Googol Boy and the peculiar incident of the Great Quiz Trophy by John Michael (classic books for 13 year olds txt) 📕

Howie... my speech is on something called... let me think... ah... something called...   am... am... am-oo-bee-ass.

“You mean amoebas?”

Barney let out a hearty chuckle. “Amoebas! That’s it!”

All of a sudden I had the same feeling as when I boarded the bus. I felt as if some cogs were whirring away in my brain, and then my mouth started to spew information.

“Actually Barney... did you know that the amoeba was first discovered in 1757 by the Austrian naturalist, August Johann Rossel von Rosenhof, and that while in a solid state it is called plasmagel but when it turns into a liquid state, it is called plasmasol.”

Barney stared at me with a bedazzled expression. At the same time, I was wondering why I knew so much about amoebas. First the bus engine and now this... things were just getting weirder and weirder.

After a long pause Barney finally responded. “Um... that was interesting Howie, I will try to remember that for my speech.”

“Ah... yeah... I don’t even know where that came from,” I replied as I scratched my head.

“Did you say naspalags and losmopops?”

“Ha ha... close enough,” I answered as I let out a forced laugh and slapped him on the back.

In return, Barney gave me a friendly punch in the arm which left a bit of a sting... Barney just didn’t know his own strength. I put on a brave face and pretended it didn’t hurt (while holding back a tear).

“Save your strength for the hanner high strike at the festival big fella!” I uttered as I rubbed ny arm.

“Ah that’s right, it’s next week, isn’t it?”

“It sure is! It should be great!”

The Quockingpoll Flats Founding Festival was the biggest event this side of three counties, with rides, competitions and games. The festival was named after Ezekiel Zebadiah Quockingpoll who was the founding father of our town − well, almost − he was actually the second founding father. The first founding father was some anonymous explorer who fell into the main river and was never seen again − nobody knew who he was, or where he came from. There was some suspicion that he might have been Dutch or French as he had left behind a pair of wooden clogs and half a wheel of camembert cheese. Some years later some lumberjacks found these items in his bag, alongside a compass, some maps, a fur hat, and a life-size carved chicken made out of soapstone. There was a heated debate whether to call the waterway ‘Anonymous River’ or ‘Chicken River.’ In the end the townsfolk came to a compromise and called it ‘Anonymous Chicken River.’

It was an impoverished farmer, Ezekiel Quockingpoll, however, who arrived after the Anonymous Chicken explorer and gave our town its name. And thank goodness for that! Imagine telling people that you came from Anonymous Chicken Flats. Apparently, Ezekiel got lost on his way to the markets where he was taking his harvest of turnips to sell. As he was setting up camp he got attacked by a pack of brabbensacks − which, for the uninitiated, are a sort of cross between a warthog and a prairie dog. Ezekiel soon ran out of ammunition and had to fight them off with his turnips and his bare hands. Luckily, he managed to hold off through the night and when sunrise arrived he could see the extent of the carnage − there were brabbensack carcases and turnips strewn across the entire meadow.

This episode became forever immortalised in the Quockingpoll annals of history as the Great Turnip War of 1818. Not to let a good opportunity go to waste, he created his famous ‘brabbensack and turnip casserole’ which became the town’s claim to fame for a good decade. He later added to his initial recipe and developed a selection of delectable delights using his own blend of secret herbs and spices, including but not limited to, brabbensack stuffed with dormice, brabbensack and toad pie, and everyone’s favourite, brabbensack custard tart.

People from miles around would visit Quockingpoll Flats to sample Ezekiel’s culinary delights and it made him the richest man this side of the Anonymous Chicken River. Things were going quite well but then an outbreak of bubonic plague* amongst the brabbensacks diminished their stock and infected half of the town’s human inhabitants. In the end Ezekiel Quockingpoll’s chain of brabbensack restaurants (called The Brabbensack Grill Shack) went belly up and he had to turn back to turnip farming. So this was your classic ‘rags to riches to rags’ story.

“I just hope that they have brabbensack custard tart,” said Barney who, as usual, was thinking of his stomach.

“They better have... or there’ll be a riot,” I replied, thinking of Barney in particular.

Of course, after the bubonic plague, when brabbensack stock was in short supply, there had indeed been riots. The ‘Bring us Back our Brabbensack’ riot of 1834 saw townsfolk marching in the streets with placards and kicking in doors, smashing windows, overturning horse carts and fouling the wells. Some unscrupulous butchers, trying to make a quick buck, started to substitute brabbensack with sackenbrab, which was the brabbensack’s smaller cousin and looked like a cross between a duck and a ferret. Unfortunately, sackenbrab tasted like a mix of chopped liver and pickled herring and, for this reason, was called the poor man’s brabbensack. At one stage there was so much sackenbrab which had flooded the market that this problem gave rise to the second great riot in Quockingpoll Flats, called the ‘No More Drab Sackenbrab’ riot of 1836.

Finally, a county law was put into place which prohibited the use of sackenbrab:

Nay person without prop'r certification shalt has’t on his living any meat or offal from the sæckenbrab beest, intended for the consumption of man, or any container enwheeling any meat or meat product, n’r shalt any such meat or offal be keptéd, storéd or offeréd for market. Any person who hath contravenest regulation 915-83 shalt be subject to prosecution and shalt be verily liable on summary conviction