Flour Babies - Anne Fine [0]
Anne Fine was born and educated in the Midlands, and now lives in County Durham. She has written numerous highly acclaimed and prize-winning books jor children and adults.
Her novel The Tulip Touch won the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year Award; Goggle-Eyes won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award and the Carnegie Medal, and was adapted for television by the BBC; Flour Babies won the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year Award; Bill’s New Frock won a Smarties Prize, and Madame Doubtfire has become a major feature film.
Anne Fine was named Children’s Laureate in 2001.
Other books by Anne Fine
Books for younger readers
Care of Henry
Countdown
Design-a-Pram
The Diary of a Killer Cat
The Haunting of Pip Parker
Jennifer’s Diary
Loudmouth Louis
Notso Hotso
Only a Show
Press Play
The Return of the Killer Cat
Roll Over Roly
The Same Old Story Every Year
Scaredy-Cat
Stranger Danger?
The Worst Child I Ever Had
Books for middle-range readers
The Angel of Nitshill Road
Anneii the Art Hater
Bill’s New Frock
The Chicken Gave it to Me
The Country Pancake
Crummy Mummy and Me
How to Write Really Badly
A Pack of Liars
A Sudden Glow of Gold
A Sudden Puff of Glittering Smoke
A Sudden Swirl of Icy Wind
Books for older readers
Book of the Banshee
Goggle-Eyes
The Granny Project
Madame Doubtfire
The Other Darker Ned
Round Behind the Ice-house
Step by Wicked Step
The Stone Menagerie
The Summer House Loon
The Tulip Touch
ANNE FINE
flour babies
PUFFIN BOOKS
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
Ecclesiastes 3:1
PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1992
Published in Puffin Books 1994
40
Copyright © Anne Fine, 1992
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any jorm of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-14-193612-3
1
Mr Cartright swung his legs to and fro under the desk, and raised his voice over the waves of bad-tempered muttering.
‘Don’t worry if you feel you can’t give this your full attention now, 4C,’ he said to his new class. ‘I’ll be delighted to go over it again in your break-time.’
Some of them visibly made a bit of an effort. A few pens were pulled out of a few mouths. One or two of the boys swivelled their heads back from the riveting sight of the janitor painting large white numbers on the dustbins. But, on the whole, the improvement was pitiful. Half of them looked as if they’d left their brains at home. The other half looked as if they didn’t have any.
This year’s 4C. What a shower! Mr Cartright knew most of them well enough already – the Sads and the Bads, the ones who had been despaired of most loudly and often in the staffroom over the last couple of years. Anyone halfway normal (these were called the Lads) had been bagged, as usual, by Mr King or Mr Henderson. And Dr Feltham