Boo hoo boy

Boo hoo boy lived in a tree beside the railway tracks. His bedroom swayed and he moved with the wind. They were animal lovers. The tongue of his shoes was the tongue of a cat and the toecap was its head. His mum and dad had a bit of trouble with the heels, but fortunately the jaw of a bulldog, called Rex, was just the right fit and could be moulded without snapping it. He was quite tasty as well. There was no telling what would happen when Boo hoo got older. But his parents would worry about that later. They were too busy carving up the local cat population. But sometimes they’d stop and halve a hot dog.

Below Boo Hoo boy lived a strange couple who ate nothing but fruit that fell from the trees and yoghurts from Asda skips. They sometimes went out on a limb, but the postman could only climb up the first forty feet. They made a little postbox there for correspondence, but it was of poor design and the postman could never find it, so always left their mail in the same damp hole in the tree. A letter found its way to their tree top dwelling from The Council, telling them Boo Hoo’s age, which was very nice of them, letting them know that he was five, but his parents weren’t at all surprised that they wanted something in return. ‘That’s the way of the world,’ they said. ‘You don’t get something for nothing.’ For giving them this information about Boo Hoo they expected him to go to school. ‘That’s quid pro quo’, said his mum.

Boo hoo boy was very excited when he first started school, because he would get to play with all the nicely dressed children that he had only seen from afar. He wondered what kinds of animals they killed to get such nice clothes. He had the rudiments of their language, but was content to watch them closely from behind the big fence that kept them in. Soon a bell went and he felt it was safe to enter the playground. He watched the gate closely to see if some hunter was going to close it behind them and corral them all in. He had his escape route already planned and besides, the fence wasn’t high enough, or the wall long enough. He could simply walk around the outside, leading into the graveyard if they stampeded.

The teacher, Mrs Wisll, was very nice. She kept her hand firmly on his back to make sure that he did not get lost in all the corridors and classrooms. Finally, she brought him into a room with a roof as high as their house, in the old part of the school, were they kept what looked like the smaller children. Boo hoo boy did not think much of them. And they smelled terrible. Any animal hunting them wouldn’t need to see them. It would be able to detect them from a great distance of at least two football fields. Fortunately, she did not seat Boo hoo boy near any of them, as their stink would have rubbed off on him and he’d have had to immerse himself and his clothes in the duck pond until he smelt better. He had two whole rows of desks to himself. Their weapons he noted were primitive. A stick with a point kept breaking when he stabbed it into his desk. But another stick was made off metal and more robust. It had a join in the middle made of plastic that acted as a hinge so that he could fold the point and hang it safely on his belt. The teacher called it a compass. They sang number songs for a while. Boo hoo boy joined in, but he already knew how to count the stars in the sky, so when the other children stopped he led the way. But the teacher held out her hand. Boo hoo boy recognized it as a signal to stop. He quickly crouched under his desk, ready to leap and run from the hidden danger.

A bell went and the children stampeded. Boo hoo boy didn’t know whether to join them, move towards the middle of the herd, where it was safer, or simply track their runs and make his own move when the right time came. The teacher crouched down and eyed him beneath his desk.

‘Don’t you want to go out to play?’ she asked.

Boo hoo boy wasn’t sure what this strategy was, but he did see his chance to get out and raced past her. He never forgot a track that his feet had already followed. He ran out of the classroom door and down the long corridors and gulped in the open air. He stood unmoving, for that was the way to give away your position, at the bottom of the stairs beside the other small children, blending in with their jerky movements. Suddenly, he pounced and caught the animal they were tracking. He bit down on it, but it tasted worse than slug.

‘Can we get our ball back please?’ asked a particularly foul smelling child, with hair that was too straight and teeth that were too white.

‘My apologies,’ said Boo hoo boy, curtsying in the way that he’d been taught, when dealing with another’s request. ‘Please accept the head of a pigeon as suitable recompense for interrupting your meal’. Boo hoo boy, with great grace, pulled out his luncheon and offered it to the foul smelling boy.

‘No thank you,’ said the foul smelling boy and bent down and made sick noises.

Boo hoo boy wasn’t in the least surprised having already caught and tasted his meal. He stuffed the pigeon into his mouth and the foul smelling boy was sick. Boo hoo boy patted him on the back. ‘There, there old fellow,’ he said, but when the other foul smelling children also began to throw up he quickly pulled up his pelt and covered his nose and mouth. The children’s herd was infected. He made a dash for the gate. A bell rang as a signal and a man tried to close it. Boo hoo boy ran towards him and leaped over the gate and ran toward the duck pond