doesn’t like people sitting too close,” said Nat, trying to be helpful, “although he probably won’t bite.”
Mr Dewdrop backed away and nervously checked a form he was carrying.
“Are you the Darius Bagley who wrote the prize-winning essay?” the young man said. “Or is there perhaps another Darius Bagley?” He sounded hopeful.
“That’s him,” said Penny, who was drawing fairies on a big sketch pad. “Have fun. And actually, Nathalia, he DOES bite.”
“We’re all very impressed with your hilarious essay,” said Mr Dewdrop quickly. His voice was sometimes high and trembly, sometimes deep and croaky, like a frog playing a flute. Darius just stared. Mr Dewdrop ploughed on.“We’d like to give you free tickets to our new garden centre, in Lower Totley Village. You can get a half-price cream tea too. Yum.”
Nat sniggered. She wasn’t jealous of THAT rubbish prize. Darius looked at Mr Dewdrop blankly.
The young man coughed. “Right. And I hear you’re team leader. So that means you get to stay in one of our luxury log cabins, with outdoor plunge pool and indoor table football.”
“Get in!” yelled Darius, jumping up.
“Where do WE stay?” said Nat, who was suddenly jealous. Darius was making a big loser ‘L’ on his forehead at her.
“The rest of you will be in our cosy eco-yurts, made from natural – well, let’s just say it’s very natural. Don’t worry about the goaty smell – you soon get used to it.”
Darius burst out laughing, which lasted all the way to the next village, when Nat pinched him into silence.
“I looked up ‘yurt’,” said Penny. “I think it’s like a tent, but not quite as good.”
Flipping luxury log cabins for the flipping team leader, thought Nat, as the coach wound its tedious way through the wet roads. Table football? Plunge pool? So not fair.
She stewed for a while, and then finally snapped at Darius, “How come you get a luxury log cabin and we have to live in rubbish tents made of recycled goat bum?”
“Stop moaning. You get to bring your dad.”
Nat always forgot that Darius actually thought Dad was great. She had NO IDEA why.
“We’re here,” shouted Miss Hunny, before Nat could carry on her row.
The coach stopped dead with a squeal of old brakes.
Nat looked out of the window and just saw trees, dripping with rain. In the distance she thought she could see a sliver of grey sea.
“You might wanna put your macs on. There’s a very light drizzle,” shouted Dad, “or possibly only a sea mist.”
The rain thrashed down harder. No one wanted to get out.
“It’s a good job I’M here to keep everyone’s spirits up,” said Dad.
He was met with a stony silence.
Mr Dewdrop made a note in a little black notebook he had stuck to a clipboard.
Their depressed geography teacher, Mr Keane, stood up. “The even better news is that there’s hail mixed in with the rain. That’s unusual for this time of year. Perhaps it’s global warming. We could go out and study it. Won’t that be fun?”
If silence could get even stonier, that’s what it got.
“No, I don’t blame you. Geography’s terrible. I wanted to be a vet when I was your age, but I didn’t pass the exams,” said Mr Keane, sitting down and putting his head in his hands. “Why didn’t I work harder at school?” he cried.
No one quite knew what to say.
Finally, Miss Austen took charge. “Come on, children,” she said bossily. “Last one off the coach is a Bagley.”
“Hey,” said Darius, as the stampede for the exit started.
They all ran helter-skelter from the coach towards the shelter of a large wooden hut in the middle of a clearing in the forest. Through the rain, from under her plastic hood, Nat could make out a sign reading:
Lower Totley Eco Camp
Parked next to the large hut was a gleaming-new white coach, with cool tinted windows and sleek curved lines. On it were emblazoned the golden words:
SAINT SCROFULA’S COLLEGE
And in smaller words underneath:
Gosh, what a great school!
Inside the smart coach, Nat caught a glimpse of a square-jawed driver in a uniform and peaked cap, watching a big TV screen. Then she heard a hacking cough behind her. It was their coach driver, Eric Scabb, sucking down on his first ciggy for two hours. He spat on a bush.
“Better out than in,” he said.
Nat’s coach had SCABB’S BUDGET COACHES FOR HIRE painted in flaking letters on the side.
“Their coach probably cost more than our entire school,” Nat muttered to Penny, as they squished through the mud and into the wooden building.
Inside, the teachers went into a small reception area to fill out forms while Dad led the damp, hungry children into a large dining hall. It was full of long wooden tables and benches. And it was also full of other children, who stopped their chattering and stared at the newcomers.
The kids from the other school were those “sit-up-straight” kind of children. They were scrubbed clean and shiny and had smart blazers and even smarter haircuts. All the girls were blonde, Nat noticed, and not even slightly murky blonde like her, but almost white, dazzling blonde.
AND NOT ONE OF THEM ATE THEIR PEAS OFF THEIR KNIVES.
Nat looked at her wet, bedraggled, muddy classmates. We look like survivors from a shipwreck, she thought.
The other children continued to stare at Nat’s class.
“You know in those cowboy films when they walk into the wrong saloon and it goes dead quiet?” Nat said to Darius. Then she thought for a minute. “Oh, I suppose you get that all the time, tee-hee,” she said.
He glared at her.
There was a long, makeshift kitchen counter at one end of the hall, where two large ladies were splodging food on to wooden plates. Behind them bubbled cauldrons of something or other. From a distance it looked like brown porridge.
Rank brown porridge.
Nat’s plan was to grab some food and sit somewhere away from the other kids as quietly and with as little fuss as possible. Which was pretty much the plan of everyone else in 8H too.
Except Dad.
Dad
