‘How hard can it be to design a school uniform?’ asked Olive. ‘It’s just clothing. And I am rather good with clothes.’
An uncomfortable silence filled the entrance hall. Her fellow students stared. Alfonzo clamped his hand over Anastasia’s mouth before she could say anything hurtful.
‘Rather good with clothes!’ shrieked Blimp. He collapsed on the rug and giggled until his belly ached.
Our heroine was, you see, highly intelligent and resourceful. She was brave and true to her friends. She was brilliant at spelling tricky words like ‘bivouacking’ and ‘pharmaceutical’. But she was not good with clothes. Olive was a child who wore pink rabbit-shaped slippers, tartan skirts, cardigans and long socks.
Long socks!!
If given a choice between fashion and comfort, she would choose comfort nine times out of ten. The tenth time she would choose something cute . . . like the hat that she was wearing right now. It was shaped like a koala and when you squeezed the left ear, it played ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’.
Oh no, no, no, no, no! Olive was not good with clothes.
‘You are not good with clothes,’ said Anastasia when she had finally removed Alfonzo’s hand by biting it. ‘I will help you, Olive, to ensure that we do not embarrass ourselves before the Queen.’
‘And I!’ declared Bozo with a toss of silver confetti. Uniforms were often dull and he wanted to keep an element of fun about theirs.
‘And us,’ squeaked the rats.
Olive smiled at her newly formed uniform committee. She sent Chester and Blimp upstairs to empty her piggy bank, Bozo to rifle around the cushions of all sofas and chairs for loose change. She passed the tape measure to Anastasia, the pencil and notepad to Wordsworth, and asked the students to line up in order to have their measurements taken.
Anastasia, while fascinated by fashion, was hopeless with numbers or any other mathematical concept. She simply held the tape measure and said the first thing that came into her head. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was quite capable of recording numbers, but was simply not interested. His passion was words.
Anastasia wrapped the tape measure around Fumble’s belly. ‘Three minutes and forty-five seconds.’
Wordsworth nodded, then scribbled in his notepad. As he wrote, he spoke the words with dramatic flair: ‘Large but probably normal for a tender-hearted moose with a voracious appetite for ruby-red apples.’
Fumble blushed and sucked on his front hoof.
Anastasia held the tape measure beside Scruffy’s tail. ‘Eight hundred and seventy kilograms.’
Wordsworth declared, ‘Shortish with a fizzely-foozely fuzz of unruly but charming hair.’ He underlined ‘charming’ with a flourish of his pencil.
‘Thank you!’ barked Scruffy.
Anastasia leapt onto Alfonzo’s shoulders and stretched the tape measure along Elizabeth-Jane’s neck. ‘Wow!’ she exclaimed. ‘Sixty-six litres!’
The grey rat chewed thoughtfully on the pencil, then let his vocabulary run free. ‘Astonishingly, profoundly, tremendously, remarkably, staggeringly, extremely, supremely elongated.’
Elizabeth-Jane was thrilled.
Olive thought the system worked quite well. As far as she was concerned, close enough was good enough. Besides, there was more than one way to skin a cat, one had to take the good with the bad, beggars couldn’t be choosers and time was of the essence. At least, that’s what it said in Wordsworth’s Little Blue Book of Wise and Witty Sayings that she had been flicking through while waiting for them to finish!
‘All done!’ cried Anastasia after forty-five minutes. ‘Except for the pig.’
An awkward silence fell over the gathering.
Anastasia held up her hands, palms facing out, and stepped backwards.
Everyone looked to Olive.
‘Right!’ said our heroine, and she marched over to the cupboard beneath the stairs.
She stopped and stared. ‘Good grief!’ The door had been painted a deep, glossy red and a new doorbell had been installed – bright and brassy with a crystal button. ‘So much for the humble cupboard!’ She sighed and pressed the button.
A bell rang.
‘How dreadfully odd,’ Olive mused. ‘That ringing sounds like it is coming from way up above. The stairs and corridors of these old buildings do mess with noises and echoes. It’s quite ridiculous!’
She waited and waited, but there was no reply. She reached forward to ring the bell a second time, but was interrupted by a clunk, some rattling like a train running along a railway track, a long whirring sound and a thud.
Olive frowned.
The cupboard door opened a crack and Pig McKenzie poked his slimy pink snout through the gap. There was a smear of grease above his left nostril.
‘Hello, Omnivore!’ he sneered. ‘How charming to see you. What can you do for me?’
‘My name is Olive, not Omnivore,’ she said.
‘Whatever.’
Olive took a deep breath. ‘I am here to take your measurements for our new school uniform. The one we’ll be wearing for the Queen’s visit.’
Pig McKenzie’s eyes narrowed to two little slits. ‘A uniform?’ he asked. ‘Will mine be special?’
‘Oh yes! They will all be special,’ she explained. ‘All the same, but all very dashing.’
‘You want me to wear the same clothes as every other student at Groves?’ grunted the pig. ‘The same clothes as . . . as . . . as you!’ A blob of saliva flew out of his mouth as he spat the word ‘you’.
Olive wiped her face. She nodded.
‘No, thank you!’ snorted Pig McKenzie, and he slammed the door. But not before he had tossed out a scrunched-up piece of paper.
Olive smoothed out the page and immediately wished she hadn’t. For it was a picture of herself, trussed like a rolled roast, lying in the window of a butcher’s shop amidst a bounty of sausages, chops and steaks. A sign hung overhead. It said: Free meet. Bares, lines end tigers welcum!
Olive slid the picture back under the pig’s door and dusted off her hands. Straightening her koala-shaped hat, she popped money and measurements into her cardigan pocket, said farewell and led Anastasia, Bozo and the rats down the street towards the shops.
Finding a tailor who was willing to provide a number of dashing uniforms for the bargain price of eight dollars and forty cents proved harder than one might think.
Three shopkeepers refused entry because rats, apparently, were not good for business. Olive tried to explain that the rats were business, but her pleas fell on deaf ears.
Terrence and Tatiana of Truly Tantalising Tailoring were quite enthusiastic about sewing the uniforms. They quickly lost interest, however, when they realised that their enormous fees could not be met. Olive offered to pay by bringing a real live acrobatic troupe to their next birthday party, and gave a brief demonstration of her skills.
‘Get out!’ shouted Terrence, and he chased her from the store.
How dreadfully rude! Olive did not mean to kick Tatiana in the teeth as she cartwheeled by. But there you have it. Some people are so unforgiving!
Mr Gripp of Gripp’s Rare and Glamorous Garments seemed rather sweet, until his true interest became clear. He offered Olive a generous amount of money for the furs and skins of every talking animal at Groves. ‘It will solve all your uniform problems,’ he explained. ‘Less to dress and more money to clothe those remaining.’ He also embarked on a passionate soliloquy about the joys of taxidermy, but Olive and her uniform committee ran from the shop with their hands over their ears, shouting, ‘La-la-la-la-la!’
By midday, our heroine felt her spirits wavering. And when I say that she felt her spirits wavering, it is really a polite way of saying that she had grown rather forlorn. And when I say that she had grown rather forlorn, it is really a polite way of saying that she was tired, hungry, grumpy and totally disheartened, and wanted to sit down in the gutter and rock back and forth with her head in her hands, moaning.
Thankfully, she did not.
Instead, she rushed across the street to help a frail and elderly gentleman with his burden.