Jacky Daydream Read online

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Mr Townsend, are you cross with me for telling lies?’

  ‘I don’t think you were really lying, Jacky. You were just making things up. There’s a big difference. You’ve got a very vivid imagination.’

  I took the deepest breath in all the world. ‘Do you think I might be able to write stories one day?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ said Mr Townsend solemnly.

  I wanted to throw my arms round his neck and kiss him.

  A week or so later Mr Townsend suggested we all might like to start a special project for English.

  ‘I’m going to give each of you your own notebook,’ he said.

  He patted a pile of brand-new green exercise books. School stationery was in short supply. We were taught to fill in every single line in our exercise books, even using up the fuzzy backing to the covers. We had to keep dipping our scratchy school pens far down into a thick gravy of congealed ink before we were allowed to top up our inkwells. Now we were being given a whole new notebook each. It was a sign that Mr Townsend was taking this special project seriously.

  ‘What is our project going to be on, Mr Townsend?’ Julian asked eagerly.

  He was the class swot, a highly intelligent, sweet, tufty-haired boy who waved his arm all the time in the-classroom, asking endless questions and knowing all the answers.

  ‘I think I will let you all choose individual projects, Julian,’ said Mr Townsend. ‘I want you to write about whatever interests you most. Maybe a special sport, a hobby, a period of history, a type of animal, a favourite country – whatever you like.’

  ‘Could I possibly do astronomy, sir?’ said Julian.

  A few children groaned. Other teachers would have groaned too and mocked Julian’s pedantic politeness, but not Mr Townsend.

  ‘I think that would be an excellent choice,’ he said.

  The rest of 3A had less esoteric choices.

  ‘Bags I do football!’

  ‘No, I’m doing football.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Can I do rugby?’

  ‘Can I write about my dog?’

  ‘I want to write about France – we’ve been there for our holidays.’

  ‘I want to write about birds. I’ve spotted heaps in my I-Spy book.’

  ‘Can I write about Gilbert and Sullivan?’ asked Cherry.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Are they your boyfriends?’

  ‘They wrote operettas. Mum and Dad sing in them and they’re ever so funny,’ said Cherry.

  There were sniggers.

  ‘Funny ha ha, or funny peculiar?’ said Jock, screwing his finger into the side of his head to indicate loopiness.

  ‘No, no, they are funny,’ said Mr Townsend. ‘I’ve sung in The Pirates of Penzance, Cherry.’

  This instantly gave Gilbert and Sullivan a total seal of approval.

  ‘Please may I write about ballet?’ Ann asked.

  ‘I wonder if I could write about Jesus?’ Marion asked. ‘What are you going to write about, Jacky?’

  ‘Maybe . . . maybe I could write a story?’ I said.

  ‘No, it’s a project. You can’t write an ordinary old story,’ said Marion.

  ‘Yes I can,’ I said. ‘Well, I don’t just want to write a story.’

  I went up to Mr Townsend’s desk, not wanting to shout it out in front of all the others.

  ‘Please could I write a novel for my project, Mr Townsend?’ I said.

  He hadn’t mocked Julian or Cherry. He didn’t mock me either.

  ‘I think that’s a brilliant idea, Jacky,’ he said.

  I danced back to my seat and nodded my head at Marion. ‘Did you hear that? Mr Townsend said it was an excellent idea,’ I said.

  ‘He’s just being kind,’ said Marion. ‘Anyway, you can’t write a whole novel.’

  ‘Yes I can,’ I said.

  I couldn’t, of course. I wrote twenty-one sides, and that included a Contents page, but it was divided into seven chapters and it seemed like a whole novel to me.

  I decided to write about a large family. I very much wanted to be a member of a large family. It was too intense when it was just Biddy and Harry and me. I decided this was going to be about a poor family with problems. I was irritated by the smug, safe, middle-class world of most of my children’s books. The fathers were doctors and vicars, the mothers baked cakes and arranged flowers, the children went to posh schools and rode on ponies and had picnics and played jolly games.

  I only knew one book about poor people, and that was The Family from One End Street. The family were called the Ruggles. I wanted to use a similar semi-comic name. I liked listening to a comedy series on the radio called Meet the Huggetts. I decided to call my family the Maggots. I called my first chapter ‘Meet the Maggots’. My dad was called Alf and was a bus driver. I drew him with a pipe and a moustache to make it clear he was a man. I wasn’t very good at drawing males.

  My mum was called Daisy. She didn’t go out to work, she just (!) looked after her seven children. She had a bun and worry lines across her forehead. She was particularly worried about her eldest, fifteen-year-old Marilyn, as she was ‘dead keen on boys. And boys were dead keen on her too.’ She was a pretty blonde. I drew her with ornate earrings. Pierced ears were considered ‘fast’ on young girls in the 1950s. I wanted Marilyn to be very fast.

  Then there was Marlene. She was twelve and brainy. She’d passed her scholarship to the grammar school (as I was expected to do next year). I wrote: ‘Her interest is books. You can’t drag her out of them.’ Poor Marlene wasn’t a beauty like her sister. She had a mousy ponytail and had to wear National Health glasses. I’d just started to wear glasses myself. Biddy was enormously proud of the fact that she’d paid for special fancy glasses with upswept frames. She wasn’t having her daughter wearing little round pink National Health specs, thank you very much.

  The third sister was called Mandy. She was ten and had big brown eyes and dark plaits and was desperate to be an actress. No prizes for guessing who I based her on!

  Then I branched out and invented nine-year-old boy twins. There were boy twins in The Family from One End Street so I was obviously copying. I called my twins Marmaduke and Montague. Daisy had obvious aspirations for her first sons. Then she went on to have Melvyn, a shy, sensitive little boy who was mercilessly teased by five-year-old Marigold, the baby of the family. She was a fiesty little girl with abundant blonde curls and a misleading angelic expression.

  I gave each child their own chapter, inventing little domestic scenarios, still shamelessly copying when I ran out of original ideas. Marilyn decided to dye her hair to please her boyfriend Sid and ended up with bright green locks – something very similar happened to Anne of Green Gables. The twins discovered stolen treasure as if they were reserve members of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five.

  ‘The Maggots’ was not a particularly startling or stylish story, sadly – but I can nowadays claim, jokingly, that I wrote my first novel at the age of nine.

  * * *

  Who wrote a story about ‘Night-time’ at school and tried very hard – but her teacher said that it was very rambling, and she had a warped imagination?

  * * *

  It was Tracy Beaker in the second book about her, The Dare Game.

  Last week we had to write a story about ‘Night-time’ and I thought it an unusually cool subject so I wrote eight and a half pages about this girl out late at night and it’s seriously spooky and then this crazy guy jumps out at her and almost murders her but she escapes by jumping in the river and then she swims right into this bloated corpse and then when she staggers onto the bank there’s this strange flickering light coming from the nearby graveyard and it’s an evil occult sect wanting to sacrifice an innocent young girl and she’s just what they’re looking for . . .

  Tracy thinks she’s written a masterpiece but her teacher, Mrs Bagley, isn’t particularly appreciative. She tells Tracy she has a ver