Pirate School – Just a Bit of Wind

Pirate School - Just a Bit of Wind by Jeremy Strong is a very silly first-day-at-school story for 5 year olds, with a head teacher far scarier than any of her pupils.

What happens

Patagonia Clatterbottom runs the best pirate school in the world. She has a warty nose, an orange wig and one wooden leg, which she chucks at her secretary when she gets cross.

She gets cross a lot.

She also has a brand new granddaughter. And she is quietly knitting her a babygro out of blue wool. Nobody is allowed to know about that (obviously).

Four new children turn up on deck. Ziggy has a joke eye on a spring. Corkella has hair that has never been cut. Smudge is taller and much quieter. Little Flo goes pale the moment the head teacher's pram-boat comes squeaking into view.

Then Patagonia asks them all what they want to be when they grow up. A dentist, says one. A model, says another. Ziggy says he would like to be a hamster, mostly to see whether she will explode again.

She does explode. It is glorious.

The daftness keeps coming. One teacher has a metal spoon where her hand used to be. Another gets whacked in the face by her own toucan. The head teacher's pram has an anchor, two sails, three flags and four cannons, and one of the cannons is called Big Betty. Behave, or you will be fired at Mars.

Then the sky darkens and Corkella says there might be a storm coming. "Nonsense," says Patagonia. "Just a bit of wind."

You can probably guess how well that goes.

What makes this one work for a very young reader is how fast it moves. The chapters are tiny, a page or two each, and something loud happens in nearly all of them. Half the best jokes are just noises, so it reads aloud brilliantly.

The scary head teacher is scary in a pantomime way rather than a real one. She roars and threatens and then goes gooey over the baby in the very next breath. Your reader will be well ahead of her the whole time.

There is a fair bit of rudeness, by the way. A shark-bitten bottom nobody is allowed to see. A teacher left dangling upside down from a mast with her dress over her head. If that sort of thing makes your child snort, it lands perfectly.

If you've got a child who wants their stories short, loud and a bit silly, this is a good one to hand over.

What to read next

For more of the same crew, Pirate School - The Bun Gun leaves the children sharing one baked bean each while the teachers feast behind a locked door. A gang of food-thieving pirates called the Woppagobs are about to make that everybody's problem.