Free The Day Our Teacher Went Mad and Other Naughty Stories for Good Boys and Girls by Christopher Milne

You know how at every school there’s always one class that seems to have heaps of bad kids? All lumped together?
    That was my class, 5B.
    The B stood for BAD.
    Some of us were shockers. ‘Evil,’ my mother said. ‘Especially that Justin Payne. He’s never to come to our house again, do you hear? Your little brother’s never been the same. Fancy telling him that spiders taste like lollies! And making him believe his ears were so big he could fly. What if he’d jumped off the high part of the roof?’
    Why so many naughty kids were all together, I don’t know. It just seemed to happen. The badder one kid became, the badder we all became. It was as if we took turns outdoing each other.
    Another reason, I guess, was the club. The Bad Club. Justin Payne started it. To get into the Bad Club was hard. Really hard. Which for some reason made it seem better. Being a member of the Bad Club became the most important thing in the world.
    ‘Peer-group pressure,’ my dad called it. Although sometimes I think my dad wouldn’t know his bum from his bald spot.
    As I say, joining the Bad Club wasn’t easy. Do you know what we had to do to get in? Initiations. Tests.
    First, we had to chew a live slug, and then we had to drink out of a drain — although we got to choose the drain. Then we had to piggy-back Big Butt Barton twice around the footy ground. Finally, we had to take off all our clothes, balance on one foot and hop past our teacher’s house making chook noises.
    I suppose I should have mentioned our poor teacher, Mr Glover, because he was part of the reason we were so naughty. He let us get away with things. Everything, in fact. He could have kicked us out of class any time he wanted, or out of school for that matter. But he always said we were his problem and he would deal with us.

    ‘My responsibility,’ he would say.
    So really, although we sometimes felt sorry for him, we knew we could never get into trouble. As long as our parents didn’t know, who cared? Sure, we’d get punished at school, like writing lines and stuff, but who bothered to do them? Not me.
    So our whole class used to muck around like no class has before. Always calling out, never doing our work, forever playing tricks and teasing each other.
    Until one day, Justin Payne had an even better idea — to make mucking around in class a test for the Bad Club. The biggest test of all. If you could make Mr Glover angry — and remember, Mr Glover was used to putting up with a fair bit — you were in. But, whatever you did, it had to be worse than the last kid.
    Bruno Carboni was the first. He’d been dying to get into the Bad Club but he couldn’t come at drinking from a drain. Especially after Phillip Prosser said the water he drank seemed to have lumps in it.
    ‘Why didn’t you spit the lumps out?’ asked Bruno.
    ‘I couldn’t,’ said Phillip. ‘They were all in one bit.’
    So, when Mr Glover turned to face the blackboard, Bruno quietly put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a jar containing the biggest, blackest, hairiest spider I have ever seen. Then, ever so softly, he tipped it onto Rachel Hunter’s head.
    Well, do you think that caused a stir? When Rachel felt it crawl onto her forehead she almost had a heart attack. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone scream so loudly.
    Trouble was, in flicking the spider away, Rachel accidentally hit Teresa Walters right in the ear. And when the spider landed on the floor and crawled up Kate Smith’s leg, the whole room went crazy.
    I don’t have to tell you that Mr Glover wasn’t a happy man. Not at all.
    ‘You idiot!’ he screamed at Bruno. ‘Not only have you frightened the daylights out of half the class, the whole thing could have terrible long-term effects. Some of those poor boys and girls might have nightmares for weeks. Some might be frightened of spiders for the rest of their lives. The rest of their lives! How does that make you feel?’
    ‘Who, me?’ said Bruno. ‘I feel