Viking at School

by Jeremy Strong

  ‘He means feast,’ whispered Tim to the rest of the class, who were beginning to giggle.

  ‘We eat chickens and pigs and sheets and coats.’

  ‘Sheep and goats,’ muttered. Tim.

  ‘I don’t think people should eat meat,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ Sigurd scowled, leant over Rachel’s table and put one hand on Nosepicker.

  ‘Vikings kill vegetables,’ he hissed.

  ‘Oh!’ squeaked Rachel, and she didn’t say anything else for a long time.

  After that things went quite well for a while. The children became engrossed in what Sigurd told them and they began asking questions. Tim sat back proudly and listened to his tenth-century friend and Mr Rumble dozed quietly in the corner. It was when Terry Reeves started asking about Viking longships that things began to go wrong – again. Terry wanted to know how everyone knew when to row.

  ‘I went in a rowing boat with my dad once,’ he said. ‘I had two oars and he had two oars but we couldn’t put them in the water at the same time. We just went round and round until he bashed one of my oars with his oar and they both broke and we got told off and had to be rescued.’

  Sigurd nodded; this was a problem he knew well. He was hopeless at rowing himself but he would never admit it. In fact, he pretended he was pretty good at it. ‘I show you how we row,’ he declared. ‘First we put tables on sides like this.’ He made two rows of tables down the classroom, with their legs pointing inwards. ‘Now you put cheese down middle.’

  ‘Cheese?’ repeated Terry. ‘I haven’t got any cheese.’

  ‘I’ve got some cheese in my sandwich,’ James said. ‘But that’s for my lunch.’

  ‘I think he might mean chairs,’ Tim suggested.

  ‘Cheese!’ grinned Sigurd, picking up one chair after another, and putting them in rows of four between the tables. ‘Now we get oars.’

  Tim stared at the tables and chairs. ‘Siggy’s made a longship!’ he cried. ‘Look, the tables are the sides of the boat and the chairs are the benches that the rowers sit on. Brill – I’ll get some oars! James – you come with me, and Terry.’ The three boys dashed out of the classroom, while Mr Rumble snored away in the corner, dreaming about being a Viking.

  A few moments later Tim and the others came racing back. They had raided the caretaker’s cupboard and taken a whole assortment of long-handled brooms, mops, window-openers and anything that was long, thin and vaguely oar-like.

  ‘Now you take oars!’ cried Siggy. The children settled into their seats and seized their oars. ‘We go Hedeby! Oars forward!’

  Fourteen assorted mops, brooms and window-openers waved in the air. Several flowerpots were knocked from the windowsill on the port side, while on the starboard bow a rack of newly-filled paint-pots crashed to the floor and began making a multicoloured ocean for the longship to sail across.

  Sigurd had never seen such hopeless rowing. He leapt on to Mr Rumble’s desk and pulled Nosepicker from its tatty scabbard. ‘You keep time with me!’ he roared, beating out a rowing rhythm on Mr Rumble’s desk with Nosepicker’s heavy blade. ‘In! Out! In! Out!’ Large chips of wood splintered off the desk and spun through the air.

  The longship was beginning to sink. The rowers were all quarrelling because they kept hitting each other with their brooms and mops. Mandy Perkins started screaming. Sally threw a flowerpot at Adam because she thought he’d flicked her with paint and Terry pushed Tim overboard.

  Sigurd jumped up and down so much that he managed to jam the horns of his helmet into one of the overhead light fittings and rip it from the ceiling. He couldn’t quite keep his balance with a large fluorescent light fitting waving about on his helmet and after a few seconds, he went tumbling down into Mr Rumble’s lap.

  ‘Eh? Eh? EH!’ cried Mr Rumble, scrambling out from beneath Sigurd. He gazed round his classroom. Children were crawling through a mixed-up sea of paint, mud and flowers and prodding each other with mops and brooms. Plaster trickled down from the ceiling where Sigurd had ripped out the light, and now the Viking was on his feet and striding round the classroom, still with a light tube stuck on his helmet and shouting ‘In! Out! In! Out!’

  Mr Rumble joined in. ‘Out! Out! Out!’ he bellowed, seizing a window-pole and poking Sigurd. ‘Get out of my classroom at once! You’re not a Viking – you’re a disaster!’ And with one final, vicious prod he sent Sigurd scampering up the corridor.

