Ten of the Best (4 page)

‘I came to wish you luck.’

It was the new girl, Rita. She’d never spoken to me before. I don’t think she’d spoken to anybody. I looked up at her. She had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen in my life.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

I burst into tears again. ‘I can’t do it,’ I sobbed. ‘It’s stupid. I wish I’d never said I’d do it. I want to go home. I feel sick. Everybody’s going to laugh at me.’

‘I won’t laugh at you,’ Rita said.

‘My theatre’s broken.’

‘I’ve got some glue in my desk.’

‘I hate it. It’s a mess. The puppets are horrible.’

‘I like the princess,’ Rita said. She knelt down and squeezed her fingers into the princess’s head. ‘Where’th my handthome pwinth?’ she lisped. She shoved her fist inside the Prince and made him bow. ‘Oh my, ain’t you cute!’

I started giggling. I hopped the cat up to her and purred.

The show was a disaster.

The glued theatre collapsed halfway through the first act, and Rita ran up and lay on the floor next to me, holding it together. I got my lines mixed up and brought the witch on stage too early, so the prince fell in love with her instead of the princess. The clown’s nose dropped off. The entire audience yelled, ‘That’s Miss O’Brien!’ when I brought the teacher on stage. ‘Oh no it isn’t,’ the real Miss O’Brien said from the back row. ‘Oh yes it is!’ they roared. And I realised then that they didn’t hate my show at all. They were enjoying every disastrous minute of it, and so was I.

Rita helped me to carry my theatre to the bus stop. She came round after tea and we played out under the lampposts. That night I shoved the theatre under my bed and lay staring up at the ceiling. I’d written a play. My first play. And I’d got a friend. A real friend. I turned off the light and floated into a deep, blissful sleep.

JEREMY STRONG has been a headteacher, teacher, strawberry picker and a jam doughnut stuffer! His first book was
Smith’s Tail
, published in 1978. Since then he has written many books including five stories about
The Karate Princess
, and the books about Nicholas and his family including
My Mum’s Going to Explode
! His three Viking stories –
There’s a Viking in my Bed, Viking at School
and
Viking in Trouble
– have been made into a hugely popular television series, Jeremy won the Children’s Book of the Year Award for
The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog
.

I’
m not proud of the title of this story. It was what a teacher wrote on one of my school reports, and it was perfectly true. I came across a whole bunch of these reports recently, when I was giving my filing system a spring clean, even though it was midsummer. (See – I’m still idle!) Anyhow, I have used some of the comments from the reports throughout this piece, and they made me start thinking about how it all started. How did I become a ‘thoroughly idle boy’, amongst many other crimes?

I think it probably began on the day I discovered I was on my own in the world, alone. It was going to be me
v
the rest of the world.

I realised this when I was six, coming up for seven. We had just started a new year at infant school. I was in the oldest class, what you would call Year Two. The teacher was preparing her new register on the first day of term, checking names, addresses, telephone numbers and birth dates. Like everyone else I knew it all off by heart, everything – everything except my birth date. I had no idea when my birthday was. I knew it happened sometime during the year, but I didn’t know when. It just wasn’t important in my world.

So Mrs G, my new teacher, checked my name and address and so on.

‘Jeremy Strong, what’s your date of birth?’

‘I don’t know.’

And everyone burst out laughing. Even Mrs G was trying to hide a smile.

The children all around me were children I had known for over a year. Many of them were my friends, I thought. Now they were all laughing. I began to think that if my friends sniggered because I didn’t know my date of birth then what on earth would happen if I didn’t know the answer to something important, like all those awkward things we kept on learning about?

I am fairly certain that it was from that time that I became more and more of a loner. I didn’t trust other people. I didn’t trust adults because you never knew how they would take things. I didn’t trust children for much the same reason. I’d got into trouble earlier because of other children. You know how it happens. You’re five years old and you say something like ‘Poo!’ (If you are five, and the year is 1954, then ‘Poo’ is a pretty bad word – oh yes!)

Your friend laughs. He thinks it’s funny too, so you say ‘Poo!’ again. Then all of a sudden your friend has his hand up and he’s saying: ‘Miss Cox! Miss Cox! Jeremy Strong said “Poo!”’

And Miss Cox – tall, slim, beautiful Miss Cox, who I adore, says: ‘Oh, Jeremy!’ in that tone of voice.

And the thing is, does the shame of being told off by Miss Cox make me stop saying ‘Poo’? Of course not! In fact I think I’ll say something else. Oh yes! ‘Bum! Knickers!’

