How To Survive Summer Camp (ePub)

by Jacqueline Wilson

  ‘I’ll do the sports page,’ said Louise.

  I stared at her.

  ‘I know more about sports than anyone else, don’t I?’ said Louise, idly picking up her tennis racket and bouncing a ball up and down on the strings.

  She was right. And it was a major triumph, Louise actually wanting to write for my magazine.

  ‘OK, Louise. You’re the sports correspondent,’ I agreed.

  Karen had gone very red. She looked as if she might be trying hard not to cry.

  ‘You can be on the magazine too, Karen,’ said Marzipan.

  ‘Here, I’m the editor,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry, I wouldn’t write for your daft old magazine even if you went down on your knees and begged,’ Karen shouted, and she ran out of the room.

  We soon forgot about her because we were so busy. I had great fun writing the Stars page, especially the horoscope for my own birthsign, Sagittarius.

  ‘You are at the start of a brilliant career. At last everyone will recognize your true talents. Do not be deterred by hostility. They are only jealous. You have a really starry future. Warning: avoid water at all costs!’

  Then I settled down to do my Star Film Review. I drew a big screen taking up nearly all the page on Marzipan’s pad and then did a border of all the delicious food you get to eat in the cinema: popcorn and Mars bars and Magnum icecreams and hot dogs and Coke and ice lollies. Then I started writing my review inside the screen—and that was when I got stuck.

  My all-time favourite film was Curse of the Killer Vampire Bats. Mum bought it for me by mistake. She found a whole pile of children’s videos at £1 a time at a Car Boot Sale and gave them to me to keep me quiet. They were mostly babyish cartoons and I fidgeted and fussed throughout—but when I watched Curse of the Killer Vampire Bats I stayed still as a mouse and didn’t so much as squeak. It was certainly not a children’s video. It had got put in this Kute Kartoons for Kiddies case by mistake.

  I couldn’t believe my luck. It was so wonderfully scary. I loved the Killer Vampire Bats. They started off as furry little Vampire Bat Babies with weeny teeny teeth, but then they grew and grew and grew. Their teeth turned into the sharpest fangs ever so they could rip your head off your neck with one bite.

  Mum just about died when she saw what I was watching and threw it in the dustbin. I was furious with her—but she couldn’t stop me buying my own toy rubber vampire bat with my pocket money. I called him Bloodsucker and decided he was a distant wicked relation of Squeakycheese. I encouraged Bloodsucker in his evil habits for all I was worth. Mum had just started to go out with Uncle Bill then. Bloodsucker decided he simply couldn’t stick Uncle Bill. He kept attacking him like crazy, going for his neck.

  Mum said if I couldn’t control Bloodsucker he was going in the dustbin too. I knew she meant it, so Bloodsucker decided Uncle Bill’s blood was too watery for his taste. He had a happy time in my toy cupboard instead, gorging on all my old discarded Barbies.

  But now I was stuck writing my review of Curse of the Killer Vampire Bats because Mum had thrown it away when I was only halfway through watching it. I needed to know what happened at the end. I asked everyone if they’d ever seen a truly super film called Curse of the Killer Vampire Bats but nobody else had seen it. Then Rosemary smiled.

  ‘I’ve seen it, Stella,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘Yes. I remember the vampire bat. I couldn’t watch much. I had to go behind the sofa.’

  She was taking a break from writing DORA’S DRAMMATIK RESKU because her wrist was aching so she was busy tidying Dora’s bed.

  ‘She’s got it in such a mess, I just don’t know what she’s been up to,’ said Rosemary primly. ‘Naughty Dora.’

  ‘I’m not at all surprised you had to go behind the sofa. I was just a little bit frightened of Curse of the Killer Vampire Bats,’ I admitted.

  ‘Dora was terribly frightened,’ said Rosemary, making her donkey shake all over. ‘They attacked a cow.’

  ‘A cow?’ I said. ‘You mean … a naughty lady?’

  ‘No. A real cow. And Dora and I thought if those vampire bats could attack a cow they might easily go for a donkey.’

  ‘There weren’t any cows in Curse of the Killer Vampire Bats,’ I said. ‘There were lots of ladies in nighties and they all died horribly, blood dribbling down their chests.’

