by Julie Bell

Created on: October 27, 2008

Everything was fine until I blew up the quarry and my parents had to come and collect me from the police station. It all turned to custard after that.

It happened the year that I was in Room 5. If you got put in Room 6 for your last year before high school, you could heave a sigh of relief. Mr. Tizzard would make you stay in at play time and give you 100 lines and predict your future career as a garbage collector. Tizzy was as battle-scarred as the desks defaced by generations of nicknames and rude words. He might spit gobs into his moustache going, "It's v-v-vandalism! Nothing but pure vandalism!' but overall, he was just a harmless old codger who'd never had kids of his own, marking time to retirement.

But Room 5 they called it the Torture Chamber. Mr. Leadbetter had one simple rule for controlling the snot-nosed guttersnipes of our beer-soaked, sun-scorched town. Instill terror. Any kid unlucky enough to be assigned to Room 5 knew the legend long before treading warily across the threshold of his classroom.

I successfully attracted his attention on my very first day and I wasn't even trying. All he'd done so far to make sure we were really listening was pick up a chair and toss it across the room. The boy was still in the chair when it landed, but did not remain attached to the splintered wood beneath his petrified and bruised behind for very long.

Mr. Leadbetter was telling us what excellent speller he was and how his father was even better. So he never, and he meant, NEVER wrote his father a letter unless he had an open dictionary, and he meant, OPEN dictionary on his desk. If his old man was anything like mine, I could well imagine he might have a good reason for such diligence. My neck still being sore from yesterday, I decided to ease it by gently turning it from side to side. My collar tickled the back of my neck, giving me goose-bumps. So I kept on doing it - all the while listening intently to the teacher's spiel, of course. Turn to the left turn to the right. Bliss. I drifted in the warm afternoon sun while a blowfly buzzed at the grubby panes.

"DICK BELL!"

I stopped in mid-turn. My eyes were frozen shut.

Should I open them? Or leave them shut?

I forced them open. They dilated.

"If you THINK that you are already so utterly brilliant that you can stick your nose in the air like that and SHAKE YOUR HEAD when I am instructing you then you had better make QUITE sure that any work you hand in to me has NO and I mean NO mistakes or you will be making corrections

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