Playschool

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  The Floods 2: Playschool

  ePub ISBN 9781864715729

  Kindle ISBN 9781864716993

  This work is fictitious. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060

  http://www.randomhouse.com.au

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  First published by Random House Australia 2006

  Copyright © Colin Thompson 2006

  http://www.colinthompson.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Thompson, Colin (Colin Edward).

  Playschool.

  For children aged 8+.

  ISBN 978 1 74166 026 5

  ISBN 1 74166 026 2.

  I. Title. (Series: Thompson, Colin (Colin Edward) The Floods; 2).

  A823.3

  Illustrations by Colin Thompson

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Imprint Page

  The Floods’ Family Tree

  Some Quicklime College teachers

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Footnotes

  The School Song

  The Quicklime College Teachers Files

  THE FLOODS 3 & 4

  How To Live Forever

  Random House

  Some Quicklime College teachers

  Click here for

  The Quicklime College Teachers Files.

  Your teachers

  Look in ANY classroom.

  Most children start school when they’re about five or six, even witch and wizard children. In fact, six of the seven Flood children started school at about the same age as you did. A particularly brilliant witch or wizard, however, may well start school before they are born.

  Winchflat Flood, who is cleverer than a whole box of knives, began school eight months before he was born, when he was just a little tadpole. To help himself add things up more quickly, he grew an extra finger on each hand and three more toes on each foot, which is why he wears such big shoes. By the time he was born, he knew more stuff than almost anyone else in the whole world.

  The children’s father, Nerlin Flood, though quite clever, never went to school at all. Where Nerlin grew up in Transylvania Waters – a dark and mysterious country four weeks’ ride by horseback beyond the furthest boundaries of Transylvania itself, turn left at the Valley of Doom and keep going until you pass through the Arches of Darkness – none of his relations had been to school. His family were Dirt People. They lived their whole lives in the drains beneath the city, cleaning the toilets from below and making sure everything always flowed away smoothly. The rest of the population looked down on them in every way, especially on Thursdays, when they would kneel on the pavement and shout rude words down the gratings into the drains just to make sure the Dirt People never got above themselves.

  ‘Waste of good education, teaching them to read and write,’ said King Quatorze.1 ‘I mean, they don’t need to read anything to use a shovel and a toilet brush.’

  ‘Exactly, Sire,’ agreed his Chancellor. ‘And besides, it’s too dark down there to read anything anyway.’

  On the other hand, Nerlin’s wife, Mordonna, was a princess and had received the very best education Transylvania Waters could offer. Because she was the King’s daughter, she didn’t go to school with the common children. She had a special governess who lived in the palace and taught her everything she needed to know. However, because Mordonna was a princess and her governess, Claypit, was just a commoner, they were forbidden to talk to each other. This meant that, although it was always very peaceful in the schoolroom, actually learning anything was a bit difficult.

  Like all clever people, Nerlin and Mordonna knew that you learn tons more useful stuff after you’ve left school than you do when you’re there. In the years since they had eloped together and travelled the world pursued by King Quatorze’s agents, Nerlin and Mordonna had gathered more knowledge and wisdom than most people ever do. Now they were brilliant at magic – and they were determined that their children would be even better. They would spare no expense when it came to their children’s schooling.2 This is why they sent their children to Quicklime College – a special school for witches, wizards, goblins, elves, shamans and anyone else who can do magic, and the finest school of its kind in the world.

  Their youngest child, Betty, is the exception. Betty goes to the normal human’s school, Sunnyview Primary School, just down the road from where she lives at numbers 11 and 13 Acacia Avenue. Betty doesn’t look like her brothers and sisters. She has blonde hair and no warts at all, and likes to do things that ordinary girls do, like baking cakes and knitting. Her cakes are normal cakes with no earwigs or cockroaches in them, and her knitting doesn’t have the usual wizard’s spiky thorns knitted into the cuffs.

  Of course, being a witch, she can still do magic, though you can’t tell by looking at her. And although she knows her parents would send her to Quicklime College with her brothers and sisters if she asked, Betty likes it at normal school – especially now that Dickie Dent is no longer there to pull her hair and tease her. She does get teased by some of the other girls for being a bit different, but it’s nothing she can’t handle with a bit of magic – ‘pain and pimples’, as she likes to call it.

  Valla, the oldest Flood child, left Quicklime’s with a first-class degree in blood and now goes out to work at the blood-bank. This leaves the five remaining children: Satanella, Merlinmary, Winchflat, and the twins, Morbid and Silent. They all go to Quicklime’s.

  Quicklime’s is hidden in a remote valley high in the mountains of distant Patagonia. It’s so far from anywhere that almost no ordinary humans have ever been there or even know the valley exists. There are no roads or footpaths into the place and, as there are always security clouds spread evenly above it, it can’t even be seen by satellite. It has never appeared on any maps at all.

  The site was chosen because it was here that the first wizards arrived on Earth. It’s a well-known fact that the original witches and wizards came from a far-off galaxy where spells and magic were something everyone could do. When they got bored, they’d get in a spaceship and fly off to another galaxy to
scare and/or enchant the local population, who thought magic was magic.

  Nerlin’s ancestor,3 Merlin Flood the Fifteenth, came to Earth to create a few legends for humans who, until then, had lived in caves and thought the best thing anyone could do was hit someone else on the head with a lump of wood – a belief that lots of humans still have. Unfortunately Merlin’s spaceship had not been serviced properly before he left home and it crashed in a remote valley in Patagonia.

  Merlin’s first thought was, Plank, which was the rudest swear word he knew. His second thought was, This is a pretty cool valley, and with the help of Big Magic, seven robots, a tape measure and some human peasants, he built Quicklime College.4 This took a very long time and Quicklime’s was opened for business seven hundred and fifty years ago, by which time there were quite a few witches and wizards living on Earth.

  Work on Quicklime’s was held up for ninety-nine years while Merlin went off to help the young King Arthur with his adventures and teach him handy household tips like how to sharpen a sword that some idiot has stuck in a rock and how to make a round table so none of his knights would feel like someone else had a more important seat than they did. What was left out of the history books was all the fights the knights had with each other because no one could tell whose seat they were sitting in. Someone would sit in the wrong place and eat someone else’s dessert and then the fight would start. The actual table still exists and is one of Quicklime College’s most treasured possessions.

  Quicklime’s looks like a proper wizard school should look, with lots of very pointy towers and fancy gargles around the tops of the walls. Gargles are like gargoyles except they make a loud gargling noise all the time. The three hundred and sixty-five gargles at Quicklime’s have been tuned to gargle in a slow eerie wail that can be heard from hundreds of miles away, which has led to the myth that there are giants in Patagonia, something humans believe to this day.

  There are three hundred and sixty-five of everything at Quicklime’s, except doors. There are only three hundred and sixty-four of them, which means that, somewhere, there is a room without a door – though no one has ever managed to find it.

  Quicklime College is more than a school, it’s a way of life. And unlike normal school, you don’t leave forever at the end of year 12. Quicklime’s is a place you go back to your whole life. If you have a problem you can’t solve, you can always find the answer at Quicklime’s, either in the great library or in the brains of the professors, who have lived for thousands of years.

  Very few Quicklime’s students ever want to take a day off from school and, if they are sick, they usually stay in the school sick bay rather than go home. Matron has far more powers than the average witch and a list of incredible medicines as long as your arm. She even has medicines longer than your arm, ancient recipes from mythical ages lost in the mists of time, when dinosaurs roamed the world – which they actually still do in Quicklime College’s valley.

  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 tea
chers 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.