Extract from : Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
‘Well? What do you think of her?’
And Mimsie said, ‘Terrific!’
And Jeremy said, ‘Smashing!’
And Jemima said, ‘Adorable!’
And Commander Caractacus Pott said mysteriously, ‘Well, that’s good. But I’m warning you. There’s something odd about this car. I’ve put all I know into her, every invention and improvement I could think of, and quite a lot of the thousands we got from the Skrumshus people, but there’s more to it than that. She’s got some ideas of her own.’
‘How do you mean?’ they all chorused.
‘Well,’ said Commander Pott carefully, ‘I can’t exactly say, but sometimes, in the morning when I came back to get to work again, I’d find that certain modifications, certain changes, had, so to speak, taken place all by themselves during the night, when I wasn’t there. Certain – what shall I say? – rather revolutionary and extraordinary adaptations. I can’t say more than that, and I haven’t really got to the bottom of it all, but I suspect that this motor-car has thought out, all by herself, certain improvements, certain very extraordinary mechanical devices, just as if she was grateful to us for saving her life, so to speak, and wanted to repay all the loving care we’ve given her. And there’s another thing. You see all those rows and rows of knobs and buttons and levers and little lights on the dashboard? Well, to tell you the truth, I just haven’t been able to discover what they’re all for. I know the obvious ones, of course, but there are some of those gadgets that seem to be secret gadgets. We’ll find out what they’re for in time, I suppose, but for now I’ll admit there are quite a lot of them that have got me really puzzled. She just won’t let me find out.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Jemima excitedly.
‘Is it a she?’
‘Well,’ said Commander Pott, ‘that’s how I’ve come to call her. It’s funny but all bits of machinery that people love are made into females. All ships are “she”. Racing drivers call their cars “she”. Same thing with aeroplanes. Don’t know about rockets or sputniks – somehow they don’t seem very feminine to me – but I bet the rocketeers and sputnicators, or whatever they call the sputnik experts, I bet they call their spaceships and things “she”. Odd isn’t it? I used to serve in a battleship. Gigantic great ship stuffed with guns and radar and so on. Called the George V. But we called her “she”.’
Jeremy said excitedly, ‘We’ve got to have a name for her. And I know what we ought to call her. What she called herself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What was that?
‘When did she?’ they all cried together.
Jeremy said slowly, ‘She said it when she started – CHITTY-CHITTY, like sneezes, and then BANG-BANG! So we’ll call her that, her own invented name.’
And the others looked at each other and slowly they all smiled and Commander Caractacus Pott patted the green and silver car on her nose and said in a loud and solemn voice, ‘Now hear me, twelve-cylinder, eight-litre supercharged Paragon Panther. We hereby christen you … ’ and they all chorused: ‘CHITTY – CHITTY – BANG – BANG!’