Playschool (13 page)

¹
The King's full title is eighteen pages long but here is a brief version: King-Nombre-Sept-À-Quatorze-Knees-And-Bumpsadaisy-The-Four-Hundred-And-Fourteenth-And-A-Half-Grand-Protector-Of-The-Haunted-Grapefruit-Keeper-Of-The-Holey-Pants-Guardian-Of-The-Square-Window-Supreme-Cuddler-Of-The-Round-Widow-Prince-Of-Half-An-Hour-Before-Twilight-Kevin-King-Of-Cardboard-Keeper-Of-The-Dinner-Money-And-All-Who-Sail-In-Her-The-Ninth-Except-On-Tuesdays.

²
Not that money is ever a problem for witches and wizards. If they can't find a way of stealing it, they just make it using a spell and some simple everyday ingredients like shoe polish and centipedes.

³
Nerlin's family hadn't always been Dirt People. Once they had ruled Transylvania Waters, but, as so often happens, treachery, revolution and badly fitting tights had led to their downfall.

⁴
When the building was finished, Merlin turned the human peasants into upside-down blind cave fish, which still exist to this day. (This is true – when I was a boy my uncle had an upside-down blind cave fish in a tropical tank. It was pink, blind and swam upside down.)

⁵
A very remote island off the west coast of the Outer Hebrides, which is off the north-west coast of Scotland.

⁶
Radius Leg chose not to wear his amulet as he liked the sudden unexpected searing bolt of agony when Orkward stuck a needle in his photo. When Orkward found out about this, he immediately stopped doing it.

⁷
Orkward had tried smiling once but his mirror had laughed at him and the whole thing had made both him and the mirror sick for a week.

⁸
That was the abbreviated thought and all Prebender Glorious had time for. The full thought was:
I wish I was anywhere but here, doing any job but this, preferably a job that never brought me within two miles of anyone under twenty-five. What have I done to deserve this? Did I lock the back door when I left the house? I don't have a back door. I don't even have a house!
And so on for forty-three pages.

⁹
For example, if you look on
here
and
here
you'll see he's appeared there when he has nothing to do with the story at all.

¹⁰
Actually cats are dreadful snobs and think all other creatures are beneath contempt.

¹¹
No one ever said it was easy being a wizard.

¹²
Mordonna kept offering to turn Satanella back into a little girl, but she had decided life was more fun as a dog. ‘Of course, if I fall in love with a handsome wizard I'll probably want to change back,' she said. ‘But on the other hand I might fall in love with a whippet.'

¹³
Except the Millipede family, who are obsessed with numbers and spend all day counting their legs.

¹⁴
Which Narled had strangely failed to pick up.

¹⁵
You can imagine the chaos created by a metre-tall bird, with massively powerful jaws full of very sharp teeth, landing on top of people's heads shouting, ‘Who's a pretty boy then?'

¹⁶
Merlinmary Flood is trying to train some of Winchflat's spare birds as homing dodos. They're very good at finding their way back but, because they can't fly and are rather fat, they can only find their way home from about two hundred metres away. Merlinmary is now trying to teach dodos to read maps.

¹⁷
A cross between a bat and an onion.

¹⁸
It should be noted that this experiment had been done three hundred years earlier by Doctor Mordant's predecessor and that most of the accountants currently alive do actually have fish brains.

¹⁹
The school has thirteen clock towers because, unlike the rest of the world, Quicklime's runs on a twenty-six-hour day. Each tower rings on its own hour with a different note so that wherever you are in the valley you always know what the time is to within fifty-eight minutes (each hour has fifty-nine minutes).

²⁰
Just as you get a flock of sheep and a pride of lions and a lump of PE teachers, so you get a cloakroom of
Sacculus Pluscruris Patagonius.

²¹
Orkward's parents tried not to think about the day their son would finally leave school and return home with his nasty little head full of revenge. ‘We'll blow that bridge up when he comes to it,' said his mother.

²²
Talking proper.

²³
Shoelace???

²⁴
Quicklime's parents never worry when their children don't come home, for two reasons. One, the kids are witches and wizards so they can look after themselves; and two, Quicklime's students often stay behind at school for strange midnight ceremonies and rituals.

²⁵
Actually, only one of them, Audrey the hamster, was a real animal. The others, like Satanella, had once been children.

²⁶
If this seems rather complicated and leaves you feeling a bit muddled, take five minutes to run your head under a cold tap before reading any more.

²⁷
If you look at the back of this book there is a page about the Mobius Strip which explains how this happens. Once you get in, you can never get out again.

²⁸
Apart from the kitchen maid, who came in to get some marmalade.

²⁹
The back of Merlinmary's hand was very hairy, which none of the chimneys was. Actually, there was one secret tunnel that was extremely hairy, but that's another story.

³⁰
The Mobius Strip again.

³¹
The cellars beneath Quicklime College are even more extensive than the ones beneath the Floods' houses at 11 and 13 Acacia Avenue. There is a rumour that the two sets of cellars are somehow joined together even though they are on opposite sides of the planet. There is a more incredible rumour that Quicklime's cellars actually spread out like a fine cobweb beneath the entire planet. This is completely ridiculous and completely true.

³²
If you had a shadow that kept creeping up behind you and hitting the back of your head, you'd be scared too.

³³
Click here
for a few verses of the school song.

³⁴
Meaning Mordonna's sunglasses, because as everyone knows, one glance into Mordonna's eyes and you fall madly in love with her.

³⁵
It would be three days before the second place competitor reached the stadium and by then everyone would have gone home and it was the school holidays.

³⁶
Matron had clones for every member of staff, including herself. They had not been created using Winchflat's new Special 3D Photocopier, but by an older, much more dangerous system that often produced clones that were nothing like the originals.

³⁷
Not including a seventy-mile beach in north Queensland. If you add that in, then there were fifteen more grains of sand than grains of Orkward Warlock.

³⁸
Come on, Orkward Warlock was vile. He doesn't deserve a happy ending. Anyway, how could his parents have anything to do with him when he was blown up into a million, billion little pieces. Surely that's way too many pieces to ever be put back together again. Or is it? And it's not true that Orkward was the devil's son. His dad really was the milkman, and a milkman disguise is much too ordinary for the Prince of Darkness. Or is it?

^*
Or thirty-five more if you include the two really rude verses that have been banned by the Parents Committee, who know how bad the verses are from singing them when they were at Quicklime's.