: | 7 - 11 Years |
About the Author
Andy Stanton studied English at Oxford but they kicked him out. Before becoming a children’s writer he was a film script reader, a market researcher, an NHS lackey, a part-time sparrow and a grape. He is best known for the hilarious, bestselling and award-winning Mr Gum series and has also written picture books, including Danny McGee Drinks the Sea. Andy lives in North London and likes cartoons, books and music (even jazz).
David Tazzyman studied illustration at Manchester Metropolitan University. As well as illustrating the Mr Gum series, he has illustrated many picture books Eleanor's Eyebrows, You Can't Take an Elephant on the Bus, Michael Rosen's Jelly Boots, Smelly Boots and My Mum's Growing Down by Laura Dockrill. He lives in Leicester with his wife and three sons.
Andy Stanton lives in North London. He studied English at Oxford but they kicked him out. He has been a film script reader, a cartoonist, an NHS lackey and lots of other things. He has many interests, but best of all he likes cartoons, books and music (even jazz). His favourite expression is ‘good evening’ and his favourite word is ‘captain’. You’re a Bad Man, Mr Gum! was his first book and is the first in the bestselling Mr Gum series.
Read an Excerpt
You're a Bad Man, Mr. Gum!
The Garden of Mr. Gum
Mr. Gum was a fierce old man with a red beard and two bloodshot eyes that stared out at you like an octopus curled up in a bad cave. He was a complete horror who hated children, animals, fun, and corn on the cob. What he liked was snoozing in bed all day, being lonely, and scowling at things. He slept and scowled and picked his nose and ate it. Most of the townsfolk of Lamonic Bibber avoided him, and the children were terrified of him. Their mothers would say, "Go to bed when I tell you to or Mr. Gum will come and shout at your toys and leave slime on your books!" That usually did the trick.
Mr. Gum lived in a great big house in the middle of town. Actually, it wasn't that great, because he had turned it into a disgusting pigsty. The rooms were filled with junk and pizza boxes. Empty milk bottles lay around like wounded soldiers in a war against milk, and there were old newspapers from years and years ago with headlines such as:
VIKINGS INVADE BRITAIN
and
WORLD'S FIRST NEWSPAPER INVENTED TODAY.
Insects lived in the kitchen cupboards, not just small insects but great big ones with faces and names and jobs.
Mr. Gum's bedroom was absolutely grimsters. The wardrobe contained so much mold and old cheese that there was hardly any room for his moth-eaten clothes, and the bed was never made. (I don't mean that the duvet was never put back on the bed, I mean that the bed had never even been made. Mr. Gum hadn't gone to the bother of assembling it. He had just chucked all the bits of wood on the floor and dumped a mattresson top.) There was broken glass in the windows, and the ancient carpet was the color of unhappiness and smelled like a toilet.
Anyway, I could be here all day going on about Mr. Gum's house, but I think you've got the idea. Mr. Gum was an absolute lazer who couldn't be bothered with niceness and tidying and brushing his teeth, or anyone else's teeth for that matter.
But (and as you can see, it's a big but) he was always extremely careful to keep his garden tidy. In fact, Mr. Gum kept his garden so tidy that it was the prettiest, greeniest, floweriest, gardeniest garden in the whole of Lamonic Bibber. Here's how amazing it was:
Think of a number between 1 and 10.
Multiply that number by 5.
Add on 350.
Take away 11.
Throw all those numbers away.
Now think of an amazing garden.
Whatever number you started with, you should now be thinking of an amazing garden. And that's how amazing Mr. Gum's garden was. In spring it was bursting with crocuses and daffodils. In summer there were roses, sunflowers, and those little blue ones, what are they called again? You know, those blue ones; they look a bit like dinosaurs—anyway, there were tons of them. In autumn the leaves from the big oak tree covered the lawn, turning it gold like a gigantic leafy robot. In winter it was winter.
No one in town could understand how Mr. Gum's garden could be so pretty, greeny, flowery, and gardeny when his house was such a filthy dump.