  ‘I didn’t see any ladies in nighties,’ said Rosemary.

  ‘Yes. Well. You were behind the sofa.’

  ‘But I was listening. There was just this one man. And the vampire bats. On the telly.’

  It turned out she’d been watching some little nature programme.

  ‘You are an idiot, Rosemary,’ I said impatiently.

  ‘Don’t be mean to me, Stella. You’ll upset Dora,’ said Rosemary, making the donkey droop.

  ‘Cheer up, Dora,’ I said quickly.

  ‘She’s too unhappy now. Look, she’s sobbing,’ said Rosemary, making little sniffy noises and helping Dora wipe her eyes with her front hooves.

  I was getting a bit fed up with all this.

  ‘She’s yawning now,’ I said, snatching Dora and making her mouth gape. ‘She’s terribly tired. I think we’d better pop her into bed now.’

  ‘No! Don’t put Dora into bed,’ Rosemary squealed, snatching her away.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked, startled.

  Rosemary shuffled right up to me and whispered in my ear. ‘She’s wet it.’

  I giggled. ‘No she hasn’t. She’s completely house trained and—’

  ‘She’s really wet it, Stella. Look,’ Rosemary whispered, holding up the old cardigan.

  So I looked. And examined it. Rosemary was right.

  ‘Rosemary!’

  Rosemary shrugged helplessly.

  ‘You didn’t—?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then—?’

  We both looked at Dora. Her head still drooped, as if in shame.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ I said.

  I wondered if it could have been Tinkypoo. But he never came near our dormi. It was a mystery.

  The plot of Curse of the Killer Vampire Bats remained a mystery too. In the end I just wrote, ‘Curse of the Killer Vampire Bats is the best film I’ve ever seen. If you see it you will be scared senseless.’ I drew a picture of Bloodsucker grinning wickedly and coloured all round his mouth very red indeed.

  It was getting near lunch time but I got started on my story, copying out Princess Stellarina from my red and black notebook.

  ‘You’ve got your own notebook, you could have done the magazine in that,’ said Marzipan reproachfully.

  ‘Yes, but I’ve written out my Stellarina story in it, I’ve used up heaps of pages.’

  ‘You’re using up heaps of my pages now,’ said Marzipan. ‘What are you copying out?’

  ‘My Princess Stellarina story. It’s going to be the special Star Story now.’

  ‘Oh goody goody,’ said Rosemary, tucking Dora into a new bed of clean T-shirt and knickers.

  ‘You can’t put that story in your magazine,’ said Marzipan. ‘The Brigadier and Miss Hamer-Cotton and Uncle Ron might want to have a read of it. They’ll have a fit. They’ll see you’re making fun of them. Oh, Stella, you can’t!’

  ‘Yes, I can,’ I said—but when I read the whole story through I started to worry. Perhaps I could cross out the Brigavampire parts. The Brigadier was sort of my friend now. I could leave in the bits about Hag Hateful-Catty—although she was the Brigadier’s daughter. Well, at least I could keep the Uncle Pong parts. Or could I? Uncle Ron kept swearing he’d have me swimming like a little seal by the time I went home. I still couldn’t swim more than two strokes at a time and I kept going under and choking—but when I was nearly crying Uncle Ron ducked under the water and came up blowing bubbles so that I laughed instead.

  I sighed now and ripped out my Stellarina story from the magazine. I’d have to think of something else instead.

 
I brooded about my story over lunch and let my meal go cold. It didn’t really matter. The fishfingers were lukewarm to start with and so undercooked that I couldn’t help imagining the cold slimy little things still had tails and fins and beady eyes underneath the breadcrumbs. I prodded them dubiously and reached for my pudding. It was jam tart, a smear of strawberry on great grey paving-stone pastry and the custard had sickened in its jug and developed hard skin and boils.

  I made this joke and everyone groaned and stopped eating except James.

  ‘Honestly, James, how can you eat it?’ I said, staring in horrified fascination as he dipped a fishfinger into custard and ate both with relish.

  ‘I’m hungry, see,’ said James, his mouth full. ‘But I agree, this tuck is horrible muck. It’s even worse than my school and that’s breaking the rule. That’s just zero zero zero stars in my personal Bad Food Guide. This is zero zero zero zilch, I must confide.’

