Johnny arrived at school with his bag full of string. So much string! I’d never seen that much before. If you’d unwound it into a straight line you could have fenced off half the Sahara and still had some left over for a kite. He said he’d got it out of his garage, but I don’t know. Johnny was always nicking stuff. He was just as likely to have pinched it from the school Bookroom.
Anyway, there we were, with all this string, and we had to do something with it. I’m not sure how we got the idea really. We thought of running it around the outside of the school. Then we thought we could trail it across the playground, so that Miss Holland, or whoever found it, would pick it up and follow it to see where it led, and half-an-hour later they’d still be following it . . . It was about then we realised that because it was a Tuesday afternoon, Miss Holland would be at the staff meeting. And because it was after 3.30, Mrs Wilson and the office staff would have gone home.
Johnny didn’t exactly dare me and I didn’t exactly dare him but I think I said I’d do it if he would and he said he’d do it if I would, so somehow we more or less agreed to do it. On the way over we ran into Wesley Brown, the little Year Two kid, and it took a while to get rid of him, ’cos he knew we were doing something interesting. He’s a real little devil and he would have been in it if he’d known what we had in mind. Luckily, his bus came, so he had to go. We didn’t want to get him into trouble.
Then we got another idea: to tie something on the end of the string, as a little surprise, like a treasure hunt. So we raced around the school having a quick look—we were already running short of time—and we eventually found a scraggy old bone that a dog must have brought in and chewed on for a while and then half buried. It smelt a bit. So that seemed the right sort of surprise.
We got into Miss Holland’s office easily—just walked straight in. We pulled the blind down, even though it meant we wouldn’t have much warning of anyone coming, and got to work. I tied the bone to one end of the string and put it in a drawer of her desk. Then we started unwinding it. We passed it through the handles of the desk, around the filing cabinets and through their drawers, over the fluorescent light, under the desk, between the legs of the chairs, in and out of the pot-plants, past the cords of the blinds (tying it to them on the way), around the air-cooler, through the document trays, under the ornaments, along the back of the bookshelves, through the spines of some of the biggest books, around a statue that was on a pedestal in a corner, under the rug, and around the umbrella stand. By this stage we were getting short of space, so I went out to Mrs Wilson’s office and kept watch. Johnny kept going, giving me a running commentary. He wound it round the clock, up over the light again, across to the curtain rod and round and round one of the curtains, then he pinned it in a pattern on the notice-board with the drawing pins, and threaded it through the backs of the chairs, round the handle of a vase, across the telephone and up to a clothes hook on the back of the door. Just then I saw the first couple of teachers coming out of the Staff Room after their meeting, so I yelled a warning to Johnny. He quickly cut the unused string off (not that there was much left) and tied the loose end to the door handle. Miss Holland came out of the Staff Room door but stopped for a moment to talk to Mr Kelvin. We couldn’t leave by the normal way, or we’d be in full view of them. We opened a window in Mrs Wilson’s office on the side away from the quadrangle, and shot out of that, tumbling over each other in our hurry. We were in a sort of heap on the ground for a moment, till we sorted ourselves out. Then we ran like crazy down to the road and around the corner to the bus-stop by the shops.
It was a while before we could speak, being so out of breath from running and laughing. We’d left our bags at school which didn’t matter. But we were pretty nervous till we were safely on the bus and a few ks away from the school.