"Maybe he just likes gardening," said Jonathan Ripples, the fattest man in town.
"Perhaps he's trying to win a garden contest," said a little girl named Peter.
"I reckon he just quite likes gardening," said Martin Launderette, who ran the launderette.
"Oy, that was my idea!" said Jonathan Ripples.
"No, it wasn't," said Martin Launderette. "You can't prove it, fatso."
In fact they were all wrong. The real reason was this:
Mr. Gum had to keep the garden tidy because otherwise an angry fairy would appear in his bathtub and start whacking him with a frying pan. (You see, there is always a simple explanation for things.) Mr. Gum hated the fairy, but he couldn't work out how to get rid of it, so his only choice was to do the gardening or it was pan-whacks.
And so life went on in the peaceful town of Lamonic Bibber. Everyone got on with his or her business, and Mr. Gum snoozed the days away in his dirty house and did lots of gardening he didn't want to do. And nothing much ever happened, and the sun went down over the mountains.
THE END
(Sorry, I nearly forgot. Something did happen once, that's what this story's about. I do apologize. Right, what was it?
Um . . .
Oh, of course! How could I be so stupid? It was that massive whopper of a dog. How on earth could I forget about him? Right, then.)
One day a massive whopper of a dog—
(Actually, I think we'd better have a new chapter. Sorry about all this, everyone.)
A Massive Whopper of a Dog
One day a massive whopper of a dog came to live on the outskirts of town. Where did he come from? Nobody knows. What strange things had he seen? Nobody knows. What was his name? Everybody knows. It was Jake the dog. He was a furry wobbler and friendly as toast, and he soon made himself very popular. He would often come into town to play with the children and give them rides on his enormous broad back. No matter how many children wanted a ride on him, he never grew tired. He was just that sort of dog. If he had been a person, he probably would have been a king, or at the very least a racing car driver with a cool helmet.
Or perhaps he would have been a gardener, because Jake the dog loved nothing more than playing in gardens. He enjoyed rolling his big doggy body around on a springy green lawn to see what it felt like (generally it felt like a lawn) and chomping up the flowers in his big doggy mouth to see what they tasted like (generally they tasted like flowers). He looked so happy that nobody really minded his messy visits. In fact, a rumor began that if Jake the dog visited your garden, it meant you were in for some good luck; and if he left a "little gift" on the lawn, you were in for double good luck, and maybe even a telegram from the queen.
So the townsfolk started to leave pies and bones out on their lawns, hoping to tempt Jake into their gardens. Sometimes it worked and sometimes not. Mostly he played where he liked and when he liked. He was a free spirit, like Robin Hood or the Man in the Moon or something, I dunno—he was just a dog, after all. All summer long Jake played, and everything was fine until the fateful day he discovered a garden he'd never played in before. It was the prettiest, greeniest, floweriest, gardeniest garden in the whole of Lamonic Bibber.
On that fateful day Mr. Gum was snoozing away in his unmade bed. (I told you he was a lazer, and that's what lazers do.) He was dreaming his favorite dream, the one where he was a giant, terrorizing the townsfolk. His enormous bloodshot eyes flashed evilly like flying saucers high up in the clouds as he snatched the roofs off houses to steal the toys from the children's bedrooms. Nobody could stop him. He was the biggest and the best, he was—
For a moment Mr. Gum did not know what was happening. Where were the tiny houses? Where were the frightened people? Where were the—
"Ow!" yelled Mr. Gum, rubbing his head and looking around in terror. "Oh, no!" he rasped. The angry fairy was hovering over him, frying pan at the ready.
"Sort out the garden, you lazy snorer!" yelled the fairy, and down came the frying pan. Mr. Gum was too fast this time and shot out of bed like a guilty onion. PFFF! went the frying pan as it hit the bedcovers, sending up a little cloud of dust and ants.
