You're a Bad Man, Mr. Gum!

Did you know that Andy Stanton lives in North London? And that he studied English at Oxford but they kicked him out? And that his middle name is ‘Coinholder’?

Well, guess what? Now you can learn even more vaguely true facts about Andy’s life! You can hear Andy talking about Mr Gum in this amazingly funty new Egmont Extras edition! You can even hear him playing the harmonica, and see some illustrations that were never published - and so much more!

You’re a Bad Man Mr Gum

An Interview with Andy Stanton

The Original Illustrations

Old King Thunderbelly and the Wall of Lamonic Bibber

Ol’ Lemon Juice Sings the Blues

Contents

You’re a Bad Man Mr Gum

1. The Garden of Mr Gum

2. A Massive Whopper of a Dog

3. Mr Gum Lays His Plans Like the Horror He Is

4. Mr Gum Has a Cup of Tea

5. Jammy Grammy Lammy

6. Mr Gum Lays Down His Hearts

7. Friday O’Leary

8. Some Things Happen

9. Polly and Friday Ride Into Town

10. Jake’s Darkest Hour

11. How It All Turned Out

An Interview with Andy Stanton

The Original Illustrations

Old King Thunderbelly and the Wall of Lamonic Bibber: A Reading by Andy Stanton

Ol’ Lemon Juice Sings the Blues

Chapter 1 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 like

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 mould 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 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 mattress on top.) There was broken glass in the windows and the ancient carpet was the colour of unhappiness and smelt 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.

(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 one and ten.

Multiply that number by five.

Add on three hundred and fifty.

Take away eleven.

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 tip.

‘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 called 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 their 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.

(Sorry, I nearly forgot. Something did happen once, that’s what this story’s about. I do apologise. 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.)

Chapter 2 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 laugh 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 rumour 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 favourite dream, the one where he was a giant terrorising 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 –

WHACK!!!

For a moment Mr Gum did not know what was happening. Where were the tiny houses? Where were the frightened people? Where were the – WHACK!!! ‘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 flowerbeds 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 centre 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 each other in circles or had races.

WHACK!! The pan came down on Mr Gum’s head faster than Superman. SPLAP!! The pan whipped him one on the bottom. BOING!! 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.