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we drove off. The driver turned to me.
    ‘Where next?’
    ‘Walbottle Manor (Mixed).’
    ‘I used to go to that school,’ the driver said, running his gnarled fingers through his silvery hair. ‘I had a really nice teacher called Miss Tate.’
    ‘That figures,’ I told him. ‘Can we drive round the back?’
    He knew the way. In fact, I’ll swear I saw his rheumy eyes mist over as we passedthe old school sign. He backed the van up to the fire doors beside the gym.
    ‘I don’t believe that you can open these from the outside,’ I warned him.
    ‘That’s what you think,’ he said, sliding a spectacle arm in a gap in the doors, and springing some catch. ‘I used to break back in here regularly, after I left, to get to sing on Fridays.’
    (This is what happens when you get a town without a bowling alley or a cinema. Everyone goes loopy.)

    He helped me carry the models along the corridor, past the big hall, whereeverybody’s eyes were goody-goody shut for prayers, into the classroom.
    ‘It looks just the same!’
    ‘I’m sure it does.’
    And we set everything up. How Joe got all this lot in one small room, I’ll never understand. They did fit in. But the huge water bottle mastodon loomed horribly over Miss Tate’s desk, and Beth’s angora rabbit, borrowed for the ‘Textures’ table, eyed the wall-sized tagliatelle spider’s web with real dismay.
    ‘Splendid,’ said the van driver. ‘A job well done.’ He patted his own particular favourite – the tin can baby elephant – with evident satisfaction. ‘And this is sturdy stuff. I’ve moved top-of-the-range Hightechnicon Systems that will fall apart sooner than this.’
    ‘Joe only uses the best glue and string.’
    He glanced round wistfully, and sighed.
    ‘I’d better go.’
    ‘It isn’t Friday,’ I consoled him. ‘So at least you won’t be missing singing.’
    He hesitated at the classroom door, looking back one last time.
    ‘I spent the happiest days of my whole life inside this room.’
    See what I mean? Spend one term with Miss Tate, and you go bats. Quite bats.

10
By popular request . . .
    Miss Tate’s bun shook as she clapped her hands. I watched for moths.
    ‘Now, class!’
    They sat smartly in their seats, like doggies waiting for bones.
    ‘I hope everyone’s got over the
surprise
of all these –’ Nervously, she glanced up at the huge water bottle mastodon towering above her, gnashing his cardboard teeth. ‘All these
wonderful
models that Joe has so kindly brought in to show us today.’
    ‘I didn’t br–’
    I stepped on Joe’s foot to shut him up.
    ‘Because,’ Miss Tate went on, ‘it’s time to award the prizes.’
    She opened her desk drawer and brought out five rusty-looking medals she’dobviously bought cheap in bulk back in the Stone Age, when she started teaching. (As soon as I saw them, I realised that the van driver had had one exactly the same dangling from his rear-view mirror, but in the hoo-ha of the move, I’d taken it for a St Christopher.)
    ‘We’ll start from the bottom, as we always do.’
    She unpinned the list from the wall.
    ‘Best How-to book!’
    Believe it or not, this went to the hard-boiled egg decorator in the front row.
    ‘Best Reading!’
    That should have gone to me. I
always
win best reading, whichever school I’m in. But I had blown it this time because I hated our Reading Together book
(Six Little Peppers and How They Grew)
so much that, each time she’d made me stand and read, I’d hung my head, and pawed the groundin my embarrassment, and mumbled so softly that she couldn’t hear.
    So I didn’t get that one this year. Missed my big prize!
    ‘Best Essay!’
    Flora, of course. She came to fetch her chipped old medal with a beam on her face, stared at it meaningfully as it lay rusting in the palm of her hand, and then started one of those ghastly telly speeches.

    ‘The first person I’d like to thank today is my mo–’
    Miss Tate cut her off pretty sharpish.
    ‘I