Mr. Gum legged it out of the bedroom and went hurtling down the stairs. He stepped on an old slice of pizza lying in the hall and skidded into the kitchen, riding it like a cheese-and-tomato surfboard. He could hear the fairy right behind him, shrieking with fury.
"I 'aven't done nothin' wrong! I kept the flippin' garden TIDY!" shouted Mr. Gum as he flung open the back door and ran outside. He started to say something else, but when he saw the garden, the words got stuck in his throat. They tasted horrible.
The garden was not tidy. The garden was a total wreck. The lawn was tufted up and torn. The flower beds were trampled and chewed. Rose petals and sunflower heads lay scattered all over the place like rose petals and sunflower heads. There was something lying under the oak tree that Mr. Gum did not even want to think about. And in the center of the wreckage played the most monstrous dog Mr. Gum had ever seen.
It was Jake, of course. The beast was rolling around for his own fun, his golden brown fur matted with grass, his happy eyes squinting into the sunshine. Before Mr. Gum's disbelieving eyes, nine moles popped out of their holes and joined the party. The two smallest ones began bouncing up and down on Jake's furry belly and doing somersaults. The rest of them chased one another in circles or had races.
The pan came down on Mr. Gum's head faster than Superman. The pan whipped him one on the bottom. A fat one to the belly.
Mr. Gum doubled up in pain and tripled up in fear as the fairy raged. "It ain't my fault!" he yelled. "I ain't never seen that dog before!"
"I don't care whose"—BASH!—"fault it is! It's your"—SPLURK!!—"job to"—WALLOP!!—"do the gardening"—VROINNNK!!—"you stupid trouserface!"
Mr. Gum flung himself down on the lawn and lay there whimpering, his eyes shut tight in unbraveness. Jake, on the other hand, was having a brilliant time. But just then a cloud shaped a bit like a bone drifted by. With a hungry bark, Jake ran off to chase it. Mr. Gum watched as the dog bounced over the fence and disappeared off to who knows where. The moles raced back to their mole holes at the speed of moles. As suddenly as it had begun, the terror was over.
Mr. Gum spent all afternoon repairing the damage. The fairy watched him, scowling and brandishing the frying pan dangerously to hurry him on. Eventually the garden was back to normal, and with one last WHACK for good measure, the fairy flew back to the bathtub and vanished. Mr. Gum breathed a sigh of relief and went inside to find he'd missed his favorite TV show, Bag of Sticks, which was a broadcast of a bag of sticks for half an hour. (Mr. Gum was the only person in the country who ever watched Bag of Sticks. Everyone else tuned in to watch Funtime with Crispy.) "That dog ought to be given a meddling medal, he's such a meddler," muttered Mr. Gum. "I hope that's the last of him."
But it wasn't the last of Jake, it was the beginning. Jake's big doggy brain could not stop thinking about that amazing garden, and the very next day he returned with much the same result as before. And the day after that. And the day after that. But not the day after that, because it was Wednesday and everyone knows that dogs have the day off on Wednesdays.
But on Thursday you should have seen him! He was back with a vengeance. Every day (apart from Wednesdays) it was the same story. That massive whopper of a dog would come bouncing over the fence and start romping around like an uncontrollable doctor, sometimes leaving his "little gifts" as was only natural. Mr. Gum would run out into the garden shaking a fist on the end of a stick to frighten him off, but he could never catch him. Jake would just bark like a cheeky schoolboy doing an impression of a dog barking. Then he'd bounce over the spiky fence and disappear off to who knows where.
Three weeks later Mr. Gum was covered in frying pan–shaped bruises and he had missed ten episodes of Bag of Sticks. It was time for action. Nasty action.
"It's time for action," said Mr. Gum to nobody in particular. "Nasty action."
Nobody in particular shrugged his shoulders and wandered off to eat his dinner. Mr. Gum went to the shed and got out his thinking cap. He put it on his knee (it was a kneecap) and started thinking about how to get rid of that dog.
You're a Bad Man, Mr. Gum!. Copyright © by Andy Stanton. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.