Pirate School – The Birthday Bash

Jeremy Strong's Pirate School story The Birthday Bash is a very silly adventure for 5 year olds about a head teacher, her party food and a gang of thieves in masks.

Mrs Patagonia Clatterbottom runs Pirate School. She has a flaming orange wig, a wooden leg and a nose like an old potato. Most of the children are terrified of her.

Not Ziggy. He isn't scared of anything (apart from rice pudding).

Lessons at this school are swinging on a rope, walking the gangplank and hand-to-hand fighting. Sometimes the children have to do all three at once, which causes big problems.

Then it's Patagonia's birthday. She wants presents and she wants a party, so off they all go to buy crisps and jelly and jam.

On the way back they get jumped. The kids from the highwayperson school down the road take every last bag. And quite a lot of pants.

Getting that food back is what the rest of the story is about. The plan involves the dancing teacher, which nobody is remotely pleased about at first.

This is a LOUD book to read. People bellow, roar, screech and mutter. Things land with a SPLADDASH or a Biff! Baff! Boff!

The jokes are the sort a five year old will repeat to you all week. Ziggy hands his head teacher a wrapped up whoopee cushion and tells her she has to sit down to open it.

The robbers keep getting their own catchphrase wrong. One of them jumps out shouting about your mummy or your liver and has to be corrected by his mate halfway through the ambush.

Everyone is rude to everyone else. Patagonia yells "I heard that!" roughly once a chapter, usually because somebody has just called her a Disco Dinosaur.

If you've got a child who loves a grown up being completely ridiculous, this will go down well. Nobody in charge here is sensible for a single page.

Eight short chapters, big print energy and a proper beginning, middle and end. It reads aloud brilliantly, and a newly confident reader could get through it alone and feel very pleased with themselves.

The fighting is pure slapstick. Biffing, baffing and stolen trousers, with nobody hurt beyond a cartoon nosebleed.

If they take to this crew, A Very Fishy Battle gives them another go with the same lot. Patagonia decides to teach everyone a proper pirate attack, Ziggy's joke teeth cause chaos within about two pages, and Corkella's dolphin friends end up getting involved.