Paddington Races Ahead Read Online Free PDF Page B

Bird, “but as for taking Paddington with us, he would be bored stiff in no time at all. Besides, he’s probably hard at work already.”
    Mrs Bird spoke with the voice of experience, although for once she failed to take account of a bear’s priorities.
    The sound of the front door being closed had hardly died away before Paddington hurried downstairs in order to make a plentiful supply of marmalade sandwiches ahead of the day’s work.
    Once he was back in his room, he looked for a safe place to put them in case any dust clouds landed on top while his back was turned.
    Only then did he fill the bucket with hot water from the bathroom, and having put his pyjamas back on in case he got his fur wet, he rolled up the sleeves and began work on his bedroom walls with a scrubbing brush and a bar of soap.
    Paddington was an optimistic bear in many ways, but he had to admit it was a bit of a setback when no sooner had he applied a scrubbing brush to the paper than it began to come away from the wall. Worse still, the more he scrubbed the worse it became. In what seemed like no time at all, he was literally knee-deep in paper, and even allowing for the fact that bears’ knees were fairly near the floor, it was still a sizeable amount.

    Having decided that perhaps it had been a mistake to use the hot tap rather than the cold, Paddington sat down on the edge of his bed and gazed around the room.
    In many respects it was the reverse of what had happened soon after he went to live with the Browns and offered to help Mr Brown with the decorating.
    On that occasion, apart from adding too much water to the paste, he managed to paper over the door by mistake and had been unable to find his way out. Now the same door was practically the only part left untouched.
    Unfortunately he spent so much time wondering if perhaps his adding too much water to the paste all that time ago was the cause of his present problem, he failed to notice some large chunks of paper had somehow or other contrived to stick themselves back on the wall again. Some had done so at a very peculiar angle indeed, and when he tried to straighten out the worst of them, bits came away in his paw and stuck to his pyjamas instead.
    Catching sight of his reflection in the dressing table mirror, Paddington decided to give cleaning walls a miss for the time being and concentrate instead on doing the dusting.
    Pushing the bed to one side, he found Mrs Bird was right about one thing. The area of carpet where it had been looked particularly fruitful, and the pan was soon half-full of dust, not to mention several old Liquorice Allsorts into the bargain. They had gone missing some months previously, along with various other small items he had forgotten all about.
    By then the dust was making his nose itch, and one of the Allsorts was on the point of going down the wrong way. Fearing if he didn’t do something quickly he might drop the pan, he glanced around the room and noticed that in moving the bed away from the skirting board the carpet had risen up at one point.
    At first sight it seemed an ideal place to store the contents of the pan for the time being, especially as there appeared to be some newspapers lining the floorboards, so in desperation he opened up the gap still further and managed to upend the pan a split second before the inevitable happened.
    A loud tishoooo echoed round the bedroom, and as it did so a small cloud of dust rose from the very spot where it had just landed.
    He waited a moment or two for it to settle before bending down to brush it back into the pan and while he was doing so he glanced idly at the papers.
    Paddington wasn’t normally a great reader of newspapers. On the whole he much preferred magazines. Newspapers were rather difficult with paws. Even if you did come across something interesting to read, more often than not the pages were stuck together, and no amount of blowing would make them come apart.
    However, for once he had to admit the papers