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    Ten of the Best: School Stories with a Difference
    Ten of the Best: School Stories with a Difference
    Ten of the Best: School Stories with a Difference
    Ebook120 pages3 hours

    Ten of the Best: School Stories with a Difference

    By Wendy Cooling

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    About this ebook

    Ten prize-winning authors each with a brand new story based on their own schooldays. Bernard Ashley, Malorie Blackman, Berlie Doherty, Paul Jennings, Margaret Mahy, Michael Morpurgo, Jenny Nimmo, Michael Rosen, Jeremy Strong and Robert Swindells.

    Brand new stories based on each author’s own schooldays – sometimes funny, often poignant, always riveting. Written in each author’s unique style and based on something that is common to every child in the country – SCHOOL. Authors as below:

    PAUL JENNINGS
    MICHAEL MORPURGO
    JEREMY STRONG
    BERNARD ASHLEY
    ROBERT SWINDELLS
    MALORIE BLACKMAN
    BERLIE DOHERTY
    JENNY NIMMO
    MARGARET MAHY
    MICHAEL ROSEN

    Stories of running away from school; getting the strap for punishments; vindictive teachers; boys who tell porky-pies; the shy girl who could only talk through her puppet; getting expelled [almost]; being an evacuee; original ways of getting out of being in the school play, as well as meeting one’s own true love at school! Stories that contemporary schoolchildren will relate to in sharing the triumphs and disasters of their favourite authors’ schooldays.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateAug 30, 2012
    ISBN9780007394845
    Ten of the Best: School Stories with a Difference

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      Book preview

      Ten of the Best - Wendy Cooling

      Margaret Mahy

      School Days

      All the Fleas ran up your back

      MARGARET MAHY has been a nurse, a librarian and is New Zealand’s best-known children’s author. She became the first writer outside the United Kingdom to win the Carnegie Medal, for The Haunting, winning the same award two years later for The Changeover. Her other novels include Memory, Twenty-four Hours, Riddle of the Frozen phantom and her soon-to-be-published Alchemy. In 1993 she was awarded New Zealand’s highest honour, the Order of New Zealand, which is only ever held by twenty living people at any one time.

      Margaret Mahy

      School Days

      There are two worlds, aren’t there? Look through the window and you immediately see the everyday world of families, of pets, gardens, lawns and gates. Roads and footpaths run past those everyday gates tying family homes to parks and shops and schools. That is one world.

      But there is that other world, too – the world of magic and amazement that swallows us when we read a story. As a child I wanted to drag stories off their pages and into the everyday world around me. And I didn’t just want to live in the story. I wanted to become the story – to be the story’s hero. Being the hero worked quite well as long as I was playing in the yard at home. But somehow it never quite worked once I went to school, though sometimes it almost did. And everyone knows there are two school lives – the classroom life and the playground life, both very different from one another.

      I began school during the war when even little children were expected to lead an orderly classroom life – a life that was quiet and stern. Out in the playground life was just as noisy and wild as it is today, though back then boys and girls were not allowed to play together. Over in their part of the playground boys invented adventurous games – war games – racing around, holding out their arms on either side, making aeroplane noises and pretending to shoot each other down. In the girls’ part of the playground we made houses for ourselves in between the lower branches of the trees that ran along one edge of the playground. I played there with the rest of the girls, but I was always a little jealous of the boys. Their games looked so exciting. Over and over again I found myself longing to bring adventure into life around me – longing to become the magical hero of a fantasy – and suddenly, out of the blue, school offered me the chance to invent a story that was all my own. All the same, things did not turn out the way I thought they would. My story surprised me more than it surprised anyone else.

      I didn’t plan my story. It began accidentally because there was going to be a fancy-dress ball at my school.

      A fancy-dress ball!’ said my mother. ‘What do you want to be?’

      ‘I want to be a fairy,’ I cried, imagining myself as beautiful as early morning, flying on delicate pearly wings, a dress of pink foam trailing behind me. Waving a starry wand, I would amaze everyone with my spells.

      ‘Oh, a lot of people will go as fairies,’ my mother said. ‘Why don’t you go as a witch?’ She turned to my father. ‘In a way, she has the face for it,’ she said. It was almost as if she thought I would not be able to hear her.