  It was now almost twelve o’clock and Sigurd had reduced the school to a shambles a second time.

  5

  A Viking all Alone

  At lunch time, Mrs Crock took Sigurd home. She had taken one look at Mr Rumble’s shipwrecked classroom and decided it was the best thing to do. Zoe and Tim went with her to keep an eye on Sigurd.

  Mr and Mrs Ellis were not surprised to see Sigurd being frog-marched up the hotel steps by Mrs Crock, but they were rather bemused by the cook’s uniform the head teacher was wearing. Zoe noticed both her parents staring.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ she began.

  ‘It’s a wet story,’ Tim added.

  Mrs Crock only stopped long enough to make a brief announcement. ‘If this Viking comes anywhere near my school ever again I shall kill him,’ she said bluntly. ‘I shall probably strangle him with my bare hands. I might even slice him up on my paper-trimmer and put the bits in a thousand different files in my filing cabinet.’

  ‘Things didn’t work out, then?’ offered Mr Ellis.

  ‘That, Mr Ellis, is an understatement.’ Mrs Crock turned on her heels and strode back to the car. The door slammed, the engine revved and with a great deal of wheelspin Mrs Crock vanished.

  ‘Wow! Can she drive!’ breathed Tim.

  There was a long, cold, silent pause, while everyone stood on the hotel steps. Sigurd tried a helpful smile, and his dark eyes shot from one Ellis to another. Even Tim could sense that there was trouble ahead – big trouble. He felt for his sister’s hand and together they slipped quietly into the hotel. They hid behind the front door and listened, desperate to know what was going to happen.

  Mr and Mrs Ellis stood across the hotel doorway, blocking the entrance. ‘You can’t come in,’ said Mr Ellis. ‘I’m sorry Sigurd, but we’re not having you back here. Every time you turn up there is trouble. We cannot afford to keep paying for the mistakes you make and we are not prepared to let you live in our hotel any longer. You’ve got to go. Mrs Tibblethwaite can stay here until she finds somewhere more suitable. In the meantime you will just have to manage for yourself.’

  Tim and Zoe came racing out from behind the front door. ‘Dad! Mum! You can’t throw him out!’

  ‘Oh yes we can,’ said Mrs Ellis. ‘It might seem cruel to you, but Sigurd has to go. He has cost us hundreds, probably thousands of pounds. He has driven everyone mad. Your father and I cannot cope any longer. We have enough worries trying to run this hotel, especially with business so bad at present.’

  ‘But throwing him out!’ Zoe cried. ‘It’s not right. He’ll be homeless.’

  ‘I’ve thought of that,’ said Mr Ellis. ‘He can stay in the greenhouse until Mrs Tibblethwaite finds somewhere better for him.’

  ‘The greenhouse? But Dad, half the glass is broken.’

  ‘I know. Sigurd was the one who broke it, so that’s his problem. Come on, everyone inside, the Ramsbottoms are waiting for their lunch.’ Mr Ellis pushed his children into the hotel with Mrs Ellis following hard on their heels. She turned on the doorstep and eyed Sigurd sternly.

  ‘You’ve made all these problems, Siggy,’ she said. ‘Just for once, you sort them out.’

  She stepped inside and shut the door, leaning back against it, her face white and drawn. She was certain that this was the hardest thing she had ever done in her life; but it had to be done. Somehow Sigurd had to understand his responsibilities to other people.

  Sigurd stood on the hotel porch, gazing at the closed door. All his friends, all the people he most loved were on the other side of that door, shut away from
him. He backed slowly down the hotel steps, his eyes fixed on the front of The Viking Hotel, but the door didn’t open. Then he turned and walked away.

  Tim and Zoe sat on Zoe’s bed with their backs to the wall and their knees hunched up against their chests. ‘The thing is,’ said Zoe, ‘Siggy could be out there anywhere. Anything might have happened to him by now.’

  ‘He could have been kidnapped,’ suggested Tim.

  ‘Yeah…,’ said Zoe, although she couldn’t imagine why anyone in their right mind would want to kidnap a smelly, dirty Viking warrior like Sigurd.

  ‘He might have had all his blood sucked out by Dracula,’ Tim continued. Zoe thought that this was also rather unlikely.

  ‘Or chewed to bits by a werewolf, or snatched from the planet by aliens with three heads and ten legs….’

  ‘Tim!’

