Frankie and Stankie by Barbara Trapido

on the beachfront.
    At the end of Dinah’s first school year, Miss McNeil has a Christmas party for her class, and she gives them each a balloon out of a big multicoloured cellophane bag. Every balloon blows up to about ten inches in diameter and comes red, green, yellow, blue or orange – that’s except for Dinah’s. Her balloon is the only silver one in the bag, and it blows up to double the size. It doesn’t occur to Dinah that this blessing may have been random. She knows that it’s because Miss McNeil loves her best. She treasures the balloon. She becomes anthropomorphic about it. While some of the girls play wild games with their balloons and have popped them before the end of the afternoon, Dinah takes hers home and ties it to her bedpost and keeps it for months and months. Gradually it gets to look like a shrivelled grey kidney on a string. Then it loses its remaining air altogether. Dinah stashes the damp grey rag in a drawer with her knickers and vests. She loves Miss McNeil and she knows that Miss McNeil loves her. The end of Miss McNeil is the beginning of hell.

Three
    Mrs Vaughan-Jones takes Class Two. You have to watch out every second, because she’s like one of those malicious firecrackers that keeps on jumping about all over the place. You never know where she’s going to land or when the bang is going to come. Mrs Vaughan-Jones is like a drunkard because she’s both belligerent and unpredictable. Her teacher’s table is on a little platform and she stands on the platform making speeches in her own praise.
    â€˜I may be strict but I’m kind,’ she says.
    This is her favourite utterance and she always says it just before she moves off down the aisles to start hitting out to left and right with her metal-edged ruler. She goes raging up and down the aisles, cutting and slashing with the metal edge. But there’s a teacher’s pet in the class who never gets hit with the ruler. Then another thing she likes to do is make jeering remarks about some of the girls she’s especially taken against, because that way she gets the rest of the class to copy her and pick on them as well.
    Mrs Vaughan-Jones frequently hints at an out-of-hours connection with the teacher’s pet’s family.
    â€˜And how’s Auntie May?’ she’ll say. ‘Please give her my love, when you next see her, won’t you, dear?’ Or she’ll say,
‘Do
thank your mother for her hospitality, dear,’ just as if she and the teacher’s pet’s mother are always meeting up over the weekends.
    The teacher’s pet has come up from Miss MacLean’s Class One and Dinah tries to feel sorry for her because, like Lisa, she’s had a year of Miss MacLean which is now being followed by a year of Mrs Vaughan-Jones. Yet it’s hard to feel sorry for the teacher’s pet, because she looks as if she’s smirking all the time. Or it may be justthat her face doesn’t help because it’s so much like a pudding. She always looks smug when she gets chosen to go outside and clap the chalk out of the blackboard dusters – which is all the time. Or when she’s allowed to take messages round the school to the other teachers. And, even when everyone else in the class has got their hand up to answer a question, Mrs Vaughan-Jones always chooses her.
    â€˜Yes, dear.
You
, dear,’ she says to the teacher’s pet.
    Then she says it’s because the teacher’s pet is sitting up the straightest. Or she’ll say it’s because the teacher’s pet’s hand isn’t waving about in the air like everyone else’s. Sometimes Mrs Vaughan-Jones will even change the answer to a question so that the teacher’s pet can always be right.
    Then suddenly one day the teacher’s pet has left Dinah’s school, halfway through the year. She’s gone off to a new school that’s been built nearer to where she lives and