That was as far as I had got. In my head I had the tune of ‘Oh My Darling Clementine.’ The poetry competition judges wouldn’t know this, but it helped me write the poem and I thought I might mention it to them in my letter (the librarian said I had to write a ‘cover letter’). Still, the poem was not quite right: for instance, I knew somehow that ‘race’ was wrong. I think it should have been ‘species’, but that didn’t fit the pattern of the beats. This gave me grief for some time. Then I moved on to the second verse, which was even more difficult:

Crippled children, in the cauldron

Of a terrifying fate

We can save them, but don’t enslave the

Rhesus monkeys, it’s not too late…

And that was where I got stumped and the pencil got chewed and I realised that poetry-writing could make you get really MAD, like in Maths. It just wasn’t right. The pattern didn’t fit and you had to say some syllables really fast at the end to make the beats work.

I was grumpy for the rest of the evening. And even Papa’s leftover lamb shank stew didn’t help.

But the school librarian said it was: Genius! She said, ‘All those internal rhymes, Owen! It’s absolutely brilliant! Children and cauldron! Let’s send it off right now. Make sure you tell them you’re in Grade 4, Owen: I think that will impress them, alright!’

I could tell she wanted to hug me, so I stepped slightly away, and instead she retrieved her glasses from where they hung on a chain and went to find an envelope and a stamp.

‘To Whom It May Concern at the Mary Martin Bookshop,’ I wrote:

‘Here is my entry for the poetry competition. It is a poem about the monkeys that got killed and paralysed for the polio vaccine. My name is Owen Ferrugia and I am in Grade 4 at Hawthorn West Primary School. I hope you like my poem because I would very much like to win a book hamper.’

Mrs Plumridge gave me a little nod of approval, then we sealed the envelope and I put it in the red letterbox on the corner of Bridge Road and Burnley Street on the way home.

I forgot about it for a while, and then one afternoon I was called to the headmaster’s office. This was sufficiently terrifying for me to almost burst into tears. The headmaster’s name was Mr Box, and, though everyone knew that girls didn’t get the strap anymore at our school, boys still did. I racked my brain for something bad I had done. I had thrown a pear in the bin without even taking a bite. I had knocked my school milk over onto the bitumen and not owned up to it. I had ripped a piece of paper out of another kid’s schoolbook because he’d done a mean picture of me on it.