Pirate Pandemonium

Jeremy Strong's Pirate Pandemonium is a properly funny school story for 8 year olds about a supply teacher who turns up at the gates in an ambulance.

What happens

Violet Pandemonium has had no work for weeks. She has taken up pottery instead and bought half a ton of clay, which is currently sitting in her bath because there was nowhere else to put it.

Her first go on the potter's wheel throws a lump of clay out of the window and onto a passing cyclist's head. She never finds out.

Then the phone rings. Witts End Primary needs someone for Class Five, right now. She stuffs her bits and bobs into a holdall, climbs into her second hand ambulance and drives there with the siren going.

The roads clear beautifully. Even the police wave her through.

Class Five is the class nobody can hold. When she walks in, Samantha Boggis is throwing Gary out of the window for the fifth time that morning and a group at the back are running a wrestling competition.

Miss Pandemonium says good morning, is completely ignored, and quietly gets out a portable cooker and an empty tin can.

What she does with them is the best scene in the book, and it works because she never explains a thing until somebody asks. By the time the can crumples flat on the floor, every child in the room is watching her.

Then there is the deputy head. Mrs Earwigger has a beehive, vulture glasses, and the power to decide what every class in the school will be doing. When she is lost for words her mouth sucks itself inwards until it vanishes.

Gary reckons that is air pressure too.

It is Book Week, and Mrs Earwigger has decreed that Class Five will be Flower Fairies. Class Five would rather not.

What they become instead, after an argument about whether girls can be pirate captains that turns into a ruler battle across the classroom, is a crew. With Miss Pandemonium up on her desk waving a metre ruler and calling it the quarterdeck.

If you have ever wanted a book where the grown up is properly, gleefully on the children's side, this is it. She never tells them off. She just makes the rules stop applying.

Two things worth mentioning. The window throwing is played as a joke and nobody is hurt by it. And the boys say some fairly dismissive things about girls, which is clearly set up so that Samantha can flatten them.

What to read next

For another class and another teacher who is not at all what the school ordered, try Mr Majeika and the School Book Week. Mr Majeika used to be a wizard and still slips occasionally, and his school has just been landed with a games teacher who keeps her face wrapped in a scarf.