‘92,’ wrote Mr Creechley. ‘Mrs Blanchings.’ Then he hurried out the door to assembly.
Chapter Six
As the temporary replacement bell rang for the students to file into the gymnasium for assembly, thick, dark grey smoke issued from the top of Snodgrass Hill Private College. The smoke poured upwards, then was blown straight down over Stagnant Swamp State School.
In the dense, choking cloud, Simon lost sight of the prep running ahead of him with the pots on.
‘Whatever are they doing up there?’ asked Mrs Blanchings, passing by the staff room.
‘I heard they bought a new kiln. I suppose it’s for firing clay pottery,’ said Mrs Marchbanks, the art teacher.
‘That’s right, it’s a kiln,’ agreed Miss Grindelwald. ‘A huge one. I saw it being delivered this morning.’
‘I wish we could have a kiln,’ sighed Mrs Marchbanks enviously.
‘Well, you can always use the second oven from the left in the home economics room,’ chirped Mrs Blanchings. ‘I understand no-one’s using that one!’ And all the teachers laughed.
That, thought Mrs Blanchings, had been her second funniest joke of the year.
‘I’m afraid you can’t at the moment,’ sighed Mrs Buffet, the home economics teacher. ‘Apparently someone told the preps it was the best to use because it made cakes rise perfectly every time. So there’s been another explosion.’
‘Oh dear!’
Claire happened to be passing underneath the window of the staff room on a raft she often used so as to get to school assemblies in the gymnasium with relatively dry feet. She had a notebook like Constable Perkins, but whereas Constable Perkins’ notebook was full of blank pages, Claire’s was full of very important things indeed. She wrote down the conversation she had heard in the staff room about the kiln, then continued on to assembly.
***
It was hot in the gymnasium and the fermenting mud in the swamp underneath was starting to bubble and send noxious fumes up through the holes in the floor.
‘I call the assembly to order!’ shouted Mr Creechley and was ignored as usual.
In a spirit of generosity, Simon gave Andrew one last whack.
DONG!
‘Thank you, Simon,’ said Mr Creechley, as silence fell over the room. ‘In fact, many thanks to Simon and Angelo for operating the new temporary replacement school bell.’
‘No problem,’ replied Simon, taking a bow. ‘We're happy to help out temporarily until the new bell and trophy arrive.’
‘Well,’ frowned Mr Creechley. ‘We may be able to claim the bell on our insurance policy, so we might get another of those.’ (An audible sigh was heard from all those preps on the Bell Duty Roster.) ‘But a new trophy?’ Mr Creechley scratched his chin. ‘I’m not sure if we’ll be able to replace that.’
‘New trophy? Pah!’ snorted Mrs Blanchings. ‘We’ve been waiting for essential school supplies like chalk and crayons for years, not to mention musical instruments and library books. (Luckily, Mr Hoochley was not present.) There’ll be no new trophy, Simon Smithers, until all the important supplies have been purchased.’
‘No new trophy?’ repeated Simon, allowing the shock to sink in.
‘No trophy at all,’ announced Mr Creechley.
Simon’s ears turned red. His grey eyes sparkled. His fists clenched and his toes curled.
‘Right!’ said Simon. ‘This is intolerable.’
He leapt to his feet and was promptly booed by the other students. This came as rather a surprise to Simon, as he privately (and sometimes publicly) was of the opinion that he was the most popular boy in school.
‘Listen,’ he said.
Someone threw a paper ball at him.
‘No, listen.’
Someone threw a pickle at him instead.
‘Tough crowd,’ whispered Angelo, from the corner of his mouth.
Simon knew that this was where all his charm and wit would come in handy. First, he had to get everyone on his side.
‘Students of Stagnant Swamp State School – you deserve to be outraged!’ he shouted.
‘Yeah, sit down, ya great –,’ shouted someone in the audience.
‘No, not at me!’ Simon objected. ‘At your treatment by the repressive regime they call Stagnant Swamp State School.’
No-one was quite sure what Simon had just said, but they felt it was something slagging off the school and if so, that couldn’t be too bad. Some of the jeering stopped.
