Too Cool for School, Hammy the Wonder Hamster! by Poppy Harris

Author:Poppy Harris [Poppy Harris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141964560
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

In the shed, Hamilton was having a simply wonderful time. He had chatted for a while with his friend Bobby, who lived in a hutch in the shed. Bobby was Sam’s rabbit, but luckily Hamilton was fluent in Rabbitspeak.

A pair of Sam’s gloves lay beside Bobby’s cage, and so Hamilton had snuggled into one of them while he and Bobby settled down to enjoy Sam’s trombone practice.

‘He’s learning to oompah,’ explained Hamilton. ‘But he’s only just started learning how to make the right noises. I read about it on the computer.’

‘What’s a compertooter?’ asked Bobby.

‘It’s a thing with a screen,’ said Hamilton, ‘like a window. You click all the right things and it’s got a mouse, but it isn’t a real live mouse. You keep clicking until you find the right bit, and that’s how I found the bit about oompah music.’

Bobby tried to make clicking noises with his teeth, but wasn’t very successful. He just sounded as if he were muttering to himself.

‘The air has to go into the mouthpiece …’ began Hamilton, then remembered that while he understood the science of valves and air pressure very well, it wouldn’t mean anything to the rabbit. ‘You have to put a quiet funny noise in at one end, and it goes round all the tubes. That means it’s a loud funny noise when it comes out.’

‘It’s good!’ said Bobby, gazing up at Sam in admiration. ‘You never know what it’s going to do next!’

‘It’s supposed to oompah,’ said Hamilton, ‘but sometimes it ooms and sometimes it pahs because he hasn’t got the ooms and the pahs to meet in the middle. Sometimes it isn’t quite an oom and a pah, just a poom. It takes a long time before you can do that properly.’

The trombone gave a deep groan.

‘Is it hurting?’ asked Bobby anxiously.

‘No,’ said Hamilton. ‘It’s only playing.’

The more Sam practised with his trombone, the better he got. The noises became louder and stronger, and the slowly drawn-out notes – pa-a-arp – pa-a-arp – pa – arp grew closer together. Hamilton could almost dance to this, and Bobby swayed a bit as they listened. When something tingled in his cheek pouch, he hardly noticed it at all.

Sam stopped playing and put the trombone down in its case. His face was much redder than usual.

‘I need a break, Bobby,’ he said, and took the rabbit out of his cage to be stroked and talked to. He removed some stale old bits of apple core from the hutch floor, and told Bobby everything he’d been doing at school.

He hadn’t noticed Hamilton snuggled down in a glove, and this gave Hamilton the thing he wanted most at that moment. It gave him the chance to explore the trombone, and he couldn’t wait. Stopping only to rub at his cheek, which was tingling a lot now, he hopped into the trombone case. Hamilton wondered if he could design and make a very small trombone to play when nobody except Bethany could hear him.

He examined the valves in great detail, patting at them with his paws.

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