Derek Williams

from 'Please Don't Sponsor Me!'

Motiram - a twelve year old boy in a poor Indian village - goes for a health checkup soon after enrolment in a child sponsorship scheme:

The doctor looked very young, so I hoped he wasn't keen to tot up points by treating non-existent diseases.

'Where's your parents?' he said.

'Father's gone to sell his sorghum and Mother's gone to market. I can look after myself.'

'We'll see about that.' He debated whether to stub out his cigarette on the floor, then compromised by throwing it out of the window.

Having asked me my name, he shouted at one of his assistants who was standing gormlessly by the filing cabinet. 'Get out the folder and find this brat's form.'

He turned back to me: 'How many childhood diseases have you had?'

I told him I didn't know, but whatever they were, they hadn't killed me.

'OK. Take off your shirt.'

It was nice to display my manly chest. That little nurse must have been suitably impressed. This is what comes from being breast-fed for the first two years of my life, with my full share of that stuff new mothers produce in their milk for healthy babies. None of that bottled muck for me, though this was only thanks to Father refusing to buy dried milk when it was being promoted a few years ago. Still, his meanness did help me avoid becoming a UNICEF statistic.

The doctor was looking puzzled: 'You're much too healthy for a kid round here. If you're really twelve, we can't use these growth charts to see if you're under-nourished. They only go up to age eight.'

He put a cross in the top right hand corner of the page. 'Sponsored - huh? Poorest of the poor?'

He shook his head as though I were perpetrating the biggest hoax since Jinnah's doctors assured Mountbatten that the future Pakistan leader would live to be 104.

Interested publishers - please contact Derek.