‘We must unite to show the school that we will not be taken advantage of,’ said Simon.
That got their attention. Many students hadn’t realized that they were being taken advantage of, until Simon had pointed it out.
‘We have tolerated the homework they make us do.’ (Angry murmurs were heard from the assembly.) ‘We have tolerated the clothes they make us wear.’ (Simon gestured down to his snot-coloured uniform.) ‘But we will not tolerate the absence of a trophy for the National Pickle Racing Championships!’
There were loud cheers from the students. So loud, in fact, that the floor reverberated and small pieces of the woodwork splashed into the swamp below.
Simon symbolically held up the pickle that had been thrown at him and darted a quick glance at Mrs Blanchings. She was the only teacher in the school he actually feared and if she came charging at him, he’d have to make a run for it. But Mrs Blanchings was busily occupied filing her nails with a self-satisfied smirk on her scarlet-painted, slug-shaped lips, just as if she knew something that he didn’t.
All I need now is a big finish, thought Simon, enjoying himself immensely.
‘Students of Stagnant Swamp State School!’ he shouted. ‘Are we wronged?’
‘Yes!’ was the chorused reply.
‘Are we downtrodden?’
‘Yes!’
‘Are we going to do something about it?’
‘Yes!’
‘Are we on strike?’
‘YES!’ was the resounding response, even though no-one in the room, not even Simon, had thought about being on strike until the ‘yes’ was spoken. However, once it was, it seemed like a terribly good idea and most of the students wondered why they hadn’t thought to go on strike before.
The students merrily filed out of the gymnasium to set about finding out what it was that students did when they were on strike.
Wanting to look like he was still in control of the situation, a confused and bewildered Mr Creechley decided to do something daring and important. He had never before done anything either daring or important, so it took him a moment to think what he might do. 'I have it!' he hollered eventually and then went running after Simon. ‘Smithers! Smithers!’ he shouted. ‘That pickle is confiscated!’
After assembly, Mr Creechley went back to his office with no glass in the window to complete his work for the day.
‘102’, he wrote, ‘Simon Smithers.’
Mr Creechley took the confiscated pickle from his pocket and looked at it closely. It was now bent, and covered in hairs from his pants. He really didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. He had seen the children pickle racing – it didn’t look too hard. Perhaps if I try it, he thought.
Mr Creechley flung the pickle at the window. It sailed out over the sill and was snapped up by a passing eel.
‘Nope,’ snorted Mr Creechley. ‘Don’t understand it at all.’
***
Several hours later, Mr Creechley was just finishing his list of people he didn’t like when Angelo rounded the corner of the building in hot pursuit of Susan, the prep, who was wearing two large pots.
DONG!
DONG!
Mr Creechley sighed happily: the end of another long day. As he jumped the window sill and waded home through the swamp, he wondered whether it was possible to patent the Prep-powered Mobile School Bell and make a lot of money.
DONG!
In the staff room, as they were collecting their handbags and coats, th
e teachers were discussing the effects of the strike.
‘It’s terrible,’ said Mrs Blanchings. ‘The children won’t pay attention, they won’t do their homework, they won’t put their hands up to speak or contribute in class. In fact,’ continued Mrs Blanchings, ‘I’m having great difficulty distinguishing them being on strike from how they behave normally.’
‘Yes, we’ll have to get stickers for their foreheads saying ‘On Strike’ or ‘Business as Usual’ to help us tell the difference,’ agreed Mrs Marchbanks. Then they laughed to themselves and went home.
Chapter Seven
The first thing the next day, Mr Creechley consulted his diary as to what task was at the top of his list of things to do. In that week – the first of the school year – he’d already cleaned out his ear-wax, invented the Prep-powered Mobile School Bell and made a list of all the people he didn’t like. These three tasks alone would ordinarily be equivalent to a full weeks’ work for Mr Creechley, but he planned to continue to exert himself to make the best start to the school year ever.
The next task in his diary read as follows: ‘Write to Mr Angus, School Superintendent at the Department of Education, and inform him that the students are on strike.’
