The Boy in the Dress. Quentin Blake

       1 No Hugging

      Dennis was different.

      When he looked in the mirror he saw an ordinary twelve-year-old boy. But he felt different–his thoughts were full of colour and poetry, though his life could be very boring.

      The story I am going to tell you begins here, in Dennis’s ordinary house on an ordinary street in an ordinary town. His house was nearly exactly the same as all the others in the street. One house had double glazing, another did not. One had a gravel drive, another had crazy paving. One had a Vauxhall Cavalier in the drive, another a Vauxhall Astra. Tiny differences that only really pointed out the sameness of everything.

      It was all so ordinary, something extraordinary just had to happen.

      Dennis lived with his dad–who did have a name, but Dennis just called him Dad, so I will too–and his older brother John, who was fourteen. Dennis found it frustrating that his brother would always be two years older than him, and bigger, and stronger.

      Dennis’s mum had left home a couple of years ago. Before that, Dennis used to creep out of his room and sit at the top of the stairs and listen to his mum and dad shout at each other until one day the shouting stopped.

      She was gone.

      Dad banned John and Dennis from ever mentioning Mum again. And soon after she left, he went around the house and took down all the photographs of her and burnt them in a big bonfire.

      But Dennis managed to save one.

      One solitary photograph escaped the flames, dancing up into the air from the heat of the fire, before floating through the smoke and onto the hedge.