Abe’s Team
Fantasy adventure, 10+
I was sent off to boarding school when I was seven. My main memory is of always being made to stand out in the corridor. I didn’t mind this too much because there were loads of photographs along the corridor of boys who had been at the school before me. Still, it could get quite spooky standing down there on your own when everyone else was up in their dormitory and the corridor seemed so long and shadowy.I remember clearly that one of the early photographs went right back about sixty years and the boys had to wear really wierd clothes. I wondered what sort of people they had turned into. And then I wondered what would happen if the picture of the team I was looking at suddenly stepped out of the photograph – not as the young boys they were in the image, but as old men. Well, old men on the outside anyway.
This is what happens to the main character in this story. He is called Ebrahim, nicknamed Abe. He is half Egyptian, and his mother is a witch. He doesn’t know that of course. There is quite a lot he doesn’t know. How to look after a football team of geriatrics who think they are eleven is almost the least of his troubles. Alicia, daughter of a decidedly witchy headmistress could be a more serious problem . . .
I had a lot of fun writing this and its sequel, Jamboy.