Сборник рассказов на Английском языке

8. The Dog Who Judged Talent Shows

Animals / Humour

Every year, Ashcombe Primary held a talent show in the last week of term, and every year, for reasons lost to institutional memory, the judging panel included the headteacher, the deputy headteacher, and Colonel, an elderly bulldog belonging to the caretaker, Mr. Pettigrew, who had apparently been brought in as a judge eight years earlier as a one-off joke that nobody had ever had the heart, or the authority, to discontinue.

Colonel's judging method consisted entirely of remaining asleep through most performances and occasionally, unpredictably, lifting his head to give a single, deep, mournful bark, an action the school had long ago decided to interpret as a mark of particular distinction, since it happened so rarely that whichever act triggered it invariably felt as though they had achieved something significant. This year, the mystery of what precisely stirred Colonel from his slumber became a matter of intense twelve-year-old speculation, since he had, thus far in rehearsals, barked exactly once, during a magic act involving a slightly incompetent card trick, and remained resolutely silent through everything else.

Theories multiplied rapidly across the school, most of them entirely unscientific. One popular rumour held that Colonel could only be moved by performances involving the colour red, a theory swiftly disproven when a girl in a scarlet dress recited a poem to complete silence. Another suggested he simply favoured whichever act rehearsed nearest to his usual napping spot by the radiator, a theory that collapsed the moment the magic act, performed nowhere near the radiator, produced its single celebrated bark regardless.

Priyanka, who had spent three months perfecting a violin piece she was quietly terrified of performing in front of the whole school, became fixated on the idea that securing Colonel's bark would somehow validate months of nervous practice in a way that the human judges' polite applause never quite would. Her best friend Deshawn, who was performing immediately after her with a stand-up comedy routine he'd been rehearsing obsessively in the mirror, agreed to help her "crack the Colonel code," as he put it, with the seriousness of someone conducting actual scientific research, complete with a notebook in which he recorded, with genuine solemnity, the precise timing of every rehearsal noise that produced so much as a twitch of Colonel's ear.

Their investigation, involving several afternoons spent quietly observing Colonel during other rehearsals, eventually produced a theory: Colonel did not respond to skill, volume, or technical accomplishment at all. He responded, as far as they could determine, exclusively to anything involving a sudden change in rhythm — the moment in the magic act when the cards were suddenly, dramatically fanned out; a drummer's abrupt cymbal crash during practice; anything with a surprising pause followed by a burst of sound. Mr. Pettigrew, passing through the hall during one of these observation sessions, watched the two of them scribbling notes with unmistakable amusement but offered, when asked directly, only a noncommittal shrug and a comment about how "Colonel's always had strong opinions about music, he just doesn't share them with everyone."

On the night itself, Priyanka, against every instinct of a classically trained violinist, built a single unplanned pause into the middle of her piece, a moment of near-silence before the final, triumphant passage, a change her violin teacher would almost certainly have disapproved of had she known about it in advance. Colonel, apparently unable to help himself, lifted his head and delivered his solitary bark precisely as she resumed playing, and the hall, already moved by the performance, erupted into a laughter and applause that had as much to do with the dog's impeccable timing as with the music itself. Priyanka, mid-bow, had to bite back a grin fierce enough to nearly ruin her final note.

Deshawn's set, immediately after, deliberately built around a long comic pause before its final line, earned Colonel's second bark of the evening — a first in the show's eight-year history — and the two of them spent the after-party comparing notes with the smug satisfaction of scientists whose hypothesis had been thoroughly confirmed, sketching out increasingly ambitious plans for next year's acts entirely around the goal of extracting a third, unprecedented bark.

Word of their discovery spread quickly through the school, and the following year's contestants arrived considerably more theatrically prepared, several of them building deliberate pauses into acts that had never previously needed one, to Colonel's evident, if entirely undiscriminating, delight. The headteacher, addressing the matter at a staff meeting with what she insisted was complete seriousness, noted that student engagement with the concept of comedic and musical timing had "measurably improved" since the discovery, a claim nobody could substantiate but which everybody enjoyed repeating regardless.

Priyanka, for her part, kept practising the violin long after that summer, and credits the whole episode, half-jokingly, with teaching her more about performance than two years of formal lessons had managed: that the moments you hold back are sometimes exactly what make the moments you don't land properly, whether your audience happens to be a packed school hall or one elderly, thoroughly unbothered bulldog.