  Tim frowned to himself and counted carefully on his fingers before turning to his sister. ‘Zoe, if you have ten legs does that mean you must have five bottoms?’

  ‘TIM! What are we going to do about Siggy?’

  ‘It’s Dad’s fault,’ muttered Tim through his teeth.

  ‘And Mum’s,’ Zoe added. ‘They should be arrested and taken to court and charged with um….’ Zoe couldn’t quite decide what her parents ought to be charged with.

  ‘Cruelty to Vikings,’ suggested Tim.

  ‘Yeah, something like that.’ There was a short silence during which Tim gave up trying to think for himself.

  ‘Maybe we could smuggle him back into the hotel,’ Zoe murmured.

  ‘Smuggle him back in? Brilliant idea! We could hide him in my room!’

  ‘I don’t think that would work Tim. The best place for him would be one of the empty guest rooms.’

  ‘You can be quite clever sometimes, for a girl.’

  Zoe glanced up at her brother’s smiling face. ‘And you can be quite stupid,’ she replied. ‘Most of the time.’ Tim’s smile vanished.

  ‘That’s not very nice,’ he grumbled. She grinned and grabbed hold of his hand.

  ‘Come on. Let’s see if we can find Siggy. He’ll probably be down on the beach somewhere. He always goes and stares at the sea when he’s upset about something.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Tim, who had never noticed anything of the sort.

  ‘Because I’m a girl and I’m clever.’

  Tim had no answer to this. It was a real pain being two years younger than his sister. It meant that Zoe was always two years older. She was always ahead of him. He would never, ever be able to catch her up. Life was very unfair.

  Zoe was right, too. Sigurd was down on the beach, standing at the water’s edge and staring out at the flat, grey shimmering sea, while little waves rolled up to his feet and frothed over them. The children went and stood quietly at his side.

  ‘Siggy?’ Zoe held his big hand.

  ‘Mmmmm?’

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I think Sigurd stupid,’ growled the Viking. ‘He biggest stupid in whole world.’

  ‘No you’re not!’ cried Tim.

  ‘More stupid than donkey; more stupid than dog; even more stupid than eeny-weeny-teeny-titchy-witchy-snitchy mouse.’

  ‘No you’re not!’ Tim repeated. Sigurd gave a big gloomy sigh and threw a stone into the sea.

  ‘I more stupid than carrot,’ he announced sadly.

  Zoe felt that the conversation was rapidly slipping into a list of animals and vegetables. Sigurd could probably keep up this display of self-pity for hours. ‘Listen, Tim and I have got an idea. We could smuggle you back into the hotel.’

  ‘Scoose me, what is smuggle?’

  ‘We sneak you into the hotel when no one’s looking, and you can hide in one of the spare rooms.’

  Sigurd picked up another stone and hurled it as far as he could. The stone seemed to curve through the air for ages before at last it dived down into the distant sea. A burst of foam exploded into the air, marking where the stone hit the surface, before it vanished from sight. Sigurd turned to Zoe and shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘I no go smuggling and sneaking. Mr, Mrs Ellis – they very angry with Sigurd. They right. I bad man.’

  ‘You’re not bad!’ protested Zoe. ‘You’re just, sort of, different.’

  ‘I make mess,’ Sigurd went on. ‘I break things, make people cross. I no good in hotel. I good one thing only – make trouble. Trouble easy-peasy for me. People say – Sigurd, what you do? I say I do trouble. I do good trouble. You want big trouble, small trouble, or piddle-size trouble?’

  ‘Sigurd,’ pleaded Zoe. ‘Don’t go on like that. Please come back to the hotel.’

  But the Viking pulled his big hand away from hers. ‘Go home Tim. Go home Zoe. I find place to sleep. Maybe I go to bluehouse like Mr Ellis say.’

  ‘Greenhouse,’ said Tim. ‘Not bluehouse.’

  Sigurd shrugged. ‘Greenhouse, bluehouse – it good place for man like carrot. You clever – hotel your house. Now I stay here alone. Want to think.’

  Tim and Zoe trudged back across the wet sand without him. ‘He’s not really as stupid as a carrot, is he?’ asked Tim.

  ‘Of course he isn’t. He’s just feeling a bit sorry for himself.’

  ‘And he isn’t trouble either, is he?’

