by Angie Bates
As the others probably told you, Mrs Weaver isn’t nearly such a soft touch as our head. However, since Mrs Poole was rooting for us, Mrs Weaver couldn’t exactly make a fuss. About us getting off lessons, I mean. But boy, did that woman come down hard on us in maths!
It was worth it though. We were having excellent fun with the M&Ms and their loyal poodles, Alana and Regina.
You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to lead the M&Ms up the garden path. Those girls are so in love with themselves, they truly believe everyone else is a total dimwit.
All we had to do was let them accidentally ‘overhear’ our private conversation in the girls’ toilets!
You’ve got to picture us washing our hands incredibly slowly, OK? And behind a row of locked doors, the M&Ms, plus Alana and Regina, were all silently earwigging like crazy.
“I wish I’d never heard of ecology, don’t you, Frankie?” said Kenny, winking at Frankie.
“Totally, Kenny,” agreed Frankie, sounding stressed out. “Izzy still wakes us a billion times a night. I’m really having trouble coping with this project on top of having a new baby sister.” She nudged me.
“I just had no idea ecology would be so hard,” I whined, making my voice weedier and more gerbil-like than usual. Then I pulled a face at Lyndz.
Lyndz sighed dramatically. “It IS a mega responsibility, Fliss. Still, it’s too late to wriggle out of it. We’ve just got to do the best we can.”
Rosie gave an Oscar-winning sob. “Face it, you guys. Even with all the extra time Mrs Poole gave us, there’s no way we’ll pull this thing together by Saturday. It’s going to be a disaster.”
And we shuffled away in a deeply tragic manner!!
At dinner time, the M&Ms kept darting really cocky looks in our direction. It was totally obvious they were talking about us.
“Heh heh heh. I think we got a result, guys,” chortled Kenny.
By the way, I don’t know about the others, but I wasn’t totally putting it on earlier. I really WAS worried the Sleepover Club had bitten off more than it could chew! We’d given ourselves an absolutely outrageous amount to do in a ridiculously short time.
I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard in my life as I did in that poky stockroom Mrs Poole was letting us use for a base.
On Wednesday afternoon, Dishy Dave tapped on the stockroom door. He looked dead pleased with himself. “Come and tell me what you think,” he said.
We followed him into the hall.
“Coo-ell!” said Kenny.
“The wood’s pretty rough. I found it in a skip.” Dave grinned and tapped the side of his nose. “But you can’t really see it behind the curtains.”
Lyndz’s mum had donated the curtains. They were made of dark green velvet and were incredibly long. As well as hanging them from the sides of his structure, Dave had draped some over the top as well.
It reminded me of those cute little dens I made when I was little. Remember them? The kind where you sling a blanket over two chairs and crawl inside and play house! (Only obviously Dave’s creation was heaps bigger and more impressive than that.) We swished back a corner of the curtain and tiptoed into a shadowy green cave.
“Magic!” we gasped.
“The green makes it look like moss,” breathed Lyndz.
“It’s perfect,” said Rosie. “Thanks, Dave!”
“And when you’ve fixed up all those little lights, Dave,” said Frankie cunningly, “it’ll be even more perfect.”
“Give me a chance,” complained Dave. “What did your last slave die of?”
Frankie beamed. “Admiration?” she suggested.
We had one last problem. Somehow we had to smuggle in the entire contents of our zone, without the other kids seeing.
In the end, Mrs Poole agreed to let us to stay on after school on Friday, even though this meant she had to work late herself.
Dishy Dave volunteered to help. “To speed things along a bit,” he said.
Can you believe that even with us all working flat out, our Ecology Zone wasn’t finished till 7.30pm on Friday night?!
Finally Kenny slumped to the floor. “I’m so shattered I can’t tell if it’s OK, or just total rubbish,” she whimpered.
“Me neither,” yawned Lyndz.
Dave gazed around one last time before he pulled the curtains shut and firmly safety-pinned them together, to discourage any unofficial peeking.
He shook his head. “No, it’s OK,” he said. “Definitely OK.”
