Playschool (2 page)

Monday morning, 8.01 am

‘Sorry we're late, kids,' said the driver as the wizard school bus arrived at 13 Acacia Avenue. ‘Couldn't get the dragon started this morning. Must be the wet weather.'

Below the Floods' home at 11 and 13 Acacia Avenue was a vast network of cellars, and the bus stop was in one of these. It wasn't just the school bus that stopped there every day, but a whole range of witch and wizard transport. There were Shopping Specials that took all the mother witches to the UnderMall where they bought underwhere, extra-black eye-shadow and this season's new magical pointy objects. There were Sports Specials that took all the wizards to
intergalactic football games, and there were Holiday Specials that took the children to summer camp. All the buses were the same – not so much buses as dragons with seats and toilets, run by an interplanetary company called Blackhound. These buses travelled at a fantastic speed and there were express buses – dragons with seats and no toilets – that could travel at the speed of light. For technical reasons, which are too messy and complicated to explain, it is extremely
dangerous to go to the lavatory at the speed of light.

The dragon stood at the bus stop, with smoke trickling out of its nostrils. Its eyelids kept dropping shut as if it was about to fall back to sleep. It looked very old and tired, which it was. It had been taking children to Quicklime's for two hundred years and it wanted a rest. All it could think of was the school holidays when it could spend all day asleep in its cave. It should have retired years ago, but there was no one to take its place. Dragons have always been very misunderstood. Humans have never been able to see the poetry in them burning down the occasional village and carrying off beautiful women, and have persecuted them for centuries until dragons have sadly become an endangered species. The few remaining dragons are now protected by spells of invisibility so humans can never see them.

‘Come on, children, we've got fifty-eight seconds to make up,' said the driver as the five Flood children climbed aboard. ‘And no blood-letting in the back seats.'

Fifty-eight seconds might seem like less than a
minute, but when you travel as fast as a Blackhound school bus, that's all it takes to travel a few hundred miles.

The Flood children were the first on the bus each morning and always sat in the back row where they could see everything that was going on. Winchflat was head boy at Quicklime's, which meant he had the power to remove or seriously modify the head of any child who was naughty. He was so conscientious that he once removed his own head for twenty-four hours for accidentally tripping up a junior witch.

On a normal bus journey, it's nice to look out of the window as you travel along. On a dragon bus, all you see is blur, clouds, blur, and blur, but the journey is over so quickly there's no time to get bored. There's not even time to finish the homework you didn't do last night. Because a lot of wizard homework involves small unpleasant creatures, a fair bit of blood and slimy stuff, homework has been banned on school buses since the time an out-of-control intestine wrapped itself around the bus driver's eyes and made him crash into a volcano.

Morning Assembly
Headmaster: Professor Throat

Every morning the entire school gathered in the Grate Hall, which is not the Great Hall spelled in an old-fashioned way, but a huge room that has an enormous fireplace – the Great Grate – because it is very, very cold in the Patagonian Andes. At the opposite end of the hall, in the centre of the stage, sits King Arthur's round table.

Professor Throat stood in front of the round table and raised his hand. Gradually the children fell silent. Tame bats were put back in schoolbags. Extra heads were tucked inside shirts and light sabres were switched off. Even the school creep, Orkward
Warlock, managed to stop his right eye twitching for a few moments.

‘As you all know,' the Professor began, ‘in eight weeks time we have our annual sports day.'

Everyone cheered.

‘Exactly,' Professor Throat continued. ‘And we all know that sports day is the highlight of our school year, the only day when outsiders are invited to the school – your parents and siblings, former students dead and alive, and special guests from other worlds and dimensions. And this year, of course, is extra special because it is exactly seven hundred and fifty years since the school was opened by our glorious founder, Merlin Flood, in this beautiful valley, safe and secure in the high Patagonian Andes. So let's make this sports day the one that will go down in history.'

Everyone cheered, stamped their feet and threw stuff up in the air, including wizard hats, wands, toes, an elf called Nigel and several breakfasts.

‘And now, all students please be silent for the school anthem,' said the Professor.

Unlike other schools, where everyone sings a really boring song while some dotty old lady plays on an out-of-tune piano, Quicklime's school anthem was sung in Braille. Everyone closed their eyes and ran their fingers over a card with the words embossed on it. It was the most peaceful three minutes and twenty-seven seconds of the day, just enough time for all the teachers to have a cup of tea and a biscuit.

