Spud Read Online Free Page A

Hamburgers and chips for dinner tonight (no salt, vinegar and tomato sauce). He spent the meal glaring at Vern and muttering curses under his bad breath. Eventually he stormed out of the dining hall without so much as touching his chips. It may just have been the light, but I could have sworn that I saw the hint of a smirk curling around the corner of Vern’s lips.
    22:45   Bert woke me up and said that somebody was shouting from downstairs that I had an urgent telephone call. My heart sank as I remembered my father. (Was this his final phone call before his imprisonment?) I stumbled down to the phone room and discovered a note pasted above the telephone: Meat me in the storeroom under the stares. Mad Dog. (With spelling like that he needn’t have signed his name.)
    I crept past the room occupied by Gavin, the weird prefect who lives under the stairs, and opened the creaky door to the storeroom, which looked a bit like a dungeon. A flame burned in the far corner of the room, and standing over it was Mad Dog surrounded by feathers and holding the charred corpse of an impaled bird over a gas cooker.
    ‘Said you liked pigeon,’ he muttered and held the crispy bird out to me. I took a small bite. Mad Dog nodded and I nodded back and there we sat, nodding, grunting and chomping rock pigeons under the stairs in the middle of the night.
Saturday 22nd January
    Woke up feeling nauseous – not sure if it was the rock pigeons or nerves about my first cricket match.
    10:00   After hours of agonising terror our under 14A cricket team finally took to the field in our cricket whites and blue caps. Our opposition was Westwood College, who seem to have a rather dodgy age restriction. (The captain of their under 14 team arrived in his own car shortly before the match.)
    Mad Dog’s fiery opening spell sent a player to the sanatorium with a cracked rib. Unfortunately, that player wasn’t one of their batsmen, but our silly mid-on fielder, Steven George, who was flattened by a wild delivery that landed two metres off the pitch and crashed into his side as he was looking in the opposite direction. We managed to bowl Westwood out for 126, with me picking up my first wicket for the school.
    Condiments were returned for lunch. Fatty was beside himself with joy and gorged himself on five servings of lasagne and then stole Vern’s bread and butter pudding for good measure.
    I’m batting at ten, which is fine by me. Batting terrifies me, especially when facing fast bowlers. The Guv, after a morning of umpiring (and a few dodgy decisions), retired to a bench under a huge oak tree to smoke his pipe and watch the rest of the match. He gave us an impassioned team talk after lunch and even quoted an entire Shakespearian speech, which he reckons was said by King Henry the Fifth before the battle of Asiancaw. He also threatened to castrate us if we lost.
    The opposition captain (the one with the car) is the fastest bowler I’ve ever seen. He clean bowled our opener, Stubbs, with his second ball and removed Adam Leslie with the next. Simon righted the ship but unfortunately wickets were tumbling at the other end. Further bad news was that Steven George was declared unfit to bat so I was now batting at number nine.
    With our total on 100 and only 27 needed for victory, Simon seemed unstoppable; he had reached 76 andwas in sight of a brilliant century when disaster struck. A humongous explosion distracted our master player at the precise moment that the bowler released his delivery, causing Simon instinctively to look up. In that split second of hesitation the bails were dislodged and his stumps were shattered. I held my head in my hands. We had lost our star and it was my turn to bat. But worse than that, I knew that an explosion of such magnitude could only have been created by a pea green 1973 Renault station wagon. My parents had arrived.
    The Guv glared at my folks as they got out the car (no doubt wishing that he had brought his shotgun with