  Zoe thought for a few moments before answering. ‘Well, he is a bit,’ she said. ‘Really.’ She walked several steps and then spoke again. ‘I think that’s why I like him so much.’

  6

  With a Mud-pat Here, and a Cow-pat There…

  Tim and Zoe pleaded with their parents all evening, but it was no use. Even Mrs Tibblethwaite thought that Mr and Mrs Ellis had done the right thing. ‘I would have thrown him out long ago,’ she said.

  ‘How can you say that?’ shouted Zoe. ‘You’re married to him. You’re supposed to love him!’

  ‘Just because you love someone Zoe, it doesn’t mean that you have to put up with everything they do. I do love Siggy, but most of the time he’s like an enormous child. He has to learn how to behave.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Tim.

  ‘Because that is what all people have to do, even tenth-century Vikings.’

  ‘Huh!’ Tim didn’t think much of this at all. Zoe felt the same way as her brother, but she tried to put her feelings into proper words.

  ‘People like Siggy because he’s different,’ she said. ‘They like him because he doesn’t behave the way the rest of us have to. That’s what makes him such fun.’

  Mrs Ellis managed a faint smile. ‘I’m sure you’re right Zoe, but you have to admit that it is difficult for us. It’s all right for other people to laugh at Siggy’s stupid mistakes; they don’t have to pick up the pieces and pay for the damage, or live with him day-by-day. We do.’

  ‘You won’t let him back in then?’ Tim asked.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Ellis. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Then I shall never speak to you again and I’m going on strike.’

  ‘But you don’t do anything,’ Mr Ellis pointed out.

  ‘A hunger strike,’ Tim said, glaring at his parents. ‘I shan’t eat anything until you let Siggy back into the hotel.’ Hah! They’d soon change their minds now!

  ‘Fine,’ said Mrs Ellis. ‘That should save us some money on food bills at any rate.’

  ‘You’ll let me starve?’ cried Tim.

  Mr Ellis shook his head. ‘Of course not, Tim. We wouldn’t let you starve. We’ll let you eat anytime. You’re starving yourself.’ Tim clenched his fists. This was too much. He’d been out-argued again.

  He leapt to his feet and stamped out of the room. Zoe watched him go.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done!’ she cried, and ran from the room in tears.

  Mr and Mrs Ellis glanced across at Mrs Tibblethwaite. ‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Ellis. ‘It is hard.’

  ‘Hard for everyone,’ agreed Mrs T. ‘But don’t worry. I’m sure things will turn out all right in the end. Tim won’t go for long without eating.’

&nb
sp; ‘Oh I know that,’ said Mrs Ellis. ‘It’s Zoe I’m worried about.’

  Mrs Tibblethwaite reached forward and patted Mrs Ellis on the hand. ‘Zoe is a clever girl, and sensitive too. I’m sure she understands really, and that’s why it upsets her so much. Siggy will be all right. Goodness, he must have spent hundreds of nights outside, sleeping under the stars when he was a proper Viking in proper Viking times. I wouldn’t worry about him at all. Goodnight!’

  Tim stuck to his guns. He refused supper and he turned down a drink and a biscuit before bedtime. By the time he crawled into bed he was starving. His stomach was aching for food and he cursed himself for saying that he was on hunger-strike. He tossed and turned for hours and was just drifting off to sleep when he heard the bedroom door open. Zoe quickly slipped into the room and shut the door. She tiptoed across to the bed.

  ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘Of course I’m awake. My stomach is making very loud empty noises. I can’t sleep.’

  ‘I’ve brought you some food,’ Zoe whispered, and she pulled two chunky sandwiches from inside her dressing-gown. ‘That one’s got a bit of fluff on it I’m afraid. I had to hide them under here.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ said Tim, stuffing it into his mouth. ‘I like fluff sandwiches. Thanks. I was starving.’

  ‘I knew you would be. Anyway, it was very brave of you to go on hunger strike.’

  ‘Yeah? Yeah! It was. I could have died.’

  ‘Tim – you’ve only been without food for about ten hours,’ laughed Zoe.

  ‘Ten hours? It feels more like ten months.’

  Zoe sat down on the edge of Tim’s bed. ‘I’ll try and get something for you tomorrow at breakfast. Mr Travis always leaves his toast and…’ Zoe stopped in mid-sentence, frowned, and went across to the window. She pulled back the curtains a little way and peered into the darkness. ‘Did you hear something?’ she asked her brother.