  I had a sudden idea.

  ‘James, you’re interested in food, aren’t you?’

  ‘You’d be a twit not to notice it,’ said James.

  ‘Can you do any cooking?’

  ‘Mmm,’ said James, nodding.

  ‘You cook?’ said Richard, sniggering. ‘A boy cooking! What a cissy.’

  ‘Of course I can, it’s a job for a man,’ said James. ‘A chef is a bloke and that’s not a joke.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to write a cookery page for my magazine, would you?’ I asked eagerly.

  ‘I’ll write you a page for a very large wage.’

  ‘I can’t pay you anything!’

  ‘Then I won’t do it and you just blew it.’

  ‘Oh do stop those silly rhymes, they don’t half get on my nerves. Look, I’m not paying any of the others anything so why should I pay you? Please do it, James. Go on. It’d be ever so good.’

  I tried flattering him like anything but I couldn’t get round him. I asked Marzipan and some of the other girls if they could do it instead, but none of us knew much about cooking.

  Then the next morning I got a present from Mum and Uncle Bill. They were spending the first few days of their honeymoon in Paris and so they sent me a real French can-can dancer doll. She had feathers in her hair and a frilly pink skirt like a lampshade. I lifted up the pink ruffles to see what sort of knickers she was wearing and discovered that she didn’t even have legs, let alone knickers. The space underneath her skirt was filled with a cone of chocolates wrapped in pink foil paper.

  I tried one straight away but it was a bit of a disappointment. It was plain chocolate for a start and the filling was flavoured with liqueur or something that made it taste bitter. I let Marzipan have a nibble and she didn’t like it much either.

  But I knew who might like it. I did a little bargaining with James and he eventually agreed to write a cookery page for a fee of five French chocolates.

  ‘Though it’s not much of a wage. And what sort of cookery page?’ said James, munching.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s up to you. Do me a recipe for something. Only don’t do it in rhyme, that’s all I ask.’

  James went away and wrote me out a recipe for Special Star biscuits. I thought that was a smashing idea but when I read it through I couldn’t understand half of it because it was full of those weird cookery

  words that always get me muddled. How can you cream butter and sugar? And how do you leave to cool? Does that mean put in fridge? How cool is cool?

  James sighed and said I was as thick as a brick but when I gave him two more chocolates he wrote it all out again using ordinary words I could understand.

  STAR BISCUITS. A RECIPE FOR COMPLETE IDIOTS

  Things you need to make the biscuits:

  4 oz butter (just cut one packet in half)

  4 oz caster sugar (if you haven’t got scales

  to weigh it on then it’s four heaped table

  spoons. They’re the great big ones you can’t

  get right into your mouth)

  8 oz plain flour (measure in same way)

  5 oz icing sugar (measure ditto)

  1 egg

  1 tube of little silver balls for decoration

  1 Jiffy lemon

  Right. First switch on the oven at 190oc (375F) or gas mark 5. This can heat up nicely while you make the biscuits. Don’t take all day or you’ll be wasting electricity. You take the butter and the caster sugar first. (Not the icing sugar. Guess what. That is for icing the biscuits.) You shove the butter and caster sugar in a big bowl and beat them around with a wooden spoon. They stick together in lumps and it looks as if it isn’t going to work but carry on mixing them and quite soon they blend together and go all soft and creamy and smooth. Then you add the flour and mix that around too until it all looks the same colour. Then in another bowl crack the egg (just bash it on the side of the bowl and let it slurp out inside the bowl, not outside) and beat it up with a fork until it stops looking disgusting and is a nice frothy yellow. Then add the egg into the bowl of butter, sugar, and flour. It goes all oozy and you have to beat it around quite a bit with the spoon. You can also do it with your hand but if so make sure your hands are clean. No one wants little bits of fluff or grit or worse lurking in their biscuit. When it is all smooth like soft plasticine you get a rolling pin. Roll the nice squidgy mixture on a clean surface on which you’ve sprinkled a little bit of flour. You can sprinkle flour on your rolling pin too. Only a bit, don’t make it look as if it’s snowing.