Mr Creechley double-checked his diary to see if there were any other tasks on his list of things to do that he might like to do more than write to Mr Angus to tell him about the strike, but he couldn’t find any.
Mr Angus was a very fearsome man who seemed to do a great deal of shouting whenever Mr Creechley was around, or even mentioned. Mr Creechley imagined that a school students' strike was something Mr Angus would consider worth shouting about. Mr Creechley wondered how best to break the news to Mr Angus. He cleared his throat and took up his pencil and a sheet of paper with comparatively less mould than the others.
‘Dear Mr Angus,’ Mr Creechley wrote. ‘You’ll never guess what happened yesterday.’
Meanwhile, thoroughly enjoying the strike he had started, Simon Smithers sat outside the art room with the remainder of Class 6B preparing to cut a new slice from his monster pickle. He had his pickle and his pin and his pocket knife, but his magnifying glass was nowhere to be found.
Simon stuck his whole head inside his pencil case, but still nothing.
‘Stolen!’ he cried, muffled by the pencil case still being on his head.
‘Simon!’
‘Ugh!’ Simon lifted his head from the pencil case too quickly and got his nose caught in the zipper. It was Claire, and she was holding his magnifying glass.
‘Hey, that’s mine!’ scowled Simon.
‘Sorry,’ Claire apologized. ‘I just borrowed it. Come and have a look at what I’ve found on the trophy cabinet!’
Simon hastily shoved his pin, pickle, pocket knife and magnifying glass in his pocket and went with the rest of the class to see what all the fuss was about.
Claire had found several small, muddy hand prints on the inside of the trophy cabinet and several small, muddy foot prints leading down the corridor.
‘Miss Grindelwald said the trophy disappeared at lunchtime,’ Claire told Simon as they rejoined the rest of Class 6B, ‘and that she didn’t see any unusual people nearby at the time. Now we’ve found the hand and foot prints, we know it’s someone small!’
Simon yawned. A small thief was still a thief and a stolen trophy was still stolen.
‘It’s obvious,’ said Claire happily.
Simon had the distinct impression that he’d missed something important, but in order to maintain his reputation as something of a genius, wasn’t about to say so.
Luckily, Angelo had absolutely no reputation as a genius. ‘What’s obvious?’ he asked.
‘Anyone could have stolen the bell, but to steal the trophy from the cabinet right outside the General Office on a school day? That must have been one of us,’ concluded Claire. ‘Someone who belongs at Stagnant Swamp State School. Someone we know.’
‘I bet it was Mrs Blanchings,’ declared Simon angrily. ‘She’s always hated pickle races.’
‘No,’ replied Claire. ‘Judging from the size of the hands and feet, it must have been a student.’
Class 6B were silent. It was awful to think an act of treachery like that could occur right under their very noses, perpetrated by a fellow student.
‘Come on,’ ordered Mara. ‘Sitting around moping is no good. Let's walk around the courtyard again and see if we can see anyone looking suspicious.’
Class 6B had already walked around the courtyard several times that morning. Even the few students like Claire who weren’t on strike couldn’t attend class, as the teachers weren’t conducting classes. So the students wandered, chatted and told each other how much fun they were having being on strike. Class 6B shuffled forward until they reached the path opposite the chemistry building.
The chemistry building roof was where most of the preps spent their spare time. This was because the metal roof got nice and warm and helped dry out their shoes and socks. It was also because the only way to access the roof was through a very small hole in the top, which meant that bigger kids had no chance of getting up there and were forced to resort to more creative methods to have any fun with the preps at all.
‘And I’ve done some research in the library,’ added Claire excitedly.
‘Boring,’ complained Simon. He was about to explain his theory on books, when he noticed that a large banner had appeared at the top of the chemistry building and was being rolled down the side. It was made of someone’s mum’s old sheets and in bold, black paint the most ominous words in the history of Stagnant Swamp State School were written. It said simply: ‘Equal rights for preps’.