      A witch! My own mother, who loved me, thought I looked like a witch. I knew that I had a long face with a big chin, but I had never imagined that I might look like a witch. And yet, after all, witches were even more wild and magical than fairies. Witches were dangerous, so being a witch at the school fancy-dress ball might be a bit of an adventure. I suddenly felt I might have a lot of fun being a witch.

      My father made me a pointed hat out of cardboard, rolling it, gluing it, and then painting it black. While I practised swishing a broomstick and cackling, my mother made me a black dress. I thought I was rather good at cackling, and perhaps I was. I certainly cackled as if I meant it. (I still do!)

      The great night came. All the school children turned out, ready to sing and dance and to surprise each other. And my mother was right. There were lots and lots of fairies, but only one wicked witch. Me! I showed off, skidding around on the slippery floor of the local hall, waving my broomstick and cackling loudly. The fairies slid away from me. Even the cowboys and Indians looked nervous. We danced the dances we had been taught to dance at school, we ate a small supper of scones and pikelets, and then the fancy-dress ball was over. The pink fairies became ordinary little girls once more. The cowboys and Indians disappeared. The cackling witch disappeared too – well, almost disappeared.

      The next day at school a few children called me, ‘Witchie!’ They didn’t really mean any harm. It was just ordinary teasing, and if I had been really clever I would have laughed and taken no notice. After all, anyone could see that I was just another one of the school children. Yet somehow or other the name-calling made the cackling witch spring to life in me once more. After all, if I kept on being a witch those two worlds – the everyday world and the storybook one – might melt into one another.

      ‘Yes,’ I told those other children, ‘I am a witch. I can do magic spells, and I also have a poisonous bite like a snake.’

      But my story just did not work in the school world. Other children caught up with me on my way home from school shouting, ‘Witch! Witch! Witch!’ at me. Some of them just wanted to tease me, but there were one or two of them who were actually angry with me, and one girl swung me round yelling, ‘Witch!’ into my very face. I grabbed her arm and bit her just to prove to everyone how poisonous my bite could be. How I longed to turn those shouting children into frogs! They would have respected me then. I would have been surrounded by hopping frogs, all croaking and pleading and promising that if only I turned them back into children, they would be my friends forever. The strange thing was that I wanted other children to like me.

      Anyhow, I certainly did not enjoy being a witch without magic, particularly when I was on my way home from school. Sometimes, I would run as I left the playground, making for home with other children chasing after me. Sometimes, I would turn in at strange gateways and hide on the verandas of houses that belonged to people I did not know. I would knock on doors, telling the astonished women who answered my knocking that other children were chasing me. The women would look down at me, puzzled and frowning, for they were busy, and of course they didn’t know just what was going on outside their gates. In any case, there was nothing they could do to save me. In the end I always had to go back to the street and keep running towards home. That story – the story of the witch with the poisonous bite – had certainly not worked out the way I had hoped it would. No one respected me because of it.

      All the same I learned something from all this – something which altered the way I felt about the adventures other people were having at school. And to this very day, more than fifty-five years later, I can still feel that lesson working in me.

      There were small shed-like shelters in our playground into which we were expected to cram ourselves if it began to rain while we were outside at playtime, and during one particular break I joined a group of children to torment another girl. I have no idea to this day why we ganged up on her, and do not even remember her name. I only know that we drove her into one of the shelter-sheds, pointed at her and cried out a nonsense rhyme that I still remember:

      Stare! Stare! Like a bear,

      Sitting in a monkey’s chair.

      When the chair began to crack

      All the fleas ran up YOUR back.

      I was really enjoying being part of that chorus and part of that gang, all shouting and pointing. For once I felt I was a true part of the playground world. The girl leaped on to one of the seats in the shelter-shed and flattened herself against the wall. Suddenly, as I chanted and pointed, along with all the others, I remembered what it had been like a few weeks earlier when I was the one who was being chased, with other kids shouting, ‘Witch! Witch! Witch!’ as they ran after me. My arm flopped down at my side and I stopped chanting. If

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