OK, big apology coming up. No, I’m serious. I’d be going completely ballistic if I was you. I’d be thinking, when IS that little fluff-brain going to get to the point? You’re DYING to know what was keeping us girls so busy in the stockroom, aren’t you? (Heh heh heh. So was Mrs Weaver.)
I’m truuuly sorry I had to keep you in the dark so long, but hang on to your hat. Durn durn DURN. Get ready for me to tell you all about the Sleepover Club’s finest moment!!
All I’ve got to do is press REWIND and take you whizzing back to that January day when Cuddington Primary School had its very own funky Millennium Dome…
Hope you don’t hate crowds, because our school hall was totally BUZZING that day. We didn’t need to worry about any unscheduled peeking. Everyone was too busy sorting out last-minute technical hitches of their own! Somehow we’d kind of forgotten that our Ecology Zone was just one part of a major school event.
Miss Platt’s class did a Storyteller Zone. We’d never seen a real live storyteller before, so we thought we’d pop down and earwig for a bit. She was quite an eyeful – draped in a blue velvet robe covered with appliquéd stars and moons. She’d brought this kind of clothes-airer with her, bristling with weird rattles and shakers. Whenever she needed a sound effect, she’d whip something off the airer. All the mums and dads were mesmerised by her. We were mostly fascinated by her hair. You could have used it to stop traffic!
Lyndz bought a bag of Indian sweets in the Nourishment Zone, which she said reached absolutely COSMIC levels of deliciousness. Well, that’s what she said after the first three. After a couple more she went a bit quiet!
I think being a big sister has really changed Frankie, because she went incredibly soppy about some infants she saw making Chuck Wagon Stew with Mrs Carpenter.
“OK, to you and me, it’s just a pan of baked beans with cocktail sausages mixed in,” she burbled. “But those little kids were totally convinced they were cooking real cowboy food!”
Personally, I was still recovering from wandering into the Body Zone by mistake, and coming face to face with this, like, gigantic papier mâché model brain. I had no IDEA brains looked like the insides of walnuts, did you? It was so gruesome (and so GREY), my knees went completely to jelly.
Kenny heard me kind of moaning to myself. So she rushed over to see what was up. But instead of giving me some sympathy, she went into this major scientific rapture. “I’d just LURVE to have one of those in my bedroom,” she gushed. “Hey! I could use it for a lamp.”
Can you believe that girl!
I told her I don’t even want to THINK about what my brain looks like, thank you very much. This sent the others into shrieks of laughter for some reason.
Oops, I nearly forgot to tell you about our really cool ecology outfits. (That’s most unlike me!!) We’d decided it would be loads more impressive if we dressed the same. Identical white T-shirts, blue denim jeans and trainers. Guess who suggested printing funky Eco messages on the T-shirts? Moi, naturally!
We put THINK GLOBALLY – ACT LOCALLY across the front, because that’s become like our personal Eco motto. You’ll see why in a minute.
We were going to try to make ourselves look like real eco-warriors. But Kenny worried that it would look like we were taking the mick. There was also this TINY body-piercing problem! Plus, with the Sleepover Club’s rather sad dependency on flush toilets and hair conditioner, it seemed a bit dishonest to pass ourselves off as hardcore protesters.
On the other hand, we wanted to sh
ow that even if we WERE softies, we were still totally on the side of, you know, Nature.
Eventually Rosie came up with the cute idea of painting little flowers on our cheeks. Mine are daisies. Hope they’re not TOO wonky. Lyndz did them. And I don’t have to tell you what happened to her right in the middle, do I? That’s right. A MAJOR attack of the H-word!!
Did you notice I’ve been avoiding mentioning a certain Zone? Well, as it turned out, the Media Zone was actually OK. I think I’d maybe give it – six out of ten?
Regina Hill made an excellent silent movie star. Actually, if she didn’t hang around with the M&Ms, I’d probably think she was cool! She was supposed to be some actress called Mary Pickford. (No, I hadn’t heard of her either. But she must have worn oodles of eye make-up!) But I can’t say I was impressed with boring old Alana Banana as Charlie Chaplin (though she does have rather bandy legs! Miaow!).
