The Schoolmouse Read online

  Contents

  1 In Which Flora Makes a Start

  2 In Which Flora Reads a Story

  3 In Which Sweet William Makes a Mistake

  4 In Which Flora Saves the Day

  5 In Which Flora Goes Up a Class

  6 In Which Hyacinth Leads the Way

  7 In Which Flora Sees a Ghost

  8 In Which Buck Moves In

  9 In Which Robin Obeys Orders

  10 In Which Robin Comes Off Worst

  11 In Which Flora Takes a Journey

  12 In Which Hyacinth Makes an Apology

  13 In Which Flora Has a Brainwave

  14 In Which Lovey Plays Truant

  15 In Which All Ends Happily

  About the Author

  Dick King-Smith served in the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War, and afterwards spent twenty years as a farmer in Gloucestershire, the county of his birth. Many of his stories are inspired by his farming experiences. Later he taught at a village primary school. His first book, The Fox Busters, was published in 1978. He wrote a great number of children’s books, including The Sheep-Pig (winner of the Guardian Award and filmed as Babe), Harry’s Mad, Noah’s Brother, The Queen’s Nose, Martin’s Mice, Ace, The Cuckoo Child and Harriet’s Hare (winner of the Children’s Book Award in 1995). At the British Book Awards in 1991 he was voted Children’s Author of the Year. In 2009 he was made an OBE for services to children’s literature. Dick King-Smith died in 2011 at the age of eighty-eight.

  Discover more about Dick King-Smith at:

  dickkingsmith.com

  Some other books by Dick King-Smith

  BLESSU

  DINOSAUR SCHOOL

  DINOSAUR TROUBLE

  DUMPLING

  FAT LAWRENCE

  THE FOX BUSTERS

  GEORGE SPEAKS

  THE GOLDEN GOOSE

  HARRY’S MAD

  THE HODGEHEG

  THE JENIUS

  JUST BINNIE

  LADY DAISY

  THE MAGIC CARPET SLIPPERS

  MAGNUS POWERMOUSE

  MARTIN’S MICE

  THE MOUSE FAMILY ROBINSON

  POPPET

  THE QUEEN’S NOSE

  THE SCHOOLMOUSE

  THE SHEEP-PIG

  SMASHER

  THE SWOOSE

  UNDER THE MISHMASH TREES

  THE WATER HORSE

  ONE

  In Which Flora Makes a Start

  Flora was a schoolmouse.

  Everyone knows that there are housemice and fieldmice and harvest-mice, and everyone knows that mice who live inside churches are called church-mice. So it’s easy to guess where Flora lived.

  The school was a very old one, nearly a hundred and fifty years old, in fact, and it stood in the middle of some fields.

  Forty-two children went to the school (Infants and Juniors), and about the same number of mice (fathers, mothers and children) lived permanently in its crumbly old walls and ceilings and dark cupboards, and under its worn wooden floorboards.

  But of all these schoolmice, only one grew up to become interested in learning the same lessons as the children.

  That was Flora.

  It was as though Flora was destined to be a very special schoolmouse, for she was born on the first day of the first term of the new school year, in a hole in the wall of the Infant classroom.

  Just next to the teacher’s desk there was a cupboard, let in to the old whitewashed stone wall, and just above the doors of this cupboard, there was a small space between two of the stones. High up inside the cupboard a hole had been gnawed, so that a schoolmouse could run up inside and make its way into the space between the stones. From here, if it peeped out, it would have a fine view of the classroom, including a close-up of the top of the teacher’s head, a couple of feet below, as she sat at her desk.

  On this particular morning, a particular schoolmouse did not peep out at the Infant classroom, for it was much too busy giving birth to ten babies, one of which was the infant Flora.

  All that day the mother mouse lay in the hole in the wall and suckled her new pink naked children, until school was ended, and the children had gone home, and the cleaning ladies had tidied up, and the caretaker had locked up, and the old school was empty of all life save for the jackdaws nesting in the chimneys – and the schoolmice.

