CHAPTER 15
"It was the Car's Fault"

Mumsie Croc was a giant among Crocs. Powerful and very protective of her offspring. Nobody dared lift a finger or look askance at any of her children, for fear of getting Mumsie enraged.

Mumsie was very old, in fact much older than anybody else on the GollyGum River, except perhaps for an ancient white cockatoo called Bob who had only one eye and no tail feathers. Occasionally Bob and Mumsie would talk about the 'Old Days' when there were pirate ships and Australia was full of convicts.

In her day Mumsie was known to head out to sea to hunt savage sharks. She once dragged a large fishing boat all the way back to Tasmania because it got in the way of her shark hunt. Another time she tore the GollyGum Bridge out of its sockets and left it up on the golf course because a golf ball had accidentally hit the tail of one of her children.

So it was with a very respectful tone of voice that Crikey tried to explain to Mumsie how he had managed to cause so much trouble with the Red Car. Of course Crikey was rather clever and knew how much Mumsie hated anything with wheels which included most of the common forms of transport such as cars and buses. So when Crikey pointed out that it was the car's fault, Mumsie was satisfied. In fact I think she was secretly quite proud of Crikey because he had managed to put an end to the Evil Red Car.

This was not a commonly held view in GollyGum and there was quite a lot of discussion about the incident over the next few weeks. For some reason nobody ever came out to the river to disagree with Mumsie's view of the incident.