Being silent movie stars, Alana and Regina weren’t supposed to talk. Instead they held up cards with silent movie captions on, like: “Untie me! I hear the train coming down the track!” I think that’s such a wicked idea, don’t you?
But in all truthfulness (and I’m not being horrible here), we really couldn’t tell WHO the M&Ms were meant to be. In the end we had to ask. Would you believe, Laurel and Hardy?
Kenny fell about when we told her. “Those two are such little stick insects, they look more like Laurel and Laurel!” she cackled.
Personally, I thought we could afford to ease up on the M&Ms for an hour or two. You see, even though no teachers gave us ANY help with our zone whatsoever, just about everyone who saw it was madly impressed. In fact, I heard one lady say our work was in a totally different league!
So we’d won, hadn’t we? Game, set and match! Poor old Laurel and Laurel were practically spitting with envy.
Tell you what. Why don’t I give you your very own private tour round our Ecology Zone? I’m serious. You can be our star guest!
Just shut your eyes and duck under the velvet curtain.
Now open your eyes again. Aaah, isn’t it the loveliest thing?
Do you like those twinkly stars and planets hanging from the ceiling? Rosie and Lyndz did them. And don’t you LURVE how we divided up the space into smaller areas inside? Oops, don’t peek at the others yet! The first one is meant to represent the desert, right? Sand, cacti, that kind of thing. I think we went a bit overboard with the house plants in the jungle bit. I mean, OK, a jungle is meant to be, like, bursting with plants, but this is ridiculous!
It took forever to make those blossoms. They look dead real though, don’t they? The frog sounds and monkey calls were my idea. Atmospheric or what! Andy’s such a sweetheart. He taped loads of jungle sounds for us, off one of his wildlife videos.
The next bit gave us a BIG headache. In case you wondered, it’s meant to be the ocean. Oh, you guessed. Coo-ell. So it really works!
The big problem with oceans is that in real life they never ever stop moving. This means you can’t, like, fill a dish from the tap and just pretend it’s the sea. We tried and it looked totally naff. Lyndz suggested having a tank with live fish swimming around, but as I pointed out, you can see one of those at our dentist’s.
We were totally tearing our hair out, when Rosie saved the day. She was channel-hopping at home when she caught this Chinese dance group. And guess what? They were creating an absolutely wicked ocean, with just a few shimmery chiffon scarves! Rosie was so impressed, she rang us all up at about ten o’clock at night to tell us all about it!
Then Dishy Dave suggested using an electric fan to get the proper billowy effect. The transparent fish were Frankie’s idea. And what with Dave’s cunning lighting and all those pebbles and shells, I think it really suggests that lonely sea-shore feeling, don’t you?
If you listen hard, you can hear some of Andy’s environmental sounds. No, it isn’t foghorns, bird-brain. And it’s not his tummy rumbles either! It’s dolphins and whispery ocean waves.
Look, I’m not going to make some big hairy deal about this next part, because the fact is, you either get it or you don’t. It’s an exhibition, OK?
We call it: SAVING BROWSES PIECE.
One or two of the people we showed around didn’t get it at all. It was like they simply couldn’t understand why a bunch of kids picked some stupid meadow hardly anyone knows about to be the most important part of their Ecology Zone.
“What about the dolphins?” these clever people said in their snooty flutey voices. “What about the tigers? I mean, what about the OZONE layer, darlings?”
We didn’t bother to argue. We just went into silent movie-star mode and pointed politely to our T-shirts.
And they’d say, “Oh. Act Locally. Oh. I see. Oh.”
Anyway, let’s forget about them. Much better watch Jewel instead.
This is her on the monitor. “… to save some old fields,” she’s saying. Mrs Diggins comes on right after Jewel says: “At least that way I know I’ve done the best I can.”
Andy fixed it so our Browses Piece film plays continuously. I know it practically by heart now. In a minute, poor Mrs Diggins gets dead emotional. It’s when she looks at the photo of her and Mr Diggins in their courting days. The picture is ever so creased and faded. But you can still tell where it’s meant to be, which is the main thing.
