“Please, please, please put her down, Gertrude!” pleaded Eric.

The boy tried his best to reason with the gorilla. Despite being a gentle giant, Gertrude was still a giant when she wanted to be.

“Pretty please!” added Sid.

Gertrude tilted her head to one side, as if trying to understand.

“PUT ME DOWN!” ordered the lady.

“DOWN!” repeated the boy.

The gorilla nodded her head down, as if she were saying, “You want her to go down?”

“Yes!” said Eric, thinking he must be getting through. “DOWN!”

With that, Gertrude put the warden down head first into a dustbin.

Her helmet must have clunked against the bottom of the metal bin as she was knocked out.

“Oh no! Naughty Gertrude!” scolded the boy.

The gorilla shrugged and smirked. It looked very much like she’d done the whole thing on purpose.

“Is she all right?” asked Eric.

The pair heaved Nina out of the bin and laid her on the ground. Next, Sid leaned down and put his ear to the lady’s mouth to listen. “She’s still breathing, but she’s out cold.”

“We can’t just leave her lying here on the road.”

“No, of course not. Come on! Gertrude, that was very bad!” he said, wagging his finger at the ape.

Gertrude looked behind her, as if to say, “Who are you telling off?”

The gorilla sniffed dismissively.

“SNIFF!”

Peering at the reflection in a window of one of the houses, Gertrude flattened down the spiky hair on her head that had been so rudely tugged.

“Now, Eric, you grab the warden’s arms and I will grab her legs! On three! One, two, three!”

The pair picked Nina up, and gently sat her on the bench of a nearby bus stop.

“Miss Misra can sleep it off there!” remarked Sid.

“And, of course, it’s handy if she needs to catch the bus home in the morning!”

“Exactly!” concluded the old man, before turning his attentions to the gorilla, who was still preening herself like a posh lady in a make-up shop. “Now come along, trouble.”

He and Eric took Gertrude by the hands and led her down the deserted road to his home. As they did so, the all-clear signal sounded.

WOOOHOOO!

To their great relief, the night’s bombing raid was over. Those Luftwaffe bombers that hadn’t been shot out of the sky were now flying back to Germany.