Oooh, I know,

‘Milk, milk, lemonade;

Round the corner chocolate’s made!’

You see, at five years old I had discovered
two
things:

1. If you say rude words people snitch on you and you get into trouble.

2. If you say rude words people are shocked. People pay attention to you. People listen. It’s a kind of fun, and since I always seemed to be getting into trouble, I might as well have fun doing it. So, ‘Bum, Poo, Knickers to everyone!’

Hmmm, I wonder… I wonder if I was a loner because nobody wanted to be friends with someone who was always in trouble?

So, at almost seven, I was a loner, but there are great advantages to that. You are left in your own world, and if you have any imagination at all – and most children have – you start inventing things, like your own games and your own conversations. If nobody wants to talk to you and you want to have a conversation then you have to invent all the bits of it. You talk to yourself, and to the trees and plants and animals.

So I would wander around, stare at the flowers in the school garden and say: ‘Hello Little Busy Bee! Bzzz, bzzzz, bzzzz. You’re very busy. Do you get hot with all that work? Do you get sweaty armpits? No, you haven’t got arms – so, do you get sweaty legpits? You’d have six sweaty legpits! Urgh, what a stink! Do bees use underleg deodorant?’

Then I’d suddenly realise that two or three children were standing beside me, grinning like monkeys and laughing.

‘You’re mad!’ they’d say. ‘You talk to bees!’

To tell you the truth, I still do! I often talk to myself out loud when I’m out walking and I’m thinking about a story, or I’m considering an important meeting I am about to have. I rehearse what I might say, what the other person might say, and so on. (And no, I’m not mad. People often do things like that inside their head. It’s just that I do it out loud too.)

‘
Jeremy’s result should be much higher than this…
’

So there I was at primary school, on my own for the most part, and things were slowly getting worse. Every month we were tested – on Comprehension (understanding), Composition (writing a story), Spelling and Maths. Then once a term we were given a big test on everything the teacher had ever taught us. Phew. Hard work. (And I don’t like hard work.)

My marks got steadily worse. I started off getting marks like 98 out of 100, which were pretty good, but by the time I was in Year Six I was getting 59 out of 100. I was so scared of telling my parents I reversed the two digits and told them I’d got 95! They were over the moon – until they found out. Big Trouble!

‘I just misread it,’ I lied.

‘You liar!’ my parents said, telling the truth.

‘He should adopt a more adult attitude to his work.’

Life was not easy, and I made everything much harder for myself insisting on doing things my way. (It’s embarrassing to report that it’s still a bit of a problem even now. I do like to be in control.)

But don’t teachers say funny things sometimes? I mean, that little bit up above – my teacher put that on my report when I was eleven. Eleven! How can you be adult when you’re eleven? Even my dad thought it was daft.

Anyhow, all this was going on when something staggering happened to me. The clouds parted and sunshine burst upon my life. The house directly opposite from us was sold and new people moved in. There was a husband, who was a teacher, his wife, their two girls and a baby boy. It was nice to have a new family across the road, even though their oldest child was younger than me, and a girl. (You know how it is: up to the age of mid-teens or so you never lower yourself to speak to younger children unless they are your own brothers and sisters.)

However, although the oldest girl, Susan,
was
younger than me, she was a vision of sunlight. She had long, long blonde hair that danced about her head, a smile that made her eyes crinkle, and a sprinkling of cheeky freckles. We would meet up in the fields, usually with other friends around too, and we spent a bit of time together. That’s all it was. I didn’t think of her as a girlfriend – after all, she was younger than me. But I liked to be near her and despite her being younger she was no pushover. She answered back – and how. She also liked to play Kiss-Chase. Wow!

It’s a good game, Kiss-Chase, and Susan could run fast. (Although most of the time she ran slowly because she liked to be caught!)

I could run pretty fast myself.

And so could my friend, Colin.

So there we were, playing Kiss-Chase, with me running down one side of a building, Susan up ahead, and Colin running along the other side of the building.

He couldn’t see me.

I couldn’t see him.

When we reached the corner of the building—BAMM!

We collided, banging our heads together. I went sprawling on to the grass and my face hit a large, rusty padlock that was just lying there. My cheek was split open just beneath my eye and blood went everywhere.

It was pretty impressive.

I got up, holding my cheek together, blood streaming down my face, and went off home, with Susan dancing attendance. She kept asking if I was all right. Yeah – no problem!

Then my mum saw the cut and whisked me off to hospital. I ended up with three stitches. Ouch – that was the bit that hurt!