It was hard that day to concentrate on the school anthem. The announcement about sports day was filling up everyone's head. Many children, including the Floods, had spent months preparing themselves with special training. Satanella had spent hours in the back garden of 13 Acacia Avenue chasing her tail round and round Queen Scratchrot's grave. So far she had never managed to catch it, which didn't really matter as there was no tail-chasing event in the school sports.

‘Mind you,' she'd said to her brothers and sisters, ‘as soon as I do catch my tail, I will petition for it to be included. I mean if they allow beach volleyball in the Olympics, they'd have to let tail chasing in.'

(Sport at Quicklime's is not like sport anywhere else. Here are a few of the best-loved events past and present:

• Wizard Rules
  – Twenty-two players stand in the middle of a soccer field and watch as all the spectators kick a ball around the terraces. Sometimes the players get overexcited and throw things such as intestines and referees into the crowd.
  
• Gristleball
  – See the next chapter.
  
• The high jump
  – This was abandoned in 1873 after a small wizard, Obadiah Flood (distant relation), jumped up into the clouds and was never seen again. There is a small sect living in a cave near Mount Everest that is waiting for the day when Obadiah will return to Earth. They prophesy that this will be next Thursday just after lunch and he will reappear in Mexico. No one knows why they are waiting in the Himalayas.
  
• The long jump
  – Because this event took too long, it has been replaced by the short jump. The school record is 0.003 seconds.
  
• Cross country
  – In 1994, the school made Belgium so cross that everyone at Quicklime's had to wear a T-shirt for the rest of the year that said: ‘Belgium is not at all boring. It is a really, really interesting place.'
  
• The pole vault
  – Temporarily cancelled because
  there is no more room in the vault and Poland has lodged a complaint with the United Nations.
  
• Three-legged race
  – Teams are made up of families. Where there are more than two children, like in the Flood family, they are all tied together and have to leave some of their legs in the changing room. Where there is only one child, they are allowed to grow an extra leg for the day. There is always a protest about this race from the Millipedes – a family of witches and wizards from a damp ditch in Tristan da Cuhna – who claim the whole race is ‘leggist'.
  
• Long distance cricket
  – You will probably find it hard to believe but long distance cricket is actually slower and even more boring than normal cricket. One wicket is on the school playing field and the other wicket is thousands of kilometres away in the back yard of number 7, The Street, St Kilda.
  ⁵
  Top score for a three-day match is Quicklime College 3, Scotland 0.)
  

After the school anthem, other teachers stood up one by one with various announcements: things that had been lost – the usual iPods, fountain pens and fingers; and things that had been found – usually nothing because the school was kept very clean and tidy by someone we shall meet later.

And as it was the first Assembly of term, there was a report of the past holiday's great achievements by students and ex-students. The highlight that holiday had been Winchflat Flood's creation of a volcano right at the North Pole.

‘Talk about global warming!' said Professor Throat to hoots of laughter.

‘Well, I thought that was what they wanted,' said Winchflat. ‘What with so many humans walking around whingeing about how cold they were.'

Finally, Assembly was dismissed and everyone went off to their classes. Classes at Quicklime's are different from those at other schools. Apart from the
subjects being much more interesting, children of different ages are often in the same class. Quicklime College knows that you don't get more clever as you get older. You're as clever when you die as you are on the day you're born. The only difference is that you know more stuff.

Even better, the school doesn't make anyone go to any lessons they find boring – which is a bit like a Steiner school, except that at Quicklime's everyone actually learns to read and write. So, if you are really keen on something like genetic engineering, you can go to every single Genetic Engineering class each week no matter what age you are. And if you think that maths is boring, which of course it is, you don't have to go to any Maths classes. The only rule is that you have to go to four classes every day.

The Flood twins, Morbid and Silent, went off to study Invisibility. Satanella trotted off to her Special Breeds class.

Winchflat, who was brilliant at everything, shook a little bag with all the lessons written on different tiles, like Scrabble, and picked out the class
he would go to first. His favourite class was Genetic Engineering, so to make sure he went to that class more often than the others, he had twenty-three tiles with ‘Genetic Engineering' written on them and only one each for the other subjects.

And Merlinmary went off to play Gristleball.