Ms Richardson was our English teacher in Year 7. She was, with all due respect, not the most attentive individual. She was always late to our lessons for some reason. We mostly just read books in her lessons, and one day, Lewis fell asleep in the lesson - we didn't blame him.

To prove that she was inattentive, one day I decided to crawl under my desk, and shuffle on the floor towards her desk. I stayed underneath her desk for a short while, until I decided to shuffle back. She only noticed something was off when I was just climbing back onto my bench.

Max and Sameer decided to hide behind the door one lesson, using their cravat to hold it open. Ms Richardson just thought they were both absent that day. The rest of us, though, could see them from behind the door, and they kept trying to make us laugh during the lesson.

She must have had some sort of a talking-to, as after one of the holidays (either Christmas or Easter I think) she came back with a fiery personality, a ruthless attitude, and even a different hair colour. We concluded she had been replaced by her evil twin sister, Ms Richarddaughter.

The Board Wars

Once we had finished a book as a class, we would decorate one of the cork boards in her classroom, the Fleming Room, with drawings and quotes from these books. However, one day Adam Seydo decided to put up a post-it note with the caption "cows and the aliens". Ms Richardson never seemed to notice it, and thus began our conquest of that particular cork board.

We put up all sorts of made-up quotes - a few of which I have written below (to the best of my memory)

Kino, you spent all out money on trousers!

Kristoff, I can trust you no longer. Bang!

Cows and the Aliens

The Spicemaster

"Yeah, get 'im", shouted Harry. "Put 'im wiv' the uvvers!"

There were plenty more of the sort, but sadly I have forgotten many of them. In the end, we had come up with a story which involed a character called King Beef V (he actually prefered bacon, but King Beef V sounded better than King Bacon CCCLXXXIV (that's 384)), and he employed pangolins to cook his bacon for him. Kino and his wife's pet pangolin Kristoff was abducted by King Beef V's henchman Harry, and after he once burnt the bacon, King Beef V no longer trusted Kristoff to cook the bacon, and he shot him. Somewhere in that there was a character called the Spicemaster, the aforementioned cows and aliens, and somehow Kino ended up spending all his family's money on trousers.

So now we get to the 'wars' bit. One of the other classes (I can't remember which one) also decorated one of the boards with their own things. However, we just decieded they did a terrible job (I recall that someone had written their letter ns in a way that made them look like hs). Anyway, Ms Richardson agreed it wasn't very good, so she told us to take it down. The next lesson, we saw that the other class had taken our stuff down and thrown it in the bin. Undeterred, we took it out of the bin and put it all back on the boards. Our stuff stayed on the board for most of the rest of the year, until one day Ms Richardson looked up from her desk, saw the board (which had been in front of her all this time), and realised what we had done. She immediately told us to take it down, and so we put it all in Adam's folder. I think he still has them. The board wars were a favourite memory for many of us in the class.

The Brontë Room

The Brontë room was at the very top of the school, typically where Transitus (year 5 and 6 girls) were found. We had English there once a week, and at the very back of the classroom was a tall desk with three large stools, each in its own little compartment under the desk. These were by far and away the most popular seats in the room, and so I always tried to be the first to arrive in order to claim one.