But, when I got back from casualty, Susan thought I was the bee’s knees. I had been so brave. (Good thing she hadn’t seen me at the hospital!) I was her hero. So I got to kiss her. All Colin got was a banged head. (He was too young for her, anyhow. He was only ten.)

Yes, Susan was good fun.

‘He cannot hope to succeed like this
…’

Then, after the sunshine, the big black clouds. My parents decided to move house. We went to a bigger, smarter house, about three miles away. It was only three miles, but it was enough for Susan and I to lose touch. I was plunged into The Dark Years.

Somehow I had managed to get to Grammar School, and that was where my problems really started. They began with TR, (which probably stood for Tyrannosaurus Rex). TR was repeating his first year. Heaven alone knows what he had done (or probably
hadn’t
done) to achieve this honour. It meant that not only was TR a year older than anyone else in the class, but he had a grudge too. He decided to take it out on me, and he got his mates in the year above to help out.

Break-time became a daily hell. A typical day would see me penned up inside the coal bunker, while the older kids lobbed lumps of coal over the top of the wire cage. Or maybe it would be a straightforward bit of roughing-up.

What TR and his mates didn’t know was that when they weren’t looking I would copy their homework answers into my own books. Only once did a teacher get suspicious, and after that I made sure that when I copied the answers I always made two or three changes so it seemed like my own work. What a horribly sneaky child I was! But it was lovely to feel that I was getting my own back on them.

However, I was really on my own. I didn’t feel that there was anyone in the world who I could talk to, or who would understand or who quite simply cared. I guess that sounds a bit melodramatic, even pathetic. But if
you
have ever been in that state yourself – and remember, this went on for years – you will know what I mean. All you want is one person who will listen. It doesn’t even matter if they can’t do anything about it – but to have one person with whom you can share without fear of ridicule or being made to feel like – well, it’s your own fault anyhow – that is all you want. But there was nobody. (Not even the busy bees!)

‘He runs away from anything he dislikes.’

My willingness to do anything at all at school gradually evaporated away and my reports grew worse. Everyone was on my back. Everyone knew I could do better. Was I going to? No. As long as all those everyones out there were making the decisions and telling me what I should be doing I made sure I did the opposite. The adults would say: ‘The only person you’re hurting is yourself.’ And of course they were so right; I knew that. A report at the time said: ‘He runs away from anything he dislikes.’ You bet I did! Who wouldn’t?

‘He fears no punishment
…’

The school tried everything to make me work, and at this particular school ‘everything’ actually only meant three things: detention after school, the slipper, or the cane. The more they tried, the less I responded. The more they talked at me, the more I crawled inside my own shell and hid.

My mother told me recently that she always knew when I was coming home from school with a bad report because I would be clutching a bunch of flowers to give her, in the hope of putting her in a good mood. ‘Heaven alone knows where you got them from,’ she added. ‘You probably pinched them from the Headmaster’s garden!’ (She was right.)

Then, about three years after moving, an amazing thing happened. I bumped into that blonde girl again. By this time her hair was even longer and her smile made me feel like I was in an Easter Egg factory.

We started seeing each other, and this time it was serious. Suddenly I had that one person who would listen, who cared.

Even better was the fact that I now had someone I wanted to impress. I had long ago given up on wanting to impress my parents – that task just seemed too difficult. But Susan – she
wanted
to be impressed. And as for the rewards I might get from her – oh boy! She didn’t play Kiss-Chase any more – she couldn’t be bothered to do all that running away bit. Susan just stood still and waited!

‘He is prepared to work hard in certain subjects
…’

I didn’t exactly turn over a new leaf at school, but I did begin to improve at the things I liked – music, art, writing, English. Some of the masters even stopped wanting to kill me and became cautiously pleasant. (Me likewise.)

It’s little wonder I enjoyed writing. When you write stories you are out there on your own, inventing your own world. I’ve always loved that kind of escape, not to mention the control, the power! (The only time people have always done what I’ve told them to do has been in stories.)

There was one sport I enjoyed at school, and that was Cross Country Running. I enjoyed it for three simple reasons.

1. I was good at it.

2. It got me out of afternoon school.

3. You ran for a long time, on your own. You were not part of a team. You just went out there and ran, alone with your own thoughts and nobody to bother you.

So what happened in the end? I managed to finish Grammar School well enough to go on to further education. I carried on writing for myself. I carried on seeing Susan. In fact I still see her today because we got married. (And that was twenty-eight years ago.)