‘Tomas, are you listening?’

It was teatime and as usual I hadn’t really been listening to my mum at all. I was too busy thinking about Flicker and the other dragons. And watching Lolli finger-painting a face on her plate with meatball sauce. But in the end it’s hard to ignore someone who is waggling a forkful of spaghetti under your nose.

‘Make sure none of your sillier classmates upset the animals on your school trip when you go,’ she said. ‘I’m relying on you to keep an eye on them. The Caldwells’ donkey is a bit of a nervy old thing at the best of times. And maybe you can keep an eye on that poor Liam Sawston. His mum’s ever so worried about him.’

Hang on, what? Poor Liam? Suddenly I was listening.

‘I saw her in the chemist’s earlier. He’s got a nasty burn on his leg. He’d been messing about in their shed and she thinks he must have spilled something on himself.’

I pictured Liam limping the other day and how he had yelled out after banging into the table at school.

‘People can keep all sorts of toxic things these days,’ Mum went on. ‘Although she says her husband swears blind he doesn’t use pesticides and all that stuff.’

‘Sounds just like Liam to be messing about with stuff he’s not supposed to,’ I muttered crossly.

Mum looked at me.

‘Oh dear, are you two not getting on any more?’ she asked. ‘That’s a shame.’

I nearly choked on my meatball.

‘What do you mean, “any more”?’ I spluttered. ‘We never got on in the first place.’

Mum smiled. ‘You and he were best buddies back in nursery. The two of you were so sweet together. I’m sure he hasn’t changed that much.’

I stared at her.

‘We were what?’

‘Come on, surely you remember? You were inseparable when you went to the Happy Meadow Centre. I guess when you went off to school and Ted was there, you just forgot all about Liam.’

She reached out and caught one of the ferrets as it launched onto the table and started to make off with one of Lolli’s meatballs. ‘All I can say is I’m glad Grandad’s got the sense to keep his garden organic. I wouldn’t want to think of you messing about with chemicals.’

And then the image of Liam’s monstrous sunflower popped into my head. And it hit me.

Was that how Liam had grown such a huge flower? Had he really used chemicals?

He was as sneaky as that ferret licking his lips as he eyed up another meatball. He was such a cheat.

Mum was wrong. There was no way I had ever been friends with Liam. Just no way.

When I told the others about Liam and the chemicals they were as angry as I’d been. I didn’t tell them what Mum’d said about me and Liam being friends – that really would have horrified them.

‘We need to keep an eye on him. Now we know how he plans to win the sunflower competition, maybe we can stop him,’ I said.

‘At least he can’t do anything with the sunflower today,’ Kat said. ‘Not with the school trip happening.’

That was true, but if we thought giant sunflowers were our biggest problem we were about to discover just how wrong we were.

The school trip was to Caldwell Farm and was meant to be the big finale of our ‘Animals at Large’ topic. The farm was owned by Mrs Caldwell and her grown-up son. She was a bit of a local legend, having won the great inter-village welly-wanging championship twelve years running. People said her right arm was so powerful she could throw a welly clear across the English Channel on a good day with the wind behind her.

Her son was probably the tallest person I’d ever seen and had long straw-like hair that drooped so far down over his eyes that you had to wonder about his ability to drive the huge red tractor he careered around on.

We hadn’t taken the dragons back into school since the pigeon-bat-attack incident, but we figured they’d be no trouble on a farm trip, not out in the open. Besides, now we had the ash we were feeling a lot more confident about things.

Miss Logan and Mr Firth set off at a brisk stride while, like the animals marching onto the ark, we followed along behind in our pairs. Apart from Liam, who was swaggering along on his own, talking loudly, showing off to Amira and Jody in front of him about how he’d once spent a day as a VIP at a safari park and so basically knew everything now. The dragons, aware we had a hefty supply of snacks and ash in our backpacks, flitted back and forth above us, keeping to the trees.

When we got to the farm we were welcomed by Mr Caldwell. Or rather he stood there pointing down the dirt track that led into the farmyard. Mr Firth started handing out clipboards and pencils and explaining what we were expected to do, and more importantly what we were expected not to do.

‘No upsetting the animals. No feeding the animals. No shouting near the animals. No climbing over fences. No eating anywhere except the lunch tables. No touching farm machinery. No …’

No one seemed to be listening very hard. We were all too busy taking in the sights. It wasn’t your typical farm – that much was clear. Dad had said they were trying to ‘diversify’, which basically meant they had to find new ways to make money since everyone bought their veg and milk from the local supermarket these days. He said the Caldwells had plans to revamp the farm and open it up to the public. The first thing they’d got was some more exotic animals, including, wait for it – crocodiles. Actual Nile crocodiles, which are like the most vicious crocodiles in the world. And as we looked across at the paddock we saw an ostrich, a couple of llamas, deer, peacocks and a donkey who looked about a hundred. There was also a play area with a fort made out of stacking crates and old wooden trestle tabletops laid over barrels, which I guessed was meant to be our picnic spot.

The place was awesome. And what’s more, with clipboards in hand and dragons overhead, we were free to explore.