In shock, Simon had not managed to draw breath before printed pamphlets came fluttering down after the banner. Here is what they said:
Preps Demand Equal Rights
We, the preps of Stagnant Swamp State School, demand the following rights:
1). the right not to be bullied;
2). the right not to be teased;
3). the right not to have pots tied to us and be chased with sticks;
4). the right not to be used to generate electricity;
5). the right to be warned of any life-threatening objects, persons or places at the school, including the second oven from the left in home economics; and
6). the right not to be misled about the state of the toilet next to the Principal’s office.
So there!
Signed:
Stagnant Swamp State School Preps
‘They all seem like pretty reasonable demands to me,’ said Claire honestly.
‘Rubbish,’ said Simon. ‘How dare they dictate to us? We’ll show them.’
Simon always carried a balloon in his pocket for just such emergencies. With it, he fashioned a water bomb from the swamp. It was a fine, large one with plenty of slimy swamp life swimming inside.
‘Simon,’ complained Claire. ‘You really shouldn’t do that.’
But Simon wasn’t listening to Claire. He held the balloon like a shot put, did several practice heaves on the spot, then finally propelled the water bomb onto the chemistry roof.
‘Hiiiiii-ya!’
Just as Simon had expected, there was a splash and a series of squeals, followed by silence.
‘Are you going to stop this nonsense and give up now?’ shouted Simon towards the roof. ‘Equal rights for preps?’ he scoffed. ‘I've never heard such nonsense.’
In response, the entire prep intake of Stagnant Swamp State School appeared over the edge of the roof. They were lying on their tummies, peeking out behind shields that had previously enjoyed useful lives as garbage bin lids. One lone figure stood over them, smiling evilly. It was Ethel Ormiston.
‘Preps,’ she shouted. ‘Ready.’
‘What are they doing?’ asked Paul.
‘Aim,’ continued Ethel.
‘What have they got?’ asked Mara.
‘Fire!’
In unison, dozens of crocodile dung bombs were propelled over the sides of the building, scattering Class 6B as fast as it could go. They rained down, shattering on impact and festooning the older students in the pungent manure.
‘Right,’ spluttered Simon Smithers, as he collapsed, panting, in the safety of the shelter sheds. ‘This has gone far enough.’
To his dismay, Simon found that the shelter sheds were plastered with copies of the preps’ pamphlet.
Also plastered to the walls were quotes from Simon’s speech the day before, but with critical words altered:
Preps must unite to show the school that we will not be taken advantage of.
Are preps wronged?
Yes!
Are preps downtrodden?
Yes!
Are preps going to do something about it?
YES!
‘That’s not fair!’ spat Simon crossly. ‘I’ve been misquoted. I was just talking about not having a trophy. Now my strike has been hi-jacked.’
‘There’s no way they could have come up with this idea alone,’ scoffed Paul. ‘Someone’s been putting ideas into their little heads about an uprising.’
‘Someone like Simon?’ sneered Claudia, pulling crocodile dung from her hair.
‘No,’ said Claire, thoughtfully, ‘someone who can read properly and spell properly and who has a printing press.’
‘I don’t qualify on any of those counts,’ noted Simon.
‘Well, whoever’s helping them, it must stop immediately,’ fumed Paul. ‘The last thing we want is equal rights for preps.’
Everyone except Claire nodded vigorously in agreement.
‘There’s only one thing for it,’ said Simon. ‘I’ll have to call off the strike.’
Chapter Eight
A short time later:
‘Mrs Blanchings,’ said Simon, meekly. ‘I’d like to call a truce and end the strike.’
Mrs Blanchings had taken a great deal of effort to find. She and some of the other teachers had erected a beach umbrella on the other side of the swamp under the giant scribbly gum tree and were sipping fruit punch, playing cards and listening to music played by Miss Grindelwald on her cello. Consequently, Mrs Blanchings was enjoying herself immensely and the very last thing on her mind was ending the strike.
‘What’s that?’ asked Mrs Blanchings, over the music. ‘You’ll have to speak up, Smithers.’
‘I said,’ repeated Simon a little louder, ‘that I am willing to declare that the strike is off.’