I’ll talk you through the rest of our exhibition, OK?
We found the wild flowers in garden and country-life magazines. Then we cut them out and blew them up on the school’s colour photocopier. We wanted the daisies and buttercups giant-sized, just like when Frankie was a baby toddling in a daisy and buttercup forest! I decided they should SMELL right, too. So I sprayed the entire area with Meadow Sweet air freshener for AGES. Then the others pointed out to me that this probably wasn’t very ecological!
Do you remember that picture our headmistress showed us in assembly that time? The old-fashioned picnic one that started this whole business off? Well, we got Mrs Poole to let us have a copy.
Frankie carefully sliced out all the original villagers, those poker-faced looking men and women and stern little babies. Then she cleverly glued them onto a new, really hideous background.
Instead of their beautiful flowery meadow, she stuck them in front of a gigantic colour blow-up of a DIY hypermarket! Sinister or what! Frankie thought up a wicked caption too:
Spot the deliberate mistake!
The Leicester Mercury people were so impressed, they used her poster in this big feature they ran about the protest.
Oh, didn’t I tell you about that? Frankie was over the moon. Plus, when the Mercury did the write-up of the school Millennium Dome, our zone was the ONLY one to get a special mention!!
They also used this ace quote from Kenny, which she absolutely denies saying. About how when it comes to saving the planet, some children don’t believe they can make a difference, but they totally can!!
And even if Kenny didn’t actually say it, it’s still true. I mean. Mrs Poole told us it was that article in the Mercury which finally persuaded the council to save Browses Piece after all!
Not only that, but thanks to us, our village came up with the PERFECT way to celebrate the new millennium.
Yikes!! I’ve been so busy nattering, I forgot to keep an eye on my watch.
Oh-oh. See that coach pulling out of the school playground? Well, I’m supposed to be on it! I can’t believe this is happening. Hey – wait for me! I SAID, WAIT FOR ME!!!
Phew! I’m still getting my breath back, aren’t you?! Can you believe Kenny and the others had to scream blue murder until the driver finally agreed to stop and pick me up!! Mrs Weaver was NOT amused.
It’s all right for her. If it wasn’t for having totally brilliant mates, I’d have completely missed the chance to take my place in History, like Mrs Poole said.
Originally we were going with our families. But the school laid on this coach, and we thought it would be more of a laugh to go together.
Didn’t I tell you w
here we’re going? OK, you remember that new village photograph Mrs Poole was talking about, to celebrate the year 2000?
Well, thanks to the outrageous brilliance of You Know Who, the parish council changed their minds about using our school as the venue. Can you guess where they want it taken instead?
Yesss! Browses Piece!! I think those old-style villagers would be really pleased we were keeping up their tradition, don’t you?
As you might guess, hanging around the countryside in the freezing cold while some photographer tries to get the entire village population to face in the same direction isn’t NORMALLY our idea of fun.
But in the circumstances, we wouldn’t miss it for the world. Nor would Mr and Mrs Diggins.
Did I mention that Andy took us back to the protest site a couple of days ago? We’d clubbed together to buy Jewel a little thank-you present. Nothing major. Just some embroidery silks. She must get through tons making those little bracelets.
But the camp was deserted. Jewel and her mum must have moved on, to protest somewhere else.
Maybe she saw us in the paper. I hope she did.
Hey, we’re there! I’ll have to beetle off to join the others in a minute.
But before I go, I’ll let you in on a little private joke.
Hang around a bit, and watch for that moment when the photographer finally gets us all lined up and tells us to yell “Cheese”.
Want to know what we’ve decided to yell instead?
Sure you do! All together on a count of three. One, two, three..
“MILLENNIUM!!!”
Have a great century. Love and Peace. Bye!
Have you been Invited to all these Sleepovers?
The Sleepover Club at Frankie’s
The Sleepover Club at Lyndsey’s
The Sleepover Club at Felicity’s
The Sleepover Club at Rosie’s
The Sleepover Club at Kenny’s
Starring the Sleepover Club
The Sleepover Girls go Spice
The 24 Hour Sleepover Club
The Sleepover Club Sleeps Out