  Then, at last, easing herself off her sleeping babies, the mother scuttled down into the cupboard and out between its rickety old doors that never quite shut. One jump landed her on top of the teacher’s desk, and another on to her chair, down the leg of which she clambered.

  In the middle of the classroom floor, she could see, was another mouse, pottering about, whiskers twitching. He was searching for any little bits of anything eatable that the children might have dropped and the cleaning ladies missed.

  What a husband, thought the mother mouse, whose name was Hyacinth. Here am I, brought to bed of ten children, and he’s not even been to visit me, and sharply she called out, ‘Robin!’

  Hyacinth’s husband was an untidy fellow, whose coat always looked badly in need of grooming. He had lost a part of one ear in a fight and the end of his tail in a trap, and the other schoolmice called him ‘Ragged Robin’.

  Now, at Hyacinth’s summons, he came hurrying towards her.

  ‘Hyce!’ he cried (for it was his habit always to address his wife thus – to rhyme with ‘mice’). ‘Hyce, my love! I haven’t seen you all day!’

  ‘No,’ said Hyacinth shortly.

  ‘And you seem to have grown thinner, more slender, that is,’ said Robin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hyacinth.

  ‘Have you been on a diet?’

  ‘No,’ said Hyacinth. ‘I have simply lost weight.’

  ‘How?’ said Robin.

  ‘You had better come and see.’

  Up the leg of the teacher’s chair they went and on to the desk-top and up inside the cupboard to the hole in the wall.

  ‘There!’ said Hyacinth, and she could not keep a note of pride from her voice. ‘All yours!’

  ‘All mine?’ said Ragged Robin, and he could not keep a note of anxiety from his voice. Did she expect him to look after this swarm of ugly little pink hairless monsters? He had never had children before. What did fathers do?

  ‘What do I do, Hyce?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘Do?’ said Hyacinth. ‘You don’t do anything. It is I who have to suckle them and keep them warm and keep them clean and bring them up to be good mousekins. All you need to do is admire our ten children. Are they not beautiful?’

  ‘Without doubt,’ said Robin doubtfully. ‘Ten, did you say?’

  ‘Yes, as like as peas in a pod.’

  But here, though she was not to know it for quite a while, Hyacinth was wrong. Alike in looks and size the babies might be, and no one, watching them as their hair grew and their eyes opened and they began to crawl about the nest, could possibly have told one from another. Yet among them, as the weeks of term went by and they grew into active, nimble mousekins, was one, a female, who was to develop into the world’s most educated schoolmouse.

  That one, of course, was Flora.

  Whether, in fact, Flora was more intelligent than her nine brothers and sisters, we shall never know. What is certain is that she was more inquisitive. From an early age, Flora liked to poke her nose into everything. Everything interested her, and ‘why’ was her favourite word. Why did they live in a school? Why was the school sometimes full of people, mostly small, and why, sometimes, empty? Why did all these small people, and some big ones, come to the school? Why did the little ones look at lots of pieces of paper all joined together, with pictures on them and strange black marks and squiggles on the white paper? Why did they hold what looked like thin pieces o
f wood in their fat little hands and make other black marks on other sheets of paper?

  All these things Flora observed, for she alone looked outward from the hole in the wall above the teacher’s desk, in the Infant classroom. Always during the school day Hyacinth and the other nine kept well back inside, out of sight, but Flora crouched at the dark mouth of the hole, watching everything that went on with the greatest curiosity.

  Whether she inherited this thirst for knowledge from her matter-of-fact mother or her somewhat scatterbrained father, we shall again never know, but it did not take her long to discover that neither of them knew the answers to all her many ‘whys’. It was up to her to find out.

  She began the very next morning.

  One thing that Flora already knew was that at some time in each day, each child would bring with it one of those joined-together wads of paper, put it down on the desk, and open it. Then the teacher would point at the black marks on the paper, one after another, from left to right, and the child would make different noises.

