Mr Bambuckle’s Remarkables 3 – Go Wild

Tim Harris's Mr Bambuckle's Go Wild is a school camp story for 9 year olds where the teacher is easily the strangest thing in the forest.

The bus pulls out of Blue Valley School and nobody knows where it's going. Mr Bambuckle has arranged the whole thing in secret. He asks the children to shut their eyes for nine seconds, and when they open them the bus is passing under a stone bridge that isn't on any map.

Albert has studied every map of the region. He says so. He's ignored.

Then Mr Bambuckle hands the wheel to Slugger, a boy with arms as thick as the trees outside, and steps out of the moving bus. He's back seconds later, apparently out of thin air, with his pet blue jay on his shoulder and an explanation about a speckled-dagger vulture that Albert is quite sure does not exist.

That's the register of the whole book. Something impossible happens. Somebody objects, briefly. Everyone carries on.

Back at school things are less fun. There's a new assistant principal called Miss Frost, and she's icy in the way that makes a classroom go quiet. Mr Bambuckle has trained Dodger to fly in and chirp a warning when she's coming, so the class can shove all their real work in the cupboards and pretend to be doing sums. It's a very good running joke and it also tells you exactly what the man is for.

What the children do at camp is tell stories. They sit round a fire that got lit by a beetle and take turns, and their stories are honest in a slightly startling way. Vinnie opens hers by admitting she's always been a bit of a suck-up.

So it reads as lots of short pieces held together by one big one, which is handy if your reader likes to stop at the end of a chapter.

There are fifteen children in room 12B and they arrive quickly. Sammy, Albert, Miffy, Scarlett, Harold, Slugger, Vinnie, Ren, Evie, Carrot and more. Your reader will sort them out by about the third story, but the opening pages do come at you.

A heads-up though. This is the third book about this class and it doesn't stop to introduce anybody.

If they like a school where nobody thinks any of this is odd, Strangeville School Is Totally Normal does it with a piranha in the drinking fountain and a lizard planning revenge.