Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car

Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car is a flying car adventure for 9 year olds about a family who save an old wreck from the scrap heap.

What happens

The Potts haven't got the money for a car. Commander Caractacus Pott is an explorer and an inventor, and the neighbours call him Commander Crackpott (he finds that very funny).

Then he invents a sweet you can whistle through. A big sweet company buys the idea, and suddenly there's enough for a car.

But the Potts don't want a car like everybody else's. Round the back of a tumbledown garage they find a long green racing car under a tarpaulin. She's rusty, peeling and due to be squashed flat next week. Fifty pounds and she's theirs.

The Commander locks himself in his workshop for a whole school term. When the twins, Jeremy and Jemima, come home, she's gleaming. And when he presses the starter, she says her own name. CHITTY-CHITTY-BANG-BANG!

On a boiling Saturday in August the family get stuck in a huge traffic jam on the way to the seaside. A little knob on the dashboard lights up with the word PULL. Then a second word appears next to it. IDIOT. Who wouldn't love a car with that much cheek?

Pull it, and her mudguards turn into wings.

The narrator is half the fun. He talks to your reader the whole way through, explains his own long words and keeps asking if they can guess what happens next. It feels very much like being read to by a slightly eccentric uncle.

There are proper scary moments too. The family doze off on a sandbank out at sea and wake to fog and the tide coming in round the wheels. It's tense for a few pages (they really do think they might drown) before the car comes up with an answer of her own.

It's worth knowing that this is an old book and it sounds like one. Car salesmen offer the parents cigarettes, the radio talk and the Navy slang belong to another time, and nobody worries much about driving at a hundred miles an hour. Most children will take that as part of the adventure, but you might get a few questions.

What to read next

If they fall for the car, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again is a much newer story by Frank Cottrell Boyce. It starts with a different family, the Tootings, a dad who has just lost his job and an enormous old twelve-cylinder engine found in a tree at a scrapyard.