  Then roll it out carefully. You must know how to roll, if not you’re too thick to make biscuits, you probably don’t even know how to eat them. When it’s all smooth and as flat as you can get it without it developing holes then use a cutter. Ideally you need a cutter in the shape of a star. If you haven’t got one maybe you could use a round jampot lid and then snip into the circle with scissors turning it into a star. This might make the stars a bit lopsided but have a go. Then you smear a bit of old butter or marge all over a baking tray (great if you can just use the wrapper round the butter). This is to make the tray slippery so the biscuits won’t stick when they’re cooked. Put the star shapes on the greased baking tray. Leave a biscuit-sized gap between each one because they spread out a lot as they cook. Then put them in the oven on one of the little shelves. Not right at the top or they might burn. Make sure you close the door properly. They take about 8–10 minutes to cook. While they are doing this then you’re supposed to wash up. I don’t always. About 8 minutes after you’ve put the biscuits in they start to smell delicious. You can open the oven

  door and peep at them to make sure they’re not going too brown. If they’re still very pale then they obviously aren’t cooked yet. Wait another couple of minutes and try again. Careful when you take them out the oven. You’ll need an oven glove or an old towel. You can’t touch a red hot baking tray with your bare hands. Well, you can, but you have to go around in bandages for weeks. So, you take the baking tray out. The biscuits will still be softish so don’t poke them about too much. Leave them for five or ten minutes so they can harden up a bit. Slide a fish slice or a flat knife under them gently one by one and put them on a wire mesh cooking thing. If you haven’t got one then use the wire tray inside the grill pan. Anyway, leave the biscuits to cool a bit more, at least ten minutes. While they are cooling it’s time to mix the icing sugar. This is the best bit. You have to put the 5 oz through a sieve into a bowl. It doesn’t flop through all at once. You have to encourage it by rubbing it through with a spoon. When it’s all in the bowl you add about one tablespoonful of Jiffy lemon juice. You can add plain water instead, but lemon gives a much better taste.

  Don’t add it all at once. Icing sugar is horribly deceptive. You can add one little squeeze and it seems to disappear into the sugar but when you mix it around with a spoon it suddenly goes all sloppy and runny and useless. So not more than a tablespoon of lemon juice and mix it around and around with a metal spoon until eventually it’s smooth. You shouldn’t be able to pour it like milk, sort of ooze it like crea
m. I’d spread it on the biscuits with a knife, it’s less messy. Do not have too many sly licks or there won’t be enough. Then dot your little silver balls over the icing. Then EAT them.

  When I’d read it all through I gave James another chocolate for luck.

  ‘Here, why’s old Fatso getting all your chocolates, Stella?’ said Alan. ‘I’ll do something for your magazine if you like.’

  He did a carefully drawn comic strip. I knew he’d copied part of it from the Beano but I gave him a chocolate anyway. Then I had to give one to Bilbo too because he’d got Alan to help him print some silly old jokes we’d all heard hundreds of times already. Bilbo didn’t even like his chocolate and was rude enough to spit it straight out.

  Richard helped Louise with her sports column and he also did his own Sports Star quiz. I didn’t know any of the answers and I didn’t think many of the others would either but I quite liked the idea of a quiz. I decided to make it a great big All Stars Quiz and I got everyone to help me make up questions on Television Stars and Film Stars and Pop Stars. Nearly everyone. Karen was still sulking and wouldn’t join in.

  I certainly didn’t care. My magazine was coming along splendidly. I even thought of a new Star Story. The idea came to me when I was looking at my beautifully repaired book at bedtime. I’d always liked the baddies in the fairy tales much more than all those whimpering princesses and simpering princes. So I decided to write my own Topsy-Turvy tales for the magazine. I had Fifty Favourite Topsy-Turvy Tales as my first title. A few days later I changed it to Fifteen Favourite Topsy-Turvy Tales. It actually ended up as Five Favourite Topsy-Turvy Tales. I wrote about the wolf gobbling up the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood and the woodcutter, Rumpelstiltskin leaving that silly girl to do her own spinning and skipping off with all the gold, the Three Bears catching Goldilocks and pelting her with porridge, the Ugly Sisters one at a time cramming their great fat feet into the glass slipper and sharing the handsome prince between them, and the giant squashing Jack into squidge with one great stamp of his boot.