  Day after day, Flora peered down intently, longing to make sense of whatever was going on. But her eyes, though clearly seeing the shape of the printed words on the pages of the books, could not interpret them. And her ears, though clearly hearing the child as it read, could not understand the sounds it made.

  Then at last one morning came the great breakthrough that was to make all the difference to Flora’s future.

  She was watching attentively as usual while a little girl stood beside the teacher with her book. She was a very little girl, just beginning to learn to read, and the book was a very simple one. On each page was a large coloured picture, and below the picture a single word.

  The first picture, for example, was of a round red fruit, and below it was written

  Flora had never seen an apple, so the sound the child made meant nothing to her, nor had she yet in her short life set eyes on a loaf of

  or (mercifully) a

  or on any of the other objects shown as the pages turned. Until the child reached M.

  There was a picture that Flora immediately recognized, and below it were five little black marks on the paper, five marks like these – ‘Well?’ said the teacher.

  ‘“Mouse”,’ said the child, and in Flora’s tiny brain something clicked. Once again she stared hungrily at those five little black marks.

  ‘Mouse,’ she said to herself.

  Flora had begun to read.

  TWO

  In Which Flora Reads a Story

  The five letters, each so different from its fellows, that made up that first word were the key to Flora’s progress.

  As she crouched in the hole in the wall, eagerly watching the children reading from their various books, she began to recognize those strangely shaped black marks. This was especially so when one of them was the first letter of a word that meant something to her.

  The shape M, for example, stood not only for ‘mouse’ but for ‘mother’. O was for ‘owl’, and though Flora had never seen one, Hyacinth had told them all what made that melancholy nighttime cry outside the old school. And U began a number of common words like ‘us’ and ‘up’ and ‘under’, while S was for lots of things mice did, like ‘squeak’ and ‘scurry’ and ‘sniff’, and E for another, most important one, ‘eat’.

  One word led to another, and since Flora not only looked but also listened as each of the infants read to the teacher every day, she began to match the shape of the word on the page to the sound that came out of the child’s mouth.

  Never was there such an attentive, hard-working schoolmouse as Flora.

  As Christmas approached at the end of that first term of Flora’s life, something else happened which was to further her education.

  One weekend, a time when the schoolmice had the place to themselves, Hyacinth called a family conference in the cupboard in the Infant classroom. Ragged Robin had taken little notice of his ten children, being too busy, like all his fellows, searching for food. But now, summoned by his wife, he gave the mousekins his full attention.

  ‘I say, Hyce!’ he cried. ‘I must congratulate you, my love. You have reared ten splendid children. How strong and healthy they look.’

  ‘They are,’ said Hyacinth. ‘Say hello to Daddy, children.’

  ‘Hello, Daddy!’ chorused the mousekins, all except Flora, who said, ‘Hello, Father,’ a word that she had recently learned.

  ‘And now,’ said Hyacinth, ‘say goodbye.’

  ‘To Daddy?’ said one of the children.

  ‘To both of us,’ said Hyacinth. ‘It is time you all went to seek your fortunes out in the great wide school.’

  ‘Yippee!’ cried nine of the mousekins, and away they went, out of the cupboard, on to the desk, on to the floor, and out through one or other of the doors of the Infant classroom, rejoicing that they were infants no longer.

  Only Flora remained. She did not at all wish her education to be interrupted.

  ‘Mother,’ she said. ‘Please can I stay here? I like it here. I wouldn’t be in your way.’

  ‘You won’t,’ said Hyacinth, ‘because I’m not stopping. That hole in the wall is draughty. I’m off to find somewhere cosier for the next lot.’

  ‘Next lot, Hyce?’ said Robin. ‘Next lot of what?’

  ‘Babies, you booby,’ said Hyacinth crossly. ‘Hadn’t you noticed?’

  Ragged Robin looked at his wife.

  ‘You seem to have put on weight, grown plumper, that is,’ he said. ‘I had not realized.’

  ‘Hadn’t you?’ said Hyacinth.