The headteacher, only half-joking, suggested at the following year's show that Colonel be given an official title befitting his apparently sophisticated grasp of comic and musical structure, and the programme that year duly listed him, in print, as "Colonel: Judge of Timing and Dramatic Pause," a credit he received, as ever, entirely asleep, one paw twitching very slightly as the audience read it aloud to each other with delighted disbelief.

Mr. Pettigrew, overhearing them, merely smiled and said that Colonel had always been a more discerning judge than anyone gave him credit for, and refused, despite considerable pressure from both of them over the following weeks, to confirm or deny whether he'd known the secret all along. Priyanka suspected, from the particular quality of his smile, that he had known for years, and had simply been waiting, with the patience of a man who trusted good detective work to find its own way there eventually, for someone curious enough to work it out for themselves.

Discussion Questions

1. Why might Priyanka feel that Colonel's approval matters more to her than the human judges' applause?

2. What does the story imply about the value of paying close attention and testing ideas, even about something silly?

9. My Neighbour, the Amateur Beekeeper

Humour / Friendship

Mr. Ferreira had lived next door to us for as long as I could remember, a quiet, courteous man who kept an immaculate lawn and, until the spring I turned fourteen, had never given anyone the slightest reason to suspect he harboured ambitions of any kind. This changed abruptly the day three wooden hives appeared at the bottom of his garden, accompanied by a suit that made him look, my mother observed, "like an astronaut who'd taken a catastrophically wrong turn."

As the only teenager on the street with what my mother generously called "an excess of free time," I was recruited, somewhat against my will, as Mr. Ferreira's unofficial assistant, a role that mostly involved holding things, standing at what he assured me was a safe distance, and occasionally being sent to fetch his reading glasses, which he lost with a regularity that seemed almost supernatural given how few places there were to lose them in a single garden.

My initial scepticism about the entire enterprise — bees seemed to me, at fourteen, an unnecessary risk undertaken by a man who had previously seemed entirely sensible — lasted approximately until the first time he opened a hive and showed me the comb inside, glistening and impossibly intricate, thousands of bees moving with a coordination that looked less like chaos and more like the most complicated dance I had ever seen. Mr. Ferreira talked to them constantly, in a low, conversational murmur that he swore calmed them, though I privately suspected it did rather more to calm him.

He explained, that first afternoon, that his own grandfather had kept hives back in Portugal, and that he'd spent forty years telling himself he'd take it up again "once things settled down," a phrase that had apparently covered several decades of career, family, and a house move before he finally admitted things were never going to settle down any more than they already had, and that if he wanted to keep bees, he would simply have to begin. I remember thinking, at fourteen, that this was a faintly ridiculous way to run a life. I think about it rather differently now.

The first harvest, that August, produced barely two jars of honey, most of which Mr. Ferreira insisted on giving away to neighbours who had, in his words, "tolerated the inconvenience" of living near his experiment, an inconvenience that had amounted, as far as I could tell, to absolutely nothing beyond one memorable afternoon when a swarm relocated briefly to Mrs. Kowalczyk's washing line and had to be gently persuaded elsewhere by a local beekeeping association member summoned in some urgency, while Mrs. Kowalczyk herself stood at a safe distance narrating events to anyone who would listen with the breathless drama of a war correspondent.

The second summer brought a genuine scare, when an entire hive collapsed over a single fortnight for reasons neither Mr. Ferreira nor the beekeeping association could satisfactorily explain. I had never seen him so quiet. He spent an entire Sunday simply sitting on an upturned crate beside the empty hive, not doing anything in particular, and when I asked if he was alright, he said only that losing a hive felt oddly like losing an argument you didn't know you were having, and that the only remedy he'd ever found was to start the next one properly rather than dwell on where the last one had gone wrong.

By the third summer, the two jars had become nearly thirty, and Mr. Ferreira had developed, to his own evident bewilderment, something of a local reputation, fielding questions at the school fete from parents curious about starting hives of their own and giving, with visible pride, an entirely unplanned talk to my biology class about pollination that ran forty minutes over its allotted time and which several classmates later cited as the reason they'd chosen ecology topics for their coursework. He credited me, quite undeservedly, with having "kept the whole operation honest" simply by turning up every week whether I felt like it or not, a compliment I have thought about more often than he probably realises.

