I Got a 'B' For Being Spectacular

I was recently looking over my vast collection of paper earlier on and I found something that really took me back to those happy, heady days of school. The great days where football was played on concrete daily, when you could throw an apple at a teacher and scurry away with no-one grassing you up. Those were the great days of my life. It seems life has been a downhill slump ever since.

What I found was a short story I wrote in year 10 for English. I remember at the time I was none too impressed with Mr Gunningham for giving me a 'B' for it. By my early standards it was wildly imaginative and actually....if I may say so, quite brilliant.

It was a story about a frog, imaginatively named after those 10p chocolate bars called 'Freddo' and set in the backdrop of an inter-species war between land and flying animals in a back garden in Kensington. Freddo was an assassin frog employed by the 'Al Capone' of the garden 'Sparrow', who was profiting from the war by selling the services of his mercenaries who were composed of bees (of which Sparrow owned a hive, thus unlimited troops), whilst sabotaging the two warring factions war efforts to keep it forever in stalemate. I had made up nice names for all of these armies, but I can't lay my hand on the story at the moment, it's somewhere in this swamp of paper.

Anyway, Freddo tracks down and kills a gang off pacifist insects intent on stopping the war, who were to reveal the sabotages to the leaders of the two armies. This was witnessed by a young frog called Sam, but rather than let Sparrow know of this, Freddo tries to guide Samuel to safety whilst crossing the battle ground of the garden to 'Peace Turf'.

The ending was frenzied, the war got to a crucial point with dogs and cats collaborating, defections to both sides and Freddo killing Sparrow who was intent on killing Sam himself. The war eventually ended in a blood-bath with neither sides winning until the leaders made a peace treaty and the clear up action began with the maggot cleaning services put to use. The last line was one of the human owner of the house going out to sunbathe and calling back to his wife: 'get me the disinfectant, it fucking stinks out here!'

It was well written and a nice bit of imagination if I do say so myself. I will never forget the lingering anger that I had when it was given a 'B' when other kids had been writing typical horror and ghost stories and securing themselves A+s. Maybe one day I'll get the chance to actually write a full novel on it but for now I'm happy enough to appreciate it as a rare finished work, which is actually pretty damn good.

JPH