  ‘Another lot of babies,’ said Robin thoughtfully. ‘And so soon. I don’t know how you do it, Hyce.’

  Hyacinth looked at her scruffy husband with an expression that was a mixture of scorn and resignation.

  ‘Run along, Robin, do,’ she said, ‘and see if you can find somewhere really comfortable for me. Preferably not in one of the Junior classrooms – children are so noisy.’

  ‘Right ho, Hyce,’ said Ragged Robin. ‘I’ll try the staffroom first. Meet me there,’ and off he went.

  ‘Now, young lady,’ said Hyacinth, ‘just what is this all about? You saw how anxious your brothers and sisters were to be gone. Why do you want to stay here?’

  ‘Please, Mother,’ said Flora, ‘it’s a good place for my lessons.’

  ‘Lessons?’

  ‘Yes, Mother. I’m learning to read.’

  ‘To read?’ said Hyacinth. ‘What on earth does that mean?’

  ‘To make sense of the words in books, Mother. It’s what the schoolchildren are taught to do. They are learning to read and so am I. It’s very interesting. At first I could only read the odd word here and there, but before long I hope to be able to read a whole story.’

  ‘Flora!’ said Hyacinth sternly. ‘I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about except that it’s rubbish. Whoever heard of mice doing the same things that people do. Next thing, you’ll be walking about on your hind legs. You listen to me, my girl – just forget all this nonsense. You’ve got too high an opinion of yourself, that’s your trouble. Giving yourself airs and making out you’re cleverer than the rest of us. You’re just an ordinary schoolmouse and don’t you forget it,’ and with this Hyacinth went out through the cupboard doors and dropped carefully down to the desk and on to the floor and away.

  Flora climbed up to the hole in the wall and looked out at the Infant classroom. Empty as it was, of humans and mice, there was no one to hear her say, ‘I am not an ordinary schoolmouse. I’m sure I’m not. I’m sure I can learn all sorts of things that no mouse has ever learned before, if only I study hard enough, and then I shall be an extraordinary schoolmouse.’

  The next day dawned. Flora never forgot that first Monday morning all on her own in the Infant classroom. Not that the other mousekins had interrupted her studies – they and their mother had mostly slept during school hours – but it was lovely to feel she had the place to herself now, ready for another happy week’s work.
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br />   As if to celebrate her independence, she did something she had never before dared to do.

  At midday the bell rang for lunch, and the infants lined up and then left the classroom, followed by the teacher. On her desk, by chance, a reading book had been left wide open, and Flora, seeing this, slipped down and stood before it, her little forepaws upon the edge of the page.

  How big and bright the pictures were, now that she was so close, how bold and black the words!

  By great good luck the book, called Billy’s Pet, was open at page one, and when Flora had read that and page two opposite, she very much wanted to know what happened next. But, of course, there was no one to turn over the pages.

  Billy, the boy in the story, wanted a pet of his own. ‘But is Billy old enough,’ his father asked his mother, ‘to look after a pet properly?’

  Is he, thought Flora? Will they let him have one? And if they do, what will it be? A rabbit? A gerbil? A guinea-pig? What colour will it be? What will it be called?

  I must know, thought Flora, and carefully she poked her nose under page two and flipped it over. Once she had the knack of page-turning, keeping each flat with a foot as she read, it was easy. By the time the children came in from the playground at the end of the lunch hour, Flora was safely back in the hole in the wall. On the desk Billy’s Pet lay open, at the last two pages now.

  Flora looked down contentedly.

  I must confess, she said to herself, I do like a happy ending.

  THREE

  In Which Sweet William Makes a Mistake

  A happy ending was not in store for Flora’s brothers and sisters. Unlike her, they were excitable and rather thoughtless mousekins.

  Several, scavenging for food, ventured outside the walls of the school that week, never to come in again. A hungry fox, sniffing around the dustbins, snapped up one of them and the owls put paid to two more, while a fourth mousekin fell into the goldfish pond and drowned.