boy charged round the corner and cut in front of Bill.
‘Late, Andrew!’ the headteacher called out fiercely. ‘Late, late, late!’
Then it was Bill’s turn to go past.
‘That’s right,’ the headteacher called out encouragingly. ‘Hurry along, dear. We don’t want to miss assembly, do we?’
And he followed Bill up the path to the school.
Assembly always took place in the main hall. After the hymn, everyone was told to sit on the floor, as usual. Desperately, Bill tried to tuck the pretty pink dress in tightly around his bare legs.
Mrs Collins leaned forward on her canvas chair.
‘Stop fidgeting with your frock, dear,’ she told him. ‘You’re getting nasty grubby fingerprints all round the hem.’
Bill glowered all through the rest of assembly. At the end, everybody stood up as usual.
‘Now I need four strong volunteers to carry a table across to the nursery,’ announced the headteacher. ‘Who wants to go?’
Practically everybody in the hall raised a hand. Everyone liked a trip over the playground. In the nursery they had music and water and sloshy paints and tricycles and bright plastic building blocks. And if you kept your head down and didn’t talk too much or too loudly, it might be a good few minutes before anyone realised you were really from one of the other classrooms, and shooed you back.
So the hall was a mass of waving hands.
The headteacher gazed around him.
Then he picked four boys.
On the way out of the hall, Bill Simpson heard Astrid complaining to Mrs Collins:
‘It isn’t fair! He always picks the boys to carry things.’
‘Perhaps the table’s quite heavy,’ soothed Mrs Collins.
‘None of the tables in this school are heavy,’ said Astrid. ‘And I know for a fact that I am stronger than at least two of the boys he picked.’
‘It’s true,’ Bill said. ‘Whenever we have a tug of war, everyone wants to have Astrid on their team.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Mrs Collins. ‘It doesn’t matter. No need to make such a fuss over nothing. It’s only a silly old table.’
And when Astrid and Bill took up arguing again, she told them the subject was closed, rather sharply.
Back in the classroom, everyone settled down at their tables.
‘We’ll do our writing first, shall we?’ said Mrs Collins. ‘And after that, we’ll reward ourselves with a story.’
While Mrs Collins handed out the writing books and everyone scrabbled for pencils and rubbers, Bill looked round his table.
He was the only one in a dress.
Flora was wearing trousers and a blue blouse. Kirsty and Nick were both wearing jeans and a shirt. Philip was wearing corduroy slacks and a red jumper, and Talilah wore a bright red satin salwar kameez.
Yes, there was no doubt about it. Talilah looked snazzy enough to go dancing, but Bill was the only one in a frock.
Oh, this was awful! What on earth had happened? Why didn’t anybody seem to have noticed? What could he do? When would it end?
Bill Simpson put his head in his hands and covered his eyes.
‘On with your work down there on table five,’ warned Mrs Collins promptly.
She meant him. He knew it. So Bill picked up his pen and opened his books. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t seem to have any choice. Things were still going on in their own way, as in a dream.
He wrote more than he usually did. He wrote it more neatly than usual, too. If you looked back through the last few pages of his work book, you’d see he’d done a really good job, for him.
But you wouldn’t have thought so, the way Mrs Collins went on when she saw it.
‘Look at this,’ she scolded, stabbing her finger down on the page. ‘This isn’t very neat, is it? Look at this dirty smudge. And the edge of your book looks as if it’s been chewed!’
She turned to Philip to inspect his book next. It was far messier than Bill’s. It was more smudgy and more chewed-looking. The writing was untidy and irregular. Some of the letters were so enormous they looked like giants herding the smaller letters haphazardly across the page.
‘Not bad at all, Philip,’ she said. ‘Keep up the good work.’
Bill could scarcely believe his ears. He was outraged. As soon as she’d moved off, he reached out for Philip’s book, laid it beside his own on the table, and compared the two.
‘It isn’t fair!’ he complained bitterly. ‘Your page is much worse than my page. She didn’t say anything nice to me.’
Philip just shrugged and said:
‘Well, girls are neater.’
Bill felt so cross he had to sit on his hands to stop himself from thumping Philip.
Up at her desk, Mrs Collins was leafing through the class reader: Tales of Today and Yesterday.
‘Where are we?’ she asked them. ‘Where did we finish last week? Did we get to the end of Polly the Pilot?’
She turned the page.
‘Ah!’ she said. ‘Here’s a good old story you all know perfectly well, I’m sure. It’s Rapunzel. And today it’s table five’s turn to take the main parts.’
Looking up, she eyed all six of them sitting there waiting.
‘You’ll be the farmer,’ she said to Nick. ‘You be the farmer’s wife,’ to Talilah. ‘Witch,’ she said to Flora. ‘Prince,’ she said to Philip. ‘Narrator,’ she said to Kirsty.
Oh, no! Oh, no! Bill held his breath as Mrs Collins looked at him and said:
‘The Lovely Rapunzel.’
Before Bill could protest, Talilah had started reading aloud. She and the farmer began with a furious argument about whether or not it was safe to steal a lettuce from the garden of the wicked witch next door, to feed their precious daughter Rapunzel. Once they’d got going, Bill didn’t like to interrupt them, so he just sat and flicked over the pages, looking for his first speech.
It was a long wait. The Lovely Rapunzel didn’t seem to do very much. She just got stolen out of spite by the Witch, and hidden away at the very top of a high stone tower which had no door. There she just sat quietly for about fifteen years, being no trouble and growing her hair.
She
