Chapter 29

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It was okay. Phredde PING!ed the whole school 1000 metres in the air at the first roar.

Of course it WAS pretty cold up there, and some of the kindergarteners got a bit scared and the school pigeons were so startled they did ten years’ doo-doo in one drop, but really everyone took it pretty well. As Mrs Allen, our headmistress, said, ‘The school is getting used to things like this.’

Then she started laughing in a funny sort of way and told Mrs Olsen she was taking a long, long holiday where there weren’t any volcanoes or ogres or dragons and would someone please send her the ‘jobs vacant’ ads.

There wasn’t much left of the school after the volcano exploded, of course, but that didn’t matter because Phredde’s mum PING!ed the classrooms back again when she came to pick Phredde up. (Or down, as we were still at 1000 metres. You get a GREAT view from there). And she got rid of the volcano, too, as it was a little bit unreliable.

‘What do you think I should give the school to replace it?’ she asked me. ‘I don’t want to give you a boring bell again.’

‘How about a pair of hippopotamuses?’ I suggested. ‘They can roar every time we have to go into class!’

So she did. Their names are Daisy and Tinkerbelle and we are the first school in our region to have our very own pet hippopotamuses, and now they’ve got their own swamp down by the oval, after Mrs Allen said firmly they could not live in the swimming pool anymore.

That was before she flew off to Tahiti. Or was it Hawaii? No, it can’t have been Hawaii because they have volcanoes there, too. Come to think of it, Mrs Allen forgot to give us her address.

And that was the end of that adventure.

I think.

I sometimes wonder, though.

Just a month ago, I was in the library leafing through this book on Egypt. Modern Egypt, not Ancient Egypt.

There were lots of cool pictures of boats on the Nile and the Aswan Dam and camels and big buildings in Cairo, and I wondered what King Narmer and Fluffy would have thought of everything that has happened to their country in the last five thousand years, and I was getting just a bit homesick, well, Ancient Egypt sick, and wishing we could visit Narmer and Fluffy and old Sennufer …

And then I turned the page and there was this picture of the pyramids. You know, I was sure they weren’t purple before!

And that photo of the sphinx too — didn’t it once have the body of a lion, not a beetle? And didn’t it have a man’s head, not the face of a giant frog?

A bit like Bruce, in fact.

But then I thought, nah, no way could we have changed history.

And then I went out to footie training because we really needed all the practice we could get because of the match we have to play next month with all those vampires and it’s going to be really bad if we lose!

But that’s another story.18