Don’t want to go to school. Feel sick! Don’t like Miss Prendergast, she smells, like boiled cabbage and sweaty socks. And she’s got wart, a great big one on the side of her nose. I know it’s a wart cos I had one on my finger and mam put some horrible brown stuff on and it fell off in bed. I’ve kept it in a matchbox with a dead fly and an airgun pellet and my best catapult stone.
I bet I got sick because of Miss Prendergast, I bet she’s got germs! Smelly old goat! That’s funny ‘old goat’ cos she looks like one too, with all them thick black hairs growing out of her chin! Wait till I tell Ivor Cattell, he’ll roll about!
Ivor’s a scream; he pulls faces behind Miss Prendergasts’ back. She caught him the other day. Pulled him right out of his seat by his ear, it was red for hours!
And she spits. Great big gobs of it! Yuk, especially when she’s angry. She spit all over me when she yelled at Ivor! Its cos her teeth don’t fit, they wobble about. Nan’s got teeth like that, she puts them in a glass by the side of her bed and they grow enormous! Once Miss Prendergast got so angry the bottom ones shot right out! The whole class was in stitches, I laughed that much I thought my tummy would burst! Miss Prendergast just picked them up, snorted and wiped em on her skirt and put them right back in her mouth! Urgghh, disgusting, smelly old goat! Throwing her germs about! They’re in my tummy now, I can feel em. Hundreds of em! Great big hairy germs with wriggly legs and no teeth!
Mam’s coming up the stairs now; I heard the third stair from the top creak. The doorknobs turning. Here goes,
‘Mam, I don’t feel very well’