Aunt Effie and Mrs Grizzle Read Online Free

because you ran away to sea and didn’t come to school last year. Your brains shrivelled, your heads shrunk, and your legs got shorter. The whole lot of you will have to start all over again in Primer One.”
    “Aunt Effie said we don’t have to go to school,” Lizzie said, and we nodded our shrunken heads up and down. But Mr Jones didn’t believe us.
    “What if the School Inspector comes and finds you don’t know your spelling and your times tables?”
    “Will he give us the strap?” asked Lizzie.
    Mr Jones burst into tears. “He’ll give it to me because I haven’t taught you properly!” He blubbed so much, we made him sit down, lifted his feet up on to the table, and gave him his newspaper to read. We were very fond of Mr Jones.
    “We won’t let the School Inspector give you the strap,” we told him.
    We heard each other’s spelling. We sang our times tables to each other. “Once one is one; once two is two; once three is three …” all the way up to, “… once thirteen is thirteen, and thirteen times thirteen is a hundred and sixty-nine.” We practised our writing. Lizzie was left-handed but practised with her right hand, just to please the School Inspector. All so he wouldn’t give Mr Jones the strap.
    We practised sitting up straight, and getting in and out of our desks without slamming the seats – to please the School Inspector. We pulled in our chins, pulled back our shoulders, stuck out our chests, pulled in our tummies, and tucked in our behinds to give us good posture for when the School Inspector came.
    We practised speech training. We looked in little mirrors, made our lips round, and said, “Oh!” and pulled back the corners of our mouths with our fingers and looked in the little mirrors and said, “Eee!” to give us good vowels. We said “Prunes” and “Prisms” and clicked our tongues against the back of our top teeth to give us good consonants.
    Although we were barefooted, we practised reaching down and pulling up our socks for the School Inspector. We heard each other’s spelling. We even learned the difference between diarrhoea, torohi, trots, and Turangaomoana.
    “Turangaomoana. Spell it!” said Daisy, and Alwyn said, “I-T!”
    We thought of a number, divided it by the number of letters in Hopuruahine, doubled the result, multiplied it by three, took away the number we first thought of, and got it wrong. All of us but Daisy who got everything right.
    By lunchtime, Mr Jones finished reading his paper and measured us again. Our heads had grown bigger, our legs had got longer, and we’d all grown several inches.
    “Your brains must have come unshrivelled,” said Mr Jones. “You can all go up a class. I always say Aunt Effie’s great-nephews and nieces are a delight to teach!”

Chapter Six
    Saying Pies in Proper Waharoa English; the Bogeyman, the Boggle, and the Boggart; What the Williewaw Did; and Why Aunt Effie Said Not to Let the Eels Drag Us Into the Ditch .
    Over at the schoolhouse , Mrs Jones rang the bell for twelve o’clock, and Mr Jones ran home for his lunch before she hid it from him. We stuck our lovely wet red tomato sandwiches across the front wall of the school so they said, “S.O.S!”
    When nobody came to save our souls, we sneaked over to the shops. Peter withdrew five bob from his Post Office School Savings Account, led us to Mrs Besant’s bakery, and bought each of us a hot pie for lunch.
    Alwyn wouldn’t let the little ones eat theirs till they learned to say pies in proper Waharoa English. Then they ate their pois too fast, burnt their tongues, and had to dangle them in cold water from the school tap.
    Mr Jones rang the bell, handed out bulls’-eyes to shut us up, and chased us inside. He stood us against the wall, put a book on our heads, and drew a line with a pencil. “Look how much you’ve grown during lunchtime. It must be the lovely lunches Aunt Effie gives you. You can all go up to Standard Four.” And, for a reward, he read us