My own family, in the meantime, had become unofficial and enthusiastic beneficiaries of the whole enterprise, my mother eventually converting an embarrassing quantity of Mr. Ferreira's honey into jars of honey cake she insisted on distributing to half the street, and my father, initially the most sceptical of all of us about the wisdom of an elderly man taking up beekeeping alone, becoming, by the third summer, the proud unofficial keeper of the spare suit, which he wore on the rare occasions Mr. Ferreira needed a second pair of steady hands.

When I left for university myself, Mr. Ferreira gave me, without any particular ceremony, a small jar from that year's harvest and a folded photocopy of a beekeeping guide he'd annotated in the margins over the years, telling me only that I probably wouldn't need it any time soon, but that it was the sort of thing worth having around for whenever the moment eventually arrived. I still have it, unopened in any practical sense, on a shelf in my student flat, and I think about it more often than its size would suggest.

Mr. Ferreira still emails me, most Augusts, with a single line reporting that year's harvest — sometimes proud, sometimes apologetic, once memorably just the words "a difficult year for everyone, bees included" — and I have come to look forward to that message more than almost any other piece of news I receive, a small yearly proof that somewhere, a patient man is still quietly showing up beside three wooden boxes at the bottom of his garden.

I never did develop Mr. Ferreira's calm around an open hive, and I suspect I never entirely lost the instinct to flinch when one of his bees drifted too close. But I learned, over those three summers, something about patience that no classroom had managed to teach me, watching a man tend something slow and easily disrupted with a gentleness that had nothing to do with results and everything to do with simply, steadily, showing up, hive after hive, season after season, whether or not that particular year rewarded him with anything more than the showing up itself.

Discussion Questions

1. What does the narrator's changing attitude towards beekeeping tell us about first impressions?

2. Identify a moment in the text where humour and a serious point are combined. Explain the effect.

10. The Day the Ducks Took Over the School

Animals / Humour

It began, as these things generally do, with a single unlocked gate. The pond at the bottom of Kingsley Academy's playing field had, for years, hosted a small and entirely unremarkable population of mallards, who kept largely to themselves and were, by unspoken agreement, ignored by staff and students alike. This arrangement collapsed spectacularly one Wednesday in May when a maintenance worker, repairing a fence panel, left the gate to the field propped open during his lunch break, at precisely the moment the school's Year 7 cohort was released for morning break.

What followed has since become the stuff of Kingsley legend, recounted with increasing embellishment at every subsequent parents' evening. Twenty-three ducks, apparently sensing an opportunity that eleven years of pond-based existence had never previously offered, made a determined and remarkably organised advance across the playing field, through the propped gate, and into the main school building via a set of doors that a Year 8 student named Priti had, with spectacularly poor timing, chosen that exact moment to prop open with a fire extinguisher while waiting for a friend.

Priti would later insist, to anyone who would listen, that she had propped the door open for a maximum of ninety seconds, and that the ducks' timing amounted to nothing short of a conspiracy against her personally. Nobody believed this theory, exactly, but it was repeated so often and with such conviction that by the end of term several younger students had genuinely come to believe the ducks had been planning the whole thing for weeks.

The ducks distributed themselves throughout the ground floor with what several teachers later described, with grudging admiration, as tactical precision. Four took up residence in the school hall, disrupting a Year 9 assembly on the importance of punctuality with an irony that was not lost on anyone present, least of all the deputy head delivering it, who paused mid-sentence, looked at the ducks now waddling unhurriedly across the stage, and simply sat down in the front row to wait the situation out rather than attempt to continue over the commotion. Several more discovered the canteen, where a lunch lady named Mrs. Osei, displaying a composure that would later earn her a special mention in the headteacher's end-of-term assembly, calmly continued serving fish fingers to a queue of students while stepping over ducks with the unbothered efficiency of someone who had, evidently, seen stranger things.

The most celebrated incident, however, involved a single duck who made its way, via a route nobody has ever satisfactorily reconstructed, into the staff room during Mr. Halloran's free period, where it settled itself, with an air of complete entitlement, directly on top of a stack of Year 10 mock exam papers Mr. Halloran had been marking. Mr. Halloran, a physics teacher renowned among students for being almost impossible to fluster, reportedly regarded the duck for a long moment before remarking, to the empty staff room, "Well, at least someone's finally taking an interest in these," and continuing to mark around it for a further twenty minutes rather than disturb it, occasionally reading out particularly weak answers aloud to the duck as if seeking a second opinion.

Order was eventually restored by the caretaker, Mr. Adeyemi, and a rapidly assembled team of student volunteers — led, somewhat improbably, by Priti, determined to atone for her role in the gate incident — who spent a chaotic but genuinely joyful forty minutes herding ducks back towards the pond using floor mats as makeshift shields and a great deal of shouted, contradictory advice. Two students very nearly came to blows over whether ducks responded better to gentle coaxing or brisk confidence, a scientific disagreement that was never conclusively resolved, since both approaches seemed to work about half the time and fail spectacularly the other half.

By the time the last duck had been persuaded back through the gate, the entire school, staff included, had gathered at the windows to watch, and a ragged cheer went up as Mr. Adeyemi finally secured the latch, holding both arms aloft like a man who had just won something considerably more significant than a duck-herding operation, to which Priti responded, without a trace of remorse, by taking a deep bow.

Mr. Halloran, asked repeatedly over the following weeks to recount the story of the duck and the mock exams, refined his telling each time with the practised timing of a man who had realised, somewhat to his own surprise, that he now possessed the single most popular anecdote in the entire physics department, and he made a point, for years afterward, of displaying that particular stack of marked papers on his desk each May as a kind of unofficial anniversary tribute.

Priti, meanwhile, leaned so thoroughly into her reputation as the accidental architect of Duck Day, as it came to be known, that she was voted, entirely without irony, "Most Likely to Cause a Minor Environmental Incident" in the Year 8 yearbook the following summer, an honour she accepted at the awards assembly with a bow nearly as theatrical as the one she'd given after the last duck was finally recaptured.

The maintenance worker responsible for the fateful propped gate, mortified beyond measure, spent the following term volunteering an hour of his lunch break every Friday to help the school's small wildlife club build proper nesting boxes around the pond, a gesture the headteacher publicly thanked him for at the end-of-year assembly, remarking, drily, that Kingsley Academy had perhaps never had a maintenance incident with quite such a constructive afterlife.

The school's newsletter that week ran the headline "KINGSLEY ACADEMY: A LEARNING ENVIRONMENT FOR ALL SPECIES," and the pond gate has, since that day, been fitted with a lock requiring two separate keys, kept by two separate members of staff who are required to coordinate before opening it — a level of institutional caution that students agree is almost certainly an overreaction, and that most secretly hope will, one day, fail again.

Discussion Questions

1. How does the story use exaggeration and understatement together to create humour?

2. Which character's reaction to the chaos did you find most amusing, and why?

11. The Squirrel Who Stole My Homework

Humour / Animals

For approximately four hundred years, or so it must have felt to every teacher who ever heard it, "the dog ate my homework" has stood as the universal, transparently false excuse of students everywhere. Marcus Webb would like it known, for the historical record, that in his particular case, the excuse was not only true but considerably stranger than the original cliché, since no dog was involved at any point, and the actual culprit was a red squirrel he later came to know, with grudging respect, as Sir Reginald.

It began on a Sunday evening in October, when Marcus left his half-finished geography project — a large, carefully labelled diagram of river erosion, several hours of work already invested — on the garden table while he went inside for dinner, fully intending to finish it within the hour. When he returned, the diagram was gone, and a suspiciously purposeful squirrel was disappearing over the fence with a corner of paper still visible between his teeth.

Marcus's first instinct was blind panic, followed swiftly by a second, more practical thought: nobody was ever going to believe this. His best friend Yusra, informed of events over a hastily typed message, replied with a single word — "Evidence" — and appeared at his back door twenty minutes later with her older brother's binoculars and a look of grim determination that Marcus found, at the time, entirely disproportionate to the crisis at hand.

What followed was three days of what Yusra insisted on calling "a stakeout," involving considerable time spent crouched behind the garden shed, a notebook recording Sir Reginald's movements with the seriousness of a wildlife biologist, and one memorable false alarm when a completely different, entirely innocent squirrel wandered into view and was nearly accused on grounds of general suspicious behaviour. On the second afternoon, they finally tracked their quarry to a large oak two gardens over, where a nest, visible through Yusra's binoculars, appeared to be liberally reinforced with what looked